TL;DR: Wakey wakey, give a crap about freedom, or accept the consequences. Another Sunday afternoon, another news item about Monero being delisted from a centralized exchange, this time in Australia. Last year it was OKEx and others. Just a few days ago it was Coinspot. It is sort of an open secret that Coinbase is not listing Monero due to external pressures. Today we're hit with news that Kraken will be ceasing Monero trading for AU residents. And you will also recall that Japan and South Korea have made similar moves. It's a near impossibility with me, especially when powered by caffeine, which is most definitely the case today, but I will try to make this brief, sweet and to the point. These are not isolated incidents. There is an International Organization™ in particular orchestrating, behind the scenes, the policies and requirements that financial institutions (crypto exchanges have since joined that category for this purpose) must follow, or else. Here is what bothers me about this. Have you been consulted about this? Anyone you know? Heard of it in the news? Yeah, me neither. You have to know where to look to find some information on what they would like to see happening (we'll get to that in a moment), and often you have to read PDFs with dozens of pages to find the good stuff too. I will leave that as an exercise to the reader. Suffice to say, I have been digging a bit deeper myself, and what I found shocked me. FATF wants nothing less than the complete elimination of anonymity and privacy in financial affairs, even going so far as to consider BANNING peer to peer transactions so that people are forced to interact with each other through exchanges, where data collection is more reliable and certain, effectively obliterating one of the major selling points of cryptocurrency (p2p-ness) with complete disregard for the millions of people who are already onboard with the vision. No privacy and no anonymity, imagine that. Many of you probably already use plastic cards for everything, day in day out, and don't think too much about this stuff. But the fact that an international organization that you have little to zero democratic control over is planning to get rid of class of financial tools that 99.99999% of people don't even realize exists yet should give you pause for concern. The tools I speak of are, of course, digital cash-like cryptocurrencies like Monero. I would like you to PAUSE, daydream a bit, visualize and imagine, what a world without zero financial privacy/anonymity would look like. Consider, this has certainly not been the case in human history, ever -- yes, even today. Today most of you still have cash as a choice. But what happens when that goes out of the window, and the only options are CBDCs, CorporateCoins, and transparent cryptocurrency ? Needless to say, both in the case of CorporateCoins and CBDCs, there will be little to none privacy/anonymity, and even if there was (in the case of CorporateCoin), the state would obviously bully its way into it and force them to do otherwise (without being asked to do so, of course). So, imagine that world. Every donation you make. Every $50 transfer to a friend or family member. Every item you buy. Every service you purchase. Every money you send to help a friend you. All of it stored, forever, to be accessed later at will for whatever reasons. Would you make the same choices, knowing that your entire financial life is entirely exposed to powerful organizations of which you likely know very little about and almost certainly can hardly ever influence at all? Does that seem like a good recipe for a free society?
Consequences
The people at the top either don't care about the consequences of what they're imposing worldwide, or they don't understand. Sounds highly concerning to me either way - It comes down to either bullying or ignorance. Would you ever have truly heart-to-heart conversations if you knew your worst enemy was potentially watching and recording everything? Could you make passionate love knowing hundreds of strangers are analyzing your every move? Can you be spontaneous knowing you are being recorded? What if you did not have a choice in those matters ?! What if someone has already decided for you, your friends, your family, your neighbors, your country, that you are all potential criminals and the thing to do is to keep records on everyone, just in case ? Newsflash: It already happened. It's been happening for awhile, and it seems to be picking up pace; the technology that was going to liberate us, slowly enslaving us instead -- because the general public largely does not understand the issues at hand, while the elite certainly does, and boy oh boy, are they thrilled with the technological advancements that help them cement their power. What do I mean by cement? Imagine trying to kick-start civil rights in a place where every social map is known, everything a person is interested in is known, every transaction they make is known, every website they have visited is known, every time they step on the street, an AI-powered camera automatically identifies them and tracks their movement. You would be unable to organize. To exchange value. To discuss behind curtains, so to speak. You would not have any privacy, and you would not have any anonymity. Could you be free under these circumstances?
Conclusion
It's been a long road towards more freedom, but nowdays it is disappearing fast. Stopping to consider the implications is a most pressing issue. They want Monero(-like tools) GONE because Monero ACTUALLY would change the paradigm. By the time they are done with their "recommendations" (which really mean: comply, or else...), mark my words, there will be a name behind every Bitcoin address in some centralized database, query-able by partners in deciding who can and cannot use the system. Merchants will be forced to perform chain analysis and by law they will be compelled to reject/refund/report transactions coming from "anonymous clusters" (addresses that are not known to have an identity tied to them). This is what the normalization of the lack of privacy has brought us. The possibility was there, and they took it. Of course they did. I repeat, it is no accident that it's not Dogecoin and Nano, Bitcoin or Litecoin being delisted. The star of the show (for better or for worse) is Monero, and that is because it works. It lets you transact anonymously and privately, like cash - why the hell should FATF know that you sent $500 to your mother last week? in fact, why the hell should they know your entire financial history?! When cash goes (and we can be fairly certain that it will be gone; would already be gone if this sort of authoritarian mindset had its way), Monero or tools like Monero, will become the only way to make any transaction outside the eyes of the state. It's not because you have anything (nefarious) to hide. It's not because you're a criminal. Rather, it's because to accept anything else is to bow to tyranny. It's your choice to make - are you meekly going to accept that in perhaps less than a decade there will be zero privacy and anonymity in financial matters, or are you going to fight back? Will you organize, campaign, email, discuss, spread awareness? Will you spend precious summer Sunday afternoons writing for strangers on the Internet trying to help a few more see the major shit-show we're headed into? Or will you be a good boy and do what you're told? Tomorrow, by the way - if left unchallenged - it won't just be financial privacy that disappears. One of the most prominent examples in the introductory part of this post (Australia) has already made quite clear that they don't like the fact that people can hide things from them (encryption). In other words, either they know about it (and archive it forever), or you better let them know. After all, a threat - any threat! - could be lurking somewhere in that encrypted data. And you have nothing to hide anyway, yes? This is a cryptocurrency sub though so let's not steer too far from that. It is important to remember that ultimately the issue is the same though - totalitarian control over everyone's life; mass-surveillance, and the ability to rewind and see someone's entire life exposed for the benefit of the state. Their actions are letting you know what really works and what really threatens the status quo. That is useful information. If you care at all about the freedom and privacy of your future self, your friends and family, children present or future, I think you would do well to think long and hard about these issues. Because the direction assumed by the most prominent regulators seems to be headed in a uniform direction - that is no surprise, seeing as how they meet with each other. You have to ask yourself though, is this for your benefit, your safety? Or is it to keep the statuo quo? How would the world be different if human beings - regardless of color, nationality, age, sexual orientation, political beliefs- with an Internet connection could freely exchange value privately and anonymously (the way we can still communicate private and anonymously in most places today - though not so in authoritarian places like China, AND THAT IS NOT A COINCIDENCE)? It would be instant, like an instant message. It would cost very little. Well, I have news for you: It's already possible, and a growing number of people are realizing this. This tool is called Monero. It exists today, and the cat is out of the bag. The technology will only get better, and more interesting tools may even come along later. In fact, barring mass persecution of open-source developers, that is very likely what is going to happen, as ultrasmart people everywhere congregate in virtual spaces to discuss better ways to do stuff. If we keep losing our right to be left alone until suspected of a crime, life will increasingly come to resemble what the regulator types are - consciously or unconsciously - creating: a Panopticon society. If you don't speak up, then the decision has already been made - and you're probably going to live to regret being complicit in it. Freedom or Tyranny. It's your choice to make. p.s: Yes, totally failed at making this short. I guess it's just not my thing.
Necessary Disclaimer: no rule breaking intended. No price manipulation intended. I only want to share verifiable facts/links and my analysis. If I am doing anything against the rules please let me know and I will do my best to fix it ASAP. I trade crypto, including LINK, and I am currently short on LINK. This is not financial advice; this is just for my own record and to start a discussion for anyone who might want more transparency around LINK.
TL;DR:
I believe there is a lot of misinformation, uncertainty, and unanswered questions about the LINK token, the Chainlink ecosystem, the SmartContract parent company. I also believe that LINK's current price is unjustified based on fundamental factors like usage/business case/current customers/future potential. So I'm raising some points and asking some questions. What is this post? Why should I care? How do I use it? Read or skim it. It's about the LINK token, the Chainlink ecosystem, and the parent company SmartContract. It's about why I believe the price of the LINK token may be currently driven mostly by hype and not backed by standard market fundamentals like usage/economics. Update 9 AUG: reorganizing, rewriting this post and moving supporting data/sources into "appendix" comments below on this post. The previous versions of this post and my comments elsewhere were too emotionally charged and caused more division rather than honest, evidence-based, productive discussion and I sincerely apologize for that. I have now rewritten it and will continue to update it.
PARTNERSHIPS
Who has Chainlink partnered with? Who is using Chainlink's technology and network? Who is contributing to developing Chainlink? Google - this is the pinned tweet on Chainlink's official page. Nothing there about Google using Chainlink services or co-developing with them. Just that blockchains/oracles CAN use google cloud services (APIs?). This is Google Cloud's June 13, 2019 blog post: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/building-hybrid-blockchain-cloud-applications-with-ethereum-and-google-cloud Oracle - (TODO. This seems to have potential as some product manager at Oracle has posted that chainlink integration is coming Q3/Q4 of 2020) SWIFT - the best they've got is a 30 second video with NOBODY from SWIFT present, with a *hypothetical* use case using SWIFT API. Intel This is the only google result for "chainlink site:intel.com", and it casually mentions that Intel's TEE (trusted execution environment) technology can be used to improve the security of oracles/blockchains. Nothing about Intel themselves using or developing with Chainlink. https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/new-confidential-computing-solutions-emerge-on-the-hyperledger-avalon-trusted-compute.html Another 240+ claimed project integrations: [TODO] There are so many to keep track of. Every week or even more frequent is yet another integration *announcement* Current DeFi usage: we've heard that Chainlink "secures" $1 billion in DeFi. But that's not in value locked: https://defipulse.com/ (LINK doesn't even appear on that list). That's just with DeFi data supposedly being priced using Chainlink nodes. EG Synthetix: https://blog.synthetix.io/chainlink-decentralizes-first-wave-of-synthetix-price-feeds/ yet where does Synthetix actually PAY to use an oracle? Not visible on-chain, maybe someone will find it. https://defipulse.com/blog/3-defi-dapps-starting-2020-off-strong/ "... Chainlink's following includes partnerships big and small, including Intel and Google Cloud services" example of misleading/exaggerated partnership claims being circulated.
Chainlink's ROADMAP
Threshold signatures, staking, on-chain SLAs: How real are these, is there a roadmap, how will this benefit users, is there any evidence of users currently *wanting* to use chainlink but needing these features and actively waiting for Chainlink to launch these? Staking: for there to be a valid incentive for users to stake LINK, it has to return around 5% annually because anything substantially under that would have users putting their money elsewhere (https://www.stakingrewards.com/cryptoassets) (not counting speculative capital gains in terms of LINK's price, but price gain per token/coin applies to all other crypto projects as well). Currently, for stakable cryptos, around 30-80% of their total supply is staked, and a good adjusted reward is on the order of 5% as well (some actually negative, some 10%+). The promise of staking incentivises people to buy and hold more LINK tokens (again, many other crypto projects have staking already live). That 5% reward will ultimately have to come from the customers who pay Chainlink oracle nodes to use their services, so it's an extra 5% fee for them. Of course, in the near future, the staking rewards *could* be subsidized by the founders' reserve wallets. Threshold signatures: addressed below in a comment. On-chain SLAs: [TODO] Here's supposedly Chainlink's agile/project planning board. (TODO: verify that it is indeed Chainlink's, and then analyse it) https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/2129823
I manually traced EVERY single inbound transaction/source of funds for the above 4 (not counting #1 as 10 LINK is negligible). 2 & 3 are 99.99%+ genesis-funded, being ACTIVELY topped up by a genesis wallet, last tx 4 days ago, 500,000 LINK. #4 has been funded 36 times over the past year and a half (that's 36 manual exports and I did them all). They all come from the 0x27158..., 0x2f0acb..., and https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x1f9e26f1c050b5c018ab0e66fcae8e4394eb0165 (another address like the 0x2f0acb that I went through and checked EVERY SINGLE inbound source of funds, and it's also >99.9% genesis-funded - one tx from Binance for 6098 LINK out of a total ~6,560,000 inbound LINK from genesis wallets), and two other addresses linked to Binance (0x1b185c8611d157a67d9a9d5261b0d2bd52c0bb78, 10,000 LINK and 0x039ac18afe298747c51c85e7c8f0d67c327f3883, 1,000,000 LINK) The 0x039ac... address funded the "Chainlink: Aggregator" address with 127,900 LINK, and the 0x1b185... with about ~9,600 LINK). So yes, it's technically possible that someone not related to Chainlink paid for the ETH / USD price feed because some funds do come from Binance. However, they only come from two distinct addresses. Surely for "240+" claimed partnerships, more than TWO would pay to use Chainlink's MOST POPULAR price feed? That is, unless they don't pay directly but to another address and then Chainlink covers this one from their own wallets. I will check if that's in line with Chainlink's whitepaper, but doesn't that throw doubt on the whole model of end-users paying to use oracles/aggregators, even if it's subsidized? I provide you this much detail not to bore you but to show you that I went through BY HAND and checked every single source (detailed sources in Appendix B) of funds for the OFFICIAL, Chainlink-listed "ETH/USD" aggregator that's supposedly sponsored by 10 DeFi partners (Synthetix, LoopSpring, OpenLaw, 1inch, ParaSwap, MCDEX, FuturesSwap, DMM, Aave, The Force Protocol). Yet where are the transactions showing that those 10 partners have EVER paid for this ETH/USD oracle? Perhaps the data is there so what am I missing? This ETH/USD aggregator has transferred out ~76,000 LINK to I guess the data providers in increments of .33 LINK. It has 21 data providers responding. I will begin investigating the data providers themselves soon. And those middle addresses like 0x1f9e26... and 0x2f0acb...? They have transferred out hundreds of thousands if not millions of LINK to exchanges. And that's just ONE price pair aggregator. Chainlink has around 40 of these (albeit this one's one of the more popular ones). SNX / ETH aggregator is funded 100% by genesis-sourced wallets, only 3 inbound transactions: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0xe23d1142de4e83c08bb048bcab54d50907390828 Some random examples (for later, ignore these for now) *********** https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x039ac18afe298747c51c85e7c8f0d67c327f3883 bought 1,000,000 LINK from Binance in Sept 12 & 15, 2019. (one of the possible funding sources for the ETH / USD aggregator example above) This address got 500,000 LINK from 0x27158... and has distributed them into ~5-10,000 LINK wallets that haven't had any out transactions yet https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x5bcf3edc0bb7119e35f322ba40793b99d4620f1e ************** Another example with an unnamed aggregator-node-like wallet that was only spun up 5 days ago, Aug 5: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x2cbfd29947f774b8cf338f776915e6fee052f236 It was funded 2,000 LINK SOLELY by the 0x27158... wallet and has so far paid out ~500 LINK in 0.43 LINK amounts to 9 wallets at a time. For example, this is one of the wallets it cashes out to: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x64fe692be4b42f4ac9d4617ab824e088350c11c2#tokenAnalytics That wallet extremely consistently collects small amounts of LINK since Oct 2019. It must be a data provider because a lot of Chainlink named wallets pay it small amounts of LINK regularly. It has transferred out 20 times. The most recent transfer out: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0xc8c30fa803833dd1fd6dbcdd91ed0b301eff87cf which then immediately transferred to the named "1inch.exchange" wallet, so I assume this was a "cash-out" transaction. It has cashed out via this address a lot. Granted, it also has transfer-out transactions that haven't (yet) ended up in an exchange wallet, eg https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x88e5353a73f38f25a9611e6083de6f361f9b537b with a current balance of 3000 LINK. This could be a user's exchange wallet, ready to be sold, or could be something else. No way for me to tell as there are no out txs from it.
LINK overall transaction, volume, and tx fees
This is to understand how much $ moves through the LINK ecosystem through: nodes, data providers, reserve wallets, wallets linked to exchanges, others. A typical aggregator node tx (payout?): https://etherscan.io/tx/0xef9e8e6dd94ebe9bbac8866f18c2ea0a07408ced1aa77fa04826043eaa55e772 This is their ETH/USD aggregator paying out 1 LINK to each of 21 addresses. Value of 21 LINK ~= $210. Total eth tx fees: .233 ETH (~$88.5, ~42% of the total tx value. If LINK was $4.2 instead of $10, the tx fees would be 100% of the value of the tx). Transactions like this happen every few minutes, and the payout amounts are most often 0.16, 0.66, 1.0, and 2.0 Link. Chainlink’s node/job listing site, https://market.link, lists 86 nodes, 195 feeds, 801 jobs, ~1,080,000 job runs (I can’t tell if this is over the past 2 months or 1.5 years). Only 20 nodes have over 1000 job runs, and 62 nodes have ZERO runs. Usual job cost is listed as 0.1 link, but the overall payout to the nodes is 10-20 times this. The nodes then cash out usually through a few jump addresses to exchanges. Some quick maths: (being generous and assuming it’s 1mil jobs every 2 months = ~6mil link/year = $60,000,000 revenue a year. This is the most generous estimate towards link’s valuation I’ve found so far. If we ignore the below examples where on multi-node payouts the tx fees are more than the node revenue itself, then it’s almost in line with an over-valued (but real) big tech company. For example, one of the latest CHF/USD job runs paid 0.1 LINK to 9 addresses (data providers?) - total $14.4 payout - and paid 0.065 ETH ($24.5) in fees. That’s a $10.1 LOSS on a $14.4 revenue: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xa6351bab810b6864bfebb0f6e1e3bde3c8856f8aac3ba769dd2e6d1a39c0d23f Linkpool’s (one of the biggest node operators) “ETH-USD CryptoCompare” job costs 0.1 link and has 33 runs in the past 24 hours (once every ~44min), total ~78,000 runs since May 30 2019 (once every ~8min). https://market.link/jobs/64bb0845-c4e1-4681-8853-0b5aa7366101/runs (PS cryptocompare has a free API that does this. Not sure why it costs $1 at current link prices to access an API once)
Token distribution:
Top 100 wallets (0.05% of ~186,000 total) hold 83% of tokens. 8 wallets each hold over 1% of total, 58 hold over 0.1%. Of these 58, 9 are named exchange/lending pool wallets. For comparison, for Tether (TUSD), the top 100 wallets (0.006% of ~1,651,000 total) hold 35.9% of the supply. 3 addresses hold over 1% of the supply and 135 hold over 0.1%. Of these 135, at least 15 are named exchange/lending pool wallets. LINK’s market cap is $3.5B (or $10B fully diluted, if we count the foundedev-controlled tokens, which we should as there's nothing preventing them from being moved at a moment's notice). Tether’s is $6.9B. Tether has 10 times more addresses and less distribution inequality. Both LINK and Tether are ERC20 tokens, and even if we temporarily ignore any arguments related to management/roadmap/teams etc, Tether has a clear, currently functional, single use case: keep 1 USDT = $1 USD by printing/burning USDT (and yet as of April 2019, only 74% of Tether's market cap is backed by real funds - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency))). Given that Chainlink's market cap is now 50% bigger than Tether's, surely by now there's AT LEAST one clear, currently functional use case for LINK? What is it? Can we *see* it happening on-chain?
Chainlink’s actual deliverable products
"What do I currently get for my money if I buy LINK 1) as an investor and 2) as a tech business/startup thinking of using oracles?” Codebase (Chainlink’s github has around 140-200,000 lines of code (not counting html/css). What else is not counted in this? Town crier? Proprietary code that we don't know about yet? How much CODING has Chainlink done other than what's on github? Current network of oracles - only ~20 active nodes - are there many more than the ones listed on market.link and reputation.link? If so, would be nice to know about these if we're allowed! Documentation - they have what seems like detailed instructions on how to launch and use oracle nodes (and much more, I haven't investigated yet) (TODO this part more - what else do they offer to me as an end consumer, and eg as a tech startup needing oracle services that I can’t code myself?)
Network utilization statistics:
Etherscan.io allows csv export of the first 5000 txs from each day. From Jul 31 to Aug 6 2020, I thus downloaded 30,000 tx from midnight every day to an average of 7:10am (so 24 hour totals are 3.34x these numbers if we assume the same network utilization throughout the day). (Summary of all LINK token activity on the ETH blockchain from 31.07 to 06.08, first 5000 txs of each day (30k total) shown Appendix A comment below this post.) If we GENEROUSLY assume that EVERY SINGLE transaction under 10.0 LINK is ACTUAL chainlink nodes doing ACTUAL work, that’s still under 0.1% of the LINK network’s total volume being used for ACTUAL ecosystem functioning. The rest is speculation, trading, node funding by foundedev wallets, or dumping to exchanges (anything I missed?) Assuming the above, the entire turnover of the actual LINK network is currently (18,422 LINK) * ($10/LINK) * (3.34 as etherscan.io’s data only gives first 5000 tx per day which averages to 7:10am) * (52 wk/year) = USD $31,995,329 turnover a year. Note: the below paragraph is old analysis using traditional stock market Price/Earnings ratios which several users have now pointed out isn't really applicable in crypto. I leave it for the record. Assuming all of that is profit (which it’s not given tx fees at the very least), LINK would need a PE ratio (Price/Earnings) of 100 times to justify its current (undiluted) valuation of $3.5 billion of 300 if you count the other 65% of tokens that haven’t been dumped by the founders/devs yet. For comparison, common PE ratios are 32 (facebook), 29 (google), 37 (uber), 20 (twitter on a good year), 10 (good hedge fund returning 10% annual).
Thoughts on DeFi & yield-farming - [TODO]
Why would exchanges who do their due diligence list LINK, let alone at a leverage? 1) that's their business, they take a cut of every transaction, overhyped or not, 2) they're not safe from listing openly bearish tokens like EIDOS (troll token that incentivized users to make FAKE transactions, response to EOS) https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-explained The current ANNUAL yield on liquidity/yield farming is something like 2% on STABLE tokens like USDC and TETHER which at least have most of their supply backed by real-world assets. If Chainlink LINK staking is to be successful, they'll have to achieve at LEAST that same 2% at end-state. IF LINK is in bubble territory and drops, that's a lot of years at 2% waiting to recoup losses.
SmartContract Team & Past Projects
Normally I don't like focussing on people because it leads too easily to ad-hominem attacks on personality rather than on technology/numbers as I've done above, but I came across this and didn't like what I saw. Steve Ellis, SmartContract's current CTO, co-founded and worked in "Secure Asset Exchange" from 2014 to 2016. They developed the NXT blockchain, issued 1,000,000,000 NXT tokens (remind you of anything?), NXT was listed end of 2013 and saw 3 quick 500%-1000% pumps and subsequent dumps in early in mid 2014, and then declined to . SecureAE officially shut down in Jan 2016. Then at some point a company called Jelurida acquired the rights to NXT (presumably after SecureAE?), then during the 2017 altcoin craze NXT pumped 300 times to a market cap of $1.8 BILLION and then dumped back down 100 times and now it's a dead project with a market cap of $13 million. https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveellis0606/ https://trade.secureae.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nxt/ https://www.jelurida.com/news/lawsuit-against-apollo-license-violations As an investor or business owner, would you invest/hire a company whose co-founders/CTO's last project was a total flop with a price history chart that's textbook pump-and-dump behaviour? (and in this case, we KNOW the end result - 99% losses for investors) If you're Google/Oracle/SWIFT/Intel, would you partner with them?
Open questions for the Chainlink community and investors:
Network activity: Are there any other currently active chainlink nodes other than those listed on market.link and reputation.link? If so, is there a list of them with usage statistics? Do they use some other token than LINK and thus making simple analytics of the LINK ERC20 token not an accurate representation of Chainlink’s actual activity? If the nodes listed on the two sites above ARE currently the main nodes, then
PR, partnership announcements: Why is the google tweet still pinned to the top of Chainlink’s twitter? Due to the frequently circulated Chainlink promotion material (https://chainlinkecosystem.com/) that lists Google as one of the key partners, this tweet being pinned is potentially misleading as there isn't anything in there to merit calling Google a "collaborator" or "partner" - just that blockchains/oracles *can* use Google's APIs (but so can most software in the world). Is there something else going on with the SmartContract-Google relationship that warrants calling Google a partner that we're simply not aware of yet?
By buying LINK, what backs YOUR money: If you have bought and currently hold LINK tokens, how comfortable are you that the future promise of your investment growing is supported on verifiable business and technological grounds versus pure, parabolic hype? If after reading this post you still are, I kindly ask you to reply and show how even one of the points I provided is either incorrect or not applicable, and I will edit my post and include your feedback in the relevant section as I have already done from other users.
What have I missed? Of course not 100% of what I've said is infallible truth. I am a real human, and I have plenty of biases and blind spots. Even if what I've provided is technically correct, there may be other much more important info that I've missed that eclipses what I've provided here. Ask yourself: if the current hype around LINK is indeed valid and points to a $100/$1000 future LINK price, then Where’s Chainlink’s missing financial/performance/usage evidence to justify LINK’s current valuation of $10+?
Conclusion
For your consideration, I have provided evidence with links that you can follow and verify, and draw your own conclusions. I have made my case as to why I believe the LINK token is currently priced much higher than evidence supports, and I ask you to peer-review my analysis and share your thoughts with me and with the wider LINK/crypto community. Thank you for your time, I realize this is a long post. All questions and feedback welcome, feel free to comment or PM. I won't delete/censoblock (except for personal threats, safety considerations etc). I am a real human but I am not revealing my true identity for obvious privacy/harassment reasons. (If anyone is wondering about my credentials ability to add 2+2 and work with basic spreadsheets: I have previously won a math competition in a USA state, I won an English-speaking country's physics olympiad, my university education is in mathematical physics/optimization engineering, and I worked for a few years in a global manufacturing company doing data analytics, obviously I'm not posting my CV here to verify that but I promise you it's the truth) I’m not looking to spread neither FUD, nor blind faith, nor pure hype, and I want an honest transparent objective discussion. I personally believe more that LINK is overvalued, but my beliefs have evolved and may continue to do so as I research more and understand more about Chainlink, LINK, Ethereum, DeFi, and other related topics, and as I incorporate YOUR feedback. If you think I haven't disclosed something, ask. As always, this is not financial advice and I am not liable for anything that may happen as a result of you reading this!
Stakenet (XSN) - A DEX with interchain capabilities (BTC-ETH), Huge Potential [Full Writeup]
Preface Full disclosure here; I am heavily invested in this. I have picked up some real gems from here and was only in the position to buy so much of this because of you guys so I thought it was time to give back. I only invest in Utility Coins. These are coins that actually DO something, and provide new/build upon the crypto infrastructure to work towards the end goal that Bitcoin itself set out to achieve(financial independence from the fiat banking system). This way, I avoid 99% of the scams in crypto that are functionless vapourware, and if you only invest in things that have strong fundamentals in the long term you are much more likely to make money. Introduction
Stakenet is a Lightning Network-ready open-source platform for decentralized applications with its native cryptocurrency – XSN. It is powered by a Proof of Stake blockchain with trustless cold staking and Masternodes. Its use case is to provide a highly secure cross-chain infrastructure for these decentralized applications, where individuals can easily operate with any blockchain simply by using Stakenet and its native currency XSN.
Ok... but what does it actually do and solve? The moonshot here is the DEX (Decentralised Exchange) that they are building. This is a lightning-network DEX with interchain capabilities. That means you could trade BTC directly for ETH; securely, instantly, cheaply and privately. Right now, most crypto is traded to and from Centralised Exchanges like Binance. To buy and sell on these exchanges, you have to send your crypto wallets on that exchange. That means the exchanges have your private keys, and they have control over your funds. When you use a centralised exchange, you are no longer in control of your assets, and depend on the trustworthiness of middlemen. We have in the past of course seen infamous exit scams by centralised exchanges like Mt. Gox. The alternative? Decentralised Exchanges. DEX's have no central authority and most importantly, your private keys(your crypto) never leavesYOUR possession and are never in anyone else's possession. So you can trade peer-to-peer without any of the drawbacks of Centralised Exchanges. The problem is that this technology has not been perfected yet, and the DEX's that we have available to us now are not providing cheap, private, quick trading on a decentralised medium because of their technological inadequacies. Take Uniswap for example. This DEX accounts for over 60% of all DEX volume and facilitates trading of ERC-20 tokens, over the Ethereum blockchain. The problem? Because of the huge amount of transaction that are occurring over the Ethereum network, this has lead to congestion(too many transaction for the network to handle at one time) so the fees have increased dramatically. Another big problem? It's only for Ethereum. You cant for example, Buy LINK with BTC. You must use ETH. The solution? Layer 2 protocols. These are layers built ON TOP of existing blockchains, that are designed to solve the transaction and scaling difficulties that crypto as a whole is facing today(and ultimately stopping mass adoption) The developers at Stakenet have seen the big picture, and have decided to implement the lightning network(a layer 2 protocol) into its DEX from the ground up. This will facilitate the functionalities of a DEX without any of the drawbacks of the CEX's and the DEX's we have today. Heres someone much more qualified than me, Andreas Antonopoulos, to explain this https://streamable.com/kzpimj 'Once we have efficient, well designed DEX's on layer 2, there wont even be any DEX's on layer 1' Progress The Stakenet team were the first to envision this grand solution and have been working on it since its conception in June 2019. They have been making steady progress ever since and right now, the DEX is in an open beta stage where rigorous testing is constant by themselves and the public. For a project of this scale, stress testing is paramount. If the product were to launch with any bugs/errors that would result in the loss of a users funds, this would obviously be very damaging to Stakenet's reputation. So I believe that the developers conservative approach is wise. As of now the only pairs tradeable on the DEX are XSN/BTC and LTC/BTC. The DEX has only just launched as a public beta and is not in its full public release stage yet. As development moves forward more lightning network and atomic swap compatible coins will be added to the DEX, and of course, the team are hard at work on Raiden Integration - this will allow ETH and tokens on the Ethereum blockchain to be traded on the DEX between separate blockchains(instantly, cheaply, privately) This is where Stakenet enters top 50 territory on CMC if successful and is the true value here. Raiden Integration is well underway is being tested in a closed public group on Linux. The full public DEX with Raiden Integration is expected to release by the end of the year. Given the state of development so far and the rate of progress, this seems realistic. Tokenomics 2.6 Metrics overview (from whitepaper)
Name: Stakenet.
Ticker: XSN. Currency type: Coin.
Consensus: Minting Proof of Stake, Trustless Proof of Stake.
XSN is slightly inflationary, much like ETH as this is necessary for the economy to be adopted and work in the long term. There is however a deflationary mechanism in place - all trading fees on the DEX get converted to XSN and 10% of these fees are burned. This puts constant buying pressure on XSN and acts as a deflationary mechanism. XSN has inherent value because it makes up the infrastructure that the DEX will run off and as such Masternode operators and Stakers will see the fee's from the DEX. Conclusion We can clearly see that a layer 2 DEX is the future of crypto currency trading. It will facilitate secure, cheap, instant and private trading across all coins with lightning capabilities, thus solving the scaling and transaction issues that are holding back crypto today. I dont need to tell you the implications of this, and what it means for crypto as a whole. If Stakenet can launch a layer 2 DEX with Raiden Integration, It will become the primary DEX in terms of volume. Stakenet DEX will most likely be the first layer 2 DEX(first mover advantage) and its blockchain is the infrastructure that will host this DEX and subsequently receive it's trading fee's. It is not difficult to envision a time in the next year when Stakenet DEX is functional and hosting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trading every single day. At $30 million market cap, I cant see any other potential investment right now with this much potential upside. This post has merely served as in introduction and a heads up for this project, there is MUCH more to cover like vortex liquidity, masternodes, TOR integration... for now, here is some additional reading. Resources
Investment Thesis: Why investing in POW.TO (Power Corporation of Canada) now is an investment in a future high market cap Wealthsimple IPO
I have seen some posts here wondering about the wisdom of investing in Wealthsimple's parent company, Power Corporation of Canada (POW.TO). I decided to look more into this, decided to post my investment thesis and research on why I, long-term, I have a very bullish view on Wealthsimple (and by extension POW.TO), and why I think this is equal to being an early stage investor in a Wealthsimple IPO.
Ownership: Power Corporation of Canada (POW.TO) (83.2% ownership)
AssetsUnderMangement: $5.4 billion, as of June 30, 2020 (4.9 billion in June 30, 2019)
Current Products
Wealthsimple Invest (ETF Roboadvisor service), WS was one of the first-movers in this space in Canada and offered robo-advising as part of its initial product in 2015. WS claims to have largest digital investing presence in Canada (70% of the market) (reference).
Wealthsimple Cash, a savings account service
Wealthsimple Trade, a commission free trading app where users can buy and sell ~8,000 stocks and ETFs
Wealthsimple Crypto, a commission free cryptocurrency trading app, currently in beta
SimpleTax.ca, a free tax-return service used by ~1 million Canadians per year, acquired in late 2019
Investment Rounds
WS has had many successful rounds of funding and a vote of confidence from both its parent POW.TO and other multinationals investing in fintech.
Last year WS received a $100 million dollar investment led by Allianz X, the start up investor arm of German financial services giant Allianz
WS has had 7 total investing rounds, totalling $266.9 million (reference)
Growth
WS has been extremely aggressive in targeting growth areas. Wealthsimple’s CEO Mike Katchen has said he wants to position the company as a “full-stack” financial services company. Here are some of their current expansion areas:
UK and USA Expansion - in 2017, they started offering similar investing services in the UK and the US (reference and reference).
Socially Responsible ETFs - WS recently partnered with Mackenzie Investment to offer socially responsible ETFs with a social and environmental focus. Although probably not something that older investors care about, this is particularly important for younger investors who want to make sure their investments are socially responsible
Cryptocurrency - WS is currently testing a beta service of their cryptocurrency app, and offering fee-free cryptocurrency trading, similar to Wealthsimple Trade. Whatever your views of cryptocurrency (I'm of the view that I can in some cases be part of a portfolio to hedge against risk), it's here to stay. Earlier this month, WS was the first company in Canada to register with the Ontario Securities Exchange Commission (reference). My sense is that crypto will face increasing regulations and scrutiny in the coming years, which will be a good thing for WS which is a step ahead of the game (reference). Even Google is starting to look into relaxing its restraints on crypto (reference).
Other full-stack services - WS has been mum on what other services they might offer, but insurance, mortgages, and chequing accounts could be other areas of disruption. (Reference)
People
WS is run by young guys who have big ambitions and plans for the company. Sometimes there are CEOs with the intangibles that can really drive a company's growth, and from what I can glean, I think the company has a lot of potential here in terms of vision by its leaders. You can read more about the founders here
Michael Katchen, CEO, Background: Led product and marketing at a start up called 1000memories, a Y Combinator startup later acquired by Ancestry.com. Worked for McKinsey & Company.
Brett Huneycutt, COO, Rhodes Scholar... not much else I know about the guy
Quote sfrom CEO: Michael Katchen On being laughed out of the boardroom when he proposed his idea for Wealthsimple:
Within the last month, Wealthsimple has also opened an office in London. Katchen said a push into the European market is “possible” as its “ambitions are global,” but right now the Canadian and U.S. markets are “a lot to chew.” It is a far cry from the company’s early days: Katchen said he was “laughed out of the boardroom” for laying out a global vision for Wealthsimple at a time when they had just $1.9-million in funding and 20 users***.***“It’s a very personal mission of mine since I moved back from California, to inspire more Canadian companies to think big and to think internationally about the businesses that they’re building,” he said. (reference)
On Wealthsimple's growth in the next 10-15 years:
Wealthsimple has more than $5 billion in assets under management and 175,000 customers in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. He sees that reaching $1 trillion 15 years. “We’re just getting started,” he said. “Our plans are to get to millions of clients in the next five years.” (reference)
Brand Value and Design
Out of all the financial services company in Canada, WS probably has the most cohesive and smart design concept across its platforms and products. I see the value in Wealthsimple in not just the assets they have under management, but also the value of the brand itself. I mean, what kind of financial services company makes a blog post about their branding colour scheme and font choices? Also see: Wealthsimple’s advertisement earlier this year capturing 4 million views on Youtube. There also seems to be very strong brand awareness and brand loyalty amongst its users. I think a lot of users find WS refreshing as a financial services company because they cut through the "bullshit" and legalese, and try to simply things for the consumer. They also have their own in house team of designers and creative directors to do branding, design, and advertising, and this kind of vertical integration is generally unheard of in the financial services industry (reference).
Potential IPO?
Interestingly, the CEO’s ultimate goal is to take the company public. Therefore, I see an investment in POW.TO as being an early stage pre-IPO investor in WS (reference).
The goal is to get Wealthsimple to the size and scale to go public, something that Katchen said he’s “obsessed with.” While admitting that an IPO was still a few years down the road, Katchen already has a target of $20 billion in assets under administration (AUA) as the tipping point (the company recently announced $4.3 billion in AUA as of Q1 2019) (reference)
Future Potential
Ultimately, my sense is that a spun-out Wealthsimple IPO eventually be worth a lot, perhaps even more than POW.TO at some point. Obviously the company is losing money right now, and no where even close to an IPO, and there are still many chances that this company could flop. The best analogy that I can think of is when Yahoo bought an early stake in Alibaba (BABA) back in the early 2000s, and there came a point where their stake in BABA was worth more than Yahoo’s core business. I think an investment in POW.TO now is an early investment in WS before it goes public. (reference)
Risks
Expansion problems. In the UK, they reported significant losses and despite increasing users. (reference). The US is also an especially competitive space with lots of similar competitors.
The robo-advising, fintech space is highly competitive now, and the Big Five Banks and other investment/trading companies could easily start offering low-cost or commission free trading
Competitors such as Robinhood could also expand into the Canadian market and take out a huge chunk of WS's userbase
The X Factor
What I find particularly compelling about WS is they have aggressively positioned themselves to be a disruptor in the Canadian financial services industry. This is an area that has traditionally been thought to be a firewall for the Big Five Banks. There is also a generational gap in investing approaches, knowledge, and strategy, and I think WS has positioned itself nicely with first-time investors. My sense is that COVID-19 has also captured a huge amount of young adults with its trading app in the last few months, who will continue to use Wealthsimple products in the future. The average age of its user is around 34. As younger individuals are more comfortable with moving away traditional banking products, I think Wealthsimple’s product offering offers significant advantages over its competitors.
Power Corp is a Good Home
Currently POW.TO is trading at $26.30, down from its 52-week high of $35.15. I see an investment in POW.TO now as fairly low risk, and while WS grows, and there is also the added benefit of a high dividend stock. One of the most confusing things I found about Power Corp was its confusing corporate structure where there were two stocks, Power Financial Corp, and Power Corp of Canada. Fortunately, in Dec 2019, they simplified and consolidated the stocks, which also simplifies the holding structure of WS. I currently see POW.TO has a good stock to hold as well if you're a dividend holder, with a dividend of 6.86%. Also, POW.TO is patient enough to bide its time and let its investment in WS grow, unlike a VC that might want to sell it quick. For example, the reason why WS went with POW.TO instead of the traditional VC route is explained here:
Katchen has directly addressed the question of why he did not go the traditional VC route recently, saying: If you are a business that requires perhaps decades to achieve the vision you have, well, if you’re not going to be able to generate the kind of returns that venture needs is they will force you to sell yourself, they will force you to go public before you’re ready, or they will just forget about you because you’re going to be a write off. And so Katchen essentially flipped Wealthsimple to Power Financial. Power is well known as a conservative, patient, long-term investor. (https://opmwars.substack.com/p/the-wealthsimple-founders-before)
My belief is there is a huge unrecognized potential in POW.TO's massive ownership stake in WS that will be realized maybe 5-10 years down the road. I didn't really dive into the financials of POW.TO in relation to WS's performance, because the earnings reports do no actually say much about WS. I'm aware of the main criticisms that POW.TO is a mature company and dividend stock that has been trading sideways for many years, and the fact that WS is currently not a profitable company. I am not a professional investor, and this is just my amateur research, so I certainly welcome any comments/criticism of this thesis that people on this subreddit might have! (Please be gentle on me!).
I am a 28M; I started watching porn a tiny bit at 19/20. This story is going to be a bit crazy and I feel like a horrible damaged person quite a bit. Warning that it gets a little dark. Please stop reading whenever you want. Pre-story: I lost my best friend in 7th grade when he showed me porn. I told my mom and she stopped letting me see him. I thought it was an evil thing and watching it was the worst thing you could do. I never even had the temptation to watch until I was 19/20. Why I started: My computer got hacked and I lost $5,000 my Sophomore year of college. While trying to figure out what happened and to get better anti-virus software, the IT person accused me and basically told my mom that it was most likely adult/porn websites that caused it. I feel like my mom sided with him. I tried to tell him I don't go on those sites, and he repeated to my mom that it was almost certainly from porn. Then he told me some good antivirus software that should work. I was upset over his accusation, upset over losing $5,000, and as a 19 year old virgin who did not even know what a vagina or sex looked like, and who had zero luck with women in college, I thought maybe I should just take a peak at porn. I was very lonely and stressed out trying to get straight A's in college. I looked up a lot of non-nude images for weeks before I built up the courage to look up a picture of a vagina. Oh how innocent I was. I eventually followed a link to a porn site. Watched a little, then more, then more. I was a very good student who put all my self worth on my school grades. I would motivate myself to study with porn. Watch more when I got a good grade. Etc. Etc. I don't think I watched too much during this time period. I kept taking 18 credit hours per semester and did graduate with a 3.9+ gpa with 2 majors and a minor; basically top of most my STEM classes. But by now I was depressed and burnt out. Mostly from classes, but also from a job, a sport I did well at, and the porn. I was constantly doing something. I had strived so hard for good grades and now everyone was pushing me to make money. After all my self worth came from grades, I had to switch it to money. I was so burned out it was hard to apply for jobs. I did get one a year after graduating, but i watched more and more porn as i lost more and more hope of finding a job that year. As a straight A perfect student who was unable to land any job for so long, I felt like a failure. The job was extremely stressful and i started watching porn every day afterwards, eating dinner, going to bed and watching a little more to numb myself before going to work the next day. This continued for a year and a half. The job made me hate my life. The porn was not helping. I would stay up until 1 or 2 am watching it (2-3 hours per day) and being tired the next day at work. Oh well, I hated the job so i did not mind. I was 24 years old now. Never had a kiss. Hardly a hug with a woman. I had done so good at school, was working a stressful job, but felt utterly alone, hated, and immense shame from the porn. I had saved up enough money that I decided to quit the job and travel the world for a year or two and try to regain some sanity. By now I was severely depressed and almost suicidal. Maybe travelling would help. And that would have been fine. And it was. But I felt like i failed everyone. They were all expecting the super smart kid to be wildly successful at work. Then i just up and left and I could tell people started treating me like an unemployed loser. self esteem crashed even more. Depression was getting worse and worse and worse. I kept watching more and more porn up until the date I left to start travelling. The only way I could stop hating myself so much was to take the attitude of "I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks about me, no matter what". I had enough money saved up from work to coast for 3-5 years. By all objective measures I was successful and would have been fine taking a year off. But mentally I was all wrong, completely lonely and isolated, all I wanted was for one women to fall in love with me and go travelling with her for a year. But I had no idea how to ask anyone out. Nobody seemed interested in me. So I made the wise (lol) decision of visiting a strip club. Maybe just try and talk to an attractive women and keep the conversation going. Maybe it would help with other woman. I had fun. Had no idea what a lapdance was, but got one of those. The closest a women had ever been to me. It was fun but expensive... and I went back a few more times while travelling. Simultaneously my ultra-competitive fear of failure streak led me into trading cryptocurrencies obsessively. I monitored prices almost constantly. 60, 70, 80, 100 hours per week. My year of travelling ended up being 3 months of travel and 9 months of obsessively trading cryptocurrencies. Even more than 100 hours per week - Every waking moment of my life was on the computer analyzing markets. But it was stressful. I needed the porn. I would watch more and more. I was trading while watching porn. Trading while masturbating. If I made a large amount, I would go to a strip club. If I was travelling in a country where prostitution was legal - well - I hired a prostitute. Didn't even have sex with them. Didn't want to lose my virginity to one. I was so stressed and mentally broken that I just needed somebody to hug. One of them straight up told me to stop watching porn. But I couldn't. I am sorry Natalia :( These sexual distractions and the massive amounts of porn helped keep my mind off of trading on the exact moments I needed to not think about it. A convenient escape. I don't know if I would have done as well trading that year had I not had this distraction. That year i had multiple days making $5k+. That year I bragged to a stripper giving me a lapdance that I made $25k over the weekend. That year I traveled to 15 countries. That year a massage lady in asia gave me a happy ending massage and I begged her for another. That year I felt like i failed my parents/friends/extended family by quitting a shitty job. That year I stopped caring about what anyone thought about me. That year I barely escaped suicide. That year I turned $20k into $1 million from trading. The following year I bought a house, a car, did more travelling. Watched way, way, way too much porn. I felt so guilty over the porn. So guilty seeing strippers, cuddling with hookers, getting a hand job. I turned to femdom porn. The first one was funny - woman humiliating men. Clearly roleplay, for fun, a little bit silly. laughed the first time i saw one. But i needed it to be real. I needed women to tell me how much they hated me and I needed to believe it. I needed to feel like I had failed all women and let them destroy me. So I convinced myself they were real. POV femdom videos where they verbally shred me. Tell me to stay locked in my closet the entire weekend, tell me to drink a lot of alcohol, tell me to go broke for them and beg them to let me drink enough water to survive. Over and over I would watch these videos. Becoming sadder and sadder and sadder. Never able to actually cry. Just sadder and sadder and sadder. How badly I wanted to just cry for the first time in 5 years. Never anyone knowing what I was doing. The successful 25 year old millionaire. I tried to hire a prostitute to verbally degrade me. She looked at me so sad, sitting naked before her, and told me "There is nothing about you I can humiliate". We cuddled instead. And I tried to cry. I went back to see her again. This time I wished to be tied up and tickle tortured. She laughed and agreed. I told her i liked it because it was the only thing that could make me smile. I saw her again one final time 6 months later. She remembered I liked to be tickled because it made me smile. I had forgotten why I liked it. But she remembered. Went to a sex therapist. She said I needed to stop feeling guilty about porn, masturbation, about it all. Never wanted to hurt anyone. I hurt myself the most. Still watch a lot of porn but I am trying. Wrote a book about trading. Practice my sport 4 days a week. Trying to get back into studying for fun. Feeling less burned out and ready for something new. I have already seen all the (legal - never had any desire to see anything illegal) porn there is. Nothing else left to see is what i tell myself. But still watching it too much. But maybe there is something left to salvage. I was going to watch porn today. But i wrote this instead. Maybe tomorrow I will read it instead.
Got this email today: Polkadot (DOT) is coming to Kraken, but not without important changes before trading begins. As previously announced, DOT will be officially listed on Kraken starting August 18. However, due to a scheduled change in how DOT is denominated (occurring outside of Kraken’s control), clients may initially see a difference in their DOT balance. That’s because Polkadot’s first stakeholder vote, open to any DOT token holder, resulted in the decision to redenominate DOT tokens three days after transactions are enabled on the network. This means that while transactions can begin occurring on the Polkadot network on August 18, on August 21, all DOT tokens will be redenominated by a factor of 100. The redenomination simply changes how DOT is defined in terms of its smallest unit of account, the Planck. Before 21 August, the DOT will be denominated as 1e12 Plancks. After this date the DOT will be denominated as 1e10 Plancks, moving the decimal 2 places. If you are holding 1 Old DOT in a private wallet you control (not the DOT balance in your Kraken account), it will automatically convert to 100 New DOT on August 21. However, the number of Plancks in your wallet will not change. Since the redenomination doesn’t involve a fundamental change to the protocol, the exact timing of the redenomination is flexible for exchanges and wallet providers, and some are redenominating a bit earlier than the August 21 date. Kraken will list Polkadot tokens denominated as New DOT on August 18. Put simply, if you deposit 1 Old DOT on Kraken between August 18 and August 21, your account will be credited for 100 New DOT. Clients who have already claimed Old DOT with Kraken will see their balances converted to New DOT prior to August 18. To avoid possible confusion, please note that you will not be able to withdraw New DOT from your Kraken account until after the official redenomination on August 21. Further, we will refer to the Polkadot token as “New DOT” to mark the redenomination. However, in our currency pairs and on our trading platform, we will simply use the trading symbol “DOT.” After careful consideration, we decided that this plan of action is best for our clients. Once we enable trading in any asset, it has broad implications for our systems and teams. Implementing the redenomination after only three days of trading would not only mean an interruption in trading for our clients, but would impact our funding gateways, trading engine, data warehouse, data analytics, finance and accounting teams, and how we reconcile our funds. At Kraken, our first priority is to do what’s best for clients, and in this situation, that means listing the asset in a timely manner so you enjoy maximum freedom and flexibility with your funds. What price will New DOT be trading for on Kraken? Currently market price for Old DOT is approximately $350 USD. Assuming price has not changed much by August 18, market price for New DOT on Kraken might be around $3.50 USD due to the redenomination. What is Polkadot (DOT)? Polkadot is a cryptocurrency that aims to create a network of public and private blockchains that can exchange both custom assets and data. Co-founded by Ethereum co-creator Gavin Wood, there are two main components that make up its architecture: the relay chain, the foundational blockchain for the network (powered by DOT), and parachains, custom blockchains that can be built on top of its network. Polkadot’s cryptocurrency, DOT, plays a key role in maintaining and operating the network, and can be used to store value and make payments, or for staking and delegating, actions that ensure network operations and decision-making in voting. By owning and staking DOT, users gain the ability to vote on network upgrades, with each vote being proportional to the amount of DOT cryptocurrency they stake. Bookmark Polkadot’s website to follow development of the project more closely. Will Kraken also have staking for DOT? Yes - DOT staking will be enabled at the same time as trading (August 18 at approximately 13:00 UTC). The basic terms are as follows. 12% annual fixed reward, paid twice per week You can stake/un-stake immediately with no waiting period Available for Starter, Intermediate and Pro account tiers What time will funding and trading start? Deposits: enabled August 18 at approximately 13:00 UTC. Withdrawals: enabled August 21 at approximately 13:00 UTC. Trading: enabled August 18 at approximately 13:00 UTC. The initial trading minimum will be 1 DOT. Updates will be posted on the status page near launch time. Trading Pairs DOT/USD DOT/EUR DOT/XBT DOT/ETH For further details about the Polkadot listing, see our blog post. Thank you for choosing Kraken, the trusted and secure digital asset exchange. The Kraken Team
I'm kinda ok with MCO -> CRO Swap; a indepth personal view
EDIT: this post https://www.reddit.com/Crypto_com/comments/i2yhuz/open_letter_to_kris_from_one_of_cdcs_biggest/ from u/CryptoMines expresses my sentiments and concerns better than I could ever put into words myself. I'd say read his/her post instead. Very long post ahead, but TL;DR, I actually see this swap as a positive change, despite fearing for what it may do to my portofolio, and having mixed feelings about its consequences on CDC reputation.Before I start, for the sake of context and bias, here's my personal situation as a CDC user:
I'm just a average Joe, with a 500 MCO Jade card. I bough 50 MCO at 5,22€ in September 2019 and staked for Ruby, then bough 440 MCO at 2.47€ in March 2020 and upgraded to Jade. The total amount of MCO I own is currently 515, and everything above the 500 stake is cashback rewards.
I bought MCO exclusively for the card and bonus Earn interest benefits, and had no plans to unstake my MCO. Now with the swap, definetly won't unstake.
The MCO -> CRO conversion rates increased the fiat value of my MCO in about 1000€.
I own a decent amount of CRO, wich I bought at ~0,031€ in March 2020.
The country where I live is crypto friendly and completely crypto-tax free; I only have to pay income tax if I deposit a certain threshold of fiat in my bank.
Take all these factors into account as possible (if not major) influencers or bias on my opinions; both the emotional and economical ones. Call me a fool or a devil's advocate if you want, but keep your torches and pitchforks down. As we say here on Reddit: "Remember the human".----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like all of you, I woke up to find this anouncement, wich came right the #[email protected] out of nowere, and gives you little to no options. Good or bad, this announcement arrived as basicly a "comply or die" choice. Emotionally, this came as both terrifying and disgusting; but rationally, I cannot blame CDC for it. Because wether we like it or not, CDC is a centralized company, and the MCO tokens were never a stock or legally binding contract; something wich pretty much every crypto company or ICO warns in their T&C and risk warnings. Not to mention the mostly unregulated status of the cryptocurrency and. I'll call this "dishonest" any day, but I cannot see it as a "scammy" since I can't see how they broke any rules or terms. A scammer would take your money/assets away, but CDC is offering you to swap it for another asset wich you can sell right away if you want. And at current price, it is still worth more or less as much fiat as MCO cost at the 5 $/€ wich was more or less the comunity standard used for calculating the card prices. And by that, I mean that the fiat value of 50/500/5000 MCO (as CRO) is actually not far from the 250/2500/25'000 $/€ that the comunity commonly used as standard when calculating the ROI and (under)valuation of MCO. So CDC is at least trying to give us the option to get (some) our money back, and not at a unfair rate. If you happened to buy MCO at a price higher than this, I can't see how that's CDC's fault, just as I don't see anyone blaming Bitcoin or Altcoins for getting them stuck at the top of the 2017 bubble burst. I read many posts in this reddit calling this a "backstab" and "betrayal" of early investors and for the people who "believed in MCO". Emotionally, I share your sentiment.But after thinking it for a while, I'd say this was actually very rewarding for early investors and long term MCO supporters. As CDC clearly sates in the swap rules; nobody is going to lose their card tier or MCO stake benefits (at least not yet), and your stake DOES NOT unstake automatically after 180 days. Actually, so far they never did unstake automatically, you had to manually unstake yourself. With this in mind, everyone who already got their cards, or at least staked MCO to reserve one, basicly got them 3-5 times cheaper than future users; and IMHO, now the $/€ price of cards feels more fair and sustainable compared to their benefits.So in a sense, everyone who supported and believed on the MCO for its utility (i.e. the card and app benefits) has been greatly rewarded with perks that they get to keep, but are now out of reach for a lot of people.Likewise, the people who believed and invested in CRO (for whatever reason), have also been rewarded, as their CRO tokens now have more utility. So either the price of CRO crashes down to around 0.05 $/€, or the people who bought MCO/CRO early or cheap are now massively benefited. But then again, so is everyone who bought or mined Bitcoin in its early days, or invested in Bitcoin at crucial points of its history... how is that unfair? Some people bought Ethereum at 1'400 $ on a mix of hopes/promises that it would continue to rise; it didn't. And even today with DeFi and ETH 2.0 ever closer, it is still far from that price. And I know what some of you are thinking: "The cards aren't avaiable in my country yet, that's why I didn't buy/stake."Well, they weren't avaiable in my country either when I staked 50 MCO. Heck, the cards weren't avaiable in anyones country when MCO started, but many people still bought it and staked it. That's exacly what "early adopter", "long supporter" and "believing in MCO" means. On the other hand, the people who invested on MCO as a speculative asset and decided to HODL and hoard MCO, hoping for its price to moon and then sell MCO at big profit, had their dreams mercilessly crushed by this swap... and good lord, I feel their pain.But this is also where I'll commit the sin of being judgemental, because IMHO, speculating on MCO never made any sense to me; MCO was a utility token, not a value token, so it should not (and could not) ever be worth more than the value of its utility. That's basicly how stablecoins and PAXG are able to stay stable; because nobody will pay more/less than the value of the asset/service they represent. Tough now that I'm looking at the new card stake tiers in CRO, I have to give credit to the MCO hodlers I just now criticised; maybe you were right all along. Unless the price of CRO crashes or corrects, I wich case, I un-rest my case. One thing I'll agree with everyone tough, is that I fell that CDC just suckerpunched it's comunity. Because even if we have no vote on its decisions (wich again, we aren't necessarily entitled to, since they are a privante and centralized business) they should/could have warned that this was in their plans well in advance; if anything to allow those who wouldn't like it to exit this train calmly. Also the CRO stake duration reset. The mandatory reset of your CRO stake for taking advantage of the early swap bonus feels like another gut-punch. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now that we got emotional feelings out of the way, here's my sentiment about how this will affect the overall CDC ecossystem. One common criticism of the sustainability of MCO was that its supply cap could never allow a large number of cards to be issued, and how could CDC keep paying the cashbacks and rebates. On the oposite corner, one of the major criticisms of the sustainability of CRO, was it's ridiculously huge supply cap and inflation caused by the gradual un-freezing and release of more CRO into the system. But now that MCO and CRO became one, it might just have made both issues more sustainable. Now the huge supply cap of CRO makes more sense, as it allows a much larger number of future users to stake for cards (at higher costs, but still). And because most card cashback is small parcels, this large supply also ensures that CDC can keep paying said cashbacks for a long time; especially since it can be semi-renewable trough the trading fees we pay in CRO. Before this, the MCO you got as cashback had no use, other than selling it for fiat or speculate on its price. But CRO can be used, at the very least, to receive a discount on trading fees. And everytime you pay trading fees in CRO or spend CRO on a Syndicate event, some of that CRO goes back to CDC, wich they can use to keep paying the cahsback/rebates. And keep in mind, the technicalities of CRO can be changed, as well as the perks and utilities it can be used for. So even if this current model doesn't fix everything (wich it probably doesn't) it can still be changed to patch problems or expand its use. Another obvious potentially positive outcome of this, is that now CDC only has to focus on 1 token, so it makes it easier to manage and drive its value. People complained that CDC was neglecting MCO over promoting CRO, but now they can focus on both services (cards/exchange) at the same time. Sure, this might not bring much advantage to the common customer, but its probably a major resource saver and optimizer at corporate levels; wich in the long term ultimately benefits its customers. Much like Ethereum is undergoing major changes to ensure its scalability, the crypto companies themselves also have to change to acommodate the growing number of users, especially as the cryptomarket and DeFi are growing and becoming more competitive. Business strategies that were once successfull became obsolete, and exchanges that once held near-monopolies had to adjust to rising competitors. There is no reason why CDC shouldn't keep up with this, or at least try to. Point is, the financial markets, crypto or otherwise, are not a status quo haven. And when something is wrong, something has to be changed, even if it costs. The very rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, wich is why we are here in the first place, is a perfect example of this, as it experiments and provides alternatives to legacy/traditional products and technologies. Was this the best solution to its current problems? Is this what will protect us as customers from a potentially unsustainable business model? I have no idea. This change ripped me too from my previous more or less relaxed status quo (the safety of the value of the CRO I bough for cheap), along with CRO late investors wich now probably fear for the devaluation of their CRO. To say nothing of the blow this represents for my trust (and I believe everyone elses trust) on CDC and its public relations. It's not what CDC did, it's how they did it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wether you actually bothered to read all I wrote or just skip everything (can't blame you), I'm eager to hear your opinions and whatever criticisms on my opinions you may have. If you just want to vent at me, you are welcome too; now you can raise your pitchforks and torches.
Dragonchain Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off Public Proposal
Dragonchain Public Proposal TL;DR:
Dragonchain has demonstrated twice Reddit’s entire total daily volume (votes, comments, and postsper Reddit 2019 Year in Review) in a 24-hour demo on an operational network. Every single transaction on Dragonchain is decentralized immediately through 5 levels of Dragon Net, and then secured with combined proof on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Binance Chain, via Interchain. At the time, in January 2020, the entire cost of the demo was approximately $25K on a single system (transaction fees locked at $0.0001/txn). With current fees (lowest fee $0.0000025/txn), this would cost as little as $625. Watch Joe walk through the entire proposal and answer questions onYouTube. This proposal is also available on the Dragonchain blog.
Hello Reddit and Ethereum community!
I’m Joe Roets, Founder & CEO of Dragonchain. When the team and I first heard about The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off we were intrigued. We believe we have the solutions Reddit seeks for its community points system and we have them at scale. For your consideration, we have submitted our proposal below. The team at Dragonchain and I welcome and look forward to your technical questions, philosophical feedback, and fair criticism, to build a scaling solution for Reddit that will empower its users. Because our architecture is unlike other blockchain platforms out there today, we expect to receive many questions while people try to grasp our project. I will answer all questions here in this thread on Reddit, and I've answered some questions in the stream on YouTube. We have seen good discussions so far in the competition. We hope that Reddit’s scaling solution will emerge from The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off and that Reddit will have great success with the implementation.
Executive summary
Dragonchain is a robust open source hybrid blockchain platform that has proven to withstand the passing of time since our inception in 2014. We have continued to evolve to harness the scalability of private nodes, yet take full advantage of the security of public decentralized networks, like Ethereum. We have a live, operational, and fully functional Interchain network integrating Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and ~700 independent Dragonchain nodes. Every transaction is secured to Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Ethereum Classic. Transactions are immediately usable on chain, and the first decentralization is seen within 20 seconds on Dragon Net. Security increases further to public networks ETH, BTC, and ETC within 10 minutes to 2 hours. Smart contracts can be written in any executable language, offering full freedom to existing developers. We invite any developer to watch the demo, play with our SDK’s, review open source code, and to help us move forward. Dragonchain specializes in scalable loyalty & rewards solutions and has built a decentralized social network on chain, with very affordable transaction costs. This experience can be combined with the insights Reddit and the Ethereum community have gained in the past couple of months to roll out the solution at a rapid pace.
Response and PoC
In The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off post, Reddit has asked for a series of demonstrations, requirements, and other considerations. In this section, we will attempt to answer all of these requests.
Live Demo
A live proof of concept showing hundreds of thousands of transactions
On Jan 7, 2020, Dragonchain hosted a 24-hour live demonstration during which a quarter of a billion (250 million+) transactions executed fully on an operational network. Every single transaction on Dragonchain is decentralized immediately through 5 levels of Dragon Net, and then secured with combined proof on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Binance Chain, via Interchain. This means that every single transaction is secured by, and traceable to these networks. An attack on this system would require a simultaneous attack on all of the Interchained networks. 24 hours in 4 minutes (YouTube): 24 hours in 4 minutes The demonstration was of a single business system, and any user is able to scale this further, by running multiple systems simultaneously. Our goals for the event were to demonstrate a consistent capacity greater than that of Visa over an extended time period. Tooling to reproduce our demo is available here: https://github.com/dragonchain/spirit-bomb
Source Code
Source code (for on & off-chain components as well tooling used for the PoC). The source code does not have to be shared publicly, but if Reddit decides to use a particular solution it will need to be shared with Reddit at some point.
Dragonchain’s architecture attacks the scalability issue from multiple angles. Dragonchain is a hybrid blockchain platform, wherein every transaction is protected on a business node to the requirements of that business or purpose. A business node may be held completely private or may be exposed or replicated to any level of exposure desired. Every node has its own blockchain and is independently scalable. Dragonchain established Context Based Verification as its consensus model. Every transaction is immediately usable on a trust basis, and in time is provable to an increasing level of decentralized consensus. A transaction will have a level of decentralization to independently owned and deployed Dragonchain nodes (~700 nodes) within seconds, and full decentralization to BTC and ETH within minutes or hours. Level 5 nodes (Interchain nodes) function to secure all transactions to public or otherwise external chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These nodes scale the system by aggregating multiple blocks into a single Interchain transaction on a cadence. This timing is configurable based upon average fees for each respective chain. For detailed information about Dragonchain’s architecture, and Context Based Verification, please refer to the Dragonchain Architecture Document.
Economic Scaling
An interesting feature of Dragonchain’s network consensus is its economics and scarcity model. Since Dragon Net nodes (L2-L4) are independent staking nodes, deployment to cloud platforms would allow any of these nodes to scale to take on a large percentage of the verification work. This is great for scalability, but not good for the economy, because there is no scarcity, and pricing would develop a downward spiral and result in fewer verification nodes. For this reason, Dragonchain uses TIME as scarcity. TIME is calculated as the number of Dragons held, multiplied by the number of days held. TIME influences the user’s access to features within the Dragonchain ecosystem. It takes into account both the Dragon balance and length of time each Dragon is held. TIME is staked by users against every verification node and dictates how much of the transaction fees are awarded to each participating node for every block. TIME also dictates the transaction fee itself for the business node. TIME is staked against a business node to set a deterministic transaction fee level (see transaction fee table below in Cost section). This is very interesting in a discussion about scaling because it guarantees independence for business implementation. No matter how much traffic appears on the entire network, a business is guaranteed to not see an increased transaction fee rate.
Scaled Deployment
Dragonchain uses Docker and Kubernetes to allow the use of best practices traditional system scaling. Dragonchain offers managed nodes with an easy to use web based console interface. The user may also deploy a Dragonchain node within their own datacenter or favorite cloud platform. Users have deployed Dragonchain nodes on-prem on Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, MS Azure, and other hosting platforms around the world. Any executable code, anything you can write, can be written into a smart contract. This flexibility is what allows us to say that developers with no blockchain experience can use any code language to access the benefits of blockchain. Customers have used NodeJS, Python, Java, and even BASH shell script to write smart contracts on Dragonchain. With Docker containers, we achieve better separation of concerns, faster deployment, higher reliability, and lower response times. We chose Kubernetes for its self-healing features, ability to run multiple services on one server, and its large and thriving development community. It is resilient, scalable, and automated. OpenFaaS allows us to package smart contracts as Docker images for easy deployment. Contract deployment time is now bounded only by the size of the Docker image being deployed but remains fast even for reasonably large images. We also take advantage of Docker’s flexibility and its ability to support any language that can run on x86 architecture. Any image, public or private, can be run as a smart contract using Dragonchain.
Flexibility in Scaling
Dragonchain’s architecture considers interoperability and integration as key features. From inception, we had a goal to increase adoption via integration with real business use cases and traditional systems. We envision the ability for Reddit, in the future, to be able to integrate alternate content storage platforms or other financial services along with the token.
LBRY - To allow users to deploy content natively to LBRY
MakerDAO to allow users to lend small amounts backed by their Reddit community points.
STORJ/SIA to allow decentralized on chain storage of portions of content. These integrations or any other are relatively easy to integrate on Dragonchain with an Interchain implementation.
Cost
Cost estimates (on-chain and off-chain) For the purpose of this proposal, we assume that all transactions are on chain (posts, replies, and votes).
On the Dragonchain network, transaction costs are deterministic/predictable. By staking TIME on the business node (as described above) Reddit can reduce transaction costs to as low as $0.0000025 per transaction. Dragonchain Fees Table
Getting Started
How to run it
Building on Dragonchain is simple and requires no blockchain experience. Spin up a business node (L1) in our managed environment (AWS), run it in your own cloud environment, or on-prem in your own datacenter. Clear documentation will walk you through the steps of spinning up your first Dragonchain Level 1 Business node. Getting started is easy...
Download Dragonchain’s dctl
Input three commands into a terminal
Build an image
Run it
More information can be found in our Get started documents.
Dragonchain is an open source hybrid platform. Through Dragon Net, each chain combines the power of a public blockchain (like Ethereum) with the privacy of a private blockchain. Dragonchain organizes its network into five separate levels. A Level 1, or business node, is a totally private blockchain only accessible through the use of public/private keypairs. All business logic, including smart contracts, can be executed on this node directly and added to the chain. After creating a block, the Level 1 business node broadcasts a version stripped of sensitive private data to Dragon Net. Three Level 2 Validating nodes validate the transaction based on guidelines determined from the business. A Level 3 Diversity node checks that the level 2 nodes are from a diverse array of locations. A Level 4 Notary node, hosted by a KYC partner, then signs the validation record received from the Level 3 node. The transaction hash is ledgered to the Level 5 public chain to take advantage of the hash power of massive public networks. Dragon Net can be thought of as a “blockchain of blockchains”, where every level is a complete private blockchain. Because an L1 can send to multiple nodes on a single level, proof of existence is distributed among many places in the network. Eventually, proof of existence reaches level 5 and is published on a public network.
Dragonchain is open source and even though the platform is easy enough for developers to code in any language they are comfortable with, we do not have so large a developer community as Ethereum. We would like to see the Ethereum developer community (and any other communities) become familiar with our SDK’s, our solutions, and our platform, to unlock the full potential of our Ethereum Interchain. Long ago we decided to prioritize both Bitcoin and Ethereum Interchains. We envision an ecosystem that encompasses different projects to give developers the ability to take full advantage of all the opportunities blockchain offers to create decentralized solutions not only for Reddit but for all of our current platforms and systems. We believe that together we will take the adoption of blockchain further. We currently have additional Interchain with Ethereum Classic. We look forward to Interchain with other blockchains in the future. We invite all blockchains projects who believe in decentralization and security to Interchain with Dragonchain.
While we only have 700 nodes compared to 8,000 Ethereum and 10,000 Bitcoin nodes. We harness those 18,000 nodes to scale to extremely high levels of security. See Dragonchain metrics.
Some may consider the centralization of Dragonchain’s business nodes as an issue at first glance, however, the model is by design to protect business data. We do not consider this a drawback as these nodes can make any, none, or all data public. Depending upon the implementation, every subreddit could have control of its own business node, for potential business and enterprise offerings, bringing new alternative revenue streams to Reddit.
Costs and resources
Summary of cost & resource information for both on-chain & off-chain components used in the PoC, as well as cost & resource estimates for further scaling. If your PoC is not on mainnet, make note of any mainnet caveats (such as congestion issues).
Every transaction on the PoC system had a transaction fee of $0.0001 (one-hundredth of a cent USD). At 256MM transactions, the demo cost $25,600. With current operational fees, the same demonstration would cost $640 USD. For the demonstration, to achieve throughput to mimic a worldwide payments network, we modeled several clients in AWS and 4-5 business nodes to handle the traffic. The business nodes were tuned to handle higher throughput by adjusting memory and machine footprint on AWS. This flexibility is valuable to implementing a system such as envisioned by Reddit. Given that Reddit’s daily traffic (posts, replies, and votes) is less than half that of our demo, we would expect that the entire Reddit system could be handled on 2-5 business nodes using right-sized containers on AWS or similar environments. Verification was accomplished on the operational Dragon Net network with over 700 independently owned verification nodes running around the world at no cost to the business other than paid transaction fees.
Requirements
Scaling
This PoC should scale to the numbers below with minimal costs (both on & off-chain). There should also be a clear path to supporting hundreds of millions of users. Over a 5 day period, your scaling PoC should be able to handle: *100,000 point claims (minting & distributing points) *25,000 subscriptions *75,000 one-off points burning *100,000 transfers
During Dragonchain’s 24 hour demo, the above required numbers were reached within the first few minutes. Reddit’s total activity is 9000% more than Ethereum’s total transaction level. Even if you do not include votes, it is still 700% more than Ethereum’s current volume. Dragonchain has demonstrated that it can handle 250 million transactions a day, and it’s architecture allows for multiple systems to work at that level simultaneously. In our PoC, we demonstrate double the full capacity of Reddit, and every transaction was proven all the way to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Reddit Scaling on Ethereum
Decentralization
Solutions should not depend on any single third-party provider. We prefer solutions that do not depend on specific entities such as Reddit or another provider, and solutions with no single point of control or failure in off-chain components but recognize there are numerous trade-offs to consider
Dragonchain’s architecture calls for a hybrid approach. Private business nodes hold the sensitive data while the validation and verification of transactions for the business are decentralized within seconds and secured to public blockchains within 10 minutes to 2 hours. Nodes could potentially be controlled by owners of individual subreddits for more organic decentralization.
Billing is currently centralized - there is a path to federation and decentralization of a scaled billing solution.
Operational multi-cloud
Operational on-premises capabilities
Operational deployment to any datacenter
Over 700 independent Community Verification Nodes with proof of ownership
Operational Interchain (Interoperable to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic, open to more)
Usability Scaling solutions should have a simple end user experience.
Users shouldn't have to maintain any extra state/proofs, regularly monitor activity, keep track of extra keys, or sign anything other than their normal transactions
Dragonchain and its customers have demonstrated extraordinary usability as a feature in many applications, where users do not need to know that the system is backed by a live blockchain. Lyceum is one of these examples, where the progress of academy courses is being tracked, and successful completion of courses is rewarded with certificates on chain. Our @Save_The_Tweet bot is popular on Twitter. When used with one of the following hashtags - #please, #blockchain, #ThankYou, or #eternalize the tweet is saved through Eternal to multiple blockchains. A proof report is available for future reference. Other examples in use are DEN, our decentralized social media platform, and our console, where users can track their node rewards, view their TIME, and operate a business node. Examples:
Transactions complete in a reasonable amount of time (seconds or minutes, not hours or days)
All transactions are immediately usable on chain by the system. A transaction begins the path to decentralization at the conclusion of a 5-second block when it gets distributed across 5 separate community run nodes. Full decentralization occurs within 10 minutes to 2 hours depending on which interchain (Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Ethereum Classic) the transaction hits first. Within approximately 2 hours, the combined hash power of all interchained blockchains secures the transaction.
Free to use for end users (no gas fees, or fixed/minimal fees that Reddit can pay on their behalf)
With transaction pricing as low as $0.0000025 per transaction, it may be considered reasonable for Reddit to cover transaction fees for users. All of Reddit's Transactions on Blockchain (month) Community points can be earned by users and distributed directly to their Reddit account in batch (as per Reddit minting plan), and allow users to withdraw rewards to their Ethereum wallet whenever they wish. Withdrawal fees can be paid by either user or Reddit. This model has been operating inside the Dragonchain system since 2018, and many security and financial compliance features can be optionally added. We feel that this capability greatly enhances user experience because it is seamless to a regular user without cryptocurrency experience, yet flexible to a tech savvy user. With regard to currency or token transactions, these would occur on the Reddit network, verified to BTC and ETH. These transactions would incur the $0.0000025 transaction fee. To estimate this fee we use the monthly active Reddit users statista with a 60% adoption rate and an estimated 10 transactions per month average resulting in an approximate $720 cost across the system. Reddit could feasibly incur all associated internal network charges (mining/minting, transfer, burn) as these are very low and controllable fees. Reddit Internal Token Transaction Fees Reddit Ethereum Token Transaction Fees When we consider further the Ethereum fees that might be incurred, we have a few choices for a solution.
Offload all Ethereum transaction fees (user withdrawals) to interested users as they wish to withdraw tokens for external use or sale.
Cover Ethereum transaction fees by aggregating them on a timed schedule. Users would request withdrawal (from Reddit or individual subreddits), and they would be transacted on the Ethereum network every hour (or some other schedule).
In a combination of the above, customers could cover aggregated fees.
Integrate with alternate Ethereum roll up solutions or other proposals to aggregate minting and distribution transactions onto Ethereum.
Bonus Points
Users should be able to view their balances & transactions via a blockchain explorer-style interface
From interfaces for users who have no knowledge of blockchain technology to users who are well versed in blockchain terms such as those present in a typical block explorer, a system powered by Dragonchain has flexibility on how to provide balances and transaction data to users. Transactions can be made viewable in an Eternal Proof Report, which displays raw data along with TIME staking information and traceability all the way to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every other Interchained network. The report shows fields such as transaction ID, timestamp, block ID, multiple verifications, and Interchain proof. See example here. Node payouts within the Dragonchain console are listed in chronological order and can be further seen in either Dragons or USD. See example here. In our social media platform, Dragon Den, users can see, in real-time, their NRG and MTR balances. See example here. A new influencer app powered by Dragonchain, Raiinmaker, breaks down data into a user friendly interface that shows coin portfolio, redeemed rewards, and social scores per campaign. See example here.
Exiting is fast & simple
Withdrawing funds on Dragonchain’s console requires three clicks, however, withdrawal scenarios with more enhanced security features per Reddit’s discretion are obtainable.
Interoperability Compatibility with third party apps (wallets/contracts/etc) is necessary.
Proven interoperability at scale that surpasses the required specifications. Our entire platform consists of interoperable blockchains connected to each other and traditional systems. APIs are well documented. Third party permissions are possible with a simple smart contract without the end user being aware. No need to learn any specialized proprietary language. Any code base (not subsets) is usable within a Docker container. Interoperable with any blockchain or traditional APIs. We’ve witnessed relatively complex systems built by engineers with no blockchain or cryptocurrency experience. We’ve also demonstrated the creation of smart contracts within minutes built with BASH shell and Node.js. Please see our source code and API documentation.
Scaling solutions should be extensible and allow third parties to build on top of it Open source and extensible APIs should be well documented and stable
For full documentation, explore our docs, SDK’s, Github repo’s, architecture documents, original Disney documentation, and other links or resources provided in this proposal.
Third-party permissionless integrations should be possible & straightforward Smart contracts are Docker based, can be written in any language, use full language (not subsets), and can therefore be integrated with any system including traditional system APIs. Simple is better. Learning an uncommon or proprietary language should not be necessary.
Advanced knowledge of mathematics, cryptography, or L2 scaling should not be required. Compatibility with common utilities & toolchains is expected. Dragonchain business nodes and smart contracts leverage Docker to allow the use of literally any language or executable code. No proprietary language is necessary. We’ve witnessed relatively complex systems built by engineers with no blockchain or cryptocurrency experience. We’ve also demonstrated the creation of smart contracts within minutes built with BASH shell and Node.js.
Bonus
Bonus Points: Show us how it works. Do you have an idea for a cool new use case for Community Points? Build it!
TIME
Community points could be awarded to Reddit users based upon TIME too, whereas the longer someone is part of a subreddit, the more community points someone naturally gained, even if not actively commenting or sharing new posts. A daily login could be required for these community points to be credited. This grants awards to readers too and incentivizes readers to create an account on Reddit if they browse the website often. This concept could also be leveraged to provide some level of reputation based upon duration and consistency of contribution to a community subreddit.
Dragonchain has already built a social media platform that harnesses community involvement. Dragon Den is a decentralized community built on the Dragonchain blockchain platform. Dragon Den is Dragonchain’s answer to fake news, trolling, and censorship. It incentivizes the creation and evaluation of quality content within communities. It could be described as being a shareholder of a subreddit or Reddit in its entirety. The more your subreddit is thriving, the more rewarding it will be. Den is currently in a public beta and in active development, though the real token economy is not live yet. There are different tokens for various purposes. Two tokens are Lair Ownership Rights (LOR) and Lair Ownership Tokens (LOT). LOT is a non-fungible token for ownership of a specific Lair. LOT will only be created and converted from LOR. Energy (NRG) and Matter (MTR) work jointly. Your MTR determines how much NRG you receive in a 24-hour period. Providing quality content, or evaluating content will earn MTR.
Security. Users have full ownership & control of their points.
All community points awarded based upon any type of activity or gift, are secured and provable to all Interchain networks (currently BTC, ETH, ETC). Users are free to spend and withdraw their points as they please, depending on the features Reddit wants to bring into production.
Balances and transactions cannot be forged, manipulated, or blocked by Reddit or anyone else
Users can withdraw their balance to their ERC20 wallet, directly through Reddit. Reddit can cover the fees on their behalf, or the user covers this with a portion of their balance.
Users should own their points and be able to get on-chain ERC20 tokens without permission from anyone else
Through our console users can withdraw their ERC20 rewards. This can be achieved on Reddit too. Here is a walkthrough of our console, though this does not show the quick withdrawal functionality, a user can withdraw at any time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNlTMxnfVHw
Points should be recoverable to on-chain ERC20 tokens even if all third-parties involved go offline
If necessary, signed transactions from the Reddit system (e.g. Reddit + Subreddit) can be sent to the Ethereum smart contract for minting.
A public, third-party review attesting to the soundness of the design should be available
To our knowledge, at least two large corporations, including a top 3 accounting firm, have conducted positive reviews. These reviews have never been made public, as Dragonchain did not pay or contract for these studies to be released.
Bonus points Public, third-party implementation review available or in progress
See above
Compatibility with HSMs & hardware wallets
For the purpose of this proposal, all tokenization would be on the Ethereum network using standard token contracts and as such, would be able to leverage all hardware wallet and Ethereum ecosystem services.
Other Considerations
Minting/distributing tokens is not performed by Reddit directly
This operation can be automated by smart contract on Ethereum. Subreddits can if desired have a role to play.
One off point burning, as well as recurring, non-interactive point burning (for subreddit memberships) should be possible and scalable
This is possible and scalable with interaction between Dragonchain Reddit system and Ethereum token contract(s).
Fully open-source solutions are strongly preferred
Dragonchain is fully open source (see section on Disney release after conclusion).
Conclusion
Whether it is today, or in the future, we would like to work together to bring secure flexibility to the highest standards. It is our hope to be considered by Ethereum, Reddit, and other integrative solutions so we may further discuss the possibilities of implementation. In our public demonstration, 256 million transactions were handled in our operational network on chain in 24 hours, for the low cost of $25K, which if run today would cost $625. Dragonchain’s interoperable foundation provides the atmosphere necessary to implement a frictionless community points system. Thank you for your consideration of our proposal. We look forward to working with the community to make something great!
Disney Releases Blockchain Platform as Open Source
The team at Disney created the Disney Private Blockchain Platform. The system was a hybrid interoperable blockchain platform for ledgering and smart contract development geared toward solving problems with blockchain adoption and usability. All objective evaluation would consider the team’s output a success. We released a list of use cases that we explored in some capacity at Disney, and our input on blockchain standardization as part of our participation in the W3C Blockchain Community Group. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-blockchain/2016May/0052.html
Open Source
In 2016, Roets proposed to release the platform as open source to spread the technology outside of Disney, as others within the W3C group were interested in the solutions that had been created inside of Disney. Following a long process, step by step, the team met requirements for release. Among the requirements, the team had to:
Obtain VP support and approval for the release
Verify ownership of the software to be released
Verify that no proprietary content would be released
Convince the organization that there was a value to the open source community
Convince the organization that there was a value to Disney
Offer the plan for ongoing maintenance of the project outside of Disney
Itemize competing projects
Verify no conflict of interest
Preferred license
Change the project name to not use the name Disney, any Disney character, or any other associated IP - proposed Dragonchain - approved
Obtain legal approval
Approval from corporate, parks, and other business units
Approval from multiple Disney patent groups Copyright holder defined by Disney (Disney Connected and Advanced Technologies)
Trademark searches conducted for the selected name Dragonchain
Obtain IT security approval
Manual review of OSS components conducted
OWASP Dependency and Vulnerability Check Conducted
Obtain technical (software) approval
Offer management, process, and financial plans for the maintenance of the project.
Meet list of items to be addressed before release
Remove all Disney project references and scripts
Create a public distribution list for email communications
Remove Roets’ direct and internal contact information
Create public Slack channel and move from Disney slack channels
Create proper labels for issue tracking
Rename internal private Github repository
Add informative description to Github page
Expand README.md with more specific information
Add information beyond current “Blockchains are Magic”
Add getting started sections and info on cloning/forking the project
Add installation details
Add uninstall process
Add unit, functional, and integration test information
Detail how to contribute and get involved
Describe the git workflow that the project will use
Move to public, non-Disney git repository (Github or Bitbucket)
Obtain Disney Open Source Committee approval for release
On top of meeting the above criteria, as part of the process, the maintainer of the project had to receive the codebase on their own personal email and create accounts for maintenance (e.g. Github) with non-Disney accounts. Given the fact that the project spanned multiple business units, Roets was individually responsible for its ongoing maintenance. Because of this, he proposed in the open source application to create a non-profit organization to hold the IP and maintain the project. This was approved by Disney. The Disney Open Source Committee approved the application known as OSSRELEASE-10, and the code was released on October 2, 2016. Disney decided to not issue a press release. Original OSSRELASE-10 document
Here is how to play the altcoin game - for newbies & champs
I have been here for many previous altcoin seasons (2013,2017 etc) and wanted to share knowedle. It's a LOOONG article. The evaluation of altcoins (i.e not Bitcoin) is one of the most difficult and profitable exercises. Here I will outline my methodology and thinking but we have to take some things as a given. The first is that the whole market is going up or down with forces that we can't predict or control. Bitcoin is correlated with economic environments, money supply increases, safe havens such as Gold, hype and country regulations. This is an impossible mix to analyze and almost everyone fails at it. That's why you see people valuing Bitcoin from $100 to $500k frequently. Although I am bullish on the prospects of Bitcoin and decentralization and smart contract platforms, this is not the game I will be describing. I am talking about a game where you try to maximize your BTC holdings by investing in altcoins. We win this game even if we are at a loss in fiat currency value. To put it another way:
If you are not bullish in general on cryptocurrencies you have no place in investing or trading cryptocurrencies since it's always a losing proposition to trade in bubbles, a scientifically proven fact. If on the other hand you are then your goal is to grow your portfolio more than you would if holding BTC/ETH for example.
Bitcoin is the big boy
How the market works is not easily identifiable if you haven't graduated from the 2017 crypto university. When there is a bull market everything seems amazingly profitable and things keep going up outgrowing Bitcoin by orders of magnitude and you are a genius. The problem with this is that it only works while Bitcoin is going up a little bit or trades sideways. When it decides to move big then altcoins lose value both on the way up and on the way down. The second part is obvious and proven since all altcoins from 2017 are at a fraction of their BTC value (usually in the range of 80% or more down). Also, when BTC is making a big move upwards everyone exits altcoins to ride the wave. It is possible that the altcoin market behaves as an inversed leveraged ETF with leakage where in a certain period while Bitcoin starts at 10k and ends at 10k for example, altcoins have lost a lot of value because of the above things happening.
We are doing it anyway champ!
OK so we understand the risks and just wanna gambol with our money right? I get it. Why do that? Because finding the ideal scenario and period can be extremely profitable. In 2017 several altcoins went up 40x more than BTC. But again, if you don't chose wisely many of them have gone back to zero (the author has first hand experience in this!), they have been delisted and nobody remembers them. The actual mentality to have is very important and resembles poker and other speculative games: A certain altcoin can go up in value indefinitely but can only lose it's starting investment. Think about it. You either lose 1 metric or gain many many more. Now that sounds amazing but firstly as we said we have the goal to outperform our benchmark (BTC) and secondly that going up in value a lot means that the probability is quite low. There is this notion of Expected Value (EV) that poker players apply in these kind of situations and it goes like that. If you think that a certain coin has a probability let's say 10% to go up 10X and 90% probability it goes to zero it's an even bet. If you think that probability is 11% then it's a good bet, a profitable bet and you should take it. You get the point right? It's not that it can only go 10X or 0X, there is a whole range of probability outcomes that are too mathematical to explain here and it doesn't help so much because nobody can do such analysis with altcoins. See below on how we can approximate it.
How to evaluate altcoins
A range of different things to take into account outlined below will form our decision making. Not a single one of them should dictate 100% of our strategy.
Basics
It's all about market cap. Repeat after me. The price of a coin doesn't mean anything. Say it 10 times until you believe it. I can't remember how many times I had conversations with people that were comparing coins using their coin price instead of their market cap. To make this easy to get.
If I decide because the sky is blue to make my coin supply 100 Trillion FoolCoins with a price of $0.001 and there is another WiseCoin with a supply of 100 Million and price of $1 then FoolCoins are more expensive. - Alex Fin's Cap Law
Fundamental analysis
This is done usually in the stock world and it means that each company has some fundamental value that includes it's assets, customers, growth prospects, sector prospects and leadership competence but mostly centered in financial measures such as P/E ratios etc. Valuation is a proper economic discipline by itself taught in universities. OK, now throw everything out of the window!. This kind of analysis is impossible in vague concepts and innovations that are currently cryptocurrencies. Ethereum was frequently priced at the fictional price of gas when all financial systems on earth run on the platform after decades (a bit of exaggeration here). No project is currently profitable enough to justify a valuation multiple that is usually equal to P/E in the thousands or more. As such we need to take other things into account. What I do is included in the list below:
Check Github. You need to make sure there is active development for the platform and it's a very bad sign if the project is either keeping the code closed source or even worse there is simply no development. No projects are "complete".
Check Website. If the website is written in bad English the Chinese google translate type it means that they are not serious enough to produce an unbreakable decentralized project. If you can't write English you can't change the world, period. That's a deal breaker.
Check Team's Linkedin. Numerous projects have either fake Linkedin accounts or the team is comprised mainly by unexperienced employees that are even shown to be working in other companies currently.
Check backers. Projects that have Binance, Coinbase or Silicon Valley VC funds backing them are way more legit but way more overpriced too!
Relative valuation
One of my favorite ways to value altcoins that is based on the same principle in the stock market is to look at peers and decide what is the maximum cap it can grow to. As an example you take a second layer Ethereum solution that has an ICO and you want to decide if you will enter or not. You can take a look at other coins that are in the same business and compare their market caps. Thinking that your coin will outperform by a lot the top coins currently is overly optimistic so I usually take a lower valuation as a target price. If the initial offering is directly implying a valuation that is more than that then there is no room to grow according to my analysis and I skip it. Many times this has proven me wrong because it's a game theory problem where if many people think irrationally in a market it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But since there is opportunity cost involved, in the long run, getting in initial offerings that have a lot of room to grow will pay off as a strategy.
Sector prospects
In 2017 the sexiest sector was platforms and then coins including privacy ones. Platforms are obviously still a highly rated sector because everything is being built on them, but privacy is not as hot as it used to be. In 2018 DEXes were all they hype but still people are massively using centralized exchanges. In 2020 Defi is the hottest sector and it includes platforms, oracles and Defi projects. What I am saying is that a project gets extra points if it's a Defi one in 2020 and minus points if it's a payment system that will conquer the world as it was in 2017 because that's old news. This is closely related to the next section.
Hype
Needless to say that the crypto market is a worse FOMO type of inexperienced trigger happy yolo investors , much worse than the Robinhood crowd that drove a bankrupt company's stock 1200% after they declared bankruptcy. The result is that there are numerous projects that are basically either vaporware or just so overhyped that their valuation has no connection to reality. Should we avoid those kind of projects? No and I will explain why. There are many very good technically projects that had zero hype potential due to incompetent marketing departments that made them tank. An example (without shilling because I sold out a while back) is Quantum Resistant Ledger. This project has amazing quantum resistant blockchain, the only one running now, has a platform that people can build tokens and messaging systems and other magnificent stuff. Just check how they fared up to now and you will get the point. A project *needs* to have a hype factor because you cannot judge it as normal stocks that you can do value investing like Warren Buffet does where a company will inevitable post sales and profitability numbers and investors will get dividends. Actually the last sentence is the most important: No dividends. Even projects that give you tokens or coins as dividends are not real dividends because if the coin tanks the value of the dividend tanks. This is NOT the case with company stocks where you get dollars even if the company stock tanks. All that being said, I would advice against betting on projects that have a lot of hype but little substance (but that should be obvious!).
How to construct your portfolio
My strategy and philosophy in investing is that risk should be proportional to investment capital. That means that if you are investing 100K in the crypto market your portfolio should be very different than someone investing 1K because 10% annual gains are nothing in the latter while they are very significant in the former. Starting from this principle each individual needs to construct a portfolio according to how much risk he wants to take. I will emphasize two important concepts that play well with what I said. In the first instance of a big portfolio you should concentrate on this mantra: "Diversification is the only free meal in finance". In the case of a small portfolio then this mantra is more important: "Concentrate to create wealth, diversify to maintain wealth". Usually in a big portfolio you would want to hold some big coins such as BTC and ETH to weather the ups and downs explained in previous paragraphs while generating profits and keep progressively smaller parts of your portfolio for riskier investments. Maybe 50% of this portfolio could be big caps and 10% very risky initial offerings. Adapting risk progressively to smaller portfolios makes sense but I think it would be irrational to keep more than 30% of a portfolio no matter what tied to one coin due to the very high risk of bankruptcy.
Conclusion
The altseason is supposedly coming every 3 months. Truth is that nobody can predict it but altcoins can be profitable no matter what. Forget about maximalists who are stuck in their dogmas. Altcoins deliver different value propositions and it makes sense because we are very far from a situation where some project offers everything like Amazon and we wouldn't even want that in the first place since we are talking about decentralization and not a winner takes all and becomes a monster kind of scenario! Some last minute advice:
Stay out of paid telegram/discord pump groups. They are deadly for your wallet.
Avoid jumping on overhyped coins that have pumped massively during the last days without any very important news.
Don't keep coins in obscure exchanges for too long or you will get burned with certainty.
Stop thinking that your coin will 1000x and overtake Bitcoin!
P.S If you find value in reading this and want more weekly consider subscribing to my newsletterhere
Deep Dive on the first Reddit Points, $DONUT Token 🍩 🍩 🍩Very Attractive, Low-Cap Opportunity 💎
DONUT TOKEN 🍩 🍩 🍩
TL;DR:
$DONUT is an ERC20 token initially built at the behest of Reddit to trial out their Community Points initiative. Reddit is now scaling this up big time with the Reddit Scaling Bake-off. Once the winner is announced, DONUT will get some nice airtime. It has so far remained under the radar.
$DONUT has 3 core utilities; 1) used to purchase banner space in the 230,000+ member subreddit (this is a very attractive place to promote). DONUT used on the banner space is burned, marking the deflationary aspect of the tokenomics. 2) new tokens are issued on a periodic basis which is sent to active users of the community (they can HODL or sell to the continuous stream of advertisers). 3) DONUT holders can vote on proposals such as issuance reduction in the integrated AragonDAO, i.e. fully decentralised and community-run.
$DONUT has remained under the radar since launching on main-net. This is similar to many projects where the ecosystem and product are great but simply isn’t commercially focussed i.e. no business development or marketing team. In other words, it is purely community-run (and the community is starting to push it). We’ve also been in a bear market where many have kept their capital in ETH, BTC or other tokens. In the last 4 weeks, as predicted some time ago, DONUT is now seeing some serious interest in what I believe is the beginning of an interesting journey. Marketcap broke $800,000, price reached ATH of $0.01, volume/liquidity on Uniswap broke $100,000. This is still very early days for a token which has real utility in an ecosystem that will inevitably see a lot of traction during the bull market. Imagine holding a lot of DONUT now, and being the guy to sell to the flock of advertisers during the bull market?
Following this last point, there is a positive feedback loop to consider. The more users hear about DONUT, the more they will join the sub, the more they join the sub, the more valuable the banner is, the more valuable the banner is, the higher the price of DONUT, the higher the price of DONUT the more of deflationary it becomes (due to the burn-rate surpassing issuance-rate).
How likely is it more people will hear about DONUT? Well, right now some of Ethtrader’s most active users are earning about $3000 per month in DONUT. Can you imagine the headlines and media attention? “Ethtrader users earn $XXX in DONUT."
There is also the meme-coin element to factor in. I don’t like mentioning this because DONUT has actual use-case and is not a meme-coin in the traditional sense. But, let’s be honest, meme-ability / marketability are both very important. Dogecoin got to where it did with zero utility.
I am not saying that Reddit will roll out DONUT across their entire site. DONUT will be just for Ethtrader. Other subs can have their own token and use their own tokenomics. There are some examples already, like MOON & BRICK. Neither of these has tokenomics close to as attractive as DONUT and at the moment, there is no reason for them to accrue in value.
Fun fact,@cslarson(head moderator of ethtrader and founder of DONUTS as far as I can tell) was actually hacking on SourceCred before DONUTS happened. He, along with@lkngtnand@jvlusohad recently coded upcredaoat a hackathon, a project that mints ERC-20 tokens in an Aragon DAO according to Cred scores, when he got the call from Reddit offering support for prototyping DONUTS on ethtrader. Can’t blame him:) ... 👇👇👇
MAIN POST:
Funnily enough, this is actually an alpha: right now you can ‘farm DONUT’ by contributing to ethtrader through high-quality memes, discussions, comments etc. Just by being an active member of the community, you can earn DONUT 🍩 tokens which you can sell for real $ETH. I’ll explain later why people would want to buy DONUT. Or, you can HODL them, which is highly recommended. Based on the last rewards distribution (https://www.reddit.com/ethtradecomments/i48u9g/new_donuts_distribution/) if you earned a mere 100 or so Karma points in the sub, you would have received 10,000 DONUT tokens which you can then sell for ETH on a growing list of exchanges, namely Uniswap (which has growing liquidity). This is an example of what DeFi and Ethereum are all about and is one of the more significant community-focused projects. You have all sorts of crummy community tokens out there but none have the ecosystem to back them up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying DONUT is a $LEND, $COMP, etc but it ticks all the boxes to be considered a moon-shot: meme-worthy, existing network effect, undeniable utility, Reddit-backing, AragonDAO support, and more. ... The Ethtrader Group is a 100% community-run subreddit-collective where the governance token DONUT 🍩is used to vote on proposals regarding tokenomics. Slashing supply, changing tokenomics and other decisions can be made in their AragonDAO with the more DONUT 🍩 you hold resulting in higher voting power. It makes sense that Aragon was used seeing as the lead developer Carlson was working on Credao (a similar concept) using Aragon before he was approached by Reddit to work on the very first iteration of their Community Points system before rolling it out across the entire platform. Source. Any member of the community can propose changes by first gauging sentiment through polls in the subreddit (something you need DONUT for by the way), following up with proposals in AragonDAO which require voting (again voting power is tied to DONUT holdings). ... Growth over time: DONUT 🍩 has thus far followed similar growth trajectories of projects that start out organic, community and product-focused and over time attract real interest, real activity and real growth. This is in opposition to projects that market first and deliver later. DONUT hasn’t marketed anything as the community has focussed internally during the bear market and the ecosystem is relatively new, which is why it isn’t already worth more. I have been trading crypto since 2011 and ALTs since 2014 and I’ve learned to spot these nuanced differences between projects, and the all-important signals. The DONUT token launched in its current state in Jan 2019 with a volume of $30 and a price of $0.0019. But I am going to focus on December 2019 as the start date for a number of reasons: first, due to some teething pains with the direction of Ethtrader & $DONUT some of the team split off, the Token also underwent a shift and you can see on the chart this early phase does not reflect any organic price action. So, starting from the latter date, looking at the chart, you can see an organic price development typical of many promising projects. Slow, steady accumulation, followed by sharper ups and downs with the bottoms rising upwards. I saw this same pattern on pretty much every organic-driven ALT I’ve invested in with success. In the last 2 weeks, ATHs have been broken across the board. ... Similar successes: Let’s face it. In our funky community, tokens of all kinds can grow astronomically. Even those without a single use-case can grow simply because they are meme-worthy. Think $DogeCoin or $Garlicoin. More recently you have $TEND which is growing in popularity and is currently worth $1 (when I first started writing this post, it was at $0.50. DONUT was at $0.005 and is now touching $0.01). DONUT 🍩 is unique in that it has potential to be a significant Ethereum meme token on par with these examples but more importantly, it also has tangible use-cases which will ensure the project remains active over a longer course of time, with accessibility open to anyone with spare time to meaningfully contribute to the community. But that isn’t the clincher. The Ethtrader group is large and getting larger with almost a quarter of a million members at the time of writing. That is a valuable audience of highly relevant people interested in cryptocurrency, especially Ethereum. DONUT 🍩is used in a Harbinger Tax style system (whereby someone would use DONUT to buy ad space from the current owner for a price set by that owner. This person would then set a new price — this will be the cost someone who wants it back will need to pay — and then based on this new price there will be a 100% daily tax for as long as you choose to hold the banner for). This adversarial system will ensure you have projects (typically with deep pockets) buying up lots of DONUT 🍩 to ensure they can control the banner, spending those DONUT tokens on getting the banner, and the process will continue over and over. If we enter a new bull market for DeFi, this will be a significant value and liquidity driver as let’s face it, that is prime real estate for brand exposure. I'll draw your attention back to the feedback loop I mentioned in the TL;DR.
Tokenomics:
📸IMAGE:https://imgur.com/a/CnFpfQr *note, this is just a quick thing I slapped together and shows just one process and one use-case and is not a comprehensive diagram. Hopefully, it is useful anyway. Deflationary or inflationary? The DONUT used to buy the banner is always burnt, currently, 3 Million DONUT is burned per month. While there is monthly issuance (the source of contribution rewards), there is also frequent burn events. Currently, the banner is burning 100,000 DONUT per day compared to the 4,000,000 issued per month. This daily burn can increase or decrease depending on the cost of the banner which can increase or decrease based on what the owner sets it as. This means when demand increases (exchanges, dapps, projects bid for the banner space), the burn rate will exceed the issuance rate, resulting in deflationary tokenomics. Conversely, if the cost of the banner decreases and is below the threshold (as it currently is, only slightly) then technically it will be inflationary. The deflationary dominance has already proven to be effective seeing as the token started out with 100m units and now on around 90m. Furthermore, the issuance rate can at anytime be slashed if put to a community vote which anyone in the community can initiate, so long as they own DONUT. So, DONUT is also used here as a governance token, the more you have the stronger your vote on such decisions. To use DONUT to vote on community initiatives or a change in the tokenomics, you’ll need to visit their integrated AragonDAO and learn more about the process. This can be found here: https://mainnet.aragon.org/#/0x57EBE61f5f8303AD944136b293C1836B3803b4c0 and is also where DONUT is claimed from.
Takeaways:
Own DONUT now and be the one to sell it advertisers who will be in bidding wars with each other. Advertisers in this industry are used to ridiculous prices and the banner is very cheap at the moment.
The DONUT used for the ads will be burnt and the advertisers, of course, won’t get them back. This means a continuous BUY-pressure for DONUT.
As a DONUT holder, you will have voting power in their AragonDAO integration. What does this mean? We can submit proposals and vote on tokenomics to change, e.g. reduce supply.
We all know this space, right? On top of the concrete utility, DONUT could and will become a popular ‘meme-coin’. Previous examples of these (that lack utility) are Dogecoin & GarlicCoin.
If you were an exchange, would you pay $3k per day to reach all the ETH traders? (They currently spend so much more than that on useless CMC banners) If so, that’s $1m per year. For example, you’ve all seen the endless crypto . com banners right? They spend millions on marketing. I will wager all my DONUT that they will be serious bidders soon.
Some people are already earning $3000 a month on Ethtrader via donut. You can take a look at the latest distribution list here.
Media attention is practically assured and the number of new people tweeting and talking about DONUT is rising rapidly, just take a look at twitter, 4chan, reddit and other places. DONUT was also listed on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap within the last mont.
I hope this was in-depth and useful. I have tried to add as much as possible but I have no doubt missed some stuff as well. As always, DYOR and make an informed decision. For me, at this price, it's a no brainer.
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