📌 An opinionated recap of the most interesting news in crypto
Token Economy
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Rocco adds to Kyle's recent post on value capture at layers 1 and 2 with this post where he outlines how the risks of building on top of multiple protocol layers compound.
Worth keeping in mind when thinking about the benefits of modularity in #defi.
Really important and timely post by Kevin of Gitcoin, where he advocates for inflation funding as a sustainable funding mechanism for the Ethereum commons.
He also covers other approaches to both generating and channelling the funds, such as micro-donations per tx via wallets, MolochDAO and Gitcoin grants.
Your weekly deep dive on Maker, this time by Jason Choi of Spartan Capital.
In this essay he delves into how third party protocols offering borrowing and lending services for DAI can influence Maker's monetary policy decisions.
Very cool to see the Centrifuge team explain the reasoning behind postponing the addition of a token to a later date, and launching their network tokenless to reduce complexity and uncertainty.
A fascinating crypto experiment in incentive design and Harberger Tax, curtesy of Simon de la Rouviere.
This NFT is always on sale at a price decided by its last owner. Anyone can buy it at that price and set a higher sale price, so long as they pay a 5% annual patronage fee to the original creator. The fee is taken out of an ETH deposit the buyer needs to set aside in order to complete the purchase.
Rainbownet is a cool new protocol related to something I've been thinking a lot about lately: bringing off-line assets on-chain.
The main use case that people have been targeting for the past year is real-estate and early stage startup equity, but I think we'll soon realize we all got it wrong. We should have targeted hyper-liquid public equities, commodities and similar assets first.
The reason is that you don't really bring them on-chain, but you create a synthetic version and then hedge offline with the real asset!
The more crypto-y description of Rainbow tho would be "an off-chain non-custodial exchange and payment network supporting any liquid asset."
SportX is a non-custodial betting exchange built on Ethereum and the first Dapp on the BetX network.
It's effectively a decentralized, P2P and uncensorable version of Bet365, where bettors get rewarded with a token that gives them governance rights to the 'protocol fund' that accrues trading fees from BetX-based dapps. Currently the fund has $2.6k worth of DAI in it.
Cool product release by Dether, who are allowing anyone with their app to effectively provide a local bridge between fiat and ERC20 tokens as long as they stake ETH and some DTH tokens.
The Dether protocol handles the swap in the background using Kyber's liquidity pool, turning its users into (and rewarding them to become) actual crypto ATMs.
One-stop-shop depository of all things said and written about crypto asset valuations, curated by the Ikigai team (who just announced their anchor LP, see below).
I fear Lightning is getting more complicated rather than simpler.
Lighting Loop is apparently a big deal, and "Lightning Loop Out allows users to increase their receiving capacity by offloading their funds from the network while keeping channels open. "
Fundabit, the decentralized version of Patreon, goes live on mainnet!
Any content creator can now set up a project and accept recurrent crypto payments in any ERC20 token (including DAI) without the risk of being censored or of losing their audience.
Some details supposedly emerged on Bakkt valuation at the $182M Series A round announced last year.
$740M is pretty mind blowing for a pre launch startup, though interestingly the fine print of the deal suggests that the investors also hold a put option issued by ICE that grants them equity redemption rights in case of milestones being missed.
Paradigm and Placeholder have purchased $11M worth of NMR (Erasure protocol's native token) in a secondary transaction, we presume, from Numerai's balance sheet. A transaction along the lines of A16Z recent purchase of MKR tokens.
The funding will go towards launching the Erasure marketplace later this year.
Commonwealth Labs, the startup developing Edgewere smart contract platform as a Polkadot parachain, closed a $2M round from 1confirmation, Canaan Partners and Ryan Zurrer.
The articles goes at length explaining the novel airdrop mechanism that Edgewere is planning for its native token EDG.
(disclosure: we are personal LPs in 1Confirmation fund I)
Figment Networks, the provider of institutional grade Proof of Stake infrastructure services, has announced a CAD $1.8M round from Bonfire Ventures, FJ Labs and XDL Capital Group.