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RelayNode NYC #14 - August 12

David Gogel

Welcome to RelayNode NYC Area edition! The NYC blockchain ecosystem is growing rapidly. My goal is to harness its energy, expertise, and innovation for the benefit of New Yorkers and provide a weekly curated list of interesting content and upcoming events.

Some personal thoughts from this week:

The Open Finance / DeFi space is heating up. Like many former finance professionals in the crypto industry, I am excited about Open Finance, which can democratize both the access and creation of new financial products. BUT, having spent 4 years of my early career in the aftermath of the global financial crisis working to divest AIG’s non-core assets to pay back the US government and taxpayer, I am laser focused on understanding the new system we are building and mitigating new associated risks.

Composability, limited counterparty risk and full transaction auditability are rallying cries for DeFi. But let us not forget that risk isn't eliminated just transferred. We need to make sure we don't have a garbage in / out situation. What can we learn from 08 financial crisis? What tools can be built to audit collateral and smart contract risks? What does “trustless transparency” mean in practice? Fake transparency and misaligned incentives gave us rating agencies (S&P & Moody’s) providing investors with false confidence in risky MBSs/CDOs that precipitated the crisis. Inflated ratings led to a system with more risk than it could handle.

Open Finance is a great ideal but let’s make sure we don’t end up with a censorship-resistant triple-leveraged repackaged CDP^2^2 #CrapFi insured on NexusMutual. If something bad does happen, the sooner the better. The stakes are still low(ish). A lesson now is cheap. This is a call to action for founders & teams to build new tools to better manage risk, leverage data to improve product transparency, and create a digital safety net in the event of a crisis. If you have any ideas, please DM me!

RelayNode Links: Sign up | Submit events

RelayNode NYC is curated by:

David Gogel

Advisor @ Paperchain fmr Associate @ Techstars' Blockchain Accelerator, Co-president @ Wharton FinTech

Hsin-Ju Chuang

Director of Community & Growth @TQ Tezos, ex-Head of Growth @Stellar/Lightyear, Side Hustle @Dystopia Labs

Things to read

Funding & Exits

  • FTX, a crypto derivatives exchange offering futures trading, leveraged tokens, and an OTC portal, announced it raised $8M in funding from Proof of Capital (investment thesis here), Consensus Lab, FBG, & Galois Capital.

  • BlockFi, a crypto lending company, announced it raised $18.3M in a Series A, led by Valar Ventures, with participation from Morgan Creek, Galaxy Digital, and Fidelity, among others. The funds will be used to add new products to BlockFi's existing platform, which includes interest-earning accounts for Bitcoin and crypto-backed USD loans.

  • DrawBridge Lending, a leader in digital asset lending, borrowing and investing, announced an investment from Galaxy Digital to strengthen its fiat-crypto lending and investing capabilities. The firms plans to jointly develop a co-branded special-purpose loan funding vehicle to provide structured financing against institutionally held crypto assets. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Macro

  • In light of the escalating U.S.-China trade tensions, Grayscale released an updated report: Hedging U.S.-China Trade Risk with Bitcoin. The report places the trade dispute in a broader context, providing a brief overview of the role that Bitcoin may play in a portfolio in the event of a global liquidity crisis.

Trading

  • Litecoin’s blockchain reward was reduced by half last week in the #halving. Miners now receive a block reward of 12.5 coins, a 50% reduction in the number of coins. Halving events reduce the issuance of new token supply, and thus they are closely watched by investors looking for positive price action in the asset. The next Bitcoin halving is expected on May 20, 2020. Plan B has an excellent medium post on how scarcity drives value.

  • The West-East rivalry is playing out on major crypto exchanges. Coinbase has shifted its strategy and announced it is listing new tokens at a record pace. Over time Coinbase aims to provide >90% of the aggregate market cap of all digital assets. Meanwhile, Binance US announced that its efforts to launch a crypto exchange in the US are proceeding rapidly. The US exchange is currently evaluating 30 coins to be listed.

Open Finance / DeFi

  • Camila Russo, Founder at Defiant, shows that people are pulling ether from MakerDAO, making a big dent in DeFi’s favorite metric: Total value locked.

  • Linda Xie, MD at Scalar Capital, penned an excellent recap on the future of decentralized finance, highlighting opportunities and risks in the system. Great overview.

  • Dharma, the peer-to-peer crypto lending startup behind the open-source protocol, announced that it is "pausing new deposits and loans" on its platform. Dharma has raised $7M in funding.

  • Mohamed Fouda, Partner at Token Daily, discusses why all DeFi products will eventually have to decide either to distribute control of the protocol to a DAO or clearly become a centralized company that offers non-custodial services using a public blockchain.

  • ConsenSys announced the launch of Tachyon III, an accelerator program for founders building Open Finance tools and businesses via blockchain and Web 3.0 technology. This is the third iteration of the accelerator but the first time it is focused thematically on Open Finance.

ICOs / STOs

  • Larry Cermak, Director of Research at The Block, analyzes the ICO trend. Only 11% returned more than 1,000%, while the median ICO return in terms of USD is -87% and constantly dropping. Classic bubble or first iteration of product innovation? Are IEOs / STOs version 2?

Regulatory

  • In a 130-page filing, Kik laid out a detailed rebuttal of the SEC’s arguments and denied its core allegation that the company conducted an unregistered securities offering. Katherine Wu released an annotated guide to Kik’s answer to the SEC’s complaint.

  • According to an email from Prysm, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Prysm have begun joint-research to assess the potential role, structure, and benefits of supervisory nodes in blockchain networks. We are moving towards regulators creating nodes to monitor crypto!! What will enforcement look like?

Layer 1

  • Blockstream announced a new BTC mining wing, Blockstream Mining, along with a BetterHash-based mining pool, Blockstream Pool. BetterHash decentralizes mining pool decisions, such as which block to mine, to individual owners. Proponents argue it further decentralizes and democratizes bitcoin mining.

Layer 2

  • Livepeer, a network that enables distributed transcoding for live streaming videos, released a visual 10-minute primer explaining the technology. Great design is an underappreciated asset in the blockchain industry but necessary for customer acquisition. If only there were a quiz at the end of the primer and the ability to earn LPT… future partnership opportunity with Coinbase Earn?

Events this week:

Core Developers Meetup #1: Livepeer and Spacemesh (Free)

When: Monday, August 12, 2019, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Where: Distributed Global, 16 Vestry St · New York, NY

This is the first in a series of regular monthly meetups for core devs - current and aspiring! The event will feature talks from R&D staff from the Livepeer and Spacemesh projects. Talks will be brief, and technical, and we'll leave plenty of time for Q&A. After the presentations, we'll open the floor for questions and discussions about topics of interest. Come learn with cryptographers, protocol designers, and core developers from two projects, Livepeer and Spacemesh. Help us decide which projects to invite to future meetups!

Workshop: GetHerd.app- Easy onboarding to Crypto & Open Source (Free)

When: Monday, August 12, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: WeWork Dumbo Heights, 81 Prospect St · Brooklyn

Herd is an interactive learning platform for blockchain companies to attract, engage, and enable users. We’re going to learn how the Herd team built the platform, how it utilizes smart contracts to simplify standardization and transactions, and the types of blockchain companies that are using it.

CryptoMondays NYC Fireside Chat with Marguerite deCourcelle CEO, Blockade Games (Free)

When: Monday, August 12, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Lounge At The Rose Hill Hotel, 34 E 32nd Street · New York, ny

This CryptoMondays NYC will feature a Fireside Chat with Marguerite deCourcelle, CEO of Blockade Games, a blockchain game studio developing Neon District, a Final Fantasy inspired cyberpunk RPG. The Fireside Chat will include a discussion of why gaming is the natural killer app for blockchain and the importance of community and peer production for blockchain projects and games.

Women in Blockchain - Summer Social (Free)

When: Tuesday, August 13, 2019, 6:30--8:30 PM

Where: The Park, 118 10th Ave · New York, NY

Social Meet & Greet at the relaxed and beautiful space of The Park. Meet Blockchain experts and novices alike, network for new hires, or speakers or find a new calling. Discuss the purpose you care about and how that could be improved with Blockchain or Crypto. Got a topic? A product? An idea and looking for collaborators? Ping us if you want to give a lightning talk.

Building on Quorum with Azure's Managed Blockchain Service (Free)

When: Thu, August 15, 2019, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM EDT

Where: Two Sigma Ventures, 100 6th Avenue #3rd Floor, New York, NY 10013

In this meetup we demonstrate how to set up a Quorum blockchain on the Microsoft Azure platform. Azure offers users a managed configuration and deployment of the Quorum platform, greatly simplifying the amount of effort it takes to get started with the platform. Attendees will learn how to configure new blockchain consortiums and use connection strings for web3, as well as navigate the tools and dashboards provided for Quorum developers on Azure.

Token Engineering / Techstars: Libra, Stalbecoins, and Developing Economies (Free)

When: Thu, August 15, 2019, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM EDT

Where: Distributed Global, 16 Vestry Street, New York, NY 10013

Join us for a conversation on Libra, stablecoins, and their impact on developing economies.

What we're about The goal of Token Engineering NYC is to foster a community and an ecosystem for individuals working on token models, protocols, crypto-economics, governance, and security. It will also provide an opportunity to collaborate, deep-dive and contribute to the ever-growing Token Engineering knowledge base.

BitDevs: Socratic Seminar 95 (Free)

When: Thursday, August 15, 2019, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: TBU

RSVPs close 24 hours before event start. If you can't make it to the main event please join us at BBar and Grill around 9:30PM. Thanks to Chaincode Labs and NYU Digital Asset Forum for food, refreshments and event space. Discussion topics: Please see our link aggregator for a list of potential discussion topics. This list will grow in the week proceeding the event. Feel free to make topic suggestions in the comments section below.

Upcoming events

Presentation: Clarity, Blockstack's language for predictable smart contract (Free)

When: Monday, August 19, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: WeWork Dumbo Heights, 81 Prospect St · Brooklyn

In this session, Ludo is Engineering Partner at Blockstack will do a deep dive into the design of Blockstack’s language, Clarity. Clarity is a decidable language. A programming language is decidable if you can know, with certainty, from the code itself what the program will do. Clarity is intentionally Turing incomplete as it avoids “Turing complexity.” This allows for complete static analysis of the entire call graph of a given smart contract.

Hyperledger Fabric for the Enterprise - Privacy and Security Strategies (Free)

When: Monday, August 26, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: WeWork Dumbo Heights, 81 Prospect St · Brooklyn

Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) blockchain’s architecture was designed from the ground up to be highly extensible with plug and play modules in order to meet most business cases. In this session, we will address the challenges of privacy and security by presenting the best patterns and methodologies, of how to implement enterprise grade HLF blockchain implementations. We will cite real world examples – illustrated with diagrams, code-patterns and in some cases short demos or video segments.

Introduction to Decentralized Exchanges (Free)

When: Wednesday, September 18, 2019, 7:00 -- 9:00 PM

Where: 142 W. 57th Street, New York, NY

During this meetup we'll talk about Ethereum, smart contracts and how they are used to build decentralized exchanges. We'll learn about what decentralized exchanges are and how they have the potential to revolutionize how securities are traded. Then we'll take a look at Metro, a project that I have been working on during nights and weekends that attempts to provide a central location to validate and settle trades on the Ethereum network using these three protocols allowing the trading of tokens, debt instruments and options on the blockchain. During this talk we will cover the following technologies: Ethereum, 0x, dYdX, and Dharma.

Mondo.NYC music festival & global music / tech business conference ($99 - $598)

When: Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 4:00 PM – Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 5:00 PM

Where: Williamsburg Hotel, Brooklyn, 96 Wythe Ave., Brooklyn, NY

Mondo.NYC is the first music festival and global business conference focusing on the intersection of emerging music discovery, blockchain and other frontier technologies, and how these new applications and economies will significantly impact both music and tech industries. Emerging artists, innovators and industry insiders will connect and collaborate with fans in a mission to advance human creativity in an ever-changing world.

Notable Conferences