Along similar lines, Demi from Zeppelin recaps all the great fundamental developments that have occurred in 2018 while prices crashed, laying the foundations for future growth.
Here's to his 2019 wishes coming through:
"While 2018 was more about trading, experimentation and laying out the initial infrastructure, 2019 will be more about solving problems for real users, deploying scalable and robust infrastructure, crafting great user experiences and driving sustainable businesses."
To top that up, the team at Dune Analytics churned some really good data on usage of the most popular Ethereum Dapps in 2018, from MakerDAO DAI to Compound lending, from 0x trading to Aragon DAO creation.
We are off to a good start, but still incredibly early in the grand scheme of things.
Would definitely love if they produced this sort of data on a regular basis in 2019.
The Multicoin team shared a list of all the open fundamental questions in crypto as we head into 2019. There's a lot, and some sound pretty obscure (eg "Is the “hardness” of money monotonically inversely correlated with hard forks?").
But it's an *awesome* and though-provoking read to reflect over during the holidays.
Arguably the most clearly defined narrative in 2018 has been the emergence of the #defi thesis, with the first set of building blocks going live to enable a truly open financial system.
In this post Dharma gives an overview of the state of the crypto debt markets, going through Maker's trustless central banking, Compound's programmatic lending and PoS staking.
Thinking that only a year ago none of this even existed gives us strong reasons to believe that 2019 could be an amazing time for #defi. Can't wait to see that unfold.
Dust UTXOs in PoW scenarios aren't as explored as they should imho, and this article does a great job in explaining this problem.
This is like an MBA in Dust, UTXO, Ecosystem participants, Thermodynamics, efficiency. It continues a series of spectacular content from the Unchained capital folks. Thanks.
Really cool look at the completely incredible story playing out on Compound and its potential developments.
A quick recap is included, which is helpful:
"A large trader, who we will refer to as “LT”, sent 7% of the total REP supply to Compound as collateral for a large DAI loan. LT actually kept another 3% of REP’s total supply in a separate address, so in total LT controls over 10% of the REP supply. LT also appears to own over 1% of the supply of MKR tokens, and has a large Maker CDP open with about 1/1000th of the total ETH supply with a value over $8 million today. We know that LT used the DAI loan to purchase ETH which they added to their existing Maker CDP. In effect, LT used their REP tokens as collateral to increase their margin long position on ETH."
Wild speculation as to who it is is rampant as well - but the cool things are the potential liquidation scenarios outlined here.
For the developers or wannabes out there, this is a good starting point to venture out in the world of Solidity development.
💥Newsy stuff
- Zuck-coin. First leaks of what Facebook 40-strong blockchain team has been working on behind the scene: a stablecoin for the 200+ million Indian Whatsapp users to start with. Amazingly scary.
- Mergers. Picks & Shovel have merged with MG Stover crypto fund admin team Coinvantage to build together a "leading portfolio accounting and reporting system for digital assets". (PS we are investors in Picks & Shovel Co.)
- #ETHParis. Save the dates, 8-10 March '19. Applications are open. 🇫🇷
- Troubles at RChain, which has invested tens of millions in an audio codec O_o and is now out of cash.
- Talent influx. Consensys is forcing out many of its spokes with an aggressive choice between severance and a small equity stake.
- Failed ICOs. Civil is gonna try again with its ICO, after only raising just 1.4 out of its 8M target. This time, no soft cap..
- Coinbase news stream. We just can't keep up with Coinbase's news. This week it was: crypto-to-crypto trading (major news imho), a $5B asset move to a new infrastructure, support for DAI (which competes with its own stablecoin, interesting), a new forensics framework called Dexter, and the re-birth of Earn in a somewhat controversial launch with 0x giving away 1.6M tokens (around $560k) to Coinbase customers.
- Hope. There is a chance that Tether actually has its billions.
This is one of the projects that came out of ETHSingapore and it's very cool.
With some similarities to the Aztec Protocol, ZkDAI allows for transacting with DAI in a completely private way using ZK SNARKs, shielding sender, recipient and amount. It would be the closest thing to "on-chain cash" on Ethereum.
If you haven't sorted your Xmas cards yet, here's a neat idea that lets you send NFT e-cards (all proceeds go to charities supporting the fight for freedom).
You won't avoid tough questions about bitcoin price at the family dinner, but here's a diversion at least!
Gnosis is announcing the dxDAO, which is a new DAO that will have the ability to control the DutchX protocol (a p2p decentralized Dutch-auction based trading protocol).
It's a really cool initiative.
The DAO will be 100% community-owned without any pre-allocation of voting rights. It will also be in full control over DutchX.
For this Gnosis decided to use holographic consensus (which is the consensus mechanism used by DAOs on DAOstack).
Totle launched its API, which is a very, very cool way to access all of the different liquidity pools of decentralized exchanges with just one API call.
Anything that makes it easier to interact with decentralized exchanges is a win in our view.
Spot is probably one of the most beautifully designed portfolio tracker app, one you'd be compelled to check daily despite your portfolio looking like dumpster fire...
The team have announced a $1.2M funding round led by Kima Ventures and a bunch of high profile angel investors. They already integrate with exchange APIs and allow importing of holdings via public Ethereum addresses, as well as having built their own pricing data feed. It will be interesting to see how much further down the stack they go, having started from the fairly commoditized portfolio tracking layer.
Speaking of pricing feeds, Nomics, who we've heard from multiple sources have one of the best crypto trading data APIs in the market, have closed a $3M Series A round led by Arthur Ventures and participated by Ben Davenport, CityBlock Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CoVenture Crypto and Digital Currency Group.
Abacus is building more infrastructure for the 'tokenization' of securities, with a platform to facilitate their issuance, administration and settlement on the blockchain, ultimately enabling secondary markets.
The company has closed a $2M round, from Justin Kan, YC and Coinbase.
Layer1 is a really interesting approach to investing in this space, with a combination of investing capital and technical resources in the networks they get involved in.
Not unlike other firms that have been preaching (or repeating) this active participation mantra lately, they define themselves as an "investment and infrastructure platform".
They have raised a $2.1M round (presumably for the management company?) from Peter Thiel, Digital Currency Group and Jeffrey Tarrant.
Not a new round, but a cool interview between two Unplug-alumni, with Coinlist's Regan Bozman interviewing Set Protocol's Felix Feng about their fundraising process.
A new bill called the "Token Taxonomy Act of 2018" was proposed this week by a bipartisan team and it's very pro-innovation.
Its purpose would be to "amend the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to exclude digital tokens from the definition of a security".
A pretty big step forward and in the right direction.