RelayNode NYC #20 - September 23

RelayNode
Written By David Gogel

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

Some personal thoughts from this week…

Are high interest rates DeFi’s killer app? 10% annualized interest rates sound highly attractive in the context of $17+ trillion in negative yielding debt. Value is beginning to accrue to smart contract aggregator services like Staked’s Robo-Advisor for Yield and InstaDapp, which allow users to allocate crypto assets to the highest yielding opportunities.

Is there more to DeFi lending than APRs? In traditional financial markets, returns are adjusted for RISK. How do you quantify the risk involved in producing a 10% return? ConsenSys launched Codefi and introduced the DeFi Score, an open-source methodology to evaluate code and financial risk in DeFi lending. It's a single, consistently comparable value for measuring protocol risk, based on factors including smart contract risk, collateralization, and liquidity. This score is a positive development to move the DeFi lending narrative to risk-adjusted returns.

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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

Macro

  • The past two weeks delivered an unusual number of large macro events - the ECB’s resumption of unconventional easing, a second consecutive Fed cut, an unprecedented attack on Saudi oil infrastructure, a liquidity squeeze in USD money markets, and the Fed’s injection of $200+B to keep the federal funds rate within its target range. Good time to read Matt Levine’s recap on the repo market madness and Ray Dalio’s Paradigm Shifts masterpiece. Bitcoin still not dead. What a time to be alive.

Funding & Exits

  • GK8, a cybersecurity company offering a high-security custodian technology for managing and safeguarding digital assets, raised a $4M seed round, led by Check Point co-founder Marius Nacht, Discount Capital, and the Israel Innovation Authority.

  • Genesis Global Trading, an institutional over-the-counter crypto trading firm, acquired Qu Capital, a New York-based quantitative trading and research firm developing trading technology, including exchange connectivity, order routing, and execution tools. Financial terms were not disclosed.

  • OpenSC, an Australian blockchain startup into sustainable and ethical supply chain tracking, raised $4M in a seed round led by strategic impact investors. Funds will be used to further develop its platform for tracking food and products.

  • Mars Finance, a Chinese-language crypto & blockchain news and reports platform, raised funding in a Series B at a rumored $200M post-money valuation. Binance, the crypto exchange, participated in the round. The transaction is the exchange’s first China-focused strategic investment.

Open Finance / DeFi

  • ConsenSys announced its entry into the DeFi ecosystem with a new product suite, Codefi. The product suite includes four parts: data, networks, assets, and payments. It’s clear ConsenSys wants to serve enterprise customers by processing cryptocurrency payments, fiat payment information using blockchain systems and API access for a wide range of enterprise use cases.

  • Zap, a Lightning Network solutions provider headed by Jack Mallers, launched a new service called Olympus, that enables users to purchase bitcoin with traditional currencies over the Lightning Network.

Trading

  • The long-awaited launch of Bakkt. A product designed to remake Bitcoin as a mainstream investment for the world's investment managers has gone live. ICE Futures U.S., one of the world's largest commodities markets, started offering Bakkt Daily and Monthly Bitcoin Futures, the first physically delivered crypto-currency contracts ever traded on a federally regulated exchange. If the exchange works as planned, it will give institutional investors a secure, well-monitored place to trade Bitcoin. Shawn Tully from Fortune has a great article recapping the Bakkt launch and how it represents a watershed event for institutional adoption.

  • The Korea unit of crypto exchange OKex announced its will delist all five privacy coins on the platform -- XMR, DASH, ZEC, ZEN, and SBTC -- on October 10. Continuation of the trend of exchanges delisting privacy coins following recent regulatory requirements from the international body the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

STOs / Stablecoins

  • Harbor has pivoted from directly sell security tokens to providing the infrastructure for other companies to issue their own tokens. This week, Harbor announced that they’ve partnered with real estate company iCap Equity to tokenize over $100 million worth of iCap’s real estate funds.

  • Wells Fargo announced plans to pilot an internal settlement service, Wells Fargo Digital Cash, which will run on Wells Fargo’s first distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. The DLT platform is being built on R3’s Corda enterprise network, and pilot project is scheduled to start sometime next year. First JP Morgan then Wells Fargo. Which bank will be next?

Layer 1

  • Hedera Hashgraph, which raised a total of $118M of which $100M was secured in a private sale to institutional investors, launched its mainnet earlier this week.

  • Arjun Bilaji introduced the “founder incentive problem,” which he determined operated in a trilemma: founding teams needed to strike a balance between launch fairness (equal opportunity for early investors/users), core team or developer community incentives, and a path towards decentralization.

Highlighted Industry Jobs (non-exhaustive list for NYC / remote):

If you would like to highlight jobs or internships in future editions, please email links here.

Events this week:

CryptoMondays NYC Fireside Chat with Zac Prince, CEO of BlockFi (Free)

When: Monday, September 23, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Lounge at the Rose Hill Hotel, 38 E 32nd St, New York, NY 10016

This CryptoMondays NYC will feature a Fireside Chat with Zac Prince, Founder & CEO of BlockFi, which offers a suite of financial products that enable cryptocurrency holders to put their crypto to work. The company services customers worldwide, including 47 U.S. states, with interest-earning accounts and low-cost USD loans backed by crypto. BlockFi is backed by leading institutional investors.

A Live Application of Quorum in Financial Markets (Free)

When: Monday, September 23, 2019, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Where: Two Sigma Ventures, 100 6th Ave 3rd Floor · New York, NY


Benjamin Nadareski, GM at DrumG Technologies, will discusses and demonstrate a live application of Quorum that is actively being deployed in the enterprise as a data handling and analytics solution for a network of Tier 1 financial institutions.

⚡EthBoston Recap: Presentations from Teams⚡(Free)

When: Monday, September 23, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: WeWork Dumbo Heights, 81 Prospect St · Brooklyn

Project recaps from the teams that presented at ETHBoston.

Tezos Developer Workshop: Tezos in Capital Markets (Free)

When: Tue, September 24, 2019, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM EDT

Where: NYC Blockchain Center, 54 West 21st Street, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10010

Digital assets are beginning to drive evolution in capital markets. Institutions and investors are now taking the same structures that have been developed over hundreds of years in the global financial industry (equities, bonds, derivatives, etc.) and are representing them in code. Participants will learn how to deploy and interact with smart contracts representing security tokens on the Tezos alphanet.

[Whitepaper Wednesday] Agoric Papers: Markets and Computation (Free)

When: Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

Where: Rent24, 25W 39th Street 14 Fl · New York, ny

Written in 1988, these papers imagined future of a software agents creating and participating in a market for digital assets and computational resources.

Security Token NYC - Networking Event (Free)

When: Thu, September 26, 2019, 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM EDT

Where: Sunset Terrace at Chelsea Piers, 61 Chelsea Piers, #2nd Floor, New York, NY 10011

An informative panel discussion will take place, featuring Security Token Academy Professional Members -- attorneys specializing in securities, securities regulation, corporate and commercial finance. Panelists include:

David G. Adams, Senior Associate at Clifford Chance

Aryeh Friedman, General Counsel at SeedInvest

Jason P. Gottlieb, Partner & Chair, White Collar and Regulatory Enforcement at Morrison Cohen, LLP

Robin Sosnow, principal of Sosnow and Associates PLLC

Upcoming events

Tezos Global Summit ($125)

When: September 29th - October 31

Where: Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013

The Tezos Global Summit aims to bring together the business community, developers, researchers, validators, and more to discuss Tezos, the global blockchain ecosystem, and paths to adoption.

This is the capstone event in the TQuorum conference series, featuring thought leaders and experts on digital assets and capital markets, the proof of stake ecosystem, blockchain development, and more, this multi-day conference has presentations and workshops for all levels of experience.

Building Crypto & Bitcoin Trading Apps with Python ($10 – $99)

When: Monday, September 30, 2019, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Where: MiT National Land Services, One Penn Plaza · New York, NY

This is an intensive full day loaded with learning and knowledge transfer, a course in building a crypto trading system using Python. You will walk away with a deep understanding of the skill needed to build these apps, core business concepts, how to work with exchanges, websockets, 0x exchanges, machine learning and more. We'll use libraries like pandas, matplotlib and NumPy to build a trading system and analyze trade data, time series and charting. Python experience is not required but basic programming experience is.

Speaker: Professor Jamiel Sheikh is a graduate professor at Columbia, NYU and CUNY, where he teaches blockchain, performance management and data science respectively. He has an MBA from Columbia University, BBA from Baruch College and is completing an MS in Artificial Intelligence from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Intro to predictive data analysis using Apache Kafka, Spark, Zeppelin on JVM (Free)

At this meetup, you will learn

- How Kafka can be an event source to collect weather data from say IoT sensors.

- See how Spark can be called from and execute from a few simple Java applications - Word Count, Basic functional aspects like map/reduce/fold

- How Apache Zeppelin `Notebook` allows for interaction with in memory Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD) which provide parallelized predictive analysis on single and multiple raw datasets (e.g. How Flight Delay data may collate with Weather datasets.)

NYC BigApps Blockchain Demo Day ($10)

When: Thu, October 3, 2019, 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM EDT

Where: Urban Tech Hub @ Company, 335 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10017

NYC BigApps Blockchain culminates the ongoing Innovation Challenge into a final Demo Day! Join us for a full day of pitches and networking, featuring our cohort of 10 startups and a showcase of other incredible projects in the NYC blockchain community.

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.

The Dawn Of The Enterprise Token (free)

When: Monday, October 28, 2019, 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Rise New York, 43 W 23rd St · New York, NY

A speaker and panel series focused on exploration of enterprise tokens like the JPM coin, Libra. & the Walmart patent, what it all means, where it is headed and how you might position for it.

Notable Conferences

David Gogel https://www.definancier.com
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RelayNode NYC #21 - September 30
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RelayNode NYC #19 - September 16