March 9th — Weekly Crypto Digest
Fidelity Investments’ digital assets branch, Fidelity Digital Assets, launches its Bitcoin custody services with a select group of eligible clients. Fidelity is in the final testing and process refinement period before providing services to more institutions. — Link
Mark Zuckerberg addresses privacy and encryption trends in a blog post: — Link
• “Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication.”
• “One challenge in building social tools is the ‘permanence problem’. As we build up large collections of messages and photos over time, they can become a liability as well as an asset.”
“I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do.” Facebook has a responsibility to work with law enforcement to prevent crime and bad actors.
• “Public social networks” will continue to be important for discovering new people and giving people a broadcasting platform.
Facebook is working on a coin that lets Whatsapp users send money to friends and family instantly, NYTimes reports. — Link
Argentina’s Ministry of Production and Labor will grant up to $50k for every project Binance Labs invests in. — Link
Chris Burniske writes about how now could be “The Best Time to Buy & Build Tokens”: — Link
• In a bull market, investors have extreme bias that everyone is making money doing the “new thing” (i.e. token investments), but in a bear market, investors favor investments they’ve seen work over long periods of time (i.e. equity investments)
• “Just as people in 2017 regretted their 2014/2015/2016 decision to abandon bitcoin for blockchain, many people in 2021 will regret their 2018/2019/2020 decision to abandon tokens for equity”
• “When the next bull market arrives, the token-models that are providing real utility are likely to go through another parabolic frenzy”
• Next bull market will be a bad time to be a quality investor or entrepreneur: “Quality entrepreneurs will get lost in the noise or raise too much money, which will haunt them later.”
Naval blogs about seeking wealth over status: — Link
• “My definition of wealth is businesses and assets than can earn while you sleep.”
• “The reason why you want wealth is for freedom, not fur coats or Ferraris, because that gets boring really fast. It is so you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all the product hours away into a soulless job. Wealth is so you are your own soverign individual.”
• Money is trying to be a reliable IOU to society.
• Status is a zero-sum game and its hierarchical; Avoid status games because they it puts someone else down and make you into an angry combative person.
2009 Bitcoin investor Jeffrey Wernick says, “People in the industry now care more about blockchain than bitcoin, because they’re just looking for an alternative model to make money, and they’re agnostic to the initial philosophical framework that drove people to adopt bitcoin to begin with.” Investing in bitcoin is like “making a statement to the government that says, ‘what you’re doing is completely unacceptable,’” Wenrick says. — Link
Vitalik talks about how he got interested in Bitcoin in 2011 with an interview with VICE: — Link
• “What really struck out to be [about Bitcoin] was that it actually is still possible for people to come together and create an entire new financial system.”
• “Before [Bitcoin], finance and lots of other things seemed like there were all these people way up there that were just doing these things and without them there was no way any of this could happen, and it made it very obvious that money is something a community can make for itself.”
• “Blockchain represent epochal changes in the options we have for interacting with each other. With Bitcoin, you don’t need banks to send money anymore, it’s something that happens peer-to-peer, and Ethereum extends that to making digital enforceable agreements.”
“Bitcoin Utopia” creator Morgan Rockcoons pleads guilty to wire fraud and admits he sold land he never owned to investors in Elko County, Nevada, which was previously covered by NYTimesand Vice in 2018. The loss to investors is at least $45.6k. Morgan faces up to 25 years in prison. — Link
Lyft unveils S-1: aims to raise $100M in IPO which will value the company at $20B, up from its last private valuation of $15.1B. Lyft record $2.2B in revenue in 2018 with a net loss of $911M. Lyft holds 34% of the ridesharing market, and Uber owns 66%. Lyft was founded in 2007 and raised $5.1B to date. — Link
Ernst & Young reports that five of the six QuadrigaCX’s offline wallets in question were emptied in April 2018, eight months before the CEO’s death. The sixth was emptied in December 2018. A co-founder Michael Patryn also shared multimillion dollar trades on Bitmex on Reddit in 2018, but it remains unclear where his source of funds were from. — Link
Web3 Foundation Board Member Ryan Zurrer blogs, “The Age of Crypto-Governance Is Upon Us”: — Link
• “For the first time, people are starting to work for cybernetic collectives like DAOs as their full-time job..We are entering an era where talent wins.”
• “Fair governance is a noble pursuit in and of itself and I’m excited to spend time chasing this dream”
• Due to cryptoeconomic models, we will see more advancement in new governance models and self-directed organizations in the next few years than we have seen in generations.
IDEO CoLab investor Dan Elitzer talks about DeFi and crypto collateral on Laura Shin’s Unconfirmed podcast: “The mixture of ways to exchange and lend and borrow various types of tokens are coming together to create something new and unique, which is showing a glimmer of what a new open financial system could look like.” Mentions are locking up ETH in MakerDAO to use DAI or go long. Other interesting DeFi projects include Compound, Dharma, and relayers including 0x, Kyber, Airswap. — Link
A hacker steals 2.09M EOS worth $7.7M from block producer EOS42 after it failed update its list of blacklisted mainnet EOS accounts. — Link
Naval talks about how technology and science creates abundance for society: “What would happen is we would build robots, machines, software and hardware to do everything. And we would all be living in massive abundance.. we can use technology breakthroughs to get everything that we wanted. And if anyone is still working at that point, they’re working as a form of expressing their creativity.” — Link
Airbnb agrees to acquire HotelTonight for an undisclosed sum.HotelTonight was last valued at $463M in 2017 and raised $131M to date from Accel, Battery. Forerunner, First Round and more. Airbnb was last valued at $31B in 2017. — Link
Jack Dorsey tweets about his Casa Bitcoin full node. Jack also says in The Tales From the Crypto podcast that he spent over $10k in a week using bitcoin. “The internet creates a new reality and it will want its own currency,” Jack says. — Link
Ethereum Constantinople successfully activates on February 28.Ethereum had seven previous forks, and Constantinople is the first mainet hard fork in almost two years. — Link
ThunderCore raises $50M from Pantera, Huobi Capital, MetaStable, ZhenFund, Electric Capital, Arrington XRP, FBG, Hashed, Kinetic and SV Angel. Thunder tokens were briefly trading on Bilaxy at 70–80% below the last round’s price before trading was suspended per Thunder’s request. — Link
First voting round of MakerDAO token ends in favor of increasing “DAI Stability Fee” to 3.5 percent, up from 1.5 percent today.$MKR holders will now move on to “executive voting” period before changes are executed across the network. — Link
Coinbase says its mission is “to create an open financial system for the world, ” and “the current financial system leaves many people behind.” “In many parts of the world, access, gender bias, and restrictive laws and regulations all put additional barriers on women’s ability to open a bank account, get a loan, own land, or start their own businesses,” the report says. — Link
An alleged leak of Telegram’s TON platform showcases a few features that would take advantage of anti-government-censorship, including sending money, broadcasting messages, live streaming and in-app games. — Link
BitMax offers leveraged BNB/USDT, BNB/BTC, and BNB/ETH trading. — Link
Binance will launch Celer token sale on Launchpad on March 19.Huobi and Kucoin are also rumored to offer IEOs soon, sources tell W3J. — Link
What’s Happening On Twitter
“The future of gaming is “play to earn” — Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer, in reference to a video demo of Korea-based Itam.games’ EOS game demos
“The recent BNB rally gets Chinese traders/speculators excited in all other exchange platform tokens like HT, OKB, ZB and BTMX. ZB and BTMX pumped for over 130% just today. “Pump the whole sector” is a very chinese trading mentality, trading is still a local, social behavior” — Dovey Wan
“Facebook’s commitment to privacy is only slightly less credible than Lockheed Martin’s commitment to world peace.” — Zcash Executive Director Josh Cincinnati
“The biggest problem with defi at the moment:
-A lot of people want to lend crypto.
-Not a lot of people want to borrow crypto.” — EthHub.io Founder Eric Conner
“No normal person should care about Ethereum.
It’s a backend technology.
Build something with it that people want.
They want a service. An experience. A superpower.
They certainly don’t want a backend.
Users don’t know about BigTable but they sure love using Google.” — Head of Product at Dharma Protocol Kayvon Tehranian
“Your real resumé is a painful recounting of all of your struggles.” — Naval
“UX is what will bring on the next scalability crisis. Most of the infrastructural pieces are in place; all that now needs to happen is an expression of #DeFi #OpenFi that is palatable to a large number of users.” — Ethereum Foundation member Jamie JeMeng
“If the average value of a transaction of your DAPP is below $1,000 Ethereum mainnet is not the right choice for you until sharding.” — Gnosis Founder Martin Köppelmann
“10+ scaling solutions/teams for Ethereum, 10x more likely to find solutions that work
1 — Connext Network
2 — Perun Channels
3 — Celer Network
4 — Counterfactual
5 — Subnets
6 — Generalized State Channels
7 — Generalized Plasma
8 — Sharding
9 — Funfair Channels
10- Sidechains” — Amentum Founder Steven D. McKie
“#DeFi Pulse:
Lending: $308.5M
DEX: $4.8M
Derivatives: $863.1K”
- Placeholder Partner Chris Burniske
“Here’s my honest feedback on the lightning network and Bitcoin:
I run a media company. It’s based in Australia. I employ some people in the Philippines to help with back end stuff and some grunt work.
I want to pay them with Bitcoin. But there’s a problem… [tweet thread]” — Jason Smith
“Dai is a collateralized Ethereum token pegged to the dollar. https://xdai.io/ is a way to send and receive these in a burner wallet, which you can then deposit to your personal account.” -Samgdf
“What assets with > $1B market cap do you expect will become collateral types in maker in the next 24 months?” — Multicoin Partner Kyle Samani
“I’ve found that there’s a whole generation of newly-rich who have decided to put their capital towards investments instead of material objects (cars, houses, jewelry, etc.) yet still egregiously miscalculate their finances to the point where they have no liquidity.” — Jeremy Gardner
Written & Curated By Andrew LeeFounding Editor-in-Chief of W3J
Upcoming Blockchain Conferences
TOKEN2049 March 13–14 in Hong Kong.
Deconomy April 4–5 in Seoul, Korea
Paris Blockchain Week Summit April 16–17. Discount code WEB3J. [Note:
W3J is 100% revenue and commission free, this code is just to help the community!]
Consensus May 13–15 in NYC
