It's been a volatile week in crypto trading land, but we deliberately don't want to put too much focus on prices here as we are long term focused. And we had another record-breaking ICO, obviously.

Ethereum scalability has been a hotly debated topic this week (it is every week really!). On the back of a flurry of large high profile ICOs, and the prolonged network congestion that ensued, a few people weighted in.

Fred Ehrsam, who co-founded Coinbase, thinks we are 250x off being able to run a 10m user app and 25,000x off being able to run Facebook on chain.

Interestingly the first step in Fred's schedule to scalability was increasing gas limit, which punctually happened two days later (by the way this is a great primer on the gas model by Hudson Jameson).

The Ethereum community showed some real strenght and pragmatism in this circumstance, and perhaps as a coincidence its Stack Exchange graduated this week as one of the top-35 technology sites (in only 500 days, a record!). 

Moving to Proof of Stake consensus will be another step change in network scalability, and this week one of the developers working on the Casper PoS protocol published a slidedeck summarising the three years of research that went into it.

Now onto the juicy stuff...

Crypto volatility is itself quite...volatile. Over the years though BTC volatility against the USD has compressed significantly, now ranging between 1-4% daily (for reference gold is 1.2% and most major currencies 0.5-1%). ETH volatility on the other hand is still probably similar to the BTC volatility of 2011-2012 (if we try hard enough we can start to see a descending trendline forming up). Volatility has different implications for BTC and for ETH. For BTC it's directly linked to its perception as a long term store of value, so what happens in the short term matter to an extent. It matters probably to a greater degree to ETH though, as ETH is the currency that is used by projects to raise capital via ICOs. A volatile ETH makes it much harder for teams to plan and execute capital deployment, and just generally to manage finances (e.g. ETH is growing like crazy / falling off a cliff, should we wait to hire aggressively / hire aggressively now?).

Status shared their post-ICO plans of converting to fiat on reddit, will others follow suit in being so transparent? Also, with several +$100m ICOs completed in the last few weeks and none of similar profile in the short term, will we see more price pressure on ETH? 

Gnosis ($GNO) had a pretty good week (+40%) relative to the rest of the market. The public comments made on Twitter about founder tokens been lock up for 6 years (5 years for employees) seem to have been well received.

Numeraire ($NMR) on the other hand had a pretty rough time holding up to the prices it first traded at when it came online last week. A lot of selling action in the first few days took the price down from a high of $165 to all the way down to a low $30. Jordan Cooper churned another great post this week where he talks about it: Inherently More Valuable Than Startup Equity?

How do you keep track of your crypto investments? This week Blockfolio got under the radar after some users spread rumours it could be snooping on users' holdings. The company released an official statement later denying that accusation. For those that can't breath without a spreadsheet, we got our hands on a neat Google Sheet add-on that automatically imports live prices, volumes etc from Coinmarketcap API for hundreds of cryptos.
Kudos to Julien Buty who developed it and released it in March. HANDY!

Token Economy is curated by Stefano Bernardi and Yannick Roux.

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