Vitalik has dropped another bomb in the space.

It's a new paper with Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl, which explores the problem space of funding for public goods and how to optimize it compared to fully market-based solutions.

Weyl is currently all the rage in parts of the crypto (and non-crypto) scene because of his Radical Markets book (where concepts like Quadratic voting and Harbinger taxes make appearances).

After the book got published, Vitalik started a relationship and collaboration with the author, and one of the outputs is this new paper.

Trying to summarize it in a few words, it's a new way to allocate funding for public goods, by understanding what the utility of the good is to end users, and stepping in with some public funding to make sure that those goods are funded appropriately.

If you are interested in the subject, there are a few choices. You could either read the paper itself, or you could opt for a great summary and analysis by Status.

Coindesk also has a good article with quotes from the authors.

The main thought that comes to mind here is, as highlighted in the past, the pace of innovation and how interdisciplinary it is.

If you're in the crypto space, you're either forced, encouraged or led to think about many, many different topics including technology in a broad sense, economics, monetary theory, policy, philosophy, politics and governance.

It's hard to find other spaces bubbling with so much new thinking, and I suspect that we will look back on this period as something truly special.

Nic Carter comes out with a bomb, sort of "denouncing" the role of many players in the crypto ecosystem as having the main goal of "siphoning money from retail investors and depositing it into the pockets of altcoin creators and exchange operators" (and ranking sites).

Rock on Nic.

Gavin Woods with a sort of quick manifesto for Web 3.

I feel there could have been some more details about the benefits of the Web 3, but otherwise think that we will be quoting articles like this in a few decades when it's all built out and part of our day-to-day infrastructure.

A bit of a shill post for a portfolio investment of Amentum, but nonetheless an interesting look at how the concepts of blockchain and decentralization can go towards more real-life digital use cases.

The stablecoin skepticism continues in the space, with a good post on the likely instability scenarios for most non-fully-collateralized coins.

There's a good summary in the post itself of the main thesis

"financial markets are fat-tailed. That is, the probability of large price movements is much larger than people generally assume. While the probability is finite and can be calculated, the size of the expected movements is infinite, and therefore the assumption that the price will remain within any given trading range is false"

which has been our position for a long time (and why we never got particularly excited by any stablecoin project we've seen so far).

The conclusion is that "the only form of sensible stablecoin or token representing another asset without systemic risk is the fully collateralized kind. The reason to create such a stablecoin is to enhance fiat currencies and imbue them with the cryptographic certainty, fast settlement time, and international transportability of crypto-currencies."

My view is even more extreme, and that we're all playing nice games and all, but at the end of the day (in a few decades), there will be no need for stablecoins, as Bitcoin will be the unit-of-value stablecoin.

Tony Sheng proposes we ditch the term decentralization, as it's too vague, loaded and prone to misunderstanding.

It reminds me of a movie where a dad banned the word "interesting" from the family vocabulary, instead forcing the children to come up with more specific terminology.

Both are right. It's gonna be really hard to make people care about decentralization. It might be easier to make them care about one or a few specific advantages of having such a network.

Super technical and futuristic post about Cross-Network Preimage Retrieval swaps.

The concept of atomic swaps is here to stay, and it's cool to see it advance in so many directions.

The team at sparkswap, that we first featured in issue #60, have created this new Layer 2 atomic swap method (they're doing it in the context of a decentralized Shapeshift, with Bitcoin/Litecoin trades that settle in seconds).

MCC dropped a research piece on TCRs this week. As always it's very well articulated and easy to read, providing a very realistic view of the pros and cons of this often over-hyped crypto 'primitive'.

Other than the obvious features of a TCR, MCC argue that:
- centralized list curation is most of the times satisfactory enough for the majority of users
- maximizing token value != high-quality curation, leading to attacks/dishonest behaviour
- the model fails when addressing subjective information
- token pricing is very challenging.

Treasury selling (specifically of ETH) by crypto projects has been widely discussed and analyzed recently. A tweet about Augur this week sparked further debate around best treasury management practices, with thought-provoking responses from CZ and Joey himself. 

In this post the Mosaic research team takes a deeper look and finds that many projects are likely trading at negative enterprise values.

The post smartly outlines that this doesn't mean much in reality, because by investing in the network there really isn't any guarantee or claim on the treasury assets.
So in the end it should just be regarded as "potential firepower" that the team / organization has at its disposal to make the network successful.

Probably the most interesting thing in blockchain for me (Stefano), programmable legal entities get a well deserves post.

"One way or another, the coming of programmable legal entities was always inevitable — software eventually penetrates to all classes of objects."

There's a weird Shark / Dolphin analogy that runs through the post, but this guy gets it.

Well-crafted PLEs will facilitate the trend of normalizing the crypto space.

Brayton from Boost notes how even many of the investors and stakeholders in the ecosystem haven't really been using Dapps.

The #build meme is good and all, but we need to get to serious usage or at least interest fast.

Finding the right direction and hooks to get actual users on a decentralized app soon is paramount for this community. We're especially bullish on the trajectory of projects like Spankchain, that have this clearly as their first goal, and look forward to seeing more of them.

One to read while strolling down the boulevard of broken dreams, but in hindsight an inevitable step for a centralized company operating at the edges of the regulatory table, and yet another Satoshi ha-ha moment.

Dubbed by the founder as "a precautionary move to derisk the company amid an ever-changing legal grey area”, it clearly feels like ShapeShift found itself cornered and without better alternatives.

This makes us wonder about the future of "decentralized exchanges" operated by centralized entities, as it feels like they could easily be next in line making similar moves. There's a well written piece calling the beginning of the end for the open finance movement, while in reality it's still probably only the first inning.

Bloomberg coverage of the news has some other quotes from the CEO, though the headlines sound overly catastrophic. Onwards.

The news is that Lightning Ramp has been acquired by Casa.

This is massively useful stuff. Running a Lightning node is still a messy and costly endeavor.

With a dedicated hardware device and a simple UI, the amount of Lightning nodes and routes could explode exponentially.

It's $300 and ships before the end of the year.

The amount of research and ideas in the TCR space is ridiculous.

The Ocean Protocol team has now come out with the Equilibrium Bonding Market concept to solve some problems of Bonding Curves.

The solution uses an automated market maker to achieve conservation, liquidity and equilibrium.

Dmunity, tying into the TCR trend, is a new Social Curation Market launching on Ethereum.

Nice to see these experiments. Still a bit skeptical on the usability and mind-cycles required by users to understand the minting and rewards, but hopefully something like this works out soon enough.

Blockchain based smart contracts audits for blockchain smart contracts products!

This is a fairly big technical news, even if not widely shared.

Connext and Spankchain have launched the first ever non-custodial payments channel hub on Ethereum.

Obviously it's the MACHINES over at Spankchain bringing this to the market, in production, to enable microtipping on their site.

🤟

Tokenized Credit Default Swaps are coming to Ethereum.

Spacemesh has closed a Series A round led by Polychain to continue building a base layer protocol to run scalable general-purpose smart contracts using a 'proof of space-time' consensus algorithm.

Barrel is building a protocol to automate consumer data compliance via smart contracts, interestingly built on top of the NEO blockchain.

They raised $4M from Gigi Levi, NEO Global Capital, Altair Ventures, and UK based accelerator Collider.

The first cohort of 16 companies has been announced. This is Consensys 10-week global acceleration programme happening in SF.

EU finance ministers met in Vienna this weekend and Reuters had a sneak peak at the preparatory report apparently, which argues for stricter EU-level regulation of crypto exchanges and clearer rules on ICOs. 

We'll know more about the outcome this week most likely.

The SEC is citing "confusion amongst market participants" as the reason why it ordered suspension of trading for two crypto tracker instruments.