RelayNode NYC #57 - Launching Social Money with $RELAY, Seeking DeFi Alpha.
Welcome to RelayNode NYC Area edition! The NYC blockchain ecosystem is growing. Our goal is to harness its energy & innovation and provide a weekly curated list of personal thoughts, interesting content, upcoming events, and local jobs.
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RelayNode NYC is curated by:
David Gogel: Founder @GogelX/Definancier, Advisor/Operator/Investor, Advisor @Paperchain.io, Wharton MBA/BS/BA, fmr Associate @Techstars' Blockchain Accelerator, Co-president @Wharton FinTech, Corp Dev @LinkedIn @AIG
Follow me on: Twitter | LinkedIn | Definancier | 🙏 Please DM any feedback 🙏
Market Stats (as of Sunday, June 14th, 4:00 PM EST)
A sharp correction in equity and risky markets: The S&P 500 declined 5.9% on Thursday, its largest loss since March 16, after concerns over a second wave of COVID infections and a grim forecast from the Fed, which warned “the path ahead is extraordinarily uncertain”, driving yields lower. Last week, the Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ declined 5.6%, 4.8%, and 2.3%, respectively. Defensive positions, including Treasuries, Gold, and the VIX gained.
The total market cap of crypto-assets sits at ~$267B, decreasing 4% WoW. The price of bitcoin slumped 6% on Thursday, hitting ~$9,300, as risk-on assets experienced a sharp correction following a statement from the FOMC. Bitcoin is strengthening its correlation with stock market indices. Meanwhile, according to skew, bitcoin options OI reached $1.5B, only one month after crossing $1B.
1 Big Thing: Introducing $RELAY - digital loyalty tokens to reward and engage our online following
Over the last 13 months, RelayNode NYC has grown to 1000+ weekly subscribers. It’s been tremendously rewarding. Throughout this journey, I’ve been exploring new ways to engage with the RelayNode NYC community. Naturally, the best way to learn about cryptocurrencies and blockchains is to use them.
Today, I’m proud to announce the launch of the $RELAY token on Ethereum via the Roll platform. Similar to a loyalty point, supporters can earn $RELAY by completing a variety of social actions and redeem for rewards. There is no fee associated with signing up for Roll. $RELAY tokens are NOT to be marketed as a security, stock or investment. They are a form of online social money.
Basic token terms:
Name: RelayNode
Ticker: $RELAY
$RELAY Supply & Distribution:
Max supply: 10M fixed cap of tokens issued
Current supply: 2M distributed to RelayNode NYC / 1.2M to Roll
6.8M vesting to RelayNode NYC over the next 3 years
Contract address on Etherscan
Ways to *currently* earn $RELAY:
Contribute to the community by submitting jobs (link here)
Contribute to the community by submitting upcoming events (link here)
First 10 people to share the newsletter on twitter and tag @dgogel
Ways to *currently* redeem $RELAY:
60 mins video chat with me to discuss crypto/blockchain/fintech or get feedback
Newsletter shoutout
AMA
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more about opportunities to earn and redeem $RELAY. I’m currently exploring:
Streaming social money with @SablierHQ
Creating new forms of group memberships via @UnlockProtocol
Listing on @Uniswap
Creating a telegram group requiring a minimum # of tokens for access
Rewarding users for contributing interesting metrics and observations
Onboarding other RelayNode writers
Stay tuned!
1 Other Thing: Seeking DeFi Alpha
The total amount of money locked in decentralized finance apps and protocols currently sits at ~$950M. One of the more interesting developments since the start of the year is the outperformance of several DeFi tokens.
Many of these DeFi protocol / dapps are designed to accrue value to the native token. There are fundamental reasons driving recent breakouts, which have directly translated into increased usage and adoption of Ethereum:
Changing token structures (KNC, BNT, LEND)
Mainnet / v2 / planned upgrades (MKR, REN, REP)
Growing DEX trading volumes (ZRX, LRC)
Successful liquidity mining / network-based bootstrapping driving liquidity and activity (SNX, BAL)
Most recently, Compound Governance passed Proposal 007 to upgrade the protocol, which will begin the $COMP Distribution on June 15th — the start of complete community involvement. As the line between users and investors continues to blur, I expect a fundamentals-driven combined with active protocol participation investing strategy to generate higher returns while assuming a similar amount of risk as compared to several industry benchmarks (e.g., BTC, ETH.)
What To Read
🌐 MACRO / WHY BITCOIN?
🌐 Monetary policy updates: The latest FOMC report predicts US GDP will decline by 6.5% in 2020, before recovering to a growth rate of 5% in 2021. Consumer prices continue to fall, decreasing by 0.1% in May. The unemployment rate will remain above 9% until the end of 2020. The Fed plans to keep interest rates close to zero through 2022 and set a floor for its asset purchases, pledging to monthly purchases of $80B in Treasurys and $40B worth of MBSs. It’s no surprise that in the 3 months leading up to May 11, the M2 measure of the US money supply has increased at an 82% annualized rate.
🌐 The Looming Bank Collapse: Frank Partnoy, a law professor at UC Berkeley and writer at the Atlantic, explores the rise of Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) and the worst-case scenario: a systematic risk to the banking system.
🌐 Grayscale Premium: The GBTC and ETHE premium arbitrage trade has become topical. Both products, issued by Grayscale, have traded at a consistent premium over NAV (TradeBlock XBX and ETX Index) since inception. Currently, GBTC trades at a ~30% premium to NAV, and ETHE trades at a ~850% premium to NAV. The Amber Group published excellent research on arbitrage risks.
💰 FUNDING, M&A, EXITS
💰Upvest, an asset tokenization platform, raised €900,000 (~$1M) from the European Regional Development Fund to build a prediction tool for Ethereum gas fees. The Initial benchmarking results against the current fee recommendation solutions promises crucial performance improvements by 18%.
💰Voyager Digital Canada, a public, licensed crypto-asset broker that provides investors with a turnkey solution to trade crypto assets, announced it has received subscriptions in connection with a non-brokered private placement for gross proceeds of CAD$2.9M (US$2.2M). Proceeds will be used for marketing, product development, and for other general corporate purposes.
💰Regan Bozman, Business Ops @CoinList, introduced Dove Mountain Data, a comprehensive live database of all funds deploying capital into crypto. He covers a number of investment trends while updating the original 2018 data set.
🔓 DEFI / CEFI / OPFI
🔓 Curve Finance, an exchange liquidity pool for stablecoins, announced its integration with RenVM, built on Ren, an open protocol that enables the permissionless and private transfer of value between blockchains. The integration allows cross-chain interactions for depositing BTC on Curve, enabling bitcoin holders to earn a high yield for providing liquidity.
🔓 Kyber Growth: Kyber released its ecosystem report, after hitting a big milestone: US$1B in volume since its mainnet, carried out over 1M transactions signed by 84k unique addresses and 5.8M ETH equaling ~5% of total ETH supply.
🔓 DEX revival: The DEX space saw $2.4B of volume in 2019. But in 2020, Jake Brukhman, Founder and CEO at CoinFund, estimates ~$7.1B in annualized volume, a 194% year-on-year increase. He explores how technological maturity, the proliferation of tokens, and a bullish outlook are helping to drive volumes.
🔓 Token-Based Network Bootstrapping: Deribit Insights released research on Liquidity Mining. Multiple protocols including Balancer, Curve, Thorchain, Bancor, Kava, Compound, and Mstable are currently running, or plan to run these types of incentive programs.
💸 Tokens / STOs / DAOs
💸 The LAO is exploring open For-Profit DAOs for unaccredited investors: The LAO, a venture fund powered by MolochDAO and OpenLaw, announced it is extending Moloch v2, with Raid Guild’s Minon framework (an extendable smart contract for Moloch DAOs that will enable subsidiaries), to create new structures that could open up the pathway towards unaccredited, for-profit DAOs.
💱 STABLECOINS & CBDCs
💱US Lawmakers discuss digital dollar, FedAccounts: The House Financial Services Committee (FSC) Task Force on Financial Technology convened to discuss digital currencies and how FedAccounts might help the federal government distribute stimulus payments.
💱 Replacing SWIFT with USDC: Bank Frick, one of Europe's blockchain banks, announced it is offering professional market participants and wealthy clients the trading and safekeeping of USDC. Trading takes place within the fully regulated environment of the bank. USDC's usage in regulated banking is a growing trend.
🌉 INFRASTRUCTURE
🌉 Growing institutional adoption of Crypto: Fidelity Digital Assets, the crypto asset arm of Fidelity Investments, released a survey of 770 institutional investors, which indicated that 36% own cryptocurrencies or related derivatives. 80% of institutional investors see something appealing. Highlights below:
🌉 Vanguard advances blockchain tech pilot to streamline Asset-Backed Securities markets: Through a partnership with Symbiont and in collaboration with a large US ABS issuer, as well as BNY Mellon, Citi, and State Street, Vanguard, an investment management company, announced it managed to model the full lifecycle of an ABS settlement on distributed ledger technology network by replicating end-to-end transaction flows.
🌉ConsenSys launches Codefi Compliance: Codefi announced the launch of Compliance, an automated and agile regulatory and compliance platform for crypto and digital assets. Codefi Compliance uses a custom framework to provide an AML/CFT solution compatible with Ether and token standards such as ERC20, ERC721, ERC179, ERC777, along with notable stablecoins like DAI, USDC and Tether, covering 280,000 types of digital assets built on Ethereum. It is the first solution built for digital assets that will run on ETH 2.
🌉 The race to become a full-service crypto financial institution: On the heels of recent prime brokerage announcements, Galaxy Digital, the diversified financial services and investment management company, and Bakkt, the digital asset derivatives trading and custody platform majority-owned by ICE, announced their partnership to launch a white-glove service for asset managers looking to acquire, build positions in and store bitcoin. Ryan Watkins from Messari has a great tweetstorm exploring different service providers.
🌉 Physically-settled bitcoin futures: Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges, introduced physically-settled bitcoin futures with quarterly expiration dates, to complement its perpetual swaps. The BTCUSD Quarterly Futures Contract is Binance’s first derivative contract with a set expiration and settlement date. The contract is settled in the denominated BTC asset and will expire on the last Friday of the corresponding three-month period.
🍰 LAYER 1
🍰 Crypto Exchange Blackmail, Money Laundering, or Ethereum Bug: Over the course of 3 days and 3 transactions, a user paid $5.7M in gas fees to send ~$84.5k in money over the Ethereum network. Crypto Twitter and researchers continue to debate what is behind these unusual transactions.
🍰 On-chain and derivatives indicators point to the adoption and use of Ether: Deribit Insights reports key metrics such as total addresses with a balance and number of addresses hodling at an all-time high, Ethereum’s fundamentals appear to be stronger than at its 2017 peak.
🍰 Ethereum 2.0: The team at Prysmatic Labs announced a new and improved testnet for Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0: The Onyx Test Network. This testnet is targeting v0.12.1 of the official Ethereum 2.0 specification, which is aimed to be the final specification before a mainnet launch and multiclient ready.
🕸️ Web 3
🕸️ Surveying Web3 developers: Fluence surveyed 650+ developers working on the Decentralized Web, which provides data privacy, data sovereignty, and tech resilience. Among the internet protocols, DNS concerns people the most, followed by the first-generation of communication protocols. Over 50% of devs are concerned with the current web’s massive personal data leaks, censorship, and access restriction by both tech giants and governments.
🍰🍰 LAYER 2
🍰🍰 Evaluating Ethereum L2 scaling solutions: Alex Gluchowski, Founder at Matter Labs, released an excellent analysis comparing State Channels, Sidechains, Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, Validium, and ZkRollups across security, performance/economics, usability, and other aspects.
🍰🍰 Microsoft releases a Bitcoin-based decentralized identity tool: Microsoft launched a beta of its decentralized identity tool ION, an open, public, permissionless Layer 2 network built on Bitcoin.
🎥 PODCASTS / VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
🎥 Nathaniel Whittemore: What the Stock Market’s ‘Robinhood Rally’ Means for Bitcoin
🎥 Real Vision: The Role of Crypto Post-Coronavirus with Arthur Hayes
🎥 Coinscrum Markets w/ FalconX, Bitstamp, BCB Group, Binance, CoinList
📅 Upcoming Events / Conferences
If you would like to highlight events in future editions, please submit here.
June 18: Wave Financial: Future of Asia's Capital Markets (Virtual)
June 24: FO256 - Digital Assets Conference For Sophisticated Investors (Virtual)
June 24-26: Remote Crypto Con (Virtual)
June 15-21: Korea Blockchain Week (Seoul)
June 30: DFINITY Foundation Tungsten (Virtual)
July 6-7: M2 Asset Management (Oxford)
July 15-16: Asia Blockchain Summit (Taipei)
July 21-23: Singapore Blockchain Week (Virtual)
July 22-23: Mining Disrupt (Miami)
🎓Highlighted Industry Jobs (non-exhaustive list for NY)
If you would like to highlight jobs or internships in future editions, please submit links here.
tZERO - Senior Project Manager (new)
Fireblocks - Demand Generation Manager (new)
Fidelity Digital Assets (FDAS) - Director, Corporate Business Development (new)
Chainalysis - Principal Security Engineer
Columbia University - Adjunct Associate Faculty, Intro to Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies & Analytics
Genesis Global Trading - Operations Analysis
BlockWorks Group - Account Executive
Streamr - Head of Developer Relations
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.
