 | submitted by Joe-M-4 to CryptoCurrency [link] [comments] EXPERIMENT - Tracking Top 10 Cryptos of 2020 - Month Nine - UP +56% See the full blog post with all the tables here. tl;dr
Month Nine – UP 56%2020 Top Ten OverviewAfter a rough start to the month, most of crypto had a Wake Me Up When September Ends moment. For the 2020 Top Ten Portfolio, it was bad, but could have been (as has been) much worse: it was the best performing of the Top Ten “Index Fund” Experiments in September and at least one of the cryptos (BNB up +25%) had a great month. Question of the month:In September, this decentralized exchange (DEX) overtook Coinbase in trading volume:A) UniswapB) AaveC) CompoundD) Both A and BScroll down for the answer. Ranking and September Winners and Losers2020 Top 10 RankLots of movement this month: six out of the Top Ten changed positions in September. BCH climbed one from #6 to #5 and BNB made a big move from #10 to #6. Going the opposite direction were BSV, EOS, and Tezos, dropping one, two, and four places respectively. The big story though, at least for anyone who’s been watching crypto for a while, was the ejection of Litecoin from the Top Ten. In just 30 days, LTC fell five places from #7 to #12. For some context, Litecoin’s absence from the Top Ten is a Top Ten Experiment first. It is also the first time since CoinMarketCap has tracked crypto rankings that Litecoin has not has not held a spot in the Top Ten. Drop outs: after nine months of the experiment, 30% of the cryptos that started 2020 in the Top Ten have dropped out. LTC, EOS, and Tezos have been replaced by ADA, LINK, and most recently, DOT. September Winners – Winner, singular: BNB was the only crypto to finish in the green, finished up +25% for the month, and gained four places in the rankings. A very good month for Binance Coin. September Losers – Tezos was the worst performing crypto of the 2020 Top Ten portfolio, losing nearly a third of its value, down -31% for the month. LTC also had a bad month, losing -24% and dropping out of the Top Ten. Since COVID-19 has hammered the sporting world, let’s be overly competitive and pit these cryptos against each other, shall we? Here’s a table showing which cryptos have the most monthly wins and losses nine months into the 2020 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment: Wins/Losses ETH is in the lead three monthly Ws, followed by Tether and Tezos with two wins each. Even though it is up +79% since January 1st, 2020, BSV has the most monthly losses: it has been the worst performing crypto of the group four out of the first nine months in 2020. Overall update – ETH maintains strong lead, followed by BNB. 100% of Top Ten are in positive territory.Ethereum remains firmly in the lead, up +187% on the year. Thanks to a strong month for BNB and a weak month for Tezos, Binance Coin has overtaken XTZ for second place, and is now up +109% in 2020.Discounting Tether (no offense Big-T), EOS (+4%) is the worst performing cryptocurrency of the 2020 Top Ten Portfolio. 100% of the cryptos in this group are in positive territory. Total Market Cap for the cryptocurrency sector:The overall crypto market lost about $35B in September, ending the month up +85% since the beginning of this year’s experiment in January 2020. Despite a rough month, this is the second highest month-end level since the 2020 Top Ten Experiment started nine months ago.Bitcoin dominance:Monthly BitDom - 2020 BitDom ticked up slightly this month, but is still lower than it has been for most of the year. As always, a low BitDom reflects a greater appetite for altcoins. For context, the BitDom range since the beginning of the experiment in January 2020 has been roughly between 57% and 68%. Overall return on investment since January 1st, 2020:After an initial $1000 investment on January 1st, the 2020 Top Ten Portfolio is now worth $1,536, up +56%. This is the best performing of the three Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Portfolios, but not by much: the 2019 Top Ten came in at +54% in September.Here’s the month by month ROI of the 2020 Top Ten Experiment, hopefully helpful to maintain perspective and provide an overview as we go along: Monthly ROI - 2020 Top Ten Even during the zombie apocalypse blip in March, the 2020 Top Ten has managed to end every month so far in the green (for a mirror image, check out the all red table you’ll find in the 2018 experiment). The range of monthly ROI for the 2020 Top Ten has been between a low of +7% in March and high of +83% in August. So, how does the 2020 Top Ten Experiment compare to the parallel projects?
After a $3000 investment in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, the combined portfolios are worth $3,340 ($238+ $1,538 +$1,564). That’s up about +11% for the three combined portfolios, compared to +31% last month. Here’s a table to help visualize the progress of the combined portfolios: Combined ROI - UP +11% That’s a +11% gain by buying $1k of the cryptos that happened to be in the Top Ten on January 1st, 2018, 2019, and 2020. But what if I’d gone all in on only one Top Ten crypto for the past three years? While many have come and gone over the life of the experiment, five cryptos have started in Top Ten for all three years: BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC (Big L, no pressure, but if you don’t claw yourself back in the Top Ten by January 2021, you’re out of the club). Let’s take a look: Three Year Club At this point in the Experiments, Ethereum (+104%) would have easily returned the most, followed by BTC (+77%). On the other hand, following this approach with XRP, I would have been down nearly a third at -31%. So that’s the Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiments snapshot. Let’s take a look at how traditional markets are doing. Comparison to S&P 500I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of my experiment to have a comparison point to traditional markets. The S&P slipped a bit from an all time high in August and is now up just +5% in 2020.Over the same time period, the 2020 Top Ten Crypto Portfolio is returning about +56%. The initial $1k investment in crypto is now worth about $1,563. That same $1k I put into crypto in January 2020 would be worth $1050 had it been redirected to the S&P 500 instead. That’s a $513 difference on a $1k investment, one of the largest gaps in favor of crypto all year. But that’s just 2020. What about in the longer term? What if I invested in the S&P 500 the same way I did during the first three years of the Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiments? What I like to call the world’s slowest dollar cost averaging method? Here are the figures:
After three $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, and 2020, my portfolio would be worth $3,660. That $3,660 is up +22% since January 2018, compared to a +11% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios over the same period of time. That’s an 11% swing in favor of the S&P 500 and breaks a two month mini-streak of wins from the Top Ten crypto portfolios. For those keeping track or unable to see the table above: that’s seven monthly victories for the S&P vs. two monthly victories for crypto. The largest gap so far was a 22% difference in favor of the S&P back in June. Conclusion:September saw losses for both traditional and crypto markets, but crypto got hit harder. What can we expect for the rest of 2020? The Neverending Year is entering the final quarter and is not finished with us yet: a lot can and will happen in the remaining months. More volatility is no doubt to come as we enter the final stretch of a truly unpredictable and exhausting year. Buckle up.Stay healthy and take care of yourselves out there. Thanks for reading and for supporting the experiment. I hope you’ve found it helpful. I continue to be committed to seeing this process through and reporting along the way. Feel free to reach out with any questions and stay tuned for progress reports. Keep an eye out for the original 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment and the 2019 Top Ten Experiment follow up experiment. And the Answer is…A) UniswapAs part of the DeFi/DEX wave, in late August/early September, Uniswap surpassed Coinbase in trading volume. |
 | Source submitted by pascalbernoulli to Yield_Farming [link] [comments] It’s effectively July 2017 in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), and as in the heady days of the initial coin offering (ICO) boom, the numbers are only trending up. According to DeFi Pulse, there is $1.9 billion in crypto assets locked in DeFi right now. According to the CoinDesk ICO Tracker, the ICO market started chugging past $1 billion in July 2017, just a few months before token sales started getting talked about on TV. Debate juxtaposing these numbers if you like, but what no one can question is this: Crypto users are putting more and more value to work in DeFi applications, driven largely by the introduction of a whole new yield-generating pasture, Compound’s COMP governance token. Governance tokens enable users to vote on the future of decentralized protocols, sure, but they also present fresh ways for DeFi founders to entice assets onto their platforms. That said, it’s the crypto liquidity providers who are the stars of the present moment. They even have a meme-worthy name: yield farmers. https://preview.redd.it/lxsvazp1g9l51.png?width=775&format=png&auto=webp&s=a36173ab679c701a5d5e0aac806c00fcc84d78c1 Where it startedEthereum-based credit market Compound started distributing its governance token, COMP, to the protocol’s users this past June 15. Demand for the token (heightened by the way its automatic distribution was structured) kicked off the present craze and moved Compound into the leading position in DeFi.The hot new term in crypto is “yield farming,” a shorthand for clever strategies where putting crypto temporarily at the disposal of some startup’s application earns its owner more cryptocurrency. Another term floating about is “liquidity mining.” The buzz around these concepts has evolved into a low rumble as more and more people get interested. The casual crypto observer who only pops into the market when activity heats up might be starting to get faint vibes that something is happening right now. Take our word for it: Yield farming is the source of those vibes. But if all these terms (“DeFi,” “liquidity mining,” “yield farming”) are so much Greek to you, fear not. We’re here to catch you up. We’ll get into all of them. We’re going to go from very basic to more advanced, so feel free to skip ahead. What are tokens?Most CoinDesk readers probably know this, but just in case: Tokens are like the money video-game players earn while fighting monsters, money they can use to buy gear or weapons in the universe of their favorite game.But with blockchains, tokens aren’t limited to only one massively multiplayer online money game. They can be earned in one and used in lots of others. They usually represent either ownership in something (like a piece of a Uniswap liquidity pool, which we will get into later) or access to some service. For example, in the Brave browser, ads can only be bought using basic attention token (BAT). If tokens are worth money, then you can bank with them or at least do things that look very much like banking. Thus: decentralized finance. Tokens proved to be the big use case for Ethereum, the second-biggest blockchain in the world. The term of art here is “ERC-20 tokens,” which refers to a software standard that allows token creators to write rules for them. Tokens can be used a few ways. Often, they are used as a form of money within a set of applications. So the idea for Kin was to create a token that web users could spend with each other at such tiny amounts that it would almost feel like they weren’t spending anything; that is, money for the internet. Governance tokens are different. They are not like a token at a video-game arcade, as so many tokens were described in the past. They work more like certificates to serve in an ever-changing legislature in that they give holders the right to vote on changes to a protocol. So on the platform that proved DeFi could fly, MakerDAO, holders of its governance token, MKR, vote almost every week on small changes to parameters that govern how much it costs to borrow and how much savers earn, and so on. Read more: Why DeFi’s Billion-Dollar Milestone Matters One thing all crypto tokens have in common, though, is they are tradable and they have a price. So, if tokens are worth money, then you can bank with them or at least do things that look very much like banking. Thus: decentralized finance. What is DeFi?Fair question. For folks who tuned out for a bit in 2018, we used to call this “open finance.” That construction seems to have faded, though, and “DeFi” is the new lingo.In case that doesn’t jog your memory, DeFi is all the things that let you play with money, and the only identification you need is a crypto wallet. On the normal web, you can’t buy a blender without giving the site owner enough data to learn your whole life history. In DeFi, you can borrow money without anyone even asking for your name. I can explain this but nothing really brings it home like trying one of these applications. If you have an Ethereum wallet that has even $20 worth of crypto in it, go do something on one of these products. Pop over to Uniswap and buy yourself some FUN (a token for gambling apps) or WBTC (wrapped bitcoin). Go to MakerDAO and create $5 worth of DAI (a stablecoin that tends to be worth $1) out of the digital ether. Go to Compound and borrow $10 in USDC. (Notice the very small amounts I’m suggesting. The old crypto saying “don’t put in more than you can afford to lose” goes double for DeFi. This stuff is uber-complex and a lot can go wrong. These may be “savings” products but they’re not for your retirement savings.) Immature and experimental though it may be, the technology’s implications are staggering. On the normal web, you can’t buy a blender without giving the site owner enough data to learn your whole life history. In DeFi, you can borrow money without anyone even asking for your name. DeFi applications don’t worry about trusting you because they have the collateral you put up to back your debt (on Compound, for instance, a $10 debt will require around $20 in collateral). Read more: There Are More DAI on Compound Now Than There Are DAI in the World If you do take this advice and try something, note that you can swap all these things back as soon as you’ve taken them out. Open the loan and close it 10 minutes later. It’s fine. Fair warning: It might cost you a tiny bit in fees, and the cost of using Ethereum itself right now is much higher than usual, in part due to this fresh new activity. But it’s nothing that should ruin a crypto user. So what’s the point of borrowing for people who already have the money? Most people do it for some kind of trade. The most obvious example, to short a token (the act of profiting if its price falls). It’s also good for someone who wants to hold onto a token but still play the market. Doesn’t running a bank take a lot of money up front?It does, and in DeFi that money is largely provided by strangers on the internet. That’s why the startups behind these decentralized banking applications come up with clever ways to attract HODLers with idle assets.Liquidity is the chief concern of all these different products. That is: How much money do they have locked in their smart contracts? “In some types of products, the product experience gets much better if you have liquidity. Instead of borrowing from VCs or debt investors, you borrow from your users,” said Electric Capital managing partner Avichal Garg. Let’s take Uniswap as an example. Uniswap is an “automated market maker,” or AMM (another DeFi term of art). This means Uniswap is a robot on the internet that is always willing to buy and it’s also always willing to sell any cryptocurrency for which it has a market. On Uniswap, there is at least one market pair for almost any token on Ethereum. Behind the scenes, this means Uniswap can make it look like it is making a direct trade for any two tokens, which makes it easy for users, but it’s all built around pools of two tokens. And all these market pairs work better with bigger pools. Why do I keep hearing about ‘pools’?To illustrate why more money helps, let’s break down how Uniswap works.Let’s say there was a market for USDC and DAI. These are two tokens (both stablecoins but with different mechanisms for retaining their value) that are meant to be worth $1 each all the time, and that generally tends to be true for both. The price Uniswap shows for each token in any pooled market pair is based on the balance of each in the pool. So, simplifying this a lot for illustration’s sake, if someone were to set up a USDC/DAI pool, they should deposit equal amounts of both. In a pool with only 2 USDC and 2 DAI it would offer a price of 1 USDC for 1 DAI. But then imagine that someone put in 1 DAI and took out 1 USDC. Then the pool would have 1 USDC and 3 DAI. The pool would be very out of whack. A savvy investor could make an easy $0.50 profit by putting in 1 USDC and receiving 1.5 DAI. That’s a 50% arbitrage profit, and that’s the problem with limited liquidity. (Incidentally, this is why Uniswap’s prices tend to be accurate, because traders watch it for small discrepancies from the wider market and trade them away for arbitrage profits very quickly.) Read more: Uniswap V2 Launches With More Token-Swap Pairs, Oracle Service, Flash Loans However, if there were 500,000 USDC and 500,000 DAI in the pool, a trade of 1 DAI for 1 USDC would have a negligible impact on the relative price. That’s why liquidity is helpful. You can stick your assets on Compound and earn a little yield. But that’s not very creative. Users who look for angles to maximize that yield: those are the yield farmers. Similar effects hold across DeFi, so markets want more liquidity. Uniswap solves this by charging a tiny fee on every trade. It does this by shaving off a little bit from each trade and leaving that in the pool (so one DAI would actually trade for 0.997 USDC, after the fee, growing the overall pool by 0.003 USDC). This benefits liquidity providers because when someone puts liquidity in the pool they own a share of the pool. If there has been lots of trading in that pool, it has earned a lot of fees, and the value of each share will grow. And this brings us back to tokens. Liquidity added to Uniswap is represented by a token, not an account. So there’s no ledger saying, “Bob owns 0.000000678% of the DAI/USDC pool.” Bob just has a token in his wallet. And Bob doesn’t have to keep that token. He could sell it. Or use it in another product. We’ll circle back to this, but it helps to explain why people like to talk about DeFi products as “money Legos.” So how much money do people make by putting money into these products?It can be a lot more lucrative than putting money in a traditional bank, and that’s before startups started handing out governance tokens.Compound is the current darling of this space, so let’s use it as an illustration. As of this writing, a person can put USDC into Compound and earn 2.72% on it. They can put tether (USDT) into it and earn 2.11%. Most U.S. bank accounts earn less than 0.1% these days, which is close enough to nothing. However, there are some caveats. First, there’s a reason the interest rates are so much juicier: DeFi is a far riskier place to park your money. There’s no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protecting these funds. If there were a run on Compound, users could find themselves unable to withdraw their funds when they wanted. Plus, the interest is quite variable. You don’t know what you’ll earn over the course of a year. USDC’s rate is high right now. It was low last week. Usually, it hovers somewhere in the 1% range. Similarly, a user might get tempted by assets with more lucrative yields like USDT, which typically has a much higher interest rate than USDC. (Monday morning, the reverse was true, for unclear reasons; this is crypto, remember.) The trade-off here is USDT’s transparency about the real-world dollars it’s supposed to hold in a real-world bank is not nearly up to par with USDC’s. A difference in interest rates is often the market’s way of telling you the one instrument is viewed as dicier than another. Users making big bets on these products turn to companies Opyn and Nexus Mutual to insure their positions because there’s no government protections in this nascent space – more on the ample risks later on. So users can stick their assets in Compound or Uniswap and earn a little yield. But that’s not very creative. Users who look for angles to maximize that yield: those are the yield farmers. OK, I already knew all of that. What is yield farming?Broadly, yield farming is any effort to put crypto assets to work and generate the most returns possible on those assets.At the simplest level, a yield farmer might move assets around within Compound, constantly chasing whichever pool is offering the best APY from week to week. This might mean moving into riskier pools from time to time, but a yield farmer can handle risk. “Farming opens up new price arbs [arbitrage] that can spill over to other protocols whose tokens are in the pool,” said Maya Zehavi, a blockchain consultant. Because these positions are tokenized, though, they can go further. This was a brand-new kind of yield on a deposit. In fact, it was a way to earn a yield on a loan. Who has ever heard of a borrower earning a return on a debt from their lender? In a simple example, a yield farmer might put 100,000 USDT into Compound. They will get a token back for that stake, called cUSDT. Let’s say they get 100,000 cUSDT back (the formula on Compound is crazy so it’s not 1:1 like that but it doesn’t matter for our purposes here). They can then take that cUSDT and put it into a liquidity pool that takes cUSDT on Balancer, an AMM that allows users to set up self-rebalancing crypto index funds. In normal times, this could earn a small amount more in transaction fees. This is the basic idea of yield farming. The user looks for edge cases in the system to eke out as much yield as they can across as many products as it will work on. Right now, however, things are not normal, and they probably won’t be for a while. Why is yield farming so hot right now?Because of liquidity mining. Liquidity mining supercharges yield farming.Liquidity mining is when a yield farmer gets a new token as well as the usual return (that’s the “mining” part) in exchange for the farmer’s liquidity. “The idea is that stimulating usage of the platform increases the value of the token, thereby creating a positive usage loop to attract users,” said Richard Ma of smart-contract auditor Quantstamp. The yield farming examples above are only farming yield off the normal operations of different platforms. Supply liquidity to Compound or Uniswap and get a little cut of the business that runs over the protocols – very vanilla. But Compound announced earlier this year it wanted to truly decentralize the product and it wanted to give a good amount of ownership to the people who made it popular by using it. That ownership would take the form of the COMP token. Lest this sound too altruistic, keep in mind that the people who created it (the team and the investors) owned more than half of the equity. By giving away a healthy proportion to users, that was very likely to make it a much more popular place for lending. In turn, that would make everyone’s stake worth much more. So, Compound announced this four-year period where the protocol would give out COMP tokens to users, a fixed amount every day until it was gone. These COMP tokens control the protocol, just as shareholders ultimately control publicly traded companies. Every day, the Compound protocol looks at everyone who had lent money to the application and who had borrowed from it and gives them COMP proportional to their share of the day’s total business. The results were very surprising, even to Compound’s biggest promoters. COMP’s value will likely go down, and that’s why some investors are rushing to earn as much of it as they can right now. This was a brand-new kind of yield on a deposit into Compound. In fact, it was a way to earn a yield on a loan, as well, which is very weird: Who has ever heard of a borrower earning a return on a debt from their lender? COMP’s value has consistently been well over $200 since it started distributing on June 15. We did the math elsewhere but long story short: investors with fairly deep pockets can make a strong gain maximizing their daily returns in COMP. It is, in a way, free money. It’s possible to lend to Compound, borrow from it, deposit what you borrowed and so on. This can be done multiple times and DeFi startup Instadapp even built a tool to make it as capital-efficient as possible. “Yield farmers are extremely creative. They find ways to ‘stack’ yields and even earn multiple governance tokens at once,” said Spencer Noon of DTC Capital. COMP’s value spike is a temporary situation. The COMP distribution will only last four years and then there won’t be any more. Further, most people agree that the high price now is driven by the low float (that is, how much COMP is actually free to trade on the market – it will never be this low again). So the value will probably gradually go down, and that’s why savvy investors are trying to earn as much as they can now. Appealing to the speculative instincts of diehard crypto traders has proven to be a great way to increase liquidity on Compound. This fattens some pockets but also improves the user experience for all kinds of Compound users, including those who would use it whether they were going to earn COMP or not. As usual in crypto, when entrepreneurs see something successful, they imitate it. Balancer was the next protocol to start distributing a governance token, BAL, to liquidity providers. Flash loan provider bZx has announced a plan. Ren, Curve and Synthetix also teamed up to promote a liquidity pool on Curve. It is a fair bet many of the more well-known DeFi projects will announce some kind of coin that can be mined by providing liquidity. The case to watch here is Uniswap versus Balancer. Balancer can do the same thing Uniswap does, but most users who want to do a quick token trade through their wallet use Uniswap. It will be interesting to see if Balancer’s BAL token convinces Uniswap’s liquidity providers to defect. So far, though, more liquidity has gone into Uniswap since the BAL announcement, according to its data site. That said, even more has gone into Balancer. Did liquidity mining start with COMP?No, but it was the most-used protocol with the most carefully designed liquidity mining scheme.This point is debated but the origins of liquidity mining probably date back to Fcoin, a Chinese exchange that created a token in 2018 that rewarded people for making trades. You won’t believe what happened next! Just kidding, you will: People just started running bots to do pointless trades with themselves to earn the token. Similarly, EOS is a blockchain where transactions are basically free, but since nothing is really free the absence of friction was an invitation for spam. Some malicious hacker who didn’t like EOS created a token called EIDOS on the network in late 2019. It rewarded people for tons of pointless transactions and somehow got an exchange listing. These initiatives illustrated how quickly crypto users respond to incentives. Read more: Compound Changes COMP Distribution Rules Following ‘Yield Farming’ Frenzy Fcoin aside, liquidity mining as we now know it first showed up on Ethereum when the marketplace for synthetic tokens, Synthetix, announced in July 2019 an award in its SNX token for users who helped add liquidity to the sETH/ETH pool on Uniswap. By October, that was one of Uniswap’s biggest pools. When Compound Labs, the company that launched the Compound protocol, decided to create COMP, the governance token, the firm took months designing just what kind of behavior it wanted and how to incentivize it. Even still, Compound Labs was surprised by the response. It led to unintended consequences such as crowding into a previously unpopular market (lending and borrowing BAT) in order to mine as much COMP as possible. Just last week, 115 different COMP wallet addresses – senators in Compound’s ever-changing legislature – voted to change the distribution mechanism in hopes of spreading liquidity out across the markets again. Is there DeFi for bitcoin?Yes, on Ethereum.Nothing has beaten bitcoin over time for returns, but there’s one thing bitcoin can’t do on its own: create more bitcoin. A smart trader can get in and out of bitcoin and dollars in a way that will earn them more bitcoin, but this is tedious and risky. It takes a certain kind of person. DeFi, however, offers ways to grow one’s bitcoin holdings – though somewhat indirectly. A long HODLer is happy to gain fresh BTC off their counterparty’s short-term win. That’s the game. For example, a user can create a simulated bitcoin on Ethereum using BitGo’s WBTC system. They put BTC in and get the same amount back out in freshly minted WBTC. WBTC can be traded back for BTC at any time, so it tends to be worth the same as BTC. Then the user can take that WBTC, stake it on Compound and earn a few percent each year in yield on their BTC. Odds are, the people who borrow that WBTC are probably doing it to short BTC (that is, they will sell it immediately, buy it back when the price goes down, close the loan and keep the difference). A long HODLer is happy to gain fresh BTC off their counterparty’s short-term win. That’s the game. How risky is it?Enough.“DeFi, with the combination of an assortment of digital funds, automation of key processes, and more complex incentive structures that work across protocols – each with their own rapidly changing tech and governance practices – make for new types of security risks,” said Liz Steininger of Least Authority, a crypto security auditor. “Yet, despite these risks, the high yields are undeniably attractive to draw more users.” We’ve seen big failures in DeFi products. MakerDAO had one so bad this year it’s called “Black Thursday.” There was also the exploit against flash loan provider bZx. These things do break and when they do money gets taken. As this sector gets more robust, we could see token holders greenlighting more ways for investors to profit from DeFi niches. Right now, the deal is too good for certain funds to resist, so they are moving a lot of money into these protocols to liquidity mine all the new governance tokens they can. But the funds – entities that pool the resources of typically well-to-do crypto investors – are also hedging. Nexus Mutual, a DeFi insurance provider of sorts, told CoinDesk it has maxed out its available coverage on these liquidity applications. Opyn, the trustless derivatives maker, created a way to short COMP, just in case this game comes to naught. And weird things have arisen. For example, there’s currently more DAI on Compound than have been minted in the world. This makes sense once unpacked but it still feels dicey to everyone. That said, distributing governance tokens might make things a lot less risky for startups, at least with regard to the money cops. “Protocols distributing their tokens to the public, meaning that there’s a new secondary listing for SAFT tokens, [gives] plausible deniability from any security accusation,” Zehavi wrote. (The Simple Agreement for Future Tokens was a legal structure favored by many token issuers during the ICO craze.) Whether a cryptocurrency is adequately decentralized has been a key feature of ICO settlements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). What’s next for yield farming? (A prediction)COMP turned out to be a bit of a surprise to the DeFi world, in technical ways and others. It has inspired a wave of new thinking.“Other projects are working on similar things,” said Nexus Mutual founder Hugh Karp. In fact, informed sources tell CoinDesk brand-new projects will launch with these models. We might soon see more prosaic yield farming applications. For example, forms of profit-sharing that reward certain kinds of behavior. Imagine if COMP holders decided, for example, that the protocol needed more people to put money in and leave it there longer. The community could create a proposal that shaved off a little of each token’s yield and paid that portion out only to the tokens that were older than six months. It probably wouldn’t be much, but an investor with the right time horizon and risk profile might take it into consideration before making a withdrawal. (There are precedents for this in traditional finance: A 10-year Treasury bond normally yields more than a one-month T-bill even though they’re both backed by the full faith and credit of Uncle Sam, a 12-month certificate of deposit pays higher interest than a checking account at the same bank, and so on.) As this sector gets more robust, its architects will come up with ever more robust ways to optimize liquidity incentives in increasingly refined ways. We could see token holders greenlighting more ways for investors to profit from DeFi niches. Questions abound for this nascent industry: What will MakerDAO do to restore its spot as the king of DeFi? Will Uniswap join the liquidity mining trend? Will anyone stick all these governance tokens into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)? Or would that be a yield farmers co-op? Whatever happens, crypto’s yield farmers will keep moving fast. Some fresh fields may open and some may soon bear much less luscious fruit. But that’s the nice thing about farming in DeFi: It is very easy to switch fields. |
 | Hey Parachuters! Seems like ages since I last posted a weekly update, right? Unfortunately, got super busy with IRL work and couldn’t keep up. But fret not! I finally scraped some time out today to get upto speed with all the news from the Parachute universe in May and June and organised them into a series of weekly updates like the ones I used to write earlier. But instead of posting them one by one everyday, thought it might be best to release them all at one go. So here's Part I of VI - All that happened at Parachute + partners from 15 May - 21 May'20: submitted by abhijoysarkar to ParachuteToken [link] [comments] The ParJar swap feature beta testing started this week with a call to testers far and wide. Click here for the latest update and stats on ParJar straight from Cap's mouth - "...it took almost two years of betas and growth to reach 1 million tips (March 7th) nd it’s taken 2 months to to add another 400k..". Amazing! The #par4par raffle continues with a 500k $PAR pool. Peace Love hosted a general knowledge trivia in TTR this week for 10k $PAR in prizes. Gamerboy’s random trivia and Victor’s “Big Trivia” in Tiproom were quite fun as well. Naj (who’s also this week’s Parena winner) hosted a six set quiz in TTR. Charlotte’s been hosting quizzes in a new format for quite some time now. This week too she held one in Tiproom. Jason started a #culturalweekend prompt with an invitation to Parachuters to share "about a cultural dance or ceremony" from their area. "Explain in detail about the dance and why it is important" for some cool $PAR. Among many of the cool stories shared by Parachuters included Nico’s Occitan music from Italy and Soleira’s Dancing Devils of Tinaquillo. Congratulations to Clinton’s FLI charity for partnering with Lumenthropy which is Stellar's philanthropic arm. Remember, all profits from the Parachute Shop go to FLI. Another crypto league with a 150k $PAR prize pot started this week. Gian’s Two-For-Tuesday was a free for all. To revisit all the awesome music posted for 2FT, check out the playlist made by Sebastian. Naj came back from near certain defeat in the finale to win this week’s Parena aXpire CEO Matthew Markham penned an article on remote work and billing software for legal firms. An updated e-flyer for Bilr was released as well. To track the latest $AXPR burn, click here. 2gether added customer support capabilities to their Twitter, Facebook and Discord. Plus, an incident tracker status page was added this week. The XIO dApp which is still in private beta has already seen 500k+ $XIO tokens locked into it. Awesome! To get a feel of how the dApp works, check out Dash’s latest video demo where he also shared some updates on tokenomics. Uptrennd founder Jeff Kirdeikis interviewed Dash over an hour long session to talk all things XIO. $XIO got listed on Idex. Click here to watch an update video on the latest developments. For XIO discussions this week, Citizens brainstormed over the base liquidity pair on Uniswap V2. DeFi Nation’s Clayton Roche wrote a detailed commentary on what XIO is doing right. Birdchain’s mid-May update came out this week. Voyager hosted a business update conference call this week. CEO Steve Ehrlich talked about the platform and crypto in general with Charlie Shrem on the Untold Stories podcast this week. Voyager’s Q3 2020 results were released. Still figuring out how to fund your Voyager wallet? Watch this video to find out. An upgrade to Fantom’s Opera Network was pushed which allows staking different amounts over time. For the latest project update, click here. A community AMA also happened this week where the team talked about a new staking proposal called Fluid Staking. Jeff from Uptrennd sat down to interview IOST co-founder Terry Wang this week. Uptrennd broke into the top 20k Alexa global rankings. Woohoo! GET Protocol’s GUTS Tickets app is now available in Italian as well. DoYourTip’s $DYT is now available on Uniswap V2. What a welcome sight for support engineers. Source: https://2gether.statuspage.io/history Switch’s $ESH token was listed on Stex, ProBit, Crex 24, Hotbit, Bilaxy and Bitcoin.com this week. Bitcoin.com also announced support for the $GHOST airdrop along with a deposit and trade competition. Continuing on its acquisition spree from last week, Switch acquired gaming platform Wavesbet and voting dApp ClearPoll. Whitepaper for the GHOST project by John McAfee was released. They will be airdropping their tokens 1:1 to $ESH HODLers on the 25th. The release of $GHOST has been contentious to say the least. Reflecting on some of the plagiarism allegations levelled against the project, the crew shared their side of the story. The team also sat down for an AMA with Coiner Vietnam. District0x’s latest weekly update talked about the upcoming DappDigest and new developments in Meme Factory among other news. The Q4 2019 quarterly report was released as well. Read all about Hydro’s Financial Offers framework here. If you are a graphic designer, don’t forget to check out this gig at Sentivate. US-residents only. OST’s Simona Pop will be attending a panel discussion by Outlier Ventures next week to talk about dev onboarding. P2P internet ecosystem ThreeFold announced a multi-faceted partnership with SelfKey for KYC and new user onboarding services. Following last week's community vote on the most attractive marketplaces, Passports Marketplace was found to be the most popular. This week, the community voted on their most preferred blockchain to be added to the app. Bank of Hodlers joined SelfKey's Loans Marketplace while Tokens.net joined the Exchanges Marketplace. COTI did a study on IoT payments and how it could offer a solution. The project was selected for the next listing vote on Gate.io. COTI community also got an opportunity to interact with the AtomicWallet team through an AMA this week. Hydro has been constantly updating its dev tools to offer a seamless developer experience Click here to read the latest Constellation Hypergraph mainnet stats. New features were added to the Molly wallet. Click here for steps to install the wallet. TheDailyChain expanded on how the $DAG ecosystem was growing. Pynk CEO Seth Ward wrote about the future of fintech in his EM360 article. Congratulations on crossing the 1k follower mark on Medium. In Shuffle Monster news, most of the $SHUF liquidity on Uniswap was moved to the V2 pool this week. New features were added to the Wibson app with the latest release giving more data control powers to the end user. Pre-staking started on the Harmony mainnet with the opening up of bids by validators followed by the election of the first batch of validators thereby marking the start of Open Staking. And just after, Harmony became the first ever blockchain to support sharded PoS. The news of Open Staking going live was covered by Coindesk and Cointelegraph. More details on what next was shared in a Coinspeaker article. How does a delegator fit into the overall scheme of things? Check out this video. Open staking noobs will find these 101 tutorials helpful. CTO Rongjian Lan also did a community call to explain about it. For the latest development updates otherwise known as #pow thread, click here. Harmony’s EPoS is designed to be fair to all stakers. So make sure to optimise your staking rewards. $ONE Binance wallets were taken down briefly for a temporary maintenance activity. They now support the mainnet coin. Hope you had a chance to participate in the guess-effective-median-stake contest to win some cool $ONE prizes. Click here for the latest staking stats. $ONE was added to Binance Savings which offers a fixed rate of return on locked savings. A minor bug in the staking bug was removed. The APR numbers should get calculated more accurately now. The crew appeared for an AMA with StakingHub. Congratulations to the winners of Stake Heist! Binance and BitMax announced support for staking with BItMax crew also appearing for an AMA. IntelliShare crew sat down for an AMA with CoinNess this week. And with that, we have to close for this week in the Parachuteverse! See you again with another update. Ciao! |
 | Hey everyone! This is Part IV of VI from our May-June update catchup series (5 Jun - 11 Jun'20): submitted by abhijoysarkar to ParachuteToken [link] [comments] Yosma's Cheerful Cassowary beat Eva's Bright Beetle in a quick finale to win this week's Parena which had a massive $PAR pot thanks to a generous donation from Tony. Gamer Boy’s “Random Gk” and “Renewal from January” quizzes in Tiproom were fun as always. Plus, there were 10k $PAR in prizes. Cool! Charlotte’s “Mega Trivia” got everyone scratching their heads. CoD Mobile gamers were in for an epic time this week with Tavo hosting a tournament with a 3k $PAR pot in the Parachute War Zone. Two-for-Tuesday slid into the "rap, reggae and reggaeton" mode this week. Click here to listen to the playlist. Thanks Sebastian for setting it up! If you have been around for a while, you’ll know that Clinton’s charity, For Living Independence, does some amazing work. So the next time you shop on Amazon, don’t forget to show some love though AmazonSmile. Cap and crew made their voices heard in NYC this week in solidarity with George Floyd Congratulations to 2gether for crossing the 40k user mark this week. A new way for account top ups was introduced as well. This week’s CEO email covers news on the latest UX and the 2GT token. Youtuber Funontheride featured the email in his video. Filippo Angeloni covered the latest updates in his newest video as well. Founder Savador Casquero wrote about crypto staking in an Investing.com article. MakerDAO covered the 2gether card in its blog post on crypto debit cards. Following the XIO dApp update from last week, Citizens brainstormed about the UI this week. Citizens also talked about some of their contrarian beliefs in crypto. Bomb community started a Uniswap rewards program. Voyager raised USD 2.1M through a private placement from investors such as Streamlined Ventures, Susquehanna, Market Rebellion etc. Their stock has seen some enormous growth this year too. CEO Stephen Ehrlich shared his thoughts on the crypto market in a recent Bloomberg article. The team also took inputs from the community on which crypto to list next. John McAfee announced a Ghost cell phone data service to be released in September. Check out how the eSIM will work from the sneak peek video. The list of supported phones is mentioned here. And hope you had good fun in ParJar Gaming while winning some cool $ESH. A new set of upgrades were pushed to the Fantom Wallet. For the latest technical update on the project, click here. This week, I also wrote a Hackernoon article (with my co-author Rohit) exploring projects which had unique variations to Proof-of-Stake for their chain consensus. Among the projects featured were Fantom, COTI and Harmony. Jeff from Uptrennd will be speaking at the LA Blockchain Summit in October this year. The winners of the Blockchain Awards were announced. The newest Opacity release allows expired accounts to be revived within 2 months of expiry. Fantom, Harmony and COTI take up a tiny but growing slice in the global staking pie Catch up on the latest District0x weekly update and dev update from here and here respectively. The Q1 2020 report was released as well. The project is still sitting on a healthy crypto asset base of USD 4M+. Hydro team shared a guide to choosing a prepaid debit card program manager. Their PaaS report was also covered by Finovate this week. A new research page for featuring all of Hydro’s fintech research material was released. The successful applicants of the Project Hydro Decentralization Ambassador Program (which started in May) were voted upon this week and 7 DAs were elected. Silent Notary, Ubikiri and IDL integrations were completed this week with Silent Notary now appearing in Applications section of Ubikiri. A roundup of the latest updates was published as well. Sentivate founder Thomas Marchi sat down for an interview with MineYourBiz Monday’s NrdGrl007. Mycro announced that Chaia.io will be hosting a campaign on the Mycro Hunter App soon. SelfKey’s Data Breach compendium was updated this week. And if you’re a Product Designer looking for remote work, don’t forget to check out this opening at SelfKey. What next for Constellation? Watch the Constellation Network State of The Union to find out. Their educational group Startdust Collective made a brand video and a high level explainer article on the HyperGraph Transport Protocol. Pynk is thinking about doing a global crowdfunding campaign as opposed to one that is restricted to certain countries only. In light of this, the Pynk Crowd Wisdom was put to work to find out the best way to go about this. Results of the Project Hydro DA Elections Wibson’s latest app update was covered by Cointelegraph and Europe World News. Click here to catch up on this week’s detailed work thread from the Harmony project. A recent Harmony ecosystem is the SmartStake dashboard to check staking stats. Sprout Wallet now supports core utilities of HRC20 tokens. The team sat down for an AMA with Binance India and KuCoin this week. Next week they will be doing another AMA with the larger Binance community. Some insights about the Harmony grants were shared in this week’s community call. Read up on Intellishare founder Raymond Xiong’s thoughts on DAOs which he shared as part of a speaker panel at the 2020 Digital Innovation Project Exchange Conference. The team also published a post on how they aim to solve the DeFi congestion. The TestNet is expected to arrive soon as well. After the latest livestream of DI-RECT’s concert which saw ~10k attendees, GET Protocol announced that they will be facilitating tickets to the follow-up show as well. A recap of the COTI journey was published to mark the one-year anniversary of the project and the occasion was celebrated with a fun trivia. DoYourTip community voted to have liquidity rewards for pooling $DYT on Uniswap. And with that, it’s a wrap! See you again with another update. Ciao! |
 | Can they overcome the product limitations of blockchain and deliver the world-class experience that consumers expect? submitted by mickhagen to genesisblockhq [link] [comments] https://reddit.com/link/i8ewbx/video/ojkc6c9a1lg51/player This is the second part of Crypto Banking Wars — a new series that examines what crypto-native company is most likely to become the bank of the future. Who is best positioned to reach mainstream adoption in consumer finance? --- While crypto allows the world to get rid of banks, a bank will still very much be necessary for this very powerful technology to reach the masses. As we laid out in our previous series, Crypto-Powered, we believe companies that build with blockchain at their core will have the best shot at winning the broader consumer finance market. We hope it will be us at Genesis Block, but we aren’t the only game in town. So this series explores the entire crypto landscape and tries to answer the question, which crypto company is most likely to become the bank of the future? In our last episode, we offered an in-depth analysis of big crypto exchanges like Coinbase & Binance. Today we’re analyzing non-custodial crypto wallets. These are products where only the user can touch or move funds. Not even the company or developer who built the application can access, control, or stop funds from being moved. These apps allow users to truly become their own bank. We’ve talked a little about this before. This group of companies is nowhere near the same level of threat as the biggest crypto exchanges. However, this group really understands DeFi and the magic it can bring. This class of products is heavily engineer-driven and at the bleeding-edge of DeFi innovation. These products are certainly worth discussing. Okay, let’s dive in. Users & AudienceThese non-custodial crypto wallets are especially popular among the most hardcore blockchain nerds and crypto cypherpunks.“Not your keys, not your coins.”This meme is endlessly repeated among longtime crypto hodlers. If you’re not in complete control of your crypto (i.e. using non-custodial wallets), then it’s not really your crypto. There has always been a close connection between libertarianism & cryptocurrency. This type of user wants to be in absolute control of their money and become their own bank. In addition to the experienced crypto geeks, for some people, these products will mean the difference between life and death. Imagine a refugee family that wants to safely protect their years of hard work — their life savings — as they travel across borders. Carrying cash could put their safety or money at risk. A few years ago I spent time in Greece at refugee camps — I know first-hand this is a real use-case. https://preview.redd.it/vigqlmgg1lg51.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=0a5d48a63ce7a637749bbbc03d62c51cc3f75613 Or imagine a family living under an authoritarian regime — afraid that their corrupt or oppressive government will seize their assets (or devalue their savings via hyperinflation). Citizens in these countries cannot risk putting their money in centralized banks or under their mattresses. They must become their own bank. These are the common use-cases and users for non-custodial wallets. Products in MarketLet’s do a quick round-up of some of the more popular products already in the market.Web/Desktop The most popular web wallet is MetaMask. Though it doesn’t have any specific integration with DeFi protocols yet, it has more than a million users (which is a lot in crypto land!). Web wallets that are more deeply integrated with DeFi include InstaDapp, Zerion, DeFi Saver, Zapper, and MyCrypto (disclosure: I’m an investor and a big fan of Taylor). For the mass market, mobile will be a much more important form-factor. I don’t view these web products as much of a threat to Genesis Block. https://preview.redd.it/gbpi2ijj1lg51.png?width=1050&format=png&auto=webp&s=c039887484bf8a3d3438fb02a384d0b9ef894e1f Mobile The more serious threats to Genesis Block are the mobile products that (A) are leveraging some of the powerful DeFi protocols and (B) abstracting away a lot of the blockchain/DeFi UX complexity. While none get close to us on (B), the products attempting this are Argent and Dharma. To the extent they can, both are trying to make interacting with blockchain technology as simple as possible. A few of the bigger exchanges have also entered this mobile non-custodial market. Coinbase has Wallet (via Cipher Browser acquisition). Binance has Trust Wallet (also via acquisition). And speaking of acquisitions, MyCrypto acquired Ambo, which is a solid product and has brought MyCrypto into the mobile space. Others worth mentioning include Rainbow — well-designed and built by a small indy-team with strong DeFi experience (former Balance team). And ZenGo which has a cool feature around keyless security (their CEO is a friend). There are dozens of other mobile crypto wallets that do very little beyond showing your balances. They are not serious threats. https://preview.redd.it/6x4lxsdk1lg51.png?width=1009&format=png&auto=webp&s=fab3280491b75fe394aebc8dd69926b6962dcf5d Hardware Wallets Holding crypto on your own hardware wallet is widely considered to be “best practice” from a security standpoint. The most popular hardware wallets are Ledger, Trezor, and KeepKey (by our friends at ShapeShift). Ledger Nano X is the only product that has Bluetooth — thus, the only one that can connect to a mobile app. While exciting and innovative, these hardware wallets are not yet integrated with any DeFi protocols. https://preview.redd.it/yotmvtsl1lg51.png?width=1025&format=png&auto=webp&s=c8567b42839d9cec8dbc6c78d2f953b688886026 StrengthsLet’s take a look at some of the strengths with non-custodial products.
WeaknessesNow let’s examine some of the weaknesses.
Wrap UpOne of the great powers of crypto is that we no longer depend on banks. Anyone can store their wealth and have absolute control of their money. That’s made possible with these non-custodial wallets. It’s a wonderful thing.I believe that the most knowledgeable and experienced crypto people (including myself) will always be active users of these applications. And as mentioned in this post, there will certainly be circumstances where these apps will be essential & even life-saving. However, I do not believe this category of product is a major threat to Genesis Block to becoming the bank of the future.They won’t win in the broader consumer finance market — mostly because I don’t believe that’s their target audience. These applications simply cannot produce the type of product experience that the masses require, want, or expect. The Weaknesses I’ve outlined above are just too overwhelming. The friction for mass-market consumers is just too much. https://preview.redd.it/lp8dzxeh1lg51.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=03acdce545cd032f7e82b6665b001d7a06839557 The winning bank will be focused on solving real user problems and meeting user needs. Not slowed down by rigid idealism like censorship-resistance and absolute decentralization, as it is with most non-custodial wallets. The winning bank will be a world-class product that’s smooth, performant, and accessible. Not sluggish and slow, as it is with most non-custodial wallets. The winning bank will be one where blockchain & crypto is mostly invisible to end-users. Not front-and-center as it is with non-custodial wallets. The winning bank will be one managed and run by professionals who know exactly what they’re doing. Not DIY (Do It Yourself), as it is with non-custodial wallets. So are these non-custodial wallets a threat to Genesis Block in winning the broader consumer finance market, and becoming the bank of the future? No. They are designed for a very different audience. ------ Other Ways to Consume Today's Episode:
Download the app. We're a digital bank that's powered by crypto: https://genesisblock.com/download |
Follow the website’s instructions to buy your Bitcoin Cash (BCH) or Bitcoin (BTC). Your coins will appear in the exchange's wallet connected to your exchange account. Finally, move your Bitcoin to your personal wallet to keep it more secure. Selling Bitcoin On the Bitcoin.com Wallet. Tap the Discover tab (middle tab button at the bottom). 2️. previous. massive bitcoin news! the biggest yet? this huge insider tip shows secret btc success, $150k in oct CoinDesk is the world leader in news, prices and information on bitcoin and other digital currencies. The CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index represents an average of … source YouTube Google has decided to remove hundreds of bitcoin and cryptocurrency videos from YouTube in what's being called a "crypto-purge" -- leaving many who make bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related videos feeling unfairly targeted by the search giant. A YouTube spokesperson said the video-sharing platform has since reinstated the purged videos, however some content creators claim their deleted videos ... London, England About Podcast Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, a new class of Crypto assets built using the innovative design of the blockchain is disrupting technology and financial markets. In The What Bitcoin Did Podcast, cryptocurrency trader and miner, Peter McCormack, interviews leaders from across the crypto economy.
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CoinDesk 50: Why Bitcoin Is Still King emergency medical equipment, secure their savings and conduct international business. The godfather cryptocurrency still represents 64% of the crypto market ... CoinDesk; Videos; Playlists; Community; Channels; About; Home Trending History Get YouTube Premium Get YouTube TV Best of YouTube Music Sports Gaming ... Leader in blockchain news. on CoinDesk. ... CoinDesk Bitcoin News · Trending. Consensus 2017 registration is now open! Only 67 more passes available at ... Olá meus amigos criptomaniacos, Baixe o Link do patch update da Exodus Wallet, a sua Wallet de BITCOIN, IOTA, ETHEREUM, LITECOIN, EOS, e muito mais, um Patch atualizado sem BUGS, sem ERROS com a ... CoinDesk's Most Influential Person of 2017 speaks, offering his thoughts on the value of cryptocurrencies and what he sees as the future for the industry.