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RelayNode NYC #13 - August 5

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.

I went to 3 meetups last week: Tezos, Polkadot and DeFi. The quality of crypto meetups in NYC is excellent. Keep it up!

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

  • Solana, a distributed ledger solution capable of hosting applications with the computational bandwidth comparable to the modern internet, raised a $20M Series A, led by Multicoin Capital (investment thesis here) with participation from Distributed Global, Blocktower Capital, Foundation Capital, among others. The system supports concurrent processing and optimizes computation for massively parallel GPUs, enabling Solana to process 50,000 transactions per second (TPS) (vs. Tron’s 2,000 TPS, Ripple’s 1,500 TPS, Visa’s 65,000 TPS.) This layer 1 scalability solution is very compelling for developers who don’t want to deal with the complexities and UX challenges of layer 2, without compromising on speed.

  • Interchange, an accounting, reconciliation and reporting service provider for institutions, announced it was acquired by cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. The acquisition helps bolster Kraken’s ability to improve trade workflow for traders. No financial terms were disclosed.

  • Joyce Yang, Founder of Global Coin Research, published an excellent recap of Algorand’s June token auction sale, where the company raised $60M. The Algo token price then crashed 75% due to private placement investors not having lockups, leaving retail investors deep in the red. The Algorand Foundation has since announced an optional early redemption refund where buyers can exercise a put option at a strike price of 85% of the auction price (vs. waiting 1 year to exercise a put option at a strike price of 90%.) While this a good effort on behalf of the company, future token offerings should require investor lockups (like IPOs) to prevent early private investors with information advantages to dump on retail.

Macro

  • Protests in Hong Kong, escalation in the US-China trade war, threats of increasing tariffs, devaluation of the RMB, US recession talks, Brexit deadline… macro risks are increasing. For the first time in 10 years (and the first time since the launch of Bitcoin), the Fed cut interest rates by 25 basis points. Grayscale has a great report on Bitcoin’s potential role as a hedge against macro risk.

  • Capital One announced a data breach exposing personal information of 100+ million of the bank’s customers and applicants. Meltem Demirors, CSO at CoinShares, pens a great article on privacy. “If we do not value our privacy today, and do not put into place mechanisms to protect, preserve, and enhance our privacy using technology, then we create the conditions for a future where our privacy has no value, and cannot be protected, preserved, or enhanced.”

Trading

  • CryptoCompare released its monthly crypto exchange review, providing an overview of exchange rankings by volume, predominant fee type models, derivative products, fiat, bitcoin, and stablecoin volumes. Interesting to see continued divergence between fiat-crypto exchanges and crypto-crypto exchanges.

  • Blockchain.com launched The Pit, a new crypto exchange. The exchange is entering a crowded space and plans to differentiate itself with “microsecond” matching engines and cross selling its new product to its 40 million+ wallet holders. Of course, the service is not currently available to residents of New York…. Ugh NYDFS plz fix thx.

Open Finance / DeFi

  • David Hoffman, editor of POV crypto, published a great overview of the digital finance stack on Ethereum. Ethereum is a set of layers that build on top of each-other through composable building blocks. Will we see the unbundling and rebundling of decentralized financial services?

  • Coinbase Earn launched a popular DAI education campaign. Coinbase is offering $20 in DAI to watch videos and create a CDP on MakerDAO. According to Santiment, ~28K new CDPs were since created, ~3x more than the cumulative number of CDPs created in the last year. Rewarding users for learning about cryptocurrencies is a great way to onboard new users. Future model for airdrops?

  • Jesse Walden, investor at a16z crypto, explores tradeoffs in contracts to scale crypto.

Gaming

  • Dapper Labs announced NBA Top Shot, a new digital platform for basketball fans to collect, trade, and own some of the greatest moments in the sport’s history, all completely authenticated on blockchain. Wave Financial published a great overview of the blockchain gaming market landscape. Gaming is a big deal and possibly the thing that brings blockchains and crypto tokens to mainstream users.

Regulatory

  • As US lawmakers debate crypto/blockchain regulation, it’s important to know which individuals and companies are representing the industry. William Mougayar, GP at Virtual Capital Ventures, wrote an excellent post explaining who they are and the type of changes they are requesting.

  • As lawmakers continue to discuss how to position the US at the forefront of innovation, Joyce Yang, Founder at Global Coin Research, published a comprehensive guide to crypto in Asia analyzing local ecosystems, trends, and regulations. The UK’s FCA also published final guidance on cryptoassets.

Layer 1

  • To help standardize blockchain tooling for developers and enterprises, Truffle Suite is integrating with Tezos, R3, and Hyperledger. Truffle allows developers to compile, deploy, and test smart contracts and decentralized applications all in one environment. Prior to this collaboration, the Truffle Suite of blockchain tools was only available to developers building on Ethereum.

  • Four years ago, on July 30, 2015, Ethereum, the world’s first general-purpose blockchain platform, went live. ConsenSys provides a great overview of the state of the network and what the future holds.

Events this week:

Breaking into Tech Through Blockchain (Free)

When: Monday, August 5, 2019, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Where: 40 Fulton Street, New York, NY

The Head of Communications at Steemit will break down the strategies he used to go from an ordinary content creator to Senior Management in one of the most innovative technology companies in the world: Steemit, the team behind the largest blockchain-powered social network in the world (steemit.com), and the Steem blockchain protocol which powers it.

Wall Street to Silicon Valley: How Blockchain Will Transform Financial Services (Free)

When: Tuesday, August 6, 2019, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Where: 335 Madison Avenue, New York

Columbia Blockchain Alliance is happy to announce that we are going to have a fireside chat with a special new guest, Kendrick Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO of Republic.

Kotlin Meetup - Blockchain & Coroutine Channels and Flows (Free)

When: Wednesday, August 7, 2019, 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM

Where: Vimeo, 555 W 18th St · New York, NY

In this talk, Mo will present on how to use constructs such as actors, channels and flows in use cases. Flavio will present the StreetWire real estate application built on Kotlin using R3's Corda open source platform deployed on Microsoft Azure, exploring the workings of the blockchain, Corda's framework, Kotlin code and technical aspects of the application.

BitDevs Summer Series: Debugging Bitcoin Core; Taproot and Policy Language; Erlay (Free)

When: Wednesday, August 7, 2019, 6:30--8:30 PM

Where: Chaincode Labs, 450 Lexington Ave 38th Floor · New York, NY

Our Summer Series continues with talks from Chaincode Residents Fabian Jahr and James Chiang, and Chaincode engineer Gleb Naumenko. Expect these talks to be deeply technical in nature. This week's talks:

- Fabian: Debugging Bitcoin Core

- James: Taproot & A Policy Language for Bitcoin

- Gleb: Erlay

Upcoming events

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.

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.

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