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RelayNode NYC #39 - February 10

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 @ Paperchain.io 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: The Rise of Personal Tokens & Financialization of Time

A new trend has emerged where individuals are experimenting launching personal tokens to represent time. Create an ERC-20 token on Ethereum via OpenLaw, set the terms, and launch the token on a decentralized exchange.

Some Background: Reuben Bramanathan, a blockchain consultant and former Coinbase lawyer, recently created a personal token, Counsel ($CNSL) which can be redeemed for 1 hour of his time as a consultant and advisor. The token can be traded on Uniswap. In one week, he sold 20 CNSL tokens and 2 were redeemed for sessions. The tokens were traded 35 times and are currently held by 14 people. Reuben raised $3,976, while donating 10% ($397) to GiveCrypto. At the end of week 1, Reuben shared the following performance stats:

Big Picture: Personal tokens are an interesting example of a crypto economic primitive. The token both represents an individual, and coordinates the flow of information and value to, from and around the individual.

Composability: The narrative of composability ā€“ or apps being able to connect and build off of one another ā€“ continues to manifest itself. Paul Berg, co-founder of Sablier, redeemed the $CNSL token over a call with Reuben and streamed $CNSL to his ENS domain using Sablier. If you pay for a service upfront, there's no guarantee that you will be given the information you want. If you pay for a service at the end, there's no guarantee that the seller will be paid. Sablier makes the passage of time itself the trust-binding mechanism. 

Risks: Just days after launching the token, the $CNSL token price increased 65% from $155 to $256. Price discovery takes time but volatility may impact potential demand for Reubenā€™s services.  

Bottom Line: crypto is transforming every line item on the balance sheet / income statement for individuals and businesses into new forms of programmable value transfer and risk sharing. Iā€™ll be experimenting with a personal token in the near future and will share results in a future edition. 

Go Deeper:

Bankless: How to tokenize yourself (Full)ļ»æ

Things to read

šŸŒ Why Bitcoin / Macro?

  • The price of Bitcoin is back above $10K. Larry Cermak, Director of Research at the Block, published an excellent data-driven tweetstorm on the changing sentiment in crypto. Nearly all macro indicators are up month to month and most are hitting 6-month highs. While the first half of January saw an increase in spot buying, the second half of January was influenced by an aggressive use of leverage. According to skew, Open Interest on futures platforms has rebounded and skew has turned negative.

  • The Bitcoin network halving is a pre-set inflation adjustment in the network that occurs every 4 years. The next halving will occur at block height 630,000 expected mid May 2020, which would see the new issuance supply of bitcoin decline by 50%. TradeBlock estimates the breakeven cost to mine one bitcoin before and after the halving.

šŸ’° Funding, M&A, & Exits

  • Bridge2 Solutions, a loyalty solutions provider, was acquired by ICE, the parent company of Bakkt for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will boost Bakktā€™s upcoming consumer app and position Bakkt as an aggregator and a marketplace for a broad set of digital assets. According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE also made a failed takeover offer for online market-place eBay. 

  • Arwen, a startup developing a layer 2 blockchain protocol for security during the clearing and settlement of a trade, raised $3.3M led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Coinshares, Collaborative Fund, Underscore VC, and DG Lab Fund. Arwen is building products that minimize risk, reduce manual processes, and bridge the gap between closed networks. Funds will be used to expand its technology to institutional market participants and embed it in industry-leading digital asset platforms.

  • Clear, a blockchain startup that builds settlement and clearing networks for businesses, raised a $13M Series A led by Fidelity Internationalā€™s VC arm Eight Roads, with participation from Telefónica Innovation Ventures, Telekom Innovation Pool of Deutsche Telekom, HKT and Singtel Innov8.

  • Transparent Financial Systems, a startup developing a real-time decentralized payment settlement network, raised a $14M Series A round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Square, Digital Currency Group, FuturePerfect Ventures, IDEO Colab Ventures and CMT Digital.

  • Lightning Labs, the SF-based crypto firm focused on payment scaling solutions for bitcoin, raised a $10M Series A to become the "Visa" of bitcoin. The company announced it launched its first financial services product, Lightning Loop, to monetize the Layer 2 technology that sits on top of the bitcoin blockchain.

  • PoolTogether, the "no-loss lottery" DeFi project built on Ethereum, raised a $1.05M Seed from IDEO CoLab, ConsenSys, and DTC Capital. Funds will help the Prize Linked Savings (PLS) firm improve its security, increase the size of its prizes, and support its zero-fee services.

  • Securitize, the startup providing solutions for modernizing capital markets by enabling digital securities, raised a 'six-figure sum' strategic fundraise from Sony Financial Ventures and Global Brain. The investment is an extension of Securitizeā€™s latest funding round which raised more than $14M from MUFG Innovation Partners, Nomura Holdings, and Santander InnoVentures, as well as early investors like Blockchain Capital.

  • ConsenSys, the ethereum-focused software development company, acquired Heritage Financial Systems for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition gives ConsenSys advisory and broker-dealer capabilities in the U.S., with an aim to offer tokenized municipal bonds through tokenization technology platform CodeFi.

šŸ”“ DeFi / OpFi

  • According to DeFipulse, the total amount of money locked into DeFi apps and protocols crossed a milestone of $1B, up 50% year-to-date.

  • Gauntlet released a comprehensive analysis of financial risk to participants of Compound. The report indicated that the protocol can scale its total borrowed value by 10x with less than 1% chance of going default, even when ETH is at its maximum historical volatility.

  • BitGo, the crypto custodian, partnered with SettleBit to offer instantaneous institutional trading. This will enable faster settlement and higher levels of security as institutional traders can trade with one another from cold storage. Continuation of the trend of crypto custodians moving into trading (e.g. Anchorage Trading).

šŸ’ø STOs / Stablecoins / Tokens / DAOs

  • Ryan Yi, Investment Analyst at CoinFund, published an excellent post-mortem on DigixDAO and crypto arbitrage. In January, the Digix community (DGD token holders) were given a chance to vote for the projectā€™s dissolution and will walk away with the projectā€™s Treasury proceeds. Parties who took risk on DGD and closely followed the vote technicals were able to attain as much as a ~48% spread between DGD and the underlying ETH of the DAO. 

šŸ¦ Institutionalization

  • Axoni, a New York-based technology firm that specializes in multi-party workflows and infrastructure, announced the successful launch of a distributed ledger network to manage equity swap transactions with Citi and Goldman Sachs. 

šŸŒ‰ Infrastructure

  • Binance announced a new futures market maker program fee structure with negative fees (rebates) for select trading pairs to drive liquidity. Other benefits for qualifying market makers include higher API limits and ultra-low latency connectivity and support.

  • While speculatorsā€™ needs are well met via the crypto delta one products on the market, there remain those who want to earn a yield on their coin, those who need to pay bills in fiat without selling coin, and those who need to smooth out their future return profile. In this light, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, provides a 2020 roadmap for crypto derivatives. BitMEX, a crypto derivatives exchange, also launched a new perpetual swap contract for XRP. The XRP/USD contract offers up to 50x leverage

  • Kyle Samani, GP at Multicoin Capital, published excellent research on scaling Web3 services. Bitcoin mining presented the first way to organize large scale behavior without the creator investing a dime in ongoing operations. By designing a game that codifies incentivizes for good behavior and penalties for bad behavior, supply can self organize to serve demand. Weā€™re seeing the first wave of more advanced crypto economic games roll out: graph, livepeer, Arweave, helium, and others.

šŸ° Layer 1 

  • Denis Nazarov, previously a partner at a16z crypto and founder of Mediachain, announced the launch of FEEDweave and provides a high level tutorial on how to build a decentralized social media platform using the Arweave blockchain. Super cool demo of how the architecture can enable a new wave of composable social software.

  • Tezos Foundation President, Ryan Jesperson, announces that heā€™ll be stepping down from his position and will withdraw from the Tezos Foundation board.

  • The Ethereum 2.0 team said, in an AMA discussion on Reddit, that the network wonā€™t launch until 3 clients can run testnets consistently for a minimum of 8 weeks. Developers pencil in July 2020 as the tentative launch date for phase 0, the beacon chain. 

  • Blockstack, the company behind the Stacks blockchain which aims to put user data in the hands of users, announced its plans to roll out of a new consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Transfer. Miners on the network will need to post BTC to mine a block and that BTC will then get shared with nodes maintaining a copy of the ledger. 

  • Handshake, the proof-of-work protocol supporting human-readable addresses for sending crypto and interacting with smart contracts, launched its mainnet. Handshake is its own blockchain, powered by the Handshake token (HNS), which is used to bid on domain names. Transactions and full functionality will be enabled on February 17. The protocol will distribute $115M worth of HNS (85% of the supply) to devs via an airdrop.

āš–ļø Legal

  • Nic Carter, Partner at Castle Island Ventures, explains lessons from the uneven distribution of capital and why he is bullish on US regulation. The long tail of capital ends up in the legal jurisdiction with the most investor protections (i.e. common law, despite short term arbs).

  • Hester Peirce, the SEC Commissioner, unveiled a proposal to create a regulatory safe harbor (ā€œRule 195ā€) for projects that sell tokens to build decentralized networks. As long as issuers follow the rules that apply to the initial fundraising (e.g., complying with the restrictions of a Reg D exemption), they will have 3 years during which the SEC will forebear from applying the registration and trading provisions of securities laws. CoinList published a fantastic recap on how the SECā€™s Rule 195 could change the industry. Good news for Blockstack and its STX token, given the companies focused on remaining compliant with its fundraising process, qualifying for a Reg A exemption.

šŸŽ§ Podcasts of the Week

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

DeFi NYC Presents Blockstack (Free)
When: Tuesday, February 11, 2020, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Where: Civic Hall, 118 W 22nd St 12th fl · New York, NY

Join DeFi NYC and Blockstack's Co-founder & CEO, Muneeb Ali, as he discusses breakthrough Blockstack developments planned for the first half of 2020 and the latest in decentralized news. Discussion will be around new concepts addressed in the most recent Blockstack SIP Proposal like Proof of Transfer (PoX) and Stacking, as well as Clarity, Blockstackā€™s ā€œCanā€™t Be Evilā€ Smart Contract Language.

Schedule:

- 6:00 pm: Socializing / Food and Refreshments

- 6:30 pm: Muneeb Ali, CEO and Co-founder of Blockstack PBC

- 6:50 pm: Engineer, Blockstack PBC

- 7:15 pm: Q&A

- 8:00 pm: Event Over

[Whitepaper Wednesday] Kleros (Free)

When: Wednesday, February 12, 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 Kleros - a dispute resolution protocol running on top of Ethereum. Here is the whitepaper: https://kleros.io/whitepaper_en.pdf

Bring your lunch, questions and comments to Crypto NYC, where we'll talk through it together. All levels of experience are welcome. We're here to learn from each other!

BitDevs: Socratic Seminar 101 (Free)

When: Wednesday, February 12, 2020, 6:40 PM to 8:40 PM

Where: Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center, 50 West 4th Street · New York, NY

Thanks to our friends at Chaincode Labs and NYU Digital Asset Forum for food, refreshments and event space. If you can't make it to the main event please join us at The Malt House around 9:30PM.

Please see our zotero link aggregator for a list of potential discussion topics. Topics will be added as the weeks progress. Feel free to suggest topics in the comment section below.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/691739/devsny/items/collectionKey/TZLDWGYG

Upcoming events

CryptoMondays NYC - An Evening Celebrating NFTs Ahead of NFT.NYC (Free)

When: Tuesday, February 18, 2020 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

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

NFT.NYC, the leading conference on NFTs (which we believe are a thing).

The event is in NYC on Feb. 20th, at the Edison Ballroom in Times Square. As there are going to be a lot of NFT luminaries in NYC this week, we're excited to host a night devoted to all things NFT featuring the founders of NFT.NYC Jodee Rich and Cameron Bale, together with their partners at OpenSea, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah. They'll be giving a an overview of the NFT ecosystem and the massive impact it's going to have.

NFT.NYC is the leading event for the Non-Fungible Token space. Their 2019 show was huge - 2020 will be hosted at the Edison Ballroom in Times Square on February 20. Members can use the code CRYPTOMONDAYS to get 30% if you register by Friday Feb 14.

BitDevs: Whitepaper Series 12: CoinJoin (Free)

When: Wednesday, February 19, 2020, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Baruch College, 151 East 25th Street Room 750 · New York, ny

Proposed in 2013 by Greg Maxwell, CoinJoin is a multi-party input aggregation protocol that breaks the ā€œcommon-input-ownershipā€ heuristic, a blockchain analysis technique commonly applied to Bitcoinā€™s transaction graph. Why CoinJoins work and under what circumstances they can fail are important questions. This event will start from the beginning: we will learn about the history of CoinJoin, how research has evolved in the space and what the differences are between the currently available implementations.

For a full event description and a list of discussion topics, please see here:

https://bitdevs.org/2020-02-19-whitepaper-series-11-coinjoin

Token Taxonomy Initiative Workshop Summit (Free)

When: February 19, 2020, 1PM ā€“ 5PM

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

The Token Taxonomy Initiative is offering a half-day introduction to the Token Taxonomy Framework, including detailed workshops using the TTF to define specifications for tokens. If youā€™re planning to attend the NFT.NYC conference on the 20th, or just happen to be in NYC that day, this Summit will deliver all the information you need to begin working with the TTF.

NFT.NYC 2020 ($75 for devs - $299 general)

When: February 20, 2020

Where: The Edison Ballroom - Times Square

NFT.NYC 2019 saw over 450 attendees and 85 speakers meet in New York City's iconic Times Square to discuss the emerging NFT Ecosystem. NFT.NYC is back in 2020 with debates, thought leader talks, workshops and industry briefings from the leading names and brands in blockchain.

How to Create a Supply Chain Blockchain App (Free)

When: Monday, February 24, 2020, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: LMHQ, 150 Broadway 20th floor · New York, NY

Blockchain increases visibility and efficiency in the supply chain like the coffee trade. See how blockchain can assist farmers, roaster and everyone between, bring you a fresher and fairer cup. Come out and we will walk you through design, development, and deployment of an illustrative blockchain network and application. In this hands on workshop, you will learn about...

- Developing a supply chain blockchain application with VS Code

- Deploying it on the IBM Blockchain Platform.

- Successful Blockchain applications in the Supply Chain space such as IBM Food Trust and others

- Best practices for developing blockchain applications today and looking forward to the future

A Fireside Chat w/ Gabriel Anderson, M.D. Tachyon/Consensys Accelerator

When: Monday, March 2, 2020, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

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

This CryptoMondays NYC features a Fireside Chat with Gabriel Abderson, the Managing Director of Tachyon Accelerator which brings together a highly selective group of Web 3.0 founders for an intense 12-week sprint to hone their value proposition, test their assumptions with real customers, and prepare for the next phase of investment and growth. Tachyon is part of Consensys Labs, which is the venture arm of Consensys.

ļ»æNotable Conferences

Postponed

2020

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.