RelayNode NYC #36 - January 20

January 20, 2020 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.

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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: ConsenSys Tachyon #DeFiDay

Some background: Last Thursday, I had the privilege of attending ConsenSys’ Tachyon Accelerator #DeFiDay, a gathering of people building, covering, and connecting around decentralized finance. Designed as a trade show, DeFiDay was a great opportunity to meet 9 founding teams innovating across the space, hailing from 7 countries and making NYC their temporary home. The DeFi Lego Blocks narrative is in full swing. I was impressed by the focus on solving real customer needs. Keep your 👀open on this batch.

The teams:

Cryptio @cryptio_co

Automated and transparent bookkeeping system for businesses and investors holding digital assets. We translate digital assets transactions into data usable for accounting and finance.

Team: Antoine Scalia, Emile Kratiroff

Honey Lemon @HoneylemonM

Honey Lemon aggregates and rates existing cloud mining contracts, for transparency, standardization and price discovery.

Team: Tina Zhen, Isaac Wu

Incento.io @tryincento

On Incento making a cross border payment is as easy as sending a text message! Seamlessly load your wallet with $USD, € EURO, POUND, DAI, ETH and transfer funds to a bank account in India with no transaction fees.

Team: Chetan Badhe

Idle.Finance @idlefinance

Idle gathers data from lending protocols, seeking the highest available interest rate. Funds are put into an asset pool (managed by the underlying lending protocol), from there borrowers can use the funds in the pool to open up a loan. Those borrowers pay interest into the fund, increasing the size of the fund. When you withdraw your funds, you are entitled to a proportional amount of the interest accrued. The service is 100% non-custodial and fully decentralized.

Team: William Bergamo / Matteo Pandolfi / Samuele Cester

Outlet.Finance @outletfinance

Outlet is a high yield savings account alternative leveraging decentralized finance.

Team: Patrick Manfra / Chris Gonzalez

Pie.Network

What if you could use decentralized synthetic assets to invest like Ray Dalio and replicate Bridgewater’s All Weather Portfolio? No need to pay $500K-$4M in annual fees. The democratization of alpha returns open to everyone everywhere.

Team: Alessio Delmonti

SimpleID @getsimpleid

SimpleID amplifies engagement and retention for blockchain apps extending user analytics and re-engagement capabilities to smart contract and on-chain interactions.

Team: Justin Hunter, Prabhaav Bhardwaj

Transak @transak_finance

A global fiat on / off ramp: a simple and compliant way for customers to buy and sell crypto assets with a bank transfer.

Team: Yeshu Agarwal, Sami Start

Trakx.io @Trakx_io

Trakx is a one-stop shop platform offering a large panel of standardized Crypto Traded Indices (CTIs), structured and developed in-house. CTIs are tokens which significantly reduce the complexity and fees associated with the trading of various crypto-assets. They enable their users to gain exposure to up or down markets, improve diversification and add some leverage if required.

Team: Lionel Rebibo, Matthieu Le Berre, Eduouard Lavidalle, Gary Rebibo

Things to read

🌐 Why Bitcoin / Macro?

Options launch, volatility and alt season. According to the Digital Asset Research weekly comp sheet, crypto prices soared last week with the total industry market cap up +15% to $233B. Gains were driven by volatility in altcoins, while Bitcoin / Ethereum lagged other coins. Large-cap winners on the week were Bitcoin SV (BSV +169.6%), Dash (DASH +143.5%), and EOS (EOS +39.7%). Relative laggards in the large-cap category were Bitcoin (BTC +9.8%), Monero (XMR +11.4%), and XRP (XRP +11.5%). Other noteworthy positive movers across the industry were Bitcoin Gold (BTG +122.4%), Bitcoin Diamond (BCD +95.6%), and Augur (REP +81.0%). Other notable laggards on the week included LEO (LEO -1.1%), Dogecoin (DOGE +2.6%), and Tezos (XTZ +2.7%).
Larry Cermak, researcher at The Block, provides an excellent data-driven thread on bitcoin performance and exchange data.
Plan B, an anonymous macro and institutional trader who popularized the Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow predictive model, shares his views on the S2F model and the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). He concludes that bitcoin markets are indeed reasonably efficient and price in S2F model, but also overestimate risk.
Greg Cipolaro, Co-founder of Digital Asset Research, provides an excellent analysis of price discovery in Bitcoin spot markets.

💰 Funding, M&A, & Exits

Bit Trade, one of the longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges in Australia, was acquired by Kraken. Bit Trade is a platform that combines liquidity from several exchanges into one interface. The acquisition allows Kraken to expand its presence into Asia Pacific. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Merkle Data, a risk and data solutions firm, was acquired by Anchorage, a cryptocurrency custodian. Financial terms were not disclosed. Anchorage Trading also announced it will provide a brokerage service for institutional clients. The service aims to compete with OTC desk by providing a transparent and stable fee structure (10 bps). The race between exchanges and custodians for AuM is on.
Plaid, whose API software lets start-ups connect to users’ bank accounts and works with Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Gemini, was acquired by Visa for $5.3B, as part of an effort by the card giant to tap into consumers’ growing use of fintech apps and noncard payments (Visa strategic investment deck here). Ben Thompson, Founder of Stratechery, explains the value derived from building out B2B financial infrastructure and strategic implications for the stack.
Lightnet, the Bangkok-based startup behind the Velo Protocol, a blockchain-based remittance service, raised a $31.2M Series A led by UOB Venture Management, Seven Bank, Uni-President Asset Holdings, HashKey Capital, Hopeshine Ventures, Signum Capital, Du Capital, and Hanwha Investment and Securities. Funds will strengthen the underlying technology built on the Stellar Network.
SIMBA Chain, a cloud-based smart contract as a service platform, raised a $1.5M Seed led by Notre Dame’s Pit Road Fund, Elevate Ventures, First Source Capital. Funds will be used to hire sales and development staff and support the initial execution of “major” government contracts, including one with the U.S. Air Force to secure its supply chain.
Banxa, a fiat-to-crypto gateway solution, raised a $2M Series A led by NGC Ventures with participation from the Thorney Investment Group Australia. Funds come after Banxa recently announced its partnership with Binance to enable purchases with the Australian Dollar, Euro, and Pound.
Optimism, a startup founded by Former Plasma Group researchers focused on Ethereum scaling solutions using Optimistic Rollup, raised a $3.5M Seed round led by Paradigm and IDEO CoLab Ventures. Funds will be used to make Optimistic Rollup more implementable and allow devs to build applications on top of it.

🔓 DeFi / OpFi

Tom Schmidt from Dragonfly Capital Partners explores the role of liquidators and analyzes how money is being made from being a liquidator in DeFi. Liquidators have earned almost $5M in profits. However, due to more competition and borrowers becoming more sophisticated, profits are decreasing.
Kyle Kistner, CVO of margin lending platform bZx, announced the launch of bZxDAO for protocol governance.

💸 STOs / Stablecoins / Tokens

BrickMark, a blockchain real estate company, announced it purchased an 80% stake in a $135M commercial real estate property in Zurich, announcing that it would pay 20% of the purchase price using BrickMark's “BMT” security token. BMT is an ethereum-based security token representing bonds backed by property in the BrickMark portfolio.

🏦 Institutionalization

A robust derivatives market should improve the price efficiency and liquidity of the underlying spot market. On January 13th, the CME launched live Bitcoin options trading. On the first day of trading, the exchange facilitated 55 contracts worth 275 BTC (~$2.3M). According to skew, 100% of the contracts were call options. FTX also recently launched bitcoin options trading saw $15M of volume within the first 24 hours. Compare this to Bakkt’s cumulative volume of just over $1M since launch in early December.
Arthur Hayes, co-founder and CEO of BitMEX, compares crypto options to perpetual swaps, which he argues provide higher leverage and liquidity.
Grayscale released its 2019 Digital Asset Investment Report. The company raised a record $608M in investments, largely driven by the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which raked in $193.8M in Q4 alone. Majority of investment (71%) came from institutional investors, dominated by hedge funds.
Bitwise released a survey of 415 Financial Advisors attitudes towards crypto assets. 76% fielded clients’ crypto questions in the past year, 58% say “better regulation” could spur them to invest, only 6% of them currently have allocations to crypto in their client portfolios, 7% said they would either “definitely” (1%) or “probably” (6%) make such allocations in the new year.

🌉 Infrastructure

Gemini announced the launch of Nakamoto Ltd., a captive insurance company licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority to insure Gemini Custody. The captive insurer will provide $200M in coverage for customers of Gemini Custody, the crypto cold storage service of Gemini Trust Company. Gemini now insures all customers’ assets including USD deposits and cryptocurrencies both in hot and cold wallets.
Bitstamp and Silvergate Bank announced the launch of pilot for Silvergate Bank’s new product, SEN Leverage. SEN Leverage uses the Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN) which enables real-time, around-the-clock deposits and withdrawal of U.S. dollars, to fund loans and process repayment on a 24/7 basis. The product targets institutional clients and allows them to trade with leverage collateralized by bitcoin.

🍰 Layer 1

Kadena completed the final stage of its mainnet launch by incorporating smart contract functionality and cross-chain communication with Kadena’s private network, Kadena Kuro. Devs can now build and deploy applications on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) network using Kadena’s native smart contract language, Pact. The team is also working to integrate its token wallet, Chainweaver, with the Cosmos Network, which it hopes to complete by the end of Q1
ETH 2.0 development continues to move forward, showcasing an over 100% participation from over 22k+ validators on their beacon chain testnet this past week.
Zcash poised to finally have private shielded transactions on mobile (Android and iOS) with their new SDK release.

⚖️ Legal

The SEC released an investor alert that warned would-be investors about the risk involved with IEOs. The release, published by the Office of Investor Education and Advocacy, advised investors to "be cautious if considering an investment in an IEO" because promises around such offerings "can be used improperly to entice investors with the false promise of high returns in a new investment space."
Chris Giancarlo, former Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), along with Charles Giancarlo and Daniel Gorfine, have partnered with Accenture to create the Digital Dollar Project to advance exploration of a United States Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The purpose is to encourage research and public discussion on the potential advantages of a digital dollar, convene private sector thought leaders and actors, and propose possible models to support the public sector.

🎥 Podcast & Video of the Week

On the latest Blockcrunch, Jason Choi interviews Chris McCann (Proof of Capital, ex GreylockVC) on teams with strongest execution, who has extreme founder-product fit in crypto, why hasn't crypto impacted remittances, and tokens vs equity.

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.

Filecoin - Community Manager
Gemini - Various
Chainlink - Developer Evangelist
Paxos - Strategic Partnerships
Ripple - Various
ConsenSys - Various
Pantera Portfolio Co - Various
Chainalysis - Various
LedgerX - Customer Experience
Messari - Various Marketing / Engineering
ConsenSys Labs - Various
R3 - Various Engineering
Embleema - Senior Full Stack Web Engineer
Coin Metrics - Various Engineering / Data
Kaiko - Institutional Sales
MakerDAO - People Ops Manager
Fundstrat Global Advisors - Crypto Researcher
UMA - Designer / Software Engineer
Grayscale - Director of Research
Bison Trails - Ops / Engineering
goTenna - Product Manager
Gemini / Nifty Gateway - Front-End Eng.
Genesis Trading - COO
BlockFi - Institutional S&T Associate
Paypal - Director of AML & Blockchain Strategy
Republic - Biz Ops Associate Tokenization
R3 - Venture Dev Community Lead, Americas

Events this week

Paxos Stablecoin Master Class (Free)

When: Wed, January 22, 2020, 5:45 PM – 8:00 PM EST

Where: Paxos HQ, Near Union Square, Details in confirmation

The Paxos Stablecoin Masterclass is a mixed education and collaboration session for professionals seeking to understand and apply stablecoins and blockchain technologies to current and future products. The session will consist of learning the fundamentals of blockchain technology and stablecoins from a regulatory, operational and technological perspective. Afterwards there will be a more informal session to discuss, collaborate and network.Dinner and drinks will be provided!

Event Schedule

5:45pm - 6:15pm: Dinner and drinks
6:15pm - 7:15pm: Core stablecoin/blockchain fundamentals (Blockchains, stablecoins, private chains, regulatory outlook, applications)
7:15pm-8:00pm: Q&A, information discussion, collaboration and networking

[Whitepaper Wednesday] Chainlink: Decentralized Oracle Network (Free)

When: Wednesday, January 22, 2020, 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

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

We will be going through a technical overview of Chainlink - a decentralized oracle network. Chainlink's mission is to provide tamper-proof inputs and outputs for smart contracts on any blockchain. Here is the whitepaper: https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper

Our moderator has also provided some reference documents as well if you feel like doing a deep dive.

#TNYSCM18 – Blockchains in Supply Chain (Free)

When: Thursday, January 23, 2020, 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM

Where: TBD

As the hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchains is cooling off, a few committed entrepreneurs, innovators, technologists, and academics continue to build products to solve problems that have plagued enterprise supply chains for years. This event will feature some of those people and the products they are bringing to market.

Upcoming events

NYC/XRP IV - Seeing 20/20!

When: Tuesday, January 28, 2020, 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Location, TBD

The last year has been a very exciting time for both the NYC/XRP meetup and the larger global #XRPCommunity. Ripple Labs engineers and directors will be invited to share their stories and journeys as part of a fireside chat.

State of the Blockchain dApps - WANTED: 1/2 Million Female Engineers ($6)

When: Wednesday, January 29, 2020, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Where: Lair East, 424 Broadway #602 · New York, NY

This session is particularly interesting for developers and those who want to learn about the latest in decentralized applications. What a perfect time to review the blockchain ecosystem of decentralized applications aka ‘dApps’. Fauve Altman who leads community at State of the dApps, the eldest Dapp registry out there will speak about how the ecosystem developed over the span of the last 5 years. You will learn about Dapp trends, success stories and the most popular industries.

And the Blockchain Engineers, Kelly Simer Abdelmagid from Blockapps, and Alice Henshaw from Fluidity will share their insights from the forefront of the field. What it takes to be a successful Dapp developer to realize solutions with smart contracts, tokenization and other blockchain related expertise in service of innovative solutions or to integrate blockchain technology with existing platforms and business structures. You will learn about the growing opportunities for blockchain developers i.e. in initiatives such as https://onemilliondevs.com/

Join defining the future and ensure that 1/2 of those million engineers are female!!!

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

When: Sat Feb 1st - Sun Feb 2nd 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:

How Proof-Of-Stake (PoS) Blockchains Work (An Introduction)
Costs / Rewards Calculator: The Basics (Terminology & Walkthrough Of Tools)
Approaches To Validator Architecture & Security: Trust Model & Slashing Basics
Decentralization: Metrics & Methodology For Determining The Health (And Viability) Of A Blockchain Network with Reseachers from ConsenSys
A Deep Dive Into Proof Of Stake (PoS) Validator Security & Attack Vectors
How To Identify Which Proof-Of-Stake Networks Are Worth Mining (Being A Validator For)
How To Acquire Stake: The Different Profiles Of Stakers (Community, Funds, & Service Providers)
What Makes A Good Network Custodian: A Candid Discussion On Incentive Alignment
Validator Tooling: Innovations On UX
Heroku For Staking: Democratizing Staking So That Anyone (Not Just Institutions) Can Participate
Should Your VC Fund Stake Or Run A Validator?
A Candid Discussion On The Future Of Staking-As-A-Service: Exchanges, 0% Fees, and Centralization
Incentivized Testnets: Learnings From Past Competition Winners (Case Studies)

Cornell Blockchain NYC Meetup (Free)

When: Mon, February 3, 2020, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM EST
Where: TBC

This meetup will be focused on the following theme: Beyond the Proof of Concept with two panels: Banking Beyond Blockchain and Markets Beyond Blockchain. The goal of this meetup is to dive into current investigations and/or proof of concepts of blockchain technology by enterprises and the learnings/results.

Markets Beyond Blockchain

Nasdaq - Kyle O'Connor, Sr. Strategic Planning Analyst- Global Trading & Market Services
DTCC - Artem Korenyuk, Executive Director: Business Innovation & FinTech Strategy
Seven Eight Capital - Adam Kravetz, COO

CryptoMonday NYC Fireside Chat with Cole Kennelly Organizer of DeFi NYC (Free)

When: Monday, January 13, 2020, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: SOSV - dlab, 255 W 36th 3rd floor · New York, ny

This CryptoMondays NYC features a Fireside Chat with Cole Kennelly, DeFi expert and the Organizer of DeFi NYC, a NYC-based community focused on fostering decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi NYC has hosted events featuring leading organizations in the DeFi space, including MakerDAO, Uniswap, UMA, Dharma, Messari, & more. Additionally, Cole works with Staked, a provider of best-in-class staking and lending infrastructure, on business development and growth.

Core Developers Meetup (Free)

When: Tuesday, January 14, 2020, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

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

This is a series of regular monthly meetups for core devs - current and aspiring! The event will feature talks from R&D staff, core developers, protocol designers, and cryptographers working on various projects. After that, we'll open the floor for questions and discussions about topics of interest.

Understanding Decentralized ID (Free)

When: Tuesday, January 14, 2020, 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: IBM Garage, 368 9th Ave 16th Floor · New York, NY

Get an education on what Decentralized ID is and what some of the use cases are.

How the "Tech" In FinTech Is Built - with MarketAxess (Free)

When: Tuesday, January 14, 2020, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Where: MarketAxess, 55 Hudson Yards · New York, NY

NYC FinTech Women is kicking off 2020 with MarketAxess for a discussion on the intersection of cloud engineering, big data and agile product management.

[Whitepaper Wednesday] MetaCartel DAO (Free)

When: Wednesday, January 15, 2020, 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

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

This week, we’re kicking off 2020 with a discussion about MetaCartel Ventures, a for-profit investment DAO coupled with a legal entity. Read the paper here: https://github.com/metacartel/MCV/blob/master/Whitepaper.pdf

We'll discuss their approach to the challenge of making a DAO for investing and their tradeoffs around legal liability, governance, and social scalability.

2020 Block Talk Summit ($59)

When: Sat, January 18, 2020, 9:30 AM – 5:30 PM EST

Where: Fordham University Lincoln Center, 140 W 62nd St, MCNALLY AMPHITHEATRE, New York, NY 10023

Hosted by New Power Chain, the 2020 Block Talk Summit brings together the elite of the blockchain industry from US and China including top chain projects, exchange platforms, advisory firms, and law firms to discuss and share their valuable insights on challenges and solutions with blockchain application in various industries. This event will include keynote speeches, panel discussion, and industry talk.