RelayNode NYC #29 - November 25

RelayNode
Written By David Gogel
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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.

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RelayNode NYC is curated by:

David Gogel Advisor & Finance Lead @ Paperchain fmr Associate @ Techstars' Blockchain Accelerator, Co-president @ Wharton FinTech, Corp dev @LinkedIn @AIG

Hsin-Ju Chuang Founder @Dystopia Labs. Former-Head of Growth @Stellar/Lightyear, Solana. Ex-Director at Tezos (TQ)

1 Big Thing: Mentorship…

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what I am thankful for. There are many things to list (family, friends, health) but given the high highs and low lows of operating in an exciting yet divisive industry, I am very thankful for the relationships I have developed with several mentors. Entrepreneurship is hard, discouraging, hopeless, sometimes embarrassing. It comes with uncertainty, variability, incomplete information, and disorder. Thank you for your continued support along this journey!

According to Adam Grant, “the best way to learn from mentors is not to absorb what they know, but to internalize how they think. Collecting their knowledge helps you address the challenges of the day. Understanding their thought process helps you navigate the challenges of a lifetime.”

So many important lessons learned from mentors. Develop a resilience towards uncertainty. Don’t overestimate the probability of bad outcomes. Don’t lack the boldness to be successful. Seek truth even if you don’t like the answer. Find your passion. Develop a growth mindset. Test your assumptions. Don’t be afraid to fail. Embrace mistakes. Learn from feedback. Don’t confuse uncertainty with risk. Be founder first. Have empathy. Start with the why. Focus on solving a real problem. Talk to customers. Find product-market fit. Look for trusted advisors. Make sure the viability of a business resonates with you at your very core.

Learn as a mentee, become a mentor and pay it forward! In this light, I wanted to highlight 2 mentorship opportunities I have been involved with (and you can too!):

  • BlockchainsForSchools: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which connects NYC students from public high schools to the blockchain industry. We met this weekend to discuss the bitcoin whitepaper. If you practice explaining complicated topics like Merkle Trees to smart high school students, you can explain the benefits of blockchain tech to larger audiences.

  • She256: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to entry in the blockchain space. Their mentorship program pairs female identifying individuals new to crypto with professionals in the crypto space to learn from each other, serving as guides and allies.

Things to Read

🌐 Macro / why Bitcoin?

  • Bitcoin dropped 12% on Friday falling below $6800, hitting a six-month low, amidst FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) on a crackdown on exchanges in China and miner capitulation. Willy Woo, Partner at Adaptive Fund, explains Bitcoin’s long term price is determined by investor activity and adoption curve (the domain of on-chain fundamentals.) Short term price is determined by a random walk of pivots in the direction of liquidating the most traders on BitMEX. On the derivatives side, BitMEX XBTUSD Open Interest dropped from 110K BTC down to 100K BTC following rapid liquidations. Over the weekend, BitMEX Dec futures traded at a small discount to spot (i.e. backwardation) and shorts were paying long (i.e. negative funding rate). March futures market remained in contango. Despite the downtrend, ~79% of BitMEX Open Interest remain long. Funding rates and contango/backwardation can be key indicators of reversals.

  • Matt Dibb, Founder of Astronaut Capital, has a great post examining the low implied volatility of Bitcoin options. IV, as it is known, measures the markets expectations of large moves/volatility, and builds this into options premium. The buying of puts or calls for directional trading purposes is of relatively good value on a historical basis.

  • The Block team released a 205-page Genesis Research Report, a compilation of the last month's most relevant research and analysis accompanied by new insights. The report covers macro, project deep dives, company deep dives, trends, and ecosystem maps. Great overview to get up to speed on the industry.

💰 Funding & Exits - big week for fiat on-ramps / analytics / mining / infrastructure / gaming

  • WazirX, an India-based cryptocurrency exchange, was acquired by Binance. The financial terms were not disclosed (The Economic Times estimated the deal was worth $5-$10M). Users of WazirX will be able to buy Tether with rupees via WazirX and use USDT to trade any cryptocurrency offered by Binance. Deal highlights Binance growing ambitions in developing more fiat on-ramps.

  • Nitfy Gateway, a startup allowing users to purchase collectibles in the form of non-fungible tokens using credit and debit cards, was acquired by Gemini. Financial terms were not disclosed. More bridges into the new digital economies.

  • OpenSea, a peer-to-peer marketplace for digital items and crypto collectibles, raised $2.1M in strategic investment from Animoca Brands, gumi Cryptos, Stanford StartX, and David Pazdan from MetaMask.

  • Bison Trails, a Brooklyn-based provider of secure infrastructure for multiple blockchain networks, raised $25.5M in Series A funding led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Coinbase, Collaborative Fund, among others. Bison Trails joined the Libra Association Council as one of the 21 founding members in mid-October. Funds will be used to scale the team and technology platform.

  • Mythical Games, a LA-based gaming studio making blockchain-based games where players can make money through digital ownership, raised $19M in a Series A, led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from Avon Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Hashed, among others. Funds will be used to expand its tech platform and launch its upcoming game, “Blankos Block Party”.

  • TRM, a SF-based crypto RegTech, risk management, and analytics firm for financial institutions, raised $4.2M (total seed of $5.9M) in funding from Initialized Capital, Blockchain Capital, PayPal Ventures, and Y Combinator. Funds will be used to grow TRM’s engineering and data science teams, speed up product development, and expand into new markets.

  • Canaan, a China-based manufacturer of crypto mining devices, raised $90M by offering on the Nasdaq 10M ADSs at $9, the low end of the range of $9 to $11. At the offer price Cannan commands a market cap of $1.4B. Following the Silvergate IPO, Canaan is the second major crypto / blockchain company to go public on US markets.

  • Charles Schwab is reportedly in talks to acquire TD Ameritrade, a US online brokerage, for ~$25B. The merged company would have $5T in assets and scale across asset management, advisory services, and trading. The merger follows a price war, where incumbents have slashed trading fees to zero as they face competition from Robinhood and others, forcing brokerages to consolidate. What does this mean for crypto? TD Ameritrade allows clients to trade bitcoin futures contracts on the CME. Further, TD owns a stake in ErisX, a bitcoin spot and futures exchange. Schwab’s stance on crypto is less clear.

🔓 DeFi / OpFi

  • A week after the launch of Multi-Collateral Dai, ~16% of the Sai supply has been migrated to Dai (according to sai2dai.xyz.) Overall kudos to the Maker team for a smooth and successful transition to MCD and establishing the DSR which acts as the trust-free rate. Nevertheless, CDP liquidations spiked last week with the price of ETH dropping ~22%, hitting $142. Even more reason to add multiple types of collateral to MCD.

  • Hugh Carp, Founder of Nexus Mutual, has a great post comparing the pros, cons, and features of decentralized insurance products (Nexus Mutual, Augur, Convexity).

💸 STOs / Stablecoins / Tokens

  • Linen App, a startup providing a banking services app with decentralized finance integrations, announced it is using Republic to launch an equity rewards program, offering $300K of its equity for free to early adopters to align the long-term interests of users and owners.

🌉 Infrastructure

  • CryptoCompare released its Q3 2019 exchange benchmarking report. A lot of interesting data data such as: exchanges that offer margin trading now represent 62% of total volume and only 8% of exchanges use a custody provider to store user assets.

  • BitMEX Research examines Benford’s law, a mathematical rule which describes the frequency of the leading digit in various real world sequences of numbers. They note that for a minority of trading platforms, notably OKEX and HitBTC, the reported trading volume figures appear to result in a distribution which does not follow Benford’s law. However, this pattern does not imply inappropriate manipulation of the data and there are many potential legitimate explanations for the unexpected distributions.

  • Matt Harris, FinTech Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, makes the case that fintech joins the internet, cloud and mobile as the fourth major platform technology. Over time many or even most technology companies will need to incorporate embedded financial services in order to win in their segments. In part 2, he explores the benefits of embedded financial services, and talk through some of the early examples across payments, lending, and insurance.

🏦 Institutionalization

  • Binance.US announced a partnership with institutional crypto brokerage Tagomi to offer its users increased access to the marketplace’s trading pairs, hoping to give institutional liquidity in the U.S. market an instant boost.

🍰 Layer 1

  • Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum, has a great post on hard problems in math, computer science and economics that are important for the cryptocurrency space to be able to reach maturity. In general, base-layer problems are slowly but surely decreasing, but application-layer problems are only just getting started.

  • Ivan Bogatyy, a founding partner at Dragonfly, accused Mimblewimble, a privacy-based protocol, of being "fundamentally flawed." Ivan uncovered “the exact addresses of senders and recipients for 96% Grin transactions in real time” and criticized Grin, a project that implements Mimblewimble. Daniel Lehnberg of Grin replied suggesting the attack was a “misunderstanding of a known limitation,” charging Bogatyy’s blog post for “attention-grabbing.”

  • Kadena recently launched its pre-mainnet network, a mainnet with limited functionality, using proof-of-work consensus based on a variation of the Blake2s mining algorithm. Limited functionality simply meant no transactions or smart contracts could be used on Mainnet yet. Mohamed Fouda, Researcher at Token Daily Capital, evaluates the pros and cons of Kadena’s launch strategy to bootstrap the network.

  • The Monero team has confirmed that on Nov 18th a hacker swapped out the legitimate command line wallet binaries and replaced them with software that stole users’ funds. The problem was immediately fixed which meant the compromised files were up only for a short amount of time.

⚖️ Legal

  • FDAS can now offer its service to companies based in New York. The NYDFS granted a charter to Fidelity Digital Asset Services, LLC (FDAS) to operate as a limited liability trust company and engage in virtual currency business activities. FDAS is a subsidiary of Fidelity, which has approximately $7T in assets. Michael O’Reilly, COO of FDAS, said the “custody and trade execution services that we provide are essential building blocks for institutional investors’ continued adoption of digital assets.”

  • China’s embrace of blockchain tech underpinned a rally in the price of Bitcoin. However, rumors circulated on Friday about a police raid of Binance’s China office. The Block team broke the news and was rebuked by CZ from Binance.

  • Amazing story by Nathaniel Rich from Vanity Fair on Gerald Cotten and the Quadriga hack / ponzi scheme.

🎥 Podcast & Video of the Week

  • Jason Choi, Head of Research at the Spartan Capital and curator of RelayNode HK / Singapore, has a fantastic podcast interviewing Run Christensen, the Founder of MakerDAO.

  • In the Digital Asset Report from the NYSE, Nisa Amoils covers the FINCEN travel rule, CFTC Tweet & Canaan IPO.

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.

Check out Indeed’s report on crypto / blockchain jobs and trends for 2019.

Events this week:

Lighter week ahead due to the Thanksgiving holiday!

CryptoMondays NYC Fireside Chat with Greg Di Prisco, Head of Bus. Dev, MakerDAO (Free)

When: Monday, November 25, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: The Ainsworth, 64 3rd Ave · New York, NY

This CryptoMondays NYC will feature a Fireside Chat with Greg Di Prisco, Head of Business Development for MakerDAO, producer of "the world’s first unbiased currency". Maker produces Dai, a stable, decentralized currency, when users lock approved digital collateral. When Maker launched Dai in December of 2017, the only approved collateral was ether. On November 18th, 2019, Maker introduced Multi-Collateral Dai, by enabling the Basic Attention Token (BAT), to also be used as collateral. More digital assets will follow. On the 18th, Maker also introduced the Dai Savings Rate (DSR), which will reward Dai holders with a variable interest rate paid out in Dai.

Monero NYC -Crypto Thanksgiving Pot Luck- v0.15 Update (Free)

When: Wed, November 27th, 2019 - 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Where: xCubicle, 48 Wall St. 5th Floor · New York, NY

This might be the last Monero meetup for 2019 as I'm not sure if we will have one in December. As usual, we'll be discussing the recent updates and news occurring in the Monero community!

Topics:

- Monero v0.15 Upgrade Overview

- Random X Mining

- Other related crypto news events.

Upcoming events:

Gitcoin Virtual Hackathon : Online Only (Free)

When: Monday, December 2, 2019, 7:00 PM to Sunday, December 15, 2019, 9:00 PM

Where: Online

This is a virtual hackathon hosted by Gitcoin. Developers from around the world will come together to build the infrastructure for a new, decentralized Internet, competing to earn cryptocurrency prizes along the way. This event is for coders and noncoders alike to form teams, pitch ideas and formulate plans for their projects. Sign Up Here >>>

https://share.hsforms.com/1bf0FjMk-QTaby_Mf9a79LQ2urwb

Privacy in Enterprise Blockchain – An Introduction to Corda (Free)

When: Monday, December 2, 2019, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Where: R3, 11 West 42nd Street 8th floor · New York, ny

Blockchain Technology has been evolving and maturing over the years, and enterprises are looking into it and slowly adopting it. R3 has been a champion of the enterprise level of blockchain and using its open source platform Corda, has had multiple partnerships and success in bringing the blockchain to the enterprise. Join us for an event hosted At R3 offices and Austin Moothart, as we go through an overview of the architecture of a permissioned, private blockchain. This session will be a high level technical walk through of Corda and what privacy means in Enterprise Blockchains.

DAOfest NYC: State of the DAOs (Free)

When: Monday, December 2, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: The Ainsworth, 64 3rd Ave · New York, NY

DAOfest NYC #1 will feature a diverse panel of experts speaking about the current state of DAOs and putting it in historical and legal context.

• Are DAOs the future of work?

• How do DAOs relate to cooperatives, holocracy, and other modern forms of decentralized governance?

• Are DAOs even legal?

• What are the next steps for the space?

BitDevs: Socratic Seminar 99 (Free)

When: Tuesday, December 3, 2019, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Where: NYU Stern, 44 West 4th Street · New York, NY

A final list of discussion topics will be posted the day before the event. Please see our link aggregator below for a list of potential discussion topics. Feel free to make topic suggestions in the comment section below. https://www.zotero.org/groups/691739/devsny/items/collectionKey/Y3TUNS7T

WWCode CONNECT NYC 2019 ($74.5 - $99.5)

When: Thu, December 5, 2019, 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM EST

Where: Microsoft REACTOR, 11 Times Square, New York, NY 10036

Women Who Code’s signature developer conference is coming to New York City! CONNECT NYC brings together influential technology leaders to share their expertise centered around the latest trends, technical tools, platforms, languages, and industry applications. 300+ innovators and developers will explore a cross-section of technologies, including tracks for deeper dives into Blockchain, AI/ML, and Mobile. Join us for innovative talks, in-depth panels, and technical workshops designed to help you advance your skills, connect with your community and inspire women to excel in technology.

Google Cloud for Startups: Blockchain Forum (Free)
When: Friday, December 6th from 1:00 to 5:30pm

Where: Google NYC - 111 8th Ave, New York, NY 10011

Google Cloud for Startups is hosting their second annual Blockchain Forum on Friday, December 6th from 1:00 to 5:30pm at Google NYC. Please RSVP in the link above if you’d like to attend. This half-day event will give attendees the opportunity to hear from leaders within the industry and to learn how blockchain companies are building on Google Cloud Platform. We'll finish off the day (and week!) with a closing reception.

⚡GOTHAM DLT Hackathon @ Microsoft HQ ⚡

When: Saturday, December 7, 2019, 8:30 AM to Sunday, December 8, 2019, 8:00 PM

Where: Microsoft, 11 Time Square · New York, NY

The Gotham DLT Hackathon at Microsoft HQ is bringing together developers to use the industry's leading tools! As a cross blockchain event, we are creating a great space for developers to learn, use and collaborate on best decentralized ledger tech around!

TRUST-LESS 2020: Proof of Stake (PoS) Validator Summit

When: Sunday, January 12th 2020

Where: Virtual

This is one of those pivotal moments in blockchain history. With ETH 2.0 & multiple PoS layer-1 blockchain protocols slated to launch early 2020, it's an opportunity for developers & students to enter the blockchain space & learn how to build one of the few viable business models that can earn money: staking-as-a-service. Attendees Will Learn:

  • What The ETH 2.0 Roadmap Looks Like + How Staking Will Work

  • How To Stake On Different Layer-1 Blockchain Networks

  • How To Participate (As A Validator) Via Incentivized Testnets

  • How To Build Your Own Staking-As-A-Service Startup

  • Staking-As-A-Service Models: Economics, Custody, & Security

  • Frameworks For Treasury Management

  • How To Think Through Crypto-Taxes

  • and more!

Notable Conferences

Nothing written in RelayNode NYC is legal or investment advice and should not be taken as such. No one should make any investment decision without first consulting his or her own financial advisor and conducting his or her own research and due diligence.

David Gogel https://www.definancier.com
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