This week I published a long read about why we specifically think that DAOs will take center stage in 2019.

The trends that answer the why question are:

- Globalization of talent & transformation of “work”
- Well-resourced stakeholder networks needing coordination
- Emergence of decentralized finance
- Normalization of participation in governance
- Deplatforming grows as an issue
- Upswing in political/social organization

And I think Aracon, happening next week in Berlin, is the perfect place to discuss all of this and more.

Registrations close TODAY and we're almost at capacity, but we have 3 giveaway tickets for the fastest Token Economy readers.

3 Free tickets for TE readers!
Using the code ARACONONE2019 will grant a free ticket to the first 3 people.

Worry not, if the free tickets are all gone, you can use the same code to get a 30% discount (on an already amazing price).

Hope to see many of you next week.

Featured on Token Economy. First part of a historical and anthropological perspective on world reserve currencies and implications for stablecoins (warning: long read).

Simon de la Rouviere gives a great overview of the crypto economic design of the Moloch DAO, a DAO that is being launched soon to better coordinate funding for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Comprehensive overview of the current state of scaling initiatives in Ethereum, with a focus on Layer 2 solutions, debunking the narrative that it can't scale.

On a more general note, this is fantastic recap of the 6 most important developments in Ethereum last year (warning: long read). 

A book that covers the physics, math, cryptography, game theory,

economics, and computer science needed to invent Bitcoin. Good complement to Mastering Bitcoin and The Bitcoin Standard.

Thibauld has released the v1.0 of the Continuous Organizations whitepaper.

TL;DR of the changes from the WP we featured:
- Removal of automatic dividends
- Replacement of the self-investing capability by a FAIR purchase capability
- Burning FAIRs

Lightning is happening, and fast.
2019 will be about:
- improving security guarantees in the system
- maximizing liquidity at all steps of the process
- improving privacy
- simplifying UX as much as possible

Congrats to team Marble Cards for going live!

It's an application to create pretty NFT cards out of internet content, so any web page with a URL can be turned into a unique ERC-721 digital asset. For now they are restricting the supply to memes from knowyourmeme.com, but long term you'll be able to tokenize any links and trade them in any NFT marketplace. 

If it takes off, the pricing data could become a useful proxy for the value of digital real estate for example. It will be interesting to see how this will gets used beyond vanity URL collecting though, and whether they will be able to create network effects around it.

With Grin going live this week, we also have the first exchange to support the currency (so far paired with BTC and ETH). The exchange will donate up to 50% of their trading fees to the Grin General Fund for the first 3 months.

PS: to continue on the Harry Potter theme, the Galleon is the most valued coin of the wizarding currency. :)

A good one to add to the ever increasing list of educational resources.

It's a web based platform and community for learning decentralized technology via interactive tutorials and local in-person chapters.

Anyone can contribute creating their own tutorials, improving existing ones or hosting local chapters.

If you are a Solidity developer you may want to take a look at these 4 dev tools that team 0x have open-sourced.

Corda Network is a product from R3 for the enterprise world. The cool part of it is that you can build most other public available blockchains on top of it, so you could theoretically build both Bitcoin and Ethereum as CorDapps. "You could probably build IBM Fabric as an CorDapp as well, although you probably wouldn’t want to!"

A new storage app built on top of Blockstack (which is slowly building a full ecosystem of apps on its new internet).

There's nothing much yet in terms of info unfortunately, aside from a very barebones roadmap.

Distributed, decentralized reputation is gaining some new tools with the launch of Monetha's new framework. Looks cool.

The round was led by Mandra Capital, with participation from Streamlined Ventures, The Perkins Fund, Frank Fiore, and David Aho.

Tangem has developed Smartcard-based NFC wallets for crypto currencies and blockchain assets.
SBI Crypto Investment Ltd., a digital asset venture investment company wholly owned by SBI Holdings Inc., made the investment.

Authenteq’s AI-driven automatic identity verification process uses a proprietary passive liveness detection to make sure whoever is signing up for the service is doing so in real time. The company then issues an eID for the user, located on the user’s mobile phone and private blockchain. In less than 60 seconds, a user is verified with government-grade facial recognition algorithms, and the photo ID documents are authenticated.

The funding was led by Draper Associates and Capital300.

Monerium is planning to issue asset-backed, redeemable, and regulated e-money on blockchains through a licensed institution.

The round was led by Nordic VC fund Crowberry Capital, with the participation of blockchain software technology company, ConsenSys, and Hof Holdings.