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RelayNode NYC #5 - June 10

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.

RelayNode Links: Sign up | Submit events

RelayNode NYC is curated by:

David Gogel
Associate @ Techstars' Blockchain Accelerator fmr Co-president @ Wharton FinTech

Things to read​

  • The SEC announced a suit against messaging startup Kik for conducting a sale of unregistered securities with its $100 million ICO. Katherine Wu, formerly at Messari, provides an annotated guide. Kik has refused to settle, so unlike other enforcement actions that the SEC has conducted against ICOs, this is the first time a case will be settled in court. The stakes are high as the outcome will likely determine the fate of other ICOs. Kik is setting aside $5 million in a Defend Crypto fund to fight the action and has raised $4+ million from external parties. Will this be enough?

  • According to the BBC, Facebook will roll out its cryptoasset, dubbed “GlobalCoin,” in select countries in Q1 2020. While Facebook’s 2.3 billion users provide an extensive reach for marketing and usage of the token, it’s not yet clear how the new coin will work. According to the Information, Facebook is creating an independent foundation to oversee its cryptocurrency project. With the plan for 100 nodes on the network, 3rd parties can pay $10M to become node operators, which will also give them a seat on the foundation. Facebook has approached multiple financial institutions, tech companies, and merchants about supporting the token. More details will reportedly be made public in a whitepaper to be released on June 18. After the SEC's Kik lawsuit, Facebook will be even more cautious to ensure its token is compliant with regulations.

  • Block.one, the startup that raised $4+ billion in an ICO and built the EOSIO platform, announced a new social media platform called Voice. Voice is being built on the EOS public blockchain meaning that interactions will be public, allowing for transparency to be a core part of the experience. Further, Voice plans to differentiate itself by fighting bots through a special onboarding authentication process and rewarding and returning control to users. You can watch the keynote here. Looking forward to seeing how this impacts traditional social media networks.

  • According to on-chain data and analysis provided by Diar / Chainalysis, Chinese demand for the stablecoin Tether is rising. In 2018, $16+ billion of Tether was received by Chinese exchanges. May 2019 YTD flows exceed $7 billion and demand has spiked in recent months. While Chinese activity was responsible for 39% of all Tether transactions in 2018, 2019 YTD shows a rate of 60% of the transaction volume of Tether. U.S. demand has dropped from 44% in 2017 to less than 10% this year, while global exchanges have also dropped in share to 31% of transactions. Considering the billions in Tethers moved on-chain in China that towers over US and world market transactional value, one possible conclusion is that the estimate by Bitwise of 95% of cryptocurrency trading volume being fake is likely to be far off the mark. Another possible conclusion is that rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China sparked concerns that China would devalue the yuan, leading to a move into Bitcoin via Tether from Chinese citizens.

Events this week:

Blockchain for Social Impact Conference 2019 ($50 with discount code “IMPACT”)

When: Monday, June 10, 2019, 8:00 AM –Tuesday, Jun 11, 2019, 1:00 PM

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

Join us for the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition flagship conference in NYC about Building a Resilient Future. Global leading innovators, companies, government, NGOs and foundations that are at the forefront of leveraging technology to further their mission will be engaging in a two-day conference. The first day will focus on dialogues and workshop connecting the participants to understand what are the effective solutions that are being deployed. The second day is a half-day that will activate our working groups.

Smart Legal Agreements, Ricardian Contracts and the Future of Commerce (Free)

When: Tuesday, June 11, 2019, 6:30-8:30 PM

Where: Cardozo School of Law, 55 5th Ave, New York, NY

Come meet with us to discuss the future of blockchain technology as it relates to the legal field. At this meetup we will talk about how we can make blockchain-based assets legally sound as this token economy emerges. We will also talk about our work with OpenLaw. OpenLaw is a blockchain-based protocol for the creation and execution of legal agreements. Using OpenLaw, lawyers can more efficiently engage in transactional work and digitally sign and store legal agreements in a highly secure manner, all while leveraging next-generation blockchain-based smart contracts.

Matthew Dixon - Blockchain Analytics for Intraday Financial Risk Modeling ($25)

When: Tuesday, June 11, 2019, 6:00-8:00 PM

Where: Fordham University, 140 West 62nd Street, New York, NY (12th Floor)

In this talk, we demonstrate the impact of extreme transaction graph activity on the intraday volatility of the Bitcoin prices series. Specifically, we introduce and characterize certain sub-graphs ('chainlets') that exhibit predictive influence on Bitcoin price and volatility and identify the types of chainlets that signify extreme losses. Using bars ranging from 15 minutes up to a day, we fit eGARCH models with and without the extreme chainlets and show that the former exhibit superior Value-at-Risk backtesting performance.

Women in Blockchain: Blockchain & Empowering Change: VC Funding, Civic Actions, US Congress ($6)

When: Wednesday, June 12, 6:00-8:30 PM

Where: Betaworks Studios, 29 Little W 12th St, New York, NY

This month's speaker, Amanda Frankel will be sharing her experience working for Stoic Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in blockchain companies and her journey as a woman in the blockchain space, her activism and how that led her to her next exciting step of running for US Congress in NY-10! Hear her story of empowering change via VC funding and civic actions that eventually led to her candidacy, and how an emerging tech perspective in government will beneficial.

Network Signaling, Coordination & Exploration (Free)

When: Wednesday, June 12, 2019, 6:30-8:30 PM

Where: Distributed Global, 16 Vestry St. 4th Fl., New York, NY

Join the Tezos NYC meetup group on June 12th to celebrate the historic Athens upgrade and hear some updates on exciting projects within the community. Pizza and refreshments will be served throughout the evening.

BitDevs NYC: Socratic Seminar 93 (Free)

When: Thursday, June 13, 2019, 7:00-9:00 PM

Where: NYU Stern School of Business, 44 West 4th Street, New York, NY

If you can't make it to the main event please join us at BBar and Grill around 9:30PM. Thanks to our friends Chaincode Labs and NYU Digital Asset Forum for event space and food & refreshments. Discussion topics: Please see our link aggregator for a list of potential discussion topics. A final list of topics will be posted the day of the event.

Upcoming events

DeveloperWeek New York 2019 ($150 for developers)

When: Wednesday, June 19, 2019, 8:00 AM –Thursday, June 20, 2019, 4:00 PM

Where: Brooklyn EXPO Center, 72 Noble St, Brooklyn, NY

DeveloperWeek New York (#DEVWEEKNYC) is the East Coast's largest developer & software engineering event with 3,000+ developers, engineers, architects, dev managers, IT professionals and tech execs. All will converge in New York City for a series of events covering the cutting-edge innovation in the developer technology industry: 6+ Conferences, Summits & Workshop Tracks, the 2-Day Expo, the DeveloperWeek New York Hackathon, Hiring Mixer, and Partner Events.

Notable Conferences