📌 An opinionated recap of the most interesting news in crypto
Token Economy
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YR explores the idea of running a "lockdrop" (ie locking up ETH to get token XYZ) using the Uniswap protocol, while creating a liquid market for the token.
Solid essay by Dan Zuller of Vision Hill on what it takes for an asset like ETH, or any native token of competing "programmable value" networks, to build up a monetary premium.
As always, a really thoughtful essay by team Multicoin. Kyle dives into value capture both at layer 1 and 2, arguing it's about the networks effects around security (for L1) and 'stateful-ness' (for L2).
Mostly common sense from Fred Wilson, but notable that he thinks DeFi as a use case is taking off first because it doesn't need scalability as much as mass market consumer applications.
If you'd like to place Facebook's recent moves concerning privacy in context, Ben Evans' post is an absolute must read. In it he argues that, unlike MSFT, FB is trying to make the architectural change required to solve its problems itself.
Great essay by Tony Sheng, whom we haven't featured for way too long. This one looks into the unprecedented scale of the privacy problem that society faces, drawing parallels with other times in history when the system had to change in light of some external catalysts.
The folks at HASHCIB have found a potential discrepancy between the latest Ripple Markets report (Q4 2018) and the data as well as potential divergence in the use of funds that are released from special set of on-chain escrows and Ripple’s declared intention to “help support the XRP ecosystem” with unlocked funds.
To top it off they have found additional XRP balances, possibly controlled by Ripple, that increase the company’s share of the free float of XRP to 36%.
Disclaimer: we have not independently verified, and don't care too much about Ripple to invest the time to do so, but have been impressed with their previous reporting so thought it would be worth sharing for people who want to dig further.
The folks at OpenLaw are experimenting with a bunch of crypto-real world integrations (like wrapping a DAO in an LLC).
This week they created a version of LambaSchool's Income Share Agreement that tokenizes the income of the student and also has a voting mechanism to block the new Lambda stipend feature.
Hard to understand if you don't know how Lambda works, but pretty mind blowing. And if it's not Lambda I'm 100% sure someone will be trying this in the next months.
Fantastic work by the TokenAnalyst team and Bitmex Research on this single source of truth on how the two largest Ethereum node client implementations (Geth and Parity) perform in different modes (eg full, fast, archive nodes).
Veil have released the highly anticipated market creation feature.
Now anyone can create markets and earn fees from settling and trading, as long as it doesn't break Veil's regulatory imposed rules (eg can't create a market on the price of a security) and the creator goes through KYC.
Creating a market is actually quite costly (you need to deposit* both ETH and REP, which you'll get back when the market resolves correctly), so before activating a market you can get a pulse for how much demand there if for it by leaving it in draft mode.
Look forward to seeing people go wild on it.
* since creating markets earn fees, there's a clear opportunity here to allow people to borrow ETH & REP against a share of the future fees. This could be a pool of ETH and REP (eg a DAO?) that any market creator can submit requests to and get funding from.
Unchained Capital released their multi-sigs vault product, which can be used in client-controlled (you have 2 keys, and they essentially act as a backup if you lose one of them - so helpful for teams of two that want a third co-signer for backup) and institutional (where the keys are held by you, Unchained and a 3rd party). Need to put a lot of trust into them to use the latter..
Kevin from Gitcoin released an ERC to standardize funding for OSS maintainers.
The point he makes is that the only real way is to use inflation funding that goest to either a DAO like the MolochDAO or to a Gitcoin process (he's founded it and needs to plug it after all).
Feels somewhat inevitable that we need to figure out some incentives to keep development going for projects without that mechanic built in already.
Ripple are setting aside $100M worth of XRP to provide grants to video game developers with >50K DAUs.
The grant programme will be managed by a company named Forte, headed by the founder of mobile gaming platform Kabam and whose investors/advisors count folks like A16Z, Fred Ehrsam and Balaji Srinivasan.
It's interesting to see Ripple explore areas beyond core with its stash of XRP.
Tendermint is the company behind both Cosmos and Tendermint-core, which is the default POS blockchain that people use when rolling their own networks at the moment.
The round was led by Paradigm, with participation from Bain Capital, 1confirmation, and "other notable investors".
Disclosure: we're personal investors in 1confirmation fund I.
Congrats to our friend and recent Unplugger Joe and team for unveiling Bison to the world, including a fresh $5.25M capital injection from Initialized Capital, Accomplice, Notation Capital, Homebrew, Galaxy Digital, Distributed Global and Charge Ventures.
Bison is building an "infrastructure as a service company" targeted at participatory blockchain networks and its constituents. They are opening up for alpha partners, so get in touch with them if you are looking to stake, validate, vote, transact or secure blockchain protocols.