We're finally able to write about Continuous Organizations, a concept developed by our friend Thibauld.

Try to say the following sentence to a friend who was away for the past 2 years: "The Decentralized Autonomous Trust (DAT) is a specific immutable smart-contract that implements a bonding curve contract with sponsored burning to automatically mint, burn and distribute fully digital security tokens that we call FAIR securities (FAIRs)." - or for that matter, to anyone still living in a non crypto word.

We're really traveling at a different speed here.

COs and DATs tie two very specific focuses of mine: new organizational structures and fully digital security tokens.

COs, specifically have the following features:
- Continuous Fundraising. Anyone can contribute anytime to the the DAT.
- Fully liquid. With a reserve fund to provide it and a bonding curve to set the price.
- Securities. FAIRs are a claim on the future cash-flows handled by the DAT. Automatically.
- Permission-less, friction-less & supra-national. Although offline proxies are very much needed. 
- Governance agnostic. You could use something like Aragon or DAOstack to provide the rest of the infrastructure.

This is where the cool stuff happens for me. New types of organizations. New models for fundraising. Permisionless organization, commerce and innovation.

Ping us if you're working around these concepts.

As we approach Bitcoin's 10th anniversary, you don't want to miss out on Dan's series of 4 posts in which he looks back at the origin of Bitcoin through the biology lenses, framing the crypto currency as the most advanced species of money:

"Bitcoin’s origin is akin to planting a tree. It wasn’t just Satoshi’s selection of the species (code), but the season (timing), soil (distribution), and gardening (community) that were essential to its success. It had to grow to be strong, mighty, and huge. It had to survive droughts, storms, and predators. Its deep roots had to support the weight of becoming a new world reserve currency."

A riveting read.

(disclaimer: we are investors in Dan's company)

If Dan's post left you hugely optimistic, here's a very pragmatic post as a follow up, concluding that the utopian dreams for Bitcoin (e.g. be your own bank, death of fractional banking and credit card companies, banking the unbanked etc.) may in fact be a long way off. 

The author is actually very optimistic on a version of these outcomes becoming reality in the future, but thinks it will take a lot longer than the bull in all of us tends to believe.

Another insightful deep dive on privacy technologies in crypto and the trade offs made by various implementations, outlining a useful framework to compare them based on what pieces of information are private vs public (identity, tx data, state) and what techniques they use (Layer 2, tumblers, ZK, etc).

Looking forward to the author's next post on ZK-snarks/starks, where I think we'll see a lot of exciting privacy-related developments.

Some really fascinating stats on DEX usage from Alethio, a ConsenSys company and makers of DEX explorer "Dex Watch".

The numbers across the 17 tracked exchanges are still small in the grand scheme of things, which just over 200k unique addresses executing trades, but may be enough to spot some early signs of adoption, loyalty and maybe even cases of wash trading.

A global collapse of trust could be the catalyst for a "leveraged disruption" enabled by blockchain tech.

A good optimist post around the now classic "we're in 1995" narrative. 

A very good summary of key ideas coming out of this week's Web3 Summit in Berlin. 

It seems that a hot theme was how to prevent dystopian outcomes from materializing.

The wait is over. Bitcoin is coming to Ethereum in Q1 next year as a result of a community effort led by Kyber and Republic, supported by 16 initial launch partners (Gnosis, MakerDAO, Dharma, AirSwap, IDEX, Compound, DDEX, Hydro Protocol, Set Protocol, Radar Relay, Blockfolio, and Prycto)

The main benefit of 'wrapped BTC' (WBTC) is that it should generate incremental liquidity for token pairs on DEXs, who until now only had ETH and maybe a stable coin to trade against.

The side benefit is that smart contracts and dapps can now integrate bitcoin transfers, so it will be interesting to see applications of that (e.g. lending it on Bloqboard or Compound, minting DAI out of it etc).

The downside is that it's clearly not as trustless as the real thing, or as an atomic swap, having to rely on Bitgo (a regulated custodian) for the custody of the collateral. Since it all lives transparently on-chain it should be fairly simple to verify the 1:1 backing in real time. This feels like the right trade off to make at this stage.

On a similar note, sETH is now a reality, thanks to dYdX and Radar Relay.

sETH is a representation of a short on ETH, built on top of the dYdX protocol and collateralized with DAI.

Really cool new project by the Gnosis team (deck here).

It's decentralized exchange called Dfusion that scales on chain using snarks (a snark-app, or 'snapp') while maintaining a decentralized matching engine.

What other snapps are being developed?

It's been a while since we've linked whitepapers, but this one is worth it.

LeverJ is a decentralized exchange built on top of Ethereum, which is using a custom Plasma sidechain designed specifically for non-custodial,
high-speed, low-latency trading.

This is the whitepaper that explains their approach and where else it could be taken.

You can safely start from Section 6.

Amazing to see Square open-sourcing their bitcoin cold-storage solution. 🙌

This could have probably been a business of itself, a bit like Coinbase's custody tool.

Stellar is picking up, and now interstellar is announcing a bidirectional payments channel implementation called Starlight

If only I had CS teachers like Karl Floersch.

He released a new lesson and it's highly recommended you look at it.

The decentralized finance space is where it's at in the beginning of the revolution.

Dharma has released Lever, a globally-accessible, trustless margin solution.

It's a Dharma Underwriter that originates loans and prices their default risk so investors can make informed decisions. Once a loan has been requested, Dharma Lever scans Dharma relayers to find an interested counter-party - thus leveraging the full liquidity of all the Dharma protocol users.

The OpenZeppelin suit of smart contracts hits 2.0. Take a look if you're developing on Ethereum.

Also, some pretty amazing download stats, as if we needed a reminder about the astonishing pace of decentralized development:

A cool concept, built on top of Ethereum.

Open Proofs is a standard to let anyone create badges and proofs - which are portable between applications and potentially chains.

They'll also soon be releasing a UI tool to let anyone easily design and mint them.

We've got an Australian Tether by Novatti Group, with its Novatti AUD Utility Token.

The company is legit thought, and it's developing it on top of Stellar.

cWallet hits alpha.
It's a mobile Ethereum wallet that also interfaces with the Celer Network for off-chain transactions.

This is actually quite impressive, it has:

- Fully generalized off-chain smart contract logic. 

- Out-of-the-box conditional payment. 

- Multi-hop trust-free state relay via Celer Nodes.

- Modular state dispute resolution.

- Pure Off-chain Object (claiming that no on-chain state or operation is ever needed for some apps until a dispute)

- Mobile-native and Web SDK framework and runtime.

Another elegant attempt at smoothing the dapp onboarding experience, while letting users retain control of their data.

Users can have a common identity linked to an Ethereum address that is shared across participating dapps and accessible to developers via API. Built on top of 3Box distributed database system.

Ownera is a new concept from SpiceVC co-founder Ami Ben-David. It's a global base-layer Proof of Ownership protocol on which the market can compete to manage all regulated asset ownership and trade.

It would be used when some of your rights are denied, to create legal documents that prove your rights, presumably to be used in an offline dispute resolution system (eg. courts).

Binance has raised an undisclosed amount of money from Vertex Ventures China and Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India (not from Tamasek as it was originally reported), with the strategic aim to open a base in Singapore and launch new fiat to crypto ramps in the broader South-East Asian markets.

Just six months after its $4M seed round, the MIT-linked Algorand project scores another $62M in funding.

They're not announcing where the funding came from, but it seems clear USV and Pillar are participating.

Additionally, they're getting some heavyweights in the executive team: Steve Kokinos, co-founder and Chairman at Fuze, and W. Sean Ford, co-founder of uPromise and former CMO of LogMeIn, will join Algorand as CEO and COO, respectively.

Synthetic Minds is a fascinating company that is applying some of the formal verification and program synthesis techniques used by the likes of NASA in order to build more trust in mission critical smart contract code. 

As more and more value gets managed by smart contract, demand for this sort of services is bound to grow.

The company has closed a $5.5M round of funding after completing YC W18 batch, led by Khosla Ventures and Pantera.

We missed this last week, but thought important to let you all know that dYdX has raised a Series A round led by Chris Dixon at a16z crypto and Olaf at Polychain.

Abstract Ventures, Kindred Ventures, 1confirmation, Elad Gil, Fred Ehrsamm, Craft Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Kevin Hartz, Dragonfly Capital and VY Capital also participated.

Decentralized finance is happening.

(disclaimer: we are indirectly exposed to dYdX via our investment in 1confirmation)

The Australian regulator is also hard at work policing the local ICO market.

After suspending 5 ICOs from April this year, they have required a crypto trading platform, who somehow intended to raise up to $50M via a token sale with the endorsement of a famous cricket player, to halt the sale and refund investors.

Japan's self-regulatory body for the crypto exchange industry, which formed in the aftermath of the Coincheck hack earlier this year and counts 16 licensed domestic cryptocurrency exchanges, has received formal accreditation by the Financial Service Agency.

The purpose of the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA) will be to "create guidelines for domestic exchanges including strict measures to curb insider trading and money laundering while implementing security standards to safeguard customer assets".

It will be fascinating to see the effect of self-regulation in this market and whether other regulators will be inspired by it.