Mois : mai 2021

Avertissement : Cet article vous est présenté par la société Veracash. Les investissements crypto sont risqués par nature, faites vos propres recherches et n’investissez que dans les limites de vos capacités financières. Cet article ne constitue pas une incitation à l’investissement

L’or dans tous ses états 

L’or a depuis toujours été considéré comme un métal noble, rare et précieux. Sa valeur, considérée comme valeur refuge, n’aura échappé à personne. Au fil des âges, l’or est apparu comme une valeur sûre et robuste notamment face à l’inflation. Situé en marge du système monétaire international, l’or bénéficie d’une indépendance et donc d’une couverture essentielle contre les mouvements financiers. 

De plus, le métal jaune est depuis toujours ancré dans l’imaginaire collectif comme étant unique, beau et inaccessible. L’or reste finalement un objet rare, beau, universel présent dans le monde entier et avec un ancrage culturel fort dans certains pays comme l’Inde ou la Chine.  

L’or est aussi différenciant par ses caractéristiques et sa composition, c’est d’ailleurs à cela que l’on différencie l’or 18 carats du 24 carats ou du plaqué or qui n’ont pas le même grammage. 

Dans cet article, nous avons décidé d’apporter un peu d’originalité et de ne pas aller dans une analyse des cours ni des manières d’investir, quoique. Ce que vous verrez là, ce sont les 5 choses les plus folles qui ont été conçu avec de l’or pur. Et ce qu’il faut en retenir est bien que si la valeur de ces objets peut baisser voir disparaître au fur et à mesure que les modes passent, l’or, lui, reste.

1.La Tesla en or 

Décidément, Elon Musk ne fait pas la une que dans le monde des cryptomonnaies, et on ne peut s’empêcher de penser à sa folie des grandeurs en voyant cette nouvelle annonce : Tesla lance son modèle bling bling de sa célèbre voiture électrique à la pointe de la technologie. 

Alors, pour ceux qui pensaient déjà tout avoir, voilà un nouvel actif qui pourrait bien s’ajouter à votre collection personnelle.

Regardons de plus près : notre cher Elon nous propose là une nouvelle ligne baptisée (très modestement) “Caviar Model Excellence 24K” pour son modèle S. C’est la société Caviar qui a conçu cette incroyable voiture noire avec des pièces d’or rutilantes un peu partout. Il faut dire que Caviar s’est fait un nom dans le milieu de la customisation dorée : après s’être fait la main sur l’iphone, la playstation 5 ou encore des baskets, c’est sur la voiture du futur qu’elle a jeté son dévolu. 

Caviar décrit son concept de véhicule électrique comme “une carrosserie de qualité respectable de couleur pétrole et un éblouissant éclat d’or“. Tout a été pensé dans les moindres détails : vous trouverez de l’or 24K sur la calandre, les jupes latérales, les disques, les rétroviseurs ou encore certains éléments des pare-chocs arrière et avant. L’intérieur aussi a été vêtu d’or pour le plaisir des yeux.

Si tous ces détails retiennent votre attention, dépêchez vous de passer votre commande car Caviar ne va créer que 99 Teslas plaquées or pour la modique somme de 299 999 $. C’est un peu plus que la Model S de Tesla, qui coûte 72 990 $. 

2.Les sneakers en or 

Imaginée par l’artiste américain Matthew Senna, cette paire de Air Jordan 1 pour le moins peu commune prend la forme d’une véritable sculpture.  Cette œuvre d’art, que l’on verrait d’ailleurs bien sous forme de NFT (avis aux amateurs) fait partie d’une série de créations autour des sneakers.  Ce même artiste a déjà dévoilé une paire de Nike Lunar Force 1 en bronze au NikeLab X158 de Shanghai. 

En réalité la paire de Air Jordan a entièrement été recouverte d’or 24K et notamment dédiée au rappeur Drake dans un packaging en bois avec OVO gravé dessus. D’autres projets de ce type ont déjà eu lieu : on se souvient de Cristiano Ronaldo qui a reçu pour ses 30 ans des Air Force 1 CR7 customisées avec de l’or 24K sur la virgule et offertes pour l’occasion par son partenaire de toujours, Nike. Quintuple ballon d’or, ce cadeau de Nike est un beau clin d’œil et une pièce unique avec son or pur.

Enfin il y a 3 ans, The Shoe Surgeon avait présenté à son tour sa version gold des Air Jordan 1, modèle « 24 Karat Gold Toe » : ces Air Jordan étaient composées d’une empeigne en cuir verni et en cuire reptilien, or 24 carats sur la toebox, les ailes ou encore sur le talon, ainsi que le logo de l’artiste de Los Angeles sur la languette. Dominic Ciambrone commercialise ce modèle unique pour le prix de 3500$ sur son site.

3.La viande en or 

Qui d’entre vous ne connaît pas le chef devenu une icône d’Instagram, j’ai nommé Nusret Gökçe AKA Salt Bae. Rendu populaire par la célèbre vidéo qui l’a rendue culte il y a quelques années, il est depuis parvenu à monter un empire autour de sa personne et de sa marque de fabrique : de la viande et des feuilles d’or entourant les belles pièces. L’homme quelque peu extravagant et très soigneux de son image a ainsi réussi l’impensable : mêler de l’or à un art culinaire. 

Rappelez vous de la fameuse vidéo avec Franck Ribéry et le steak doré de la discorde qui avait déchaîné les foules. Car il faut dire que notre boucher turc ne lésine pas avec la communication : son geste devenu viral le montre coude collé et pincée de sel déposée sur l’entrecôte dorée. 

Une confusion avait été laissée sur le prix : l’entrecôte dorée étant affichée à 1200 dirhams et non 1200€ comme certains l’avaient laissé penser.

En tout état de cause, cet épisode avait une fois de plus montré à quel point l’or représente vite l’opulence car finalement s’il n’y avait pas eu d’or, aucun bruit n’aurait été fait de cette soirée presque anodine à Dubaï.

Le grand public a finalement découvert Nusret Gökçe en Janvier 2017 dans une vidéo intitulée “Ottoman Steak” qui a fait le buzz en tournant plus de 10 millions de fois et lui a valu le surnom de Salt Bae Depuis, avec une fortune estimée à plus de 50 millions de $, le turc bling bling déploie sa folie à New York, Dubaï, ou encore Bali, des lieux très prisés des stars et notamment des footballeurs.

4.L’iphone plaqué or 

Vous pensiez que l’Iphone 12 était déjà cher ? Vous n’avez pas tout vu. En effet, emballé par le London Assay Office et commercialisé par GoldGenie, l’iphone 11 pro Max 512 go en or 18 carats existe, oui vous ne rêvez pas. 

Alors si vraiment le bull run a fait de vous un cryptomilliardaire, ce modèle est peut être fait pour vous : pour un peu de plus de 15 000€, la société britannique propose ce modèle unique. Et comble du bling bling, si vous aimez ce qui brille et particulièrement les métaux précieux, vous pouvez même ajouter sur commande le logo Apple en vrai diamant. Vous l’aurez compris, cette gamme très secrète n’est pas donnée à tout le monde et il faudra donc passer commande.

Pour vous assurer de la qualité de l’or qui y est utilisé, l’entreprise Goldgenie s’est assuré de tout : baignée délicatement dans une couche de métal massif avec de l’or massif, l’iphone dispose du label de qualité GG Hallmark, qui certifie que le métal précieux est de l’or véritable et authentique. 

Pour le reste des fonctionnalités de l’iphone, elles restent identiques. 

5.Les dents en or

Vous vous souvenez de Joey Starr ? Le rappeur est devenu peu à peu dandy bling bling, notamment grâce à ses dents… en or !

Joey Starr c’est avant tout 3 initiales connues de tous “NTM”, c’est le rappeur au baggy oversize et aux colliers dorés, et c’est surtout un grand fan de l’or massif.

Alors si les grillz font partie des modes les plus incongrues qu’il soit, elles ont aussi contribué à créer une véritable identité dans le milieu du rap dans les années 2000. Et pourtant, l’histoire remonte bien plus loin : déjà chez les Mayas, les plus nobles ornaient leur dent avec du jade, plus loin encore, les Etrusques (ancêtres des romains), se faisaient poser des décorations d’or lorsqu’ils se faisaient enlever une dent. Bref, plus proche de nous c’est bien à Hollywood que cette folle mode a pris de l’ampleur.

Détachables à volonté, la mode des grillz a frappé un grand coup chez les rappeurs, mais certains particulièrement déterminés ont choisi l’encastrement à vie : c’est notamment le cas de Birdman (anciennement connu sous le nom de B-32 – pour Baby with the 32 golds) ou encore Kanye West. Weezy avait quant à lui révélé en 2011 que sa dentition dorée lui avait coûté 150 000$, rien comparé au demi-million dépensé par Birdman. 

Bref, de nombreuses stars ont suivi la tendance et même marché sur le tapis rouge avec leurs dents dorées : Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Madonna, Katy Perry ou encore l’acteur Johnny Depp.

Bonus : Dubaï the Gold City 

On ne pouvait logiquement pas finir cette série sans un petit détour à Dubaï, dénommé the Gold City comme vous avez pu le lire dans un précédent article, notamment grâce à son souk de l’or connu mondialement. Alors comme d’habitude, Dubaï n’a pas fait les choses à moitié et vous en met plein les yeux : 

• le premier distributeur automatique au monde qui distribue des lingots d’or de 10 grammes à l’Emirates Palace Abu Dhabi
• la coupe glacée Black Diamond au Scoopi Café de Dubaï – faite de gousses de vanille de Madagascar, de safran d’Iran, de truffes noires rares du nord de l’Italie et de paillettes d’or 23 carats, servie dans un bol Versace à motif doré avec cuillère 
• Le Burj Al Arab en or : 20 000 mètres carrés de feuilles d’or 24 carats, 10 millions de carreaux de mosaïque d’or utilisés dans la conception des piscines et des banques d’ascenseurs, et l’entrée en coquille d’huître dorée de l’Al Mahara. Les visiteurs peuvent également se laisser tenter par l’Ultimate Gold Cappuccino. Pour conclure l’expérience du métal précieux, les clients peuvent se rendre au 27e étage pour déguster des cocktails infusés à l’or au bien nommé bar Gold on 27, un espace baigné d’or réfléchissant avec vue sur le golfe Persique.

Certes, tous ces projets paraissent un peu fous et vous vous dites certainement que l’or n’est pas à la portée de tout le monde. Pourtant, bien au contraire, certains ont réussi à croiser les deux mondes. 

Veracash vous permet ainsi désormais de payer et d’épargner très facilement, le tout en or ou en métaux précieux comme l’argent et les diamants.

Finalement, Veracash c’est la solution pour dématérialiser et digitaliser l’or et ainsi en faire une monnaie courante.

Si l’or est depuis toujours une valeur sûre et l’illustration de l’opulence et de la beauté, il s’érige désormais comme l’une des alternatives au système financier actuel, notamment grâce à sa valeur refuge et ses caractéristiques intrinsèques. Si vous souhaitez approfondir vos connaissances, n’hésitez pas à faire un tour sur la tribune des investissements alternatifs.

Sotheby’s met aux enchères un NFT qui peut être détruit si la température mondiale moyenne augmente de 2 degrés centigrades (35,6 degrés Fahrenheit) au-dessus des niveaux préindustriels.

Le NFT, Deux degrés, est une vidéo de 20 secondes d’un scan 3D d’une forêt dans le sud de l’Allemagne avec un avertissement d’autodestruction superposé.

«Tout comme la vraie forêt disparaîtra dès qu’un certain seuil de changement climatique mondial sera franchi, la NFT disparaîtra aussi», a déclaré l’organisation autonome décentralisée (DAO) qui a frappé la NFT, terra0, dans une description accompagnant le lot, qui ferme le 10 juin.

Les NFT contrat intelligent utilise un oracle pour surveiller la température mondiale que la NASA publie dans ses rapports annuels.

Les scientifiques s’attendent à que les températures mondiales augmenteront de deux degrés d’ici 2062 si la tendance historique au réchauffement au cours des 30 dernières années se poursuit. Si cela se produit, le Les contrats intelligents de NFT permettre à quiconque de le «brûler». Le DAO le décrit comme une «couverture contre l’anéantissement».

Depuis crypto L’impact sur l’environnement est une critique courante, brûler un NFT peut, à première vue, sembler ajouter une insulte à une Terre blessée.

cependant, Ethereum la mise à niveau vers un mécanisme de consensus de preuve d’enjeu dans les prochaines années devrait réduire son impact environnemental de 99,5%, selon la Fondation Ethereum, l’association à but non lucratif qui supervise le développement du réseau.

Pendant ce temps, la crypto éco-consciente projets sont à la hausse. La semaine dernière, deux développeurs lancé CryptoTrunks, un projet NFT qui génère un arbre pixélisé en accord avec son transaction l’histoire.

Les développeurs ont brièvement suspendu le projet lorsque Ethereum gaz les frais ont grimpé en flèche et sont depuis un modèle carbone négatif, devenant ainsi le premier grand projet NFT à le faire.

Authored by Packy McCormick via NotBoring.co,

“The most bullish thing for Ether is to be understood.”

Ryan Sean Adams, Bankless

What if I told you about a business with strong network effects and 200x YoY revenue growth that was preparing to offer a 25% dividend and implement a permanent share buyback program? Is that something you might be interested in?

That’s pretty much Ethereum. It’s one of the most fascinating and compelling assets in the world, but its story is obfuscated by complexity and the specter of crypto. 

Ethereum is so many things at once, all of which feed off of each other. Ethereum, the blockchain, is a world computer, the backbone of a decentralized internet (web3), and the settlement layer for web3. Its cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), is a bunch of things, too: 

• Internet money. 

• Ownership of the Ethereum network. 

• The most commonly-used token in the Great Online Game. 

• Yield-generating. 

• A Store of Value (SoV). 

• A bet on more on-chain activity, or the web3 future. 

Because Ethereum is so much at once, it’s hard to understand. This post is an attempt to help Ethereum be understood. To a group like us, people interested in technology businesses, finance, and strategy, it’s much more fascinating than bitcoin, but that comes with a tradeoff. It’s much harder to grok than bitcoin, and because of that, it hasn’t gotten the mainstream or institutional attention that bitcoin has. 

Bitcoin is easy. It’s digital gold. It’s a Store of Value (SoV). It just kind of sits there. 

That’s its value prop. It’s immutable and the most decentralized asset in the world. It’s the OG and the hardest to attack. At this point, your bitcoin will not disappear overnight (although this post on Tether is illuminating with regards to ways it, and other cryptos including ETH, can be manipulated nonetheless). As long as other people believe in its value, it will continue to be valuable. Technically, upper-case-B-Bitcoin is the blockchain and lower-case-b-bitcoin is the cryptocurrency, but for all intents and purposes, they’re the same. Bitcoin exists to make and track bitcoin. It’s very good at what it does.

Ethereum is so much more than a cryptocurrency. It’s a “world computer,” and the “value layer” of the internet. It lets people build apps and products with money baked into the code. If you believe that web3 is going to continue to grow, then you likely believe that over time, Ethereum will become the settlement layer of a new internet. All sorts of transactions, whether they happen on Ethereum, another blockchain, or even Visa, will turn to Ethereum to exchange funds and keep secure, immutable records. A year ago, I wouldn’t have said that. 

Until the past year, a lot of Ethereum’s value existed in a theoretical state, in the ideas of what might be possible on a decentralized global internet. Personally, I viewed it as a kind of more interesting thing that was kind of like Bitcoin but smaller and maybe higher upside? As a result, after buying ETH for fun in the 2017 run-up, I sold all 15 of my remaining ETH in June 2020 once I broke even. Lack of understanding = weak hands. 

As you know, I’m an idiot. Even after the recent drop, those 15 ETH are worth over $30,000. I missed ~10x upside. Not as painful as my $2 million bitcoin mistake, but still dumb. To be fair, though, you shouldn’t invest in this stuff unless you understand it, and I didn’t. I’m starting to. 

Between then and now, a few things have happened that flipped me from moderately curious to both very curious and very bullish: 

• Use Case Explosion. DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs have emerged as real use cases for crypto, and have grown spectacularly over the past year.

• Ultra Sound Money. With the upcoming implementation of EIP 1559, Ethereum will likely become deflationary, knocking out its biggest monetary weakness. 

• Eth2. Ethereum is currently running a test chain that will merge with the main Ethereum chain in about six months. When it does, Ethereum will switch from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), and more value will accrue to ETH holders.

• Narrative. The narrative around Ethereum is gaining steam and jumping from crypto people to the mainstream. Last week’s releases from Patrick O’Shaughnessy, James Wang, and Joe Weisenthal came in hot. This essay is one small additional push. 

Right now, Ethereum is at a narrative inflection point, and narrative reflexivity is more important for blockchains than for almost any other company or asset.

I’m increasingly convinced that ETH will be one of the best assets to own over the next five years. Here’s the bull case in a nutshell: 

Owning ETH is like owning shares in the internet. Demand for ETH will go up with increased web3 adoption, while upcoming changes will decrease the supply of ETH and let more value accrue to holders. It’s like a tech stock, a bond, a ticket to web3, and money, rolled into one. 

To make the bull case clear, we’ll need to understand why Ethereum will survive and adoption will grow, how it actually makes money, and the differences between ETH and a tech stock. We’ll cover:

• Ethereum is the Excel of Blockchains

• How Ethereum Makes Money

• Legitimacy and Lindy

• L1 Ecosystem 

• The Bull Case for Ethereum

• Threats, More Caveats, and a Conclusion

For ETH to be worth something, and for the bull case to matter, Ethereum needs to survive and grow. It has faced early challenges and competition from purpose-built blockchains, and this past week was scary. Nothing’s guaranteed. 

To understand why Ethereum isn’t going to die, let’s start with an analogy. 

Ethereum is the Excel of Blockchains

If you’re going to be bullish on Ethereum, the first thing you’ll need to believe is that it will be around for a long time, and that more and more people will continue to use it, and that other people also believe those things to be true.

You’ll be comforted to know, then, that Ethereum is the Excel of blockchains. 

That’s not exactly right. The analogy breaks down in places. But for our purposes, it’s good enough. Start by comparing it to Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin is like a database. That’s what a blockchain is — a distributed ledger of transactions. The Bitcoin blockchain lets people send each other bitcoin (BTC) and tracks who owns which bitcoin at any given time. It can also reward people for securing the database by giving them BTC for turning electricity into solutions to math problems (Proof of Work or PoW). It does one thing really well: track ownership of bitcoin. 

Bitcoin is kind of like a spreadsheet, and many people compare blockchains to spreadsheets, but that’s not what I mean when I say that Ethereum is like Excel. I mean that the same elements that have propelled Excel for nearly four decades are present in Ethereum, too. 

It starts with flexibility. Ethereum is a Turing complete, programmable blockchain that lets anyone build full-blown applications using smart contracts. People can build all sorts of decentralized apps (dApps) on top of Ethereum, plugging into the blockchain and the surrounding ecosystem to provide everything from security to identity to payments. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps, NFT marketplaces, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and games and virtual worlds can all be built on top of Ethereum, all fueled by the native currency, ETH. 

That flexibility is really hard to do. 

In Excel Never Dies, Ben Rollert and I wrote about Excel’s staying power in a technology landscape that typically sees new products replace old ones every few years. We wrote: 

If there is a core product design lesson to learn from Excel, it’s that combining usability with flexibility is both incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding….

A design principle for developers is to make any one piece of software really good at one specific thing, deliberately constraining its capabilities to a specific domain. Excel is a truly remarkable exception to this rule – it is something of a choose-a-phone, and clearly hundreds of millions of people do want to compose for it.

You could replace “Excel” with “Ethereum” and it works perfectly. Ethereum’s early usability challenges are a function of its flexibility. Ethereum is something of a choose-a-phone, and clearly millions of people do want to compose for it. 

Beyond the product philosophy, there are some specific similarities between the two: 

• Turing Completeness. If something is Turing complete, it means that it can solve any reasonable computational problem. With the introduction of Lambda, which lets users create their own formulas, Excel became Turing complete. With Ethereum, you can write smart contracts that can solve any reasonable problem. 

• Composability. In Excel, “You can chain functions, passing the output of one function as the input to another, allowing for an enormous number of potential computational pipelines. Each time Excel adds a function, the power and flexibility of Excel is multiplied, since that new function can be chained to a large number of existing functions.” This is very similar to the idea of composability, or “X Legos,” on Ethereum. 

Together, Turing completeness and composability mean that you can build smart contracts to compute anything, and then chain them together to build increasingly complex things, more quickly. It takes time to get the engine revving, but it should move quickly once it’s moving. 

That’s exactly what’s happening. After years of building in relative obscurity through the crypto winter, facing doubt that there was any actual use for any of this stuff, 2020 and early 2021 saw an explosion of real use cases for the Ethereum ecosystem. In Ethereum Announces First Quarter 2021 Results, James Wang included a Results Table highlighting the year’s progress:

Source: James Wang, Ethereum Announces First Quarter 2021 Results

Those are just absolutely massive numbers across a wide range of use cases. This is not one thing. It’s not just “price go up.” It’s a sign of the momentum and composability in the space, where improvements in one area feed directly into improvements in another: 

• Volume traded on Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) like Uniswap increased 76x to from $2.3 billion in Q1 2020 to $177 billion in Q1 2021. 

• Total Value Locked, or the amount of ETH staked in DeFi, increased 64x from $800 million to $52 billion. 

• Beyond finance, NFT art sales increased 562x from $700k to $396 million. 

Ethereum usage exploded in Q1, and while NFT sales have slowed, partially as a result of high gas fees and partially because the initial euphoria has died down, DeFi is still going strong: 

Source: DeFi Prime

From May 1st through May 22nd, just Uniswap and Sushiswap, the two largest Ethereum-based DEXes, handled $78 billion in transaction volume. Q2 will blow Q1 out of the water. 

Despite the explosion in activity and transaction volume, though, the question remains: what does that mean for ETH? 

How Ethereum Makes Money

I’ve been aware of Ethereum for a long time. I first bought (then sold) ETH in 2017, but it was speculative and I didn’t get it. The big question mark I had with Ethereum was how it made money. How does more activity on top of Ethereum translate into a higher price for ETH?

In the near future, the answer will be that more transactions mean higher yields for ETH holders and a decreasing supply of ETH. But that’s not how it works, yet. 

Let’s start with how it works today, look at the challenges of the current model, the proposed solutions, and what it will look like in the future. 

(Note: For a more in-depth explanation, listen to Justin Drake on Business Breakdowns)

Today

Today, when you want to transact on Ethereum, you need to use ETH. There are currently around 116 million ETH, and the price is loosely governed by supply and demand. More transactions on Ethereum means more demand for ETH which means higher price, all else equal. 

When you transact, say if you send another person ETH, a few things happen: 

• You send 1 ETH and the other person receives 1 ETH

• You pay gas fees, say .01 ETH

• Your account balance on the chain goes down by 1.01 ETH, theirs goes up by 1 ETH

To keep Ethereum running, it uses a Proof of Work consensus mechanism to trustlessly agree on the state of the blockchain. Bitcoin also uses Proof of Work, that’s where Ethereum got it from, although Bitcoin mining is able to be run on cheaper hardware and has 20x more miners than Ethereum, and is therefore more decentralized.

PoW achieves the same thing as your bank account balance going up and someone else’s going down when they send you money, except in the place of a centralized bank, there is a distributed network of miners who agree that these transactions occurred and that all balances are updated.

To do it, miners around the world race to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic problems in order to create a new block on the blockchain containing the new transactions. These problems are typically hard to solve — read: require a lot of energy — but easy to verify. When a block is entered into the blockchain, the transactions in it officially become part of the record. Miners who successfully create a block are rewarded with 2 freshly-minted ETH (down from 5 in the beginning) and all the transaction fees within the block. 

Those transaction fees, called gas, are what people pay to submit transactions to be included in the block. When a user sends someone ETH on Ethereum, or mints an NFT, or does any number of things that need to be validated on-chain, they have to pay a gas fee. That gas fee goes towards incentivizing miners to spend the money required, in the form of hardware and electricity, to solve the puzzle and create the block. 

So currently, the price of Ethereum is based on a combination of supply and demand, and the price it costs miners to secure the blockchain. To participate, you need ETH, and you need to pay the gas. Miners receive ETH in the form of newly-minted supply and your fees. Miners pay for hardware and electricity and taxes, and keep ~5% of their earnings. Today, most of the value accrues to GPU makers, electric utilities, and the government, with the miner’s portion competed down to close to 0. 

Challenges

There are a bunch of challenges with this system. 

1. It’s Slow. The Ethereum blockchain currently does somewhere around 19 transactions per second. Visa, for comparison, does about 1,700. 

2. It’s Expensive. The simplest transaction costs about $5 in gas fees, and when I minted The Great Online Game as an NFT with Jack Butcher a couple weeks ago, it cost nearly $1k to mint and auction it. 

3. It’s Volatile. Gas fees are based on auction, and change all of the time based on demand. That makes it hard to transact with confidence or predictability. 

4. It’s Inflationary. Unlike Bitcoin, there’s no hard cap on the number of ETH that could theoretically be minted, and Proof of Work requires minting a bunch of new ETH, which means growth leads to dilution for existing ETH holders. 

5. It’s Environmentally Unfriendly. Mining means using a lot of electricity. 

6. It’s Inefficient. Most of the money spent on transaction fees leaves the system — miners are forced to sell the ETH they earn to pay for electricity, hardware, and taxes. 

The fact that Ethereum has seen the adoption it has despite all of those challenges is impressive, but they remain real challenges. When I tweeted that ill-fated tweet asking for reasons not to buy ETH, many of the answers centered around one of the above, most commonly the cost of gas and inflation. 

Plus, increased demand for Ethereum-based dApps — more DeFi, more NFTs, more DAOs, more games — means more transaction fees, but those fees don’t really accrue to ETH holders. They leak out of the system to cover miners’ real-world, fiat costs in the Proof of Work process. 

So today, ETH’s price is based on demand for more ETH, like Bitcoin’s is, and like the dollar’s is. It isn’t tied to revenue, like a company’s is, but it will be soon. 

Proposed Solutions: EIP 1559 and Eth2 

One of the things that Bitcoin Maximalists like the most about bitcoin is that you can’t really change it. One of the things they don’t like about Ethereum is that you can change it. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

Two changes are coming to the Ethereum blockchain that aim to fix the challenges mentioned above.  

EIP-1559 is a proposal that changes how gas fees work by splitting them into two parts — a base fee and a tip. With EIP 1559, the base fee is burned on each transaction and the miner (and soon validator) keeps the tip. It sounds dull, but it’s huge, because burning will likely make ETH deflationary. Plus, the tip allows people who value better block positions to pay more. That might be important for DeFi participants trying to execute an arbitrage, for example. The proposal was approved in March and will go into effect in July (as part of the London hard fork).

Eth2is an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain itself that will shift consensus from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and introduce sharding. Eth2 is expected to make Ethereum more scalable, more secure, and more sustainable. The PoS chain, or Beacon Chain, is already live, and is expected to merge with the main chain some time in late 2021 or early 2022. 

Proof of Stake is a shift in how the network is secured, and who earns rewards. It means that instead of anyone in the world solving math problems to mine blocks, ETH holders can validate block transactions according to how many ETH they hold. Validators secure the network in exchange for yield in the form of tips and newly minted ETH. Ethereum claims that PoS will be more secure because validators will have ETH at stake, which can be destroyed if they try to cheat. Critics claim that staking puts more power into the hands of the people who hold the most ETH, making it less decentralized and therefore less secure. 

On the scalability side, sharding aims to increase throughput, or transactions per second, by 100x by creating 64 shard chains which validate transactions in parallel. Each shard will only need to validate a fraction of the total chain, instead of every miner needing to validate the entire chain today. 

Additionally, third-party Layer 2 solutions, like Polygon and Optimism, are already working to speed up transactions and lower fees by essentially batching transactions off-chain and settling on-chain in one transaction instead of many (there are intricacies, but this is close enough). L2 solutions could increase throughput another 100x, and combining Eth2 and L2 solutions could lead to a 10,000x improvement if the theory plays out in practice.  

Taken together, EIP 1559 and Eth2 could be revolutionary for ETH holders because they improve performance while dramatically altering where value accrues in the Ethereum ecosystem. 

The Future: Triple-Point, Ultra Sound Money

In 2019, David Hoffman wrote an essay called Ether: A New Model for Money. If you want to go deeper, you should read it. In it, he cites a 1997 Journal of Portfolio Management paper by Robert Greer, What is an Asset Class Anyway?, which says that there are three asset superclasses: 

• Capital Assets are productive and generate value or cash-flow. Examples include equities, bonds, or rentable real estate. 

• Transformable/Consumable Assets can be consumed one time, transformed into another asset, and their consumption produces economic yield. Think energy or commodities. 

• Store-of-Value Assets are scarce, cannot be consumed, just transferred, and their value persists over time and space. Examples include gold, currencies, art, or bitcoin. 

Hoffman argues that Ether, as Turing complete programmable money, can be all three once EIP 1559 and Eth2 go through, and further, can be all three at the same time. He calls this triple-point money, referring to the concept in thermodynamics that at the exact right temperature and pressure, a substance can exist as a solid, liquid, and gas at the same time. 

How they occur simultaneously with Ether is beyond the scope here, what’s important to understand is the three phases in which Ether can exist: 

• Store of Value. ETH is locked up as collateral for DeFi transactions. For example, you can put up ETH to secure a loan or to provide liquidity to a DEX. Currently, nearly 10 million ETH are locked in DeFi. 

Source: DeFi Pulse

• Consumable Asset. With EIP 1559, gas fees will act like gasoline in a car. Any time something happens on Ethereum, gas needs to be burned, decreasing the overall supply. 

• Capital Asset. Ether acts as a capital asset in a few ways. Owning ETH represents a share of the Ethereum network, like owning equity in a company. Once staked, ETH gives its owner the right to do work for the network by becoming a Validator and a right to collect fees generated by the network.

Source: David Hoffman

So how does ETH make money? Where does value accrue? 

There are a lot of ways to earn money on your ETH — staking, yield farming, liquidity pools, validating, and more — but let’s look at the simplest, just owning ETH like you’d own a stock. 

Once EIP-1559 is implemented and the Eth2 merge is complete, value accrues to the people who hold ETH, in a few ways: 

• Tips and Issuance. Tips and new issuance go to ETH holders and are retained in the system (net of taxes) instead of going to miners to pay for hardware and electricity.

• Burned Gas. Burned gas permanently removes supply from the ecosystem, and at certain transaction rates, actually decreases the overall supply of ETH each year. 

We’ll get into the implications of those two things in the bull case, but before we do, we need to understand why Ethereum is defensible. Why can’t another L1 just come in and steal its volume? 

Legitimacy and Lindy

Since Ethereum kind of behaves like a business, with the added benefit of its own currency, we can analyze its strategic position like we would a business. It benefits from brand and network effects. 

In March, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote a post titled The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy, in which he argues that the real value of any crypto asset comes not from actually owning the thing, but from legitimacy. He defines legitimacy like this: 

Legitimacy is a pattern of higher-order acceptance. An outcome in some social context is legitimate if the people in that social context broadly accept and play their part in enacting that outcome, and each individual person does so because they expect everyone else to do the same.

If people believe that other people believe something, it makes more sense for them to believe that thing as well, and act accordingly. On the popular Ethereum podcast Bankless, hosts Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman call legitimacy “the theory of everything for crypto.” They listed a series of questions people often ask about the space:

• Why is cryptocurrency trading over $2 trillion dollars?

• Why are NFTs valuable? 

• How come you can’t fork your own bitcoin and make it valuable? 

• Why do we have confidence that Ethereum’s monetary policy will only change towards decreasing inflation? 

The answer to all of them, according to Adams and Hoffman, is legitimacy. 

In the post, Vitalik highlights six ways that legitimacy can come about. Two are particularly relevant here: 

• Legitimacy by performance: if the outputs of a process lead to results that satisfy people, then that process can gain legitimacy (eg. successful dictatorships are sometimes described in this way).

• Legitimacy by continuity: if something was legitimate at time T, it is by default legitimate at time T+1.

Performance and continuity create the Lindy Effect, which says that the longer something lasts, the longer it can be expected to last. Something that has been around for a year is expected to be around for another year, but something that has been around for 100 years is expected to be around for another 100 years. 

This is an observable phenomenon. Amazon is more likely to be around in 30 years than a new startup, our kids are more likely to listen to the Beatles than to Olivia Rodrigo, and our grandkids’ grandkids’ grandkids’ are more likely to read Socrates than Dan Brown. 

Legitimacy helps explain the Lindy Effect. The longer something has been around, the more people can expect that other people will continue to use it. In the Excel piece, we described a couple more reasons something can be Lindy: 

1. Quality. Some things are just better than others, and the quality that allowed them to survive until now will allow them to continue to survive in the future. 

2. Network Effects. As people recognize the quality of a thing and as it lasts longer, more people use it, so more people build on top of it. That creates a Two-Sided Platform Network Effect. More users attract more developers, more developers attract more users, and so on. 

For Excel, the network effect comes from the fact that developers (people building models) know that other people use Excel, so they build their models there, which means that more people need to use Excel, which means that the next person building a model is more likely to use Excel.

In Ethereum’s case, more dApps on Ethereum means more users on Ethereum, and more users mean it makes sense for more developers to build dApps. 

iOS is an example of Two-Sided Platform Network Effects. The more people who have iPhones, the more likely developers are to make iPhone apps, and the more iPhone apps there are, the more likely someone is to buy an iPhone. In Apple’s case, this network effect is so strong that it takes a 30% cut of all App Store revenues — whether through the purchase of an app, or through in-app purchases. 

While they’ve been doing it for years, that model is starting to show cracks. Fortnite-maker Epic Games is battling Apple in the courtroom over the fees, and just this past week, Twitter was atwitter over the fact that Apple will make more from ticketed Twitter Spaces than Twitter itself will. Whether it’s monopolistic or not, Apple’s fees feel extractive. 

What makes Ethereum’s network effect potentially stronger, and potentially more long-lasting, is that it aligns incentives in a way that traditional software doesn’t. 

Both users and developers hold ETH — its the most used token in the Great Online Game — and benefit from its appreciation. With EIP-1559 and the Eth2 merge, the more ETH is used, the more value accrues to its holders. Additionally, the more ETH is worth, the harder it is to attack. 

In Ether: A New Model for Money, Hoffman said that fees paid to Ethereum validators act as a wall that protects Ethereum: “The height of the wall is highly correlated with the total fees produced by the network. The height of the wall is the cost of attacking Ethereum.” 

Solana’sBen Sparango took it a step further when we spoke, explaining to me that it’s in the best interest of everyone involved for the value of the underlying blockchain to exceed the value of all of the dApps built on top of it. If that weren’t the case, bad actors would be incentivized to spend what it takes to attack the blockchain to drain those dApps of their value. 

The implication is pretty wild: projects that build on top of certain blockchains are actually financially incentivized to support the value of the underlying blockchain in order to secure their project. They don’t pay for AWS or security software; hosting and security is provided by the blockchain. Instead, projects built on Solana may pay out of their Treasury to support the price of SOL, and projects built on Ethereum may pay out of their Treasury to support the price of ETH. 

That’s a Platform Network Effect unlike any other. It’s hard to imagine an app voluntarily paying to pump up Apple’s stock price. 

In traditional software, the Bill Gates Line, coined by Ben Thompson, describes what makes something a platform according to Gates: 

A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.

Ethereum has a built-in Bill Gates Line. By owning and using ETH, and making ETH more valuable through usage, the value of everybody that uses Ethereum exceeds the value of Ethereum itself. But they’re also incentivized to make Ethereum more valuable in the process. It blurs the Bill Gates Line by so tightly aligning incentives that the line becomes irrelevant. 

Importantly, this wall is also why the narrative is so important, and why narrative reflexivity is so powerful in crypto. More demand for ETH doesn’t just increase prices; it shifts some of the burden of security from builders to investors, heightens the wall, makes the network more secure, increases the attractiveness of building on Ethereum, which makes ETH more valuable, heightens the wall further, and so on. It’s a narrative-led flywheel. 

Definitionally, then, most of the value accrues to Layer 1 and those who hold the Layer 1 tokens. It makes being the Layer 1 on top of which everything is built the prime spot in the value chain. 

Because of that, and because of Ethereum’s shortcomings to date, a handful of L1 competitors have sprung up that seek to challenge Ethereum’s dominance, or at least pick off some of its use cases. 

L1 Landscape

When I first made the connection between Ethereum and Excel, I didn’t realize just how deep it went. In Excel Never Dies, Ben and I wrote that, “Excel’s flexibility lets businesses build all sorts of work flows and processes in the humble spreadsheet. That creates an emergent product roadmap for the B2B software industry.”

The result is the Unbundling of Excel, which has created software companies collectively worth half a trillion dollars. 

Similarly, a handful of blockchains/L1s are aiming to thrive where Ethereum is weak. As a refresher, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other blockchains are Layer 1 in the Web3 tech stack. For Bitcoin, pretty much everything, aside from Lightning Network, happens at Layer 1. Hold BTC, send BTC, track BTC. For Ethereum, most of the magic comes in the interaction with Layer 2, the application layer. 

Source: readthedocs.io, examples mine

The second layer is where builders create Lego blocks of protocols and smart contracts that can be arranged in countless combinations and formations to do anything from mint art to trade crypto, directly, without the need for a third-party. It’s also where L2 scaling solutions like Polygon and Optimism live. 

When I asked Twitter for compelling reasons not to buy Ethereum, other than Bitcoin Maxis, the most common nonsensical responses came from people shilling other L1s. There are a lot of Something Maxis, people who believe their thing is the one and only solution, but I subscribe to the idea that each successful L1 or L2 will focus on what it does best and interoperate with others who do something else best. I’m a Maximalist Minimalist. 

To be fair, before digging in, I also would have thought that other L1s were the biggest risk to Ethereum. But in talking to people much smarter in the space, and comparing the situation to Excel, I think the most credible L1s are complementary, and that the ones that are trying to compete directly will lose outright. 

Chief among the direct competitors is Cardano ($ADA). A lot of people in my replies were shilling Cardano. Then I looked at the website: 

“Cardano is a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.” I read and write a lot of words and I have no fucking idea what that means. The whole site has strong Quibi vibes, like seasoned execs heard about the blockchain and tried to make one that woke kids would appreciate. Plus, it’s trying to compete directly with Ethereum via smart contracts and faster speeds, and is somehow based on peer-reviewed research? ngmi. 

Others, like Avalanche and Hedera seem to be building for the enterprise. It’s an interesting approach, but not a huge threat to what Ethereum is going for. 

There are others, though, that are more interesting and less directly competitive, aimed at serving use cases that Ethereum doesn’t serve well.  If Ethereum sits in the middle of the Pareto Frontier, these others move up or down on the line: 

Source: Sino Global Capital, h/t @luxetveritasil

They make trade-offs to optimize for certain characteristics, and potentially use Ethereum as a settlement layer, where its greater security will give whales more comfort holding high-value accounts and digital items. 

Two of the L1s taking this approach that I’m most interested in are Flow and Solana. 

Flow

When Axiom Labs launched the first NFTs, CryptoKitties, they overwhelmed Ethereum with volume and overwhelmed buyers with transaction fees. In response, the team set up Dapper Labs and created the Flow Blockchain.

Dapper Labs, and its NBA TopShot, were the darlings of the recent NFT boom. They recently raised a round at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Coatue, to continue to build out Flow and expand the ecosystem built on top of it. I’ve talked to a few consumer-focused NFT startups in the past few weeks that are building on Flow with funding from Dapper Labs. It’s a win-win for both sides — startups get funding and support from the company that has had the most success scaling NFTs to non-crypto people, and Dapper gets more usage on, and consumers of, Flow. 

On Invest Like the Best, a16z partner Chris Dixon explained how Flow and Ethereum might interoperate: 

Imagine a world where you’re playing a game, it has virtual goods, and those virtual goods are interacting with Flow. But then some of your virtual goods get really valuable. You say, « You know what? I want to put these in the bank. » So you move them over to Ethereum, using a trustless bridge, which is a way for NFTs and cryptocurrencies to move across blockchains. And maybe I pay a little bit higher fee on Ethereum, because Ethereum makes a different set of trade offs. It’s trading off performance for higher security.

As Flow brings more non-crypto people into Web3, both Flow and Ethereum benefit. 

Solana

The L1 that I’m most excited about besides Ethereum is Solana(disclosure: I own some SOL). 

Solana is likely the fastest and lowest cost blockchain in operation, capable of 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), compared to Ethereum’s current 19 TPS, at a cost of less than one-tenth of one cent. This thread from Sino Global is chock full of information on Solana for the curious.

Why we are bullish on Solana.

Not investment advice.

— Sino Global Capital (@sinoglobalcap) March 21, 2021

I spoke to Solana founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, and he told me that what Solana is trying to optimize for is instantaneous censorship-resistance over very short periods of time to create fair and open market access to data. He wants to build the execution layer for finance, not necessarily competitive with Ethereum, but with the New York Stock Exchange. Where those transactions settle, and where people hold their coins, doesn’t matter as much to him. 

Like Eth2, Solana uses a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, but unlike Eth2 or most of the other scaling solutions, Solana is single-shard. Everything happens on the same chain. They achieve that by using something called Proof of History, which isn’t a consensus mechanism but a source of time, or as Anatoly explained it, “the implementation of the arrow of time in math.” Proof of History uses cryptographic timestamps to sequentially order each transaction that occurs on Solana to provide verifiable ordering without requiring all nodes to agree simultaneously.

That has obvious use cases in finance. Just as Ethereum users may be willing to pay a larger tip to move up in the block order, Solana makes money through Miner Extractable Value (or MEV). It sounds evil, but it isn’t. It’s like Payment for Order Flow, but open to anyone in the world with the right hardware instead of just hedge funds. It’s hoping to commoditize and democratize what high-frequency traders are able to do today. 

There are also non-financial products building on top of Solana. 

The Solana Ecosystem

Audius, the web3 music streaming platform, builds on both Ethereum and Solana. It issues and manages the $AUDIO token on Ethereum, but it runs upvotes and likes, things that need high speed and low-cost to work as well as a Web2 counterpart, on Solana, powered by the same engine used by some of the most sophisticated finance professionals in the world. 

That’s one of the most interesting things about blockchain technology — the ability to build a super high-performance machine that anyone in the world can plug into and use, even if they could never afford to otherwise. 

Here, too, something that I first thought was competitive with Ethereum is actually a complement. By optimizing for a high-speed trading use case not currently possible on Ethereum, Solana is bringing more financial activity on-chain. By enabling microtransactions like votes and likes, on-chain, and improving the user experience for products that also run on Ethereum, Solana is improving the web3 experience and onboarding more users. 

Plus, Solana is building compatibility with Ethereum that would allow it to behave like an Ethereum L2, but with the functionality of a L1, including the ability to deposit USD directly at miniscule fees. More on-ramps is net positive for the ecosystem as a whole, and Ethereum sits at the center of the ecosystem. This thread captures the argument well. 

1/33

Let’s talk about $SOL, where it’s going and why I’m bullish on how $SOL and $ETH actually work together to provide each other value that help grow their share.

I think this will easily bring $SOL to a top 3-5 project and in turn push $ETH over $BTC long-term. pic.twitter.com/IphHl7TqoQ

— Adam Cochran (@adamscochran) April 22, 2021

If you come at the king, you best not miss. Just as nothing has killed Excel’s core use case but plenty of multi-billion dollar companies have built businesses by focusing on specific use cases, none of the ETH-killers are going to kill ETH. To the contrary, given the nature of web3 and how early the ecosystem is, more complements bringing more demand is a positive. 

The Bull Case for Ethereum 

More demand and less supply leads to higher prices. More fees accrue to fewer coins. 

I’ve written a lot of words up to here, but the bull case for Ethereum is that simple if you believe a few things.

• Web3 will continue to grow. I do. I’ve written about it many times. There are too many smart people building too many crazy things that wouldn’t be possible without this technology for it not to. 

• EIP 1559 and Eth2 will Go Through Smoothly. This is certainly a risk, but people seem optimistic. 

• Ethereum will remain the main L1 for web3. At this point, Ethereum’s network effects are too strong to overcome. Developers, users, and even other L1s are building on or compatible with Ethereum. 

If you believe all of those things, then here’s the bull case. 

Demand Will Go Up

Between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, there was a massive increase in demand across all categories, from DeFi to NFTs to virtual worlds. Transaction fees increased 200x. 

All of that happened while usability was rough and fees were exorbitantly high. As my friend Jon Wu (who you should follow to get smarter on all of this) explained it:

This past year was as bad as it’s ever going to get for Ethereum. It’s only going to get better from here, for a few reasons. 

First, assuming everything goes as planned with EIP 1559 and the Eth2 merge, transaction speeds will go up, and gas fees will become both lower and more predictable. It will be easier and cheaper to transact. Lower transaction fees and faster transaction times should lead to more transactions. 

Second, even if what we just experienced was a bubble, short-term bubbles are long-term useful! They attract money and talent to the space, and money and talent will mix to create new products that attract new users and more demand. I’ve seen dozens of pitches from strong teams leaving traditional startups to build web3 products, many on top of Ethereum, in the past couple of months alone. More products and better experiences will attract more users. ETH is an indexed bet on that growth more than a bet on the success of any one project. 

Strong trends, lower prices, better experiences, and new products = growing demand. 

Lower Supply

For many ETH bulls, this is the crux of the argument: EIP 1559 means that ETH becomes deflationary. 

Bitcoin issuance is capped at 21 million. This has been the strongest bull case for BTC. You can’t just print more, like the evil central banks, it’s math, and it’s capped. It’s sound money.

The knock against Ethereum is that there is no cap. Theoretically, enough Ethereum users could decide to keep printing ETH and inflating supply. If you’re going to have an inflationary asset, why not just use fiat 🤮 amiright? 

But EIP 1559 and Eth2 flip that. With Eth2, new issuance to reward validators is expected to drop dramatically versus Proof of Work rewards. With EIP 1559, by burning ETH in every transaction, assuming a conservative amount of daily transaction fees and that 70% of the gas fee is burnt and 30% is sent as a tip, then more ETH will be burnt than issued every day. Together, the supply of ETH will actually begin decreasing after EIP 1559 and the Eth2 merge. 

It’s better than sound money. It’s Ultra Sound Money. 🦇 🔊

To understand the numbers, check out the models that Justin Drake built on ETH Peak Supply and The Road to 100M ETH. 

The implications here are enormous. 

Directly, it means lower supply meeting growing or accelerating demand, which should lead to higher prices. 

Even wilder, if people and institutions are holding BTC because of its use as a non-inflationary Store of Value, might they switch to Ethereum instead if the Ultra Sound Money thesis plays out? Could Ethereum flip Bitcoin as the most valuable cryptocurrency? 

But it doesn’t stop there, because ETH isn’t just a store of value. 

Value Accrues to ETH Holders 

ETH ownership also grants the right to do work for the Ethereum network as a validator and earn a share of fees. 

In Proof of Work, miners need to sell the ETH that they earn to cover costs. Today, that creates a daily sell pressure of 22.3k ETH, according to another Justin Drake model. That means that every day, 22.3k newly-created ETH, about $50 million worth, are dumped on the market. With Proof of Stake, the only costs are taxes, which Drake assumes to be 50%, and new issuance drops from 13.5k ETH to 2.1k ETH. That leads to a net sell pressure reduction, from 22.3k ETH per day to 2.6k ETH per day. That’s the equivalent of roughly $40 million per day in new demand.

Plus, instead of leaking out of the system, the value accrue to validators. Another Drake model estimates that people who stake their ETH (meaning lock it up to secure the network) can earn a 25% APR including new issuance and tips. 

In sum: 

• Ethereum has strong network effects and will remain at the center of the web3 ecosystem as it continues to grow, creating more transactions and more fees

• ETH will become a deflationary asset as demand for it increases

• ETH will become a capital asset that earns holders high APR 

I don’t even know how you price that, but of course, Justin Drake tried, putting his best guess somewhere between $13-51k. 

Risks, More Caveats, and a Conclusion

Whenever you’re reading Not Boring, you need to remember a couple things: 

Part of the reason I’m so bullish on ETH, the asset, is that the potential of Ethereum, the technology, excites me. ETH is a ticket to web3, but it’s also an excuse to keep going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. What I look for in an investment — returns + participation + education + fun — might be completely different than what you’re looking for. 

This past weekend showed just how volatile crypto can be, and how pegged everything still is to bitcoin. If you were in ETH for a quick trade, this weekend could have been nauseating. If you’re in it because you want to learn and explore web3, it was a great opportunity to buy more tokens to play the game at half-off. 

Despite my overall bullishness, there are real risks ahead for Ethereum, both macro and specific. 

On the macro side, what happens if Tether blows up? What if governments crack down on crypto generally? What if rates rise ahead of schedule and risk assets tank? What if Elon Musk tweets again? One of the scariest things about this past weekend’s sell-off is that there wasn’t a clear and obvious catalyst. Crypto markets can be wild. 

Somewhere in between the micro and the macro, there’s a question: what if people outside of the early adopter set just don’t really care about decentralization? What if more centralized solutions like Binance Smart Chain, which comes with a built-in user base of millions of people who trade on Binance, are decentralized enough and more performant? 

On the micro side, Ethereum faces some real challenges. What if EIP 1559 doesn’t go through as planned? What if the Eth2 merge is delayed? What if sharding doesn’t work as planned, and creates more issues than improvements? One very real possibility is that sharding makes the Legos built on Ethereum less composable, weakening one of the most exciting aspects of the network. 

Maybe the biggest issue facing ETH is adoption of fragmented Layer 2 scaling solutions. While L2 solutions hold the potential to dramatically improve performance, they present two main challenges, one to Ethereum, and one to ETH:

• Ethereum: Adoption of fragmented L2 solutions may make composability more difficult, as execution happens in L2, settles on L1, and then goes back to another L2 for another part of the transaction. Ideally, one or two L2 solutions emerge victorious, but a world in which there are a number of L2s may strengthen Ethereum’s network effect while weakening the product experience. 

• ETH. Layer 2 solutions are called rollups because they roll up a bunch of transactions into one transaction that settles on Layer 1. Maybe 100 transactions happen on L2, and the whole group shows up on L1 as one transaction. That would decrease transaction fees by 100x unless better performance and lower prices from L2 leads to a 100x increase in transactions or L2 handles transactions that represent new demand because they’re not possible at current speed and prices. 

Admittedly, I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion on the topic. This is an area for more exploration, and maybe a future post.

If nothing else, I hope this piece changed the way that you think about Ethereum and makes you want to keep exploring for yourself. That’s the fun here. 

Normies are getting ETH-pilled, the narrative is changing, and the most bullish thing for Ether is to be understood.

*  *  *

The Alto CryptoIRA lets you buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies with your retirement savings. You can trade any cryptocurrency available on Coinbase right in your Alto CryptoIRA account, and get the benefits of tax-free or tax-deferred gains. Crypto taxes are a nightmare. Alto lets you trade or hodl cryptocurrencies today, and deal with the taxes only after you retire and withdraw the money. On average, 70% of Americans’ net worth is in retirement accounts, and there are $11 trillion in IRAs alone, but most IRAs are deeply underweight alternative assets compared to professional investors and endowments. More and more investors, me included, are adding crypto to the mix to diversify their portfolios and hedge against inflation. I’m moving money over as we speak to buy ETH (fact, not investment advice!). To set up your Alto Crypto IRA, use this link below and get $50 off on crypto custody fees.

À moins que vous ne travailliez pour McDonald’s, il n’y a pas de déjeuner gratuit et la crypto-monnaie n’est pas différente. L’écosystème regorge d’opportunités de gagner votre «skin-in-the-game» numérique si cela ne vous dérange pas de retrousser vos manches.

«Mais je ne peux pas coder mon dîner au micro-ondes! Comment puis-je empiler des Sats sans doctorat en DLT?! »

Eh bien, mon ami analphabète smart-contract, voici 5 façons de gagner de la crypto-monnaie sans investir:

1. Community Management / Modération

Qu’on le veuille ou non, si vous aimez la crypto-monnaie, vous faites partie de la communauté (l’un de nous, l’un de nous!).

Les plates-formes communautaires en ligne, telles que Telegram et Discord, sont une ruche de plaisanteries sur la blockchain et, la plupart, sinon toutes, les communautés de pièces respectables auront un ou plusieurs espaces pour que leurs gens puissent se retrouver et discuter. Certains d’entre eux sont un lieu où fleurissent les mêmes esprits, et tout le monde s’entend comme de joyeux petits campeurs. La plupart, cependant, ne le sont pas. Les modérateurs, les administrateurs, les artisans de la paix, appelez-les comme vous pouvez, sont un rouage nécessaire dans la machine du fonctionnement de la salle.

Utilisez ces compétences humaines! Rejoignez des communautés!

2. Création de contenu

Pouvez-vous lire? Eh bien, vous pouvez écrire alors! Il existe de nombreuses plates-formes sur lesquelles vous pouvez monétiser vos connaissances, vos opinions ou vos fanboys stupides avec des mots.

En plus du meilleur site sur le marché pour que les écrivains développent leur voix, Hackernoon (bien sûr!), Vous pouvez indirectement augmenter votre audience dans des endroits comme Medium et vous déplacer pour monétiser votre expertise. Ou, si vous préférez des gains plus petits et plus instantanés, Publish0x paie les lecteurs et les écrivains directement dans des conseils de micro-crypto-monnaie. Si votre article devient viral, ces centimes peuvent s’additionner!

3. Parachutages / Campagnes de primes

Les médias sociaux sont aujourd’hui incontournables. Si vous n’avez toujours pas de compte Twitter, vous passez à côté de plus que les diatribes folles d’Elon Musk! Presque toutes les pièces et jetons valables ont une présence sur les réseaux sociaux, et ils doivent sensibiliser et retweets pour leurs annonces impressionnantes de leurs annonces. Vous pouvez créer un sou numérique ou deux simplement en partageant. Consultez des sites tels que Coinmarketcap ou airdrop-detective pour les campagnes actives!

Les parachutages récents que vous auriez pu réclamer incluent Uniswap (valeur maximale d’environ 16 000 $) et Cope (valeur maximale d’environ 12 000 $).

4. Esports et poker

Vous avez les yeux sur un plus gros prix? Pourquoi ne pas vous essayer à des tournois Esports crypto-monnaie?

Au cours des derniers mois, la communauté décentralisée avec laquelle je travaille, TON GRATUIT, a parrainé des dizaines de compétitions pour les joueurs de CS: GO, PUBG, DOTA2 et plus, distribuant des milliers de dollars de cristaux TON aux gagnants.

Et si vous préférez vos jeux à base de cartes, Poker TON organise des freerolls quotidiens, ouverts à tous!

5. Concours et subventions

En combinant tout ce qui précède, les concours ont tendance à se produire principalement avec des communautés basées sur DAO. Les subventions sont similaires mais sont généralement offertes en réponse à un appel d’offres aux représentants d’une communauté.

Free TON a actuellement littéralement des millions de dollars de récompenses disponibles pour ceux qui ont le temps et les compétences nécessaires pour participer et gagner des concours.

Les concours récents incluent des relations publiques décentralisées, la conception de NFT bilatéraux et même la chance d’être un ambassadeur de Free TON en frais payés à Dubaï pour la conférence AIBC!

Pour voir tous les concours actifs sur Free TON en ce moment, consultez https://gov.freeton.org/main.

TL; DR – Investissez l’effort, pas les bénéfices

Comme le dit le vieil adage:

N’investissez pas ce que vous ne pouvez pas vous permettre de perdre.

Bien que l’huile de coude ne soit pas gratuite, elle vous permet de revendiquer l’avenir de cette économie florissante sans sacrifier le niveau de vie. Alors impliquez-vous dans le bon projet, et qui sait où cela vous mènera!

Histoires liées

Mots clés

There is one universal truth in the crypto space – whoever gets in early, wins!

Crypto aggregators list projects when they get significant amounts of traction. Discovering and identifying projects when they are at an early stage is very difficult. Missing out on those projects means you’re leaving out massive returns on the table. 

Is there a platform or an aggregator to discover early-stage crypto projects before they get to the mainstream? Absolutely, and we call them Crypto Launchpads. Think of these platforms as AngelList crypto. 

Crypto launchpads have been gaining tremendous amounts of attention. They allow you to identify early-stage crypto projects and participate in their presale rounds. They also have a vetting process in place to avoid scams and rug-pulls, so you can invest with peace of mind without worrying about losing your hard-earned money. 

In this guide, we will be discussing some of the most popular crypto launchpads that are available today.

Let’s dig in!

Binance is the leading cryptocurrency exchange and fastest-growing trading platform based on trading volumes. Launched in 2017, Binance, as a platform, has not limited itself to just being a cryptocurrency exchange. Instead, it has expanded into a complete ecosystem for all kinds of crypto services as it establishes a strong foothold in the fastest-growing sector.

The platform is lauded for its contributions to the DeFi industry and crypto ecosystem through its native token launch platform, Binance Launchpad. Binance Launchpad functions as a token launch platform that facilitates early-stage crypto projects to raise funds using IEOs.

Binance Launchpad is known as the first successful example of a crypto launchpad. With numerous successful projects under its belt, Binance has raised millions of dollars for upcoming and promising projects such as BitTorrent, Injective Protocol, and PancakeSwap. 

Projects powered by the Binance Launchpads have seen significant growth in their numbers, reach, and success because the platform offers their IEO tokens to the 13 million active users on Binance exchange.

Binance Launchpad isn’t just a platform for putting up tokens for sales; instead, it also serves as an advisory service for upcoming projects. Binance helps streamline, motivate, and mentor upcoming crypto projects with their experience and insights. 

Binance ensures the projects can access the best mentorship and marketing services so they can focus on the most critical developmental and technological aspects of the project. 

Note that projects listed on Binance Launchpad aren’t just your usual projects. These projects are survivors of Binance’s rigorous review and verification processes, where Binance determines if the project is up to its standards.

Some of the factors that Binance factors in for the upcoming projects include:

• Promising project development roadmap 
• Potential for large-scale adoption
• A dedicated and experienced team
• Ability to benefit the expansion of a broader crypto ecosystem

Once projects go through a selection process, they get featured on the Binance Launchpad to over 13 million active users on Binance who may be interested in participating and investing in the project’s token offerings. 

Moreover, before investing in any project, users can do their own research via the platform’s research portal, Binance Research, where they can find all the key details of the project like: 

• Project metrics
• The team behind it
• Tokenomics
• Overview and use-cases
• Roadmap, updates, and business development
• Updated development progress
• Activity and a community overview
• Community and social channels

All users have to do is complete their Binance verification processes. Binance ensures that tokens are sold in compliance with regulatory requirements.

A promising new entrant to the launchpad space, Red Kite is a platform where they launch hand-picked projects and allow investors to participate in a transparent and assured token sale process. 

There are two main reasons why promising crypto projects can’t raise enough capital, i.e., poor marketing and investor’s fear of scams. Americans have lost a little over $80 million in crypto scams since October 2020, a 1,000% increase from 2019. 

If we look at the other side of the picture, promising crypto projects can’t be discovered by retail investors, which is a big reason why they end up investing in rug-pulls or exit scams because they had better marketing and discovery. 

Unlike other crypto launchpads, the Red Kite launchpad aims to solve these problems with its unique approach for investors and those crypto projects that are struggling to raise capital. 

For crypto projects – RedKite is backed by the community, influencers, and marketing partners to help your project get in front of the investors. 

For investors – All the crypto projects on the Red Kite launchpad are hand-picked, and they go through a very rigorous vetting process to enhance investors’ confidence and protect their interests. 

Red Kite aims to become a safer platform where investors can select the hand-picked and vetted projects without worrying about a rug pull or an exit scam. This doesn’t end here; Red Kite launchpad offers distinctive features that differentiate it from the rest of the ecosystem players. 

Multi-chain support – Red Kite supports both Ethereum and BSC pools out of the box. It will soon support Polkadot and become the first launchpad on the Polkadot network with flexible pool types and whitelist conditions. 

Tier and Reputation – One of the biggest problems in any pre-sale round of a token is price manipulation. Red Kite launchpad has a tier-based reputation system that monitors each participant’s behavior and assigns reputation points. Any malicious activity will affect the participant’s reputation and his ability to participate in the subsequent launches.

Fairness – If you have participated in an ERC-20 token pre-sale, you might have heard the term ‘gas war,’ where participants bid higher gas prices to discourage small investors from participating in the pre-sale. Red Kite launchpad has implemented a lane-based swap system that allows each participant to get an opportunity to join based on their tier. 

Integrated vesting schedule – Unlike other launchpads, Red Kite launchpad has a distribution portal that will allow projects to vest their tokens in pre-sale or post-sale secondary offerings. 

Parachain Crowdloan – Red Kite launchpad will fully support crowdloan campaigns to secure parachain slots on Kusama and Polkadot. Projects will be able to collect DOT or KSM tokens to win the parachain auction.

Red Kite is part of the PolkaFoundry ecosystem and supports the platform’s native PKF token as a utility token. Investors have to hold PKF tokens to participate in the token sale rounds on the Red Kite launchpad. 

Red Kite launchpad now fully supports Coinbase Wallet and BSC Wallet and has integrated Blockpass to secure the KYC process. This is just the beginning for Red Kite, and it aims to evolve from just being a launchpad to offer a full suite of DeFi services in the future.

TrustSwap is often lauded to bring the evolution of Defi transactions as it solves major issues with subscriptions, split payments, and cross-chain token swaps. TrustSwap initially emerged as a trustless P2P escrow service that expanded its vision to incorporate some of the most revolutionary services in the blockchain into the DeFi ecosystem through smart contracts. 

TrustSwap aims to promote the mass adoption of DeFi products by introducing Decentralized Subscription and payment models, cross-chain and multi-currency support, and trustless escrow and split payments through smart contracts.

Moreover, TrustSwap continues to expand and contribute to the TrustSwap ecosystem by introducing its native project launchpad, called TrustSwap Launchpad. The TrustSwap launchpad is a full-service launchpad for emerging crypto projects that want to utilize the security, trustless-ness, and sustainability. 

TrustSwap has engineered a committed community around its ecosystem. It allows users to stake a minimum of 4,000 SWAP tokens, the platform’s native token, to gain early access to promising crypto projects.

Trust Swap aims to mitigate immediate sell-offs and rug-pulls after token launches through its token lock-up mechanism called the SmartLaunch toolkit. The SmartLaunch toolkit is a customizable, full-audited service that locks up tokens for the team, developers, and early adopters until a certain development milestone or waiting period is achieved. 

The SmartLaunch system gives all parties, including investors and the team behind the project, a sense of security and confidence that nobody will put each other under the bus. Moreover, it holds the development team accountable to their community through its decentralized split payment and escrow service with respect to concrete achievements. 

Projects selected by Trust Swap gain access to an avenue of benefits such as large-scale publicity, trust from the community, marketing support, and visibility. Since its launch in September 2020, Trust Swap has raised over $20 million in funding for various emerging crypto projects. These projects include the likes of Chain Games, Glitch Finance, SOTA, and BitCashpay.

Established in late 2020, Polkastarter is undoubtedly one of the more recent additions to the list. The Polkastarter platform has a lot of promise considering it attracted over 200,000 enthusiastic investors. 

Polkastarter is an upcoming decentralized exchange built on the Polkadot network for token pools and auctions. Polkastarter serves as a decentralized crowdfunding launchpad for early-stage crypto projects to raise capital, increase outreach, build a dedicated community, and gain access to the platform’s benefits. 

Polkastarter is established on highly interoperable Polkadot network. It is benefits from all the features of Polkadot, including the liquidity of Ethereum and other leading crypto projects. A lot of this platform’s potential attributes to its cross-chain development. The Polkastarter platform is designed to enable projects to launch their own interoperable token pools. 

Given that leading platforms such as Ethereum and Bitcoin still struggle with network congestion, the Polkadot ecosystem and the Polkastarter platform can be very rewarding and beneficial for upcoming projects. 

Polkastarter is developed with familiar auction systems such as sealed-bid auctions, dutch auctions, and dynamic and fixed ratio swap. Other features include password-protected private pools, whitelisting, smart contract token swaps, and price alerts, which helps Polkastarter stand out as a unique platform for upcoming projects. 

Moreover, the Polkastarter protocol is entirely decentralized. The platform is open-source and has a permission-less environment. This means that any developer can integrate Polkastarter’s core framework into their own project to create and hold fixed token auctions. 

Polkastarter also has a native utility token called the POLS token. Users can use the POLS tokens to pay for transaction fees and participate in the governance through Polkastarter Council for Governance. To promote a user-friendly and rewarding ecosystem, Polkastarter allows users to earn rewards by staking POLS tokens and gain early access to upcoming token pools through staking. 

However, note that users must provide liquidity before they can stake their POLS tokens and earn rewards. Polkastarter aspires to be the largest decentralized token launch pool and auction platform in the market; therefore, it aims to develop a tokenomics structure catered to handle a level of global volume by offering exclusive incentives and rewards to its users for providing liquidity to upcoming token pools. 

Polkastarter plans to reward liquidity providers in POLS tokens every week, relative to the percentage of the pool they have provided liquidity to. Note that the rewards will appear for 24 hours so users can claim their rewards. However, if users fail to collect their rewards within 24 hours, their rewards will be redistributed later. 

SpiderDAO, MahaDAO, Kambria, Fire Protocol, and Exceedme are some of the top-performing launchpad pools on Polkastarter. Interestingly, these token sales sold out in minutes.

Unicrypt is another budding blockchain platform that aims to create the best possible environment for liquidity providers by emphasizing users’ trust. Similar to Polkastarter, Unicrypt was introduced to the crypto space in late 2020. Unicrypt envisioned launching an autonomous platform that would help emerging projects benefit from the exclusive features and a broader community. 

Through experiencing, observing, analyzing, and inclusively studying the hardships early-stage crypto projects face, Unicrypt found that most projects lack proper support, funding, and promotions. Therefore, Unicrypt plans to solve these issues by serving as a platform that enables any project to host a presale.

Most centralized and decentralized exchanges hold rigorous verification processes that can be very hard to pass. Projects have to match several factors on various exchanges. These are not limited to but include project history, existence, potential in the crypto market, feasibility, possibility for adoption, post-launch analysis, and more. While these processes and thresholds may be necessary; however, they can be intimidating for younger projects. 

Launching on Unicrypt is relatively straightforward. For a project to list its token on Unicrypt, it has to launch its token and set a soft and hard cap. Furthermore, the project can later specify the rounds for its presale; note that the launchpad has a maximum of two rounds. After the project has launched its token and specified the rounds for its presale, it will specify the currency it prefers to raise with USDC, USDT, DAI, ETC, among several others. 

Note that the first round of the presale is exclusively available for Unicrypt’s native token holders: UNCX or UNCL. Typically these token pre-sales often end within minutes.  However, users must hold $500 of native tokens to participate. The second round is inclusive for anyone, although project teams can specify a whitelisted address list. 

Moreover, another important point to note is that projects launching their tokens must lock a minimum of 30% of the liquidity on Uniswap. However, it is advised that platforms lock more than the minimum requirement. 

Unlike other centralized or decentralized launchpads, Unicrypt offers an entirely autonomous option that emphasizes inclusivity, simplicity, and fairness and gives investors a platform to access exclusive and upcoming crypto projects. 

DuckDAO is a one-of-a-kind incubator for digital assets backed by an enthusiastic community. The decentralized incubator allows upcoming projects to benefit from the community’s investment power and buzz-making potential to reach its maxim potential. 

DuckDAO plans to source and secure potentially lucrative investment opportunities for its community by democratizing the early-stage investment space in the crypto ecosystem. DuckDAO’s model is unique when it comes to launchpads. It serves as a decentralized venture capital investment platform, where users have to hold the platform’s DuckDAODime, also known as DDIM, to gain access to upcoming and emerging projects. 

By holding the platform’s native tokens, users can gain access to many exclusive communities, where they can benefit from the deals. Since DuckDAO is powered by its community, it allows anyone to invest in budding early-stage crypto projects and share a hand in its development by helping it with user acquisition and marketing processes. 

Moreover, DuckDAO aims to cultivate long-term partnerships with the projects it hosts on the platform. DuckDAO aims to work with its partnered projects from the beginning until they’re listed on an exchange. Projects can benefit from marketing, veteran advice, and various listing services that will surely help the project catalyze its growth and success. 

Additionally, DuckDAO also plans to assist hosted projects with various social media strategies, OTC sales, and community sales to ensure projects can establish a healthy and natural growth.                

However, note that for projects to be listed and hosted by DuckDAO, they have to go through the platform’s due diligence checks to ensure they meet their standards and stand an excellent chance of success with the community’s help. 

Besides DuckDAO, the platform is also home to a public token launchpad called the DuckSTARTER. DuckSTARTER seeks to act as the final step between upcoming crypto projects and the community before the project is publicly listed. Users can contribute to the project in either USDC or ETH, according to the project’s requirements. Moreover, DUCK token holders can also participate in the project’s token sales before it’s publicly listed. 

DuckSTARTER ensures all participants get an equal chance of success in acquiring an investment allocation. Announced this year, DuckSTARTER saw a lot of success. Interestingly, projects launched through the platform have seen impressive numbers, with projects such as Shadows generating a maximum return of 42.9x for participants. Currently, DuckStarter is based on the Ethereum blockchain; however, it plans to expand to the Polkadot ecosystem and benefit from faster and cheaper transactions in an interoperable environment.

Wrapping Up

Discovering and identifying promising early-stage projects in the crypto space is a big deal! The fact that investors lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year to scams is a clear indication that money is always there in the market, but it just flows in the wrong direction.

Crypto launchpads are unique ecosystem players that bridge the gap between investors and promising early-stage crypto projects, bringing immense value to the overall crypto ecosystem.

Happy investing!

Over and out!
Haroon

Related Stories

Tags

Bienvenue à nouveau sur The TechCrunch Exchange, une newsletter hebdomadaire sur les startups et les marchés. Il est largement basé sur la colonne quotidienne qui apparaît sur Extra Crunch, mais gratuit, et fait pour votre lecture du week-end. Vous le voulez dans votre boîte de réception tous les samedis? S’inscrire ici.

Prêt? Parlons argent, startups et rumeurs d’introduction en bourse épicées.

Bonjour à partir de vendredi, je suppose que vous profitez actuellement du long week-end. Pour célébrer la lettre d’échange de cette semaine, nous allons essayer quelque chose de nouveau en étant bref.

Si vous en avez assez d’entendre parler des crypto-monnaies, j’ai de mauvaises nouvelles. Non seulement ils ne s’en vont pas, mais il semble que les canons financiers qui ont aidé à nettoyer les champs pour leur avance générale se rechargent avec encore plus de munitions financières.

Du moins, c’est ce que rapporte Eric Newcomer dans un article publié cette semaine avec justesse « a16z Crypto Fund Balloons à 2 milliards de dollars. »

Cela soulève quelques points. D’abord! Qu’il y a suffisamment de demande de LP pour financer un véhicule cryptographique à hauteur de 2 milliards de dollars. Deuxième! Qu’il y a suffisamment d’idées cryptographiques chaudes qui valent 2 milliards de dollars.

Je peux tout à fait croire le premier, mais le second étire un peu mon cerveau. Non pas qu’il n’y ait pas de grandes entreprises en cours de construction dans l’espace de la blockchain; Coinbase Bénéfice T1 indiquez que vous pouvez gagner de l’argent avec la crypto. Mais il semble que les entreprises qui se sont révélées les plus performantes jusqu’à présent soient plus un hybride du monde bancaire traditionnel et de l’espace cryptographique que des habitants entièrement de ce dernier.

Mais comme ces idées ont été exploitées à la perfection, nous devrions nous attendre à voir l’argent chasser les idées cryptographiques les plus expérimentales. Comme je l’ai noté dans le Daily Crunch hier, il y a déjà beaucoup d’argent dans ces marchés:

[Y]Vous avez entendu parler de jetons non fongibles ou de NFT. Si vous avez déjà digéré la vague de battage médiatique NBA TopShot, attachez-vous, car beaucoup de gens construisent encore dans le monde NFT. Cela inclut Anima, qui apporte la RA aux NFT et vient de lever de nouveaux capitaux auprès de Coinbase, et Infinite Objects, qui vient de lever 6 millions de dollars pour aider les gens à apporter leur IRL NFT.

C’est là que l’investissement en capital-risque dans la crypto – et ce fonds gigantesque a16z – devient intéressant.

Bien sûr, les échanges cryptographiques peuvent gagner de l’argent. Mais qu’en est-il des avancées de la crypto-économie? Peuvent-ils générer des revenus matériels que le monde fiduciaire peut comprendre et rendre publics? (Veut-il même devenir public?)

C’est un plaisir de voir d’autres personnes parier l’argent des autres sur des idées qui peuvent échouer. Les têtes perdent, les queues nous gagnons. Pas mal!

Moment d’abonnement (et média?) Twitter

Le produit d’abonnement «Blue» de Twitter est ruisselant lentement sur le marché. Je vais l’acheter, quoi que ce soit.

Mais ce que je ne peux pas sortir de ma tête, c’est que Twitter est très bien placé pour construire une sorte de nirvana de créateur. Après tout, Twitter est déjà le lieu de rencontre de nombreux écrivains, journalistes et artistes. Où nous avons déjà un suivant. Pourquoi ne pas nous aider à tirer parti de tout le temps que nous avons passé sur la plate-forme?

Vous pouvez voir comment cela pourrait évoluer. Maintenant que Twitter a acheté des startups Revue and Scroll, il pourrait créer une plate-forme de newsletter où l’argent des abonnés Blue est réparti entre les rédacteurs pour sa plate-forme. Ou Twitter pourrait acheter Medium, comme un ami m’a suggéré l’autre jour. Medium a une énorme base d’abonnés, que Twitter pourrait fusionner avec Blue et fournir une sorte de réseau extra-social pour les écrivains et autres créatifs. Droite?

Si j’avais quelques milliards de dollars, quelques milliers d’ingénieurs et un ordre des actionnaires pour grandir, je deviendrais sauvage et ferais de la merde. Voyons ce que Twitter propose, mais espérons qu’ils ne font pas de petits projets.

En conclusion, vous pouvez rattraper tout ce que nous avons écrit sur The Exchange au cours de la semaine ici. Passez une très belle pause, nous en avons tous besoin.

Alex

Permettez-moi de vous présenter Orrin, un cyborg créateur de musique envoyé par une civilisation supérieure pour avertir les humains de l’apocalypse imminente. La mère et la sœur d’Orrin, préoccupées par la réalisation d’Orrin, sont apparues avec Orrin pour demander l’aide du Dr Phil. Ce qui a conduit à la découverte d’Orrin par des millions grâce à une série de clips viraux tirés d’un épisode du Dr. Phil Show.

Alors, qui est Orrin? Eh bien, selon l’épisode, Orrin est diplômé de la Stern Business School de NYU avec un 3,9 GPA, mais tout a changé par la suite. Au cours des deux dernières années, selon leur mère, Orrin a prétendu être un cyborg musicien. Orrin est un collectif, et parle donc en utilisant «nous», pas «je», un élément particulier du personnage d’Orrin vers lequel les fans de «borg» se sont tournés. Il y a beaucoup de citations notables de l’épisode, telles que «nous n’avons pas faim, merci» et «nous ne sommes pas fan des bananes, alors nous les supprimons», qui ont attiré les gens plus loin dans la personnalité d’Orrin. Orrin semble embrasser ces blagues sans briser son caractère.

Orrin et Mintbase

Nous sommes très heureux d’annoncer la collaboration NFT entre Mintbase et un cyborg du futur appelé Orrin.

Orrin choisit Mintbase et PRÈS pour délivrer ce message à l’aide d’une série de NFT combinée à la sortie du nouvel album du cyborg, MUTANT

Grâce à son algorithme de consensus de preuve d’enjeu et à sa collaboration pour compenser les émissions de CO2, Mintbase est capable de suivre et de répartir les redevances pour toujours sur une chaîne climatiquement neutre.

Les NFT comprennent:

• Niveau 1 – Album MUTANT pour 100 $ USD avec porte-clés bonus et single
• Niveau 2 – Lot de produits dérivés MUTANT comprenant un chapeau, une chemise et un économiseur d’écran pour 50 USD
• Niveau 3 – Porte-clés MUTANT en bleu, vert, rouge, jaune et bleu pour 20 $ USD
  • 100 exemplaires disponibles par coloris
    • Chaque trousseau est livré avec 2 chansons de l’album
    • Récupérez tous les porte-clés pour obtenir l’album «entier» plus un porte-clés spécial

Fête de lancement 3D

Il y aura également une soirée de lancement 3D organisée à Cryptovoxels ainsi que.

Assurez-vous de vous joindre à nous le vendredi 28 mai pour cet événement magique!

Soutenez Orrin et achetez son nouvel album NFT –

Écoutez MUTANT en streaming lorsqu’il est disponible –

À propos d’Orrin

Orrin est un récent diplômé de NYU qui a été découvert par des millions de personnes grâce à une série de clips viraux sur le Dr Phil spectacle.

Orrin a parlé dans des talk-shows avec Dragonchain, interviewé Neil deGrasse Tyson et a incubé une entreprise blockchain appelée « QSTN»Dans le cadre du programme d’accélérateur Verizon BLK Tech.

OneOf lance une plateforme NFT verte destinée à la communauté musicale et lève 63 millions de dollars en phase d’amorçage

• Whitney Houston, Doja Cat, H.E.R., Quincy Jones, John Legend, TLC, Charlie Puth, Jacob Collier, G-Eazy, AURORA, The Kid LAROI, Alesso et bien d’autres.
• OneOf construit une plateforme NFT musicale sur Tezos, la blockchain économe en énergie et auto-évolutive.

MIAMI, FL – 27 mai 2021 — OneOf a annoncé aujourd’hui la réalisation d’un tour de table de 63 millions de dollars auprès d’éminents vétérans des secteurs de la technologie et de la musique, dont le célèbre VC et activiste environnemental Bill Tai, Suna Said de Nima Capital, avec la participation du fonds ESG Sangha Capital, l’investisseur technologique chevronné Jack Herrick, la Fondation Tezos, Jaeson Ma, fondateur de East West Ventures et cofondateur de 88rising, et d’autres.

Co-fondée par l’entrepreneur technologique Lin Dai, le dirigeant de médias numériques Joshua James et le vétéran de l’industrie musicale Adam Fell, en partenariat avec Quincy Jones et Quincy Jones Productions, OneOf est une nouvelle plateforme verte de NFT construite spécifiquement pour la communauté musicale afin de connecter les fans et les collectionneurs de tout niveau avec leurs artistes préférés.

« OneOf réduit les frictions pour une relation plus engageante entre les artistes et leurs communautés en tirant parti des technologies modernes », déclare Bill Tai, l’un des premiers investisseurs de Zoom, Dapper Labs, Canva, Wish.com, Treasure Data et bien d’autres. « En utilisant la blockchain, des expériences significatives – auparavant difficiles à délivrer, peuvent être débloquées sur OneOf. »

Whitney Houston, Doja Cat, H.E.R., Quincy Jones, John Legend, TLC, Charlie Puth, Jacob Collier, G-Eazy, AURORA, The Kid LAROI, Alesso et bien d’autres sortiront tous des NFT sous forme de musique, d’art et d’expériences à collectionner sur la plateforme OneOf, qui sera lancée au public en juin 2021. OneOf réimagine l’expérience d’achat et de collection de NFT pour tous les fans de musique, et pas seulement pour les crypto-natifs. Les fans pourront effectuer des transactions avec des cartes de crédit ou de débit dans plus de 135 devises fiat, en plus des principales crypto-monnaies et des stablecoins. Les détails et les horaires des dépôts seront révélés dans les semaines à venir. Pour vous préinscrire et en savoir plus, rendez-vous sur oneof.com.

« J’ai hâte de lancer ma première collection Juicy Drops ! Cependant, je veux être attentif aux préoccupations environnementales et à l’accessibilité pour tous mes fans avant de lancer la collection. Je suis heureuse de travailler avec OneOf qui s’occupe de ces deux questions. » -Doja Cat

Construite sur le protocole de la blockchain Tezos, l’une des plus anciennes blockchains à faible consommation d’énergie, la mission de OneOf est d’être une place de marché durable et à faible coût pour les artistes et les fans désireux d’explorer les NFT de leurs artistes préférés. La plateforme de OneOf s’appuie sur le débit élevé et les faibles coûts de transaction de Tezos pour offrir un engagement inédit dans le secteur : des coûts de minage nuls pour tous les artistes qui souhaitent lancer des NFT sur sa plateforme.

Contrairement aux coûts de minage d’Ethereum, qui peuvent atteindre 150 dollars par NFT, les artistes pourront créer et fixer le prix de leurs NFT sur OneOf à des niveaux de prix abordables pour être accessibles à tous les fans – même à 5 dollars ou gratuitement – en plus des objets de collection « OneOf One » qui font la une. La création d’un NFT sur OneOf à l’aide de la blockchain Tezos utilise plus de 2 millions de fois moins d’énergie que les réseaux Proof of Work concurrents tels qu’Ethereum. Profondément engagé en faveur d’un avenir durable de la blockchain, OneOf fera également don d’un pourcentage des revenus de sa plateforme pour chaque vente à une œuvre de bienfaisance choisie par l’artiste ou à un partenaire pour une cause environnementale.

Le programme « Emerging Artist Spotlight » de OneOf soutiendra également de nouvelles voix influentes par des engagements financiers et marketing. Les premiers artistes de ce programme sont Laura Mvula, Barbara Doza, Erick The Architect et d’autres qui seront annoncés prochainement.

« La blockchain a la capacité de démocratiser la propriété et d’apporter un pouvoir économique aux artistes et aux fans », déclare Lin Dai, PDG et cofondateur de OneOf, « nous construisons une entreprise technologique avec une éthique privilégiant les artistes et une mission soucieuse de l’environnement pour aider à introduire des centaines de millions d’utilisateurs non natifs de la crypto-monnaie à la blockchain grâce à des cas d’utilisation faciles et passionnants tels que les NFT. »

À propos de OneOf

OneOf est une plateforme NFT conçue spécialement pour la communauté musicale afin de créer une expérience écologiquement durable et conviviale pour les artistes et les fans. En mettant en œuvre le protocole de la blockchain Tezos, la frappe d’un NFT sur la plateforme OneOf utilise plus de 2 millions de fois moins d’énergie que les autres réseaux, et pour les artistes et les fans, la frappe, l’achat et l’échange ne coûtent rien en frais de transaction de la blockchain.

À propos de l’équipe fondatrice OneOf

Lin Dai est le cofondateur et le directeur général de OneOf. Entrepreneur et cadre numérique avec deux décennies d’expérience, Lin a précédemment cofondé TAP Network, une société de technologie blockchain alimentant des récompenses en marque blanche pour de grandes entreprises clientes telles que Warner Music Group, Uber et Brave. Avant TAP, Lin était le CMO de Keek, une application sociale de vidéo mobile avec plus de 75M d’utilisateurs dans le monde entier qui a été rendue publique au Canada. Lin a fondé sa première entreprise, un réseau social pour adolescents, dans sa chambre d’étudiant en 1999, avant de la rendre publique. Il a passé plus de 10 ans à diriger des initiatives numériques dans de grandes entreprises médiatiques comme Alloy (Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries) et Emmis Communications (Hot97, Power106). Lin est un partenaire général du ChainLink Crypto Fund, un fonds de fonds dans le secteur des devises numériques et de la blockchain.

Joshua James est le cofondateur et le directeur de l’exploitation de OneOf. Avant OneOf, Joshua était le cofondateur et le directeur général de ZIG Media, acquis en 2019 par Media Rights Capital (Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, Dick Clark Productions, etc). Joshua a fondé sa première entreprise RiseTech à l’université. Après avoir vendu RiseTech à Equity Office Property (aujourd’hui Blackstone), Joshua a lancé l’entreprise pionnière de musique numérique en direct Basecamp Productions, qui s’est associée à Pearl Jam pour lancer la série révolutionnaire de bootlegs Pearl Jam. Basecamp a ensuite été rachetée par Warner Music Group, et Joshua a compté parmi ses clients Pearl Jam, Kendrick Lamar, Linkin Park et Mumford & Sons.

Adam Fell est le cofondateur et membre du conseil d’administration de OneOf, et le président de Quincy Jones Productions. Adam supervise les différentes branches de QJP, telles que la gestion des artistes, les licences et les avenants, la production de spectacles, de films et de programmes télévisés, les coentreprises internationales et les investissements. Fell a dirigé les premiers investissements de la société dans Spotify, Clubhouse, Community, Uber, Wayfair, Snowflake et bien d’autres. M. Fell a également été producteur exécutif du film original de Netflix, QUINCY, qui a remporté, entre autres, le prix du meilleur documentaire de l’African-American Film Critics Association, le prix du meilleur documentaire des Black Film Critics, deux Critics Choice Awards et un Grammy Award dans la catégorie du meilleur film musical. Outre son rôle de leader au sein de QJP, M. Fell a été l’un des principaux orateurs de divers événements, tels que la conférence « Music is in the Air » de Goldman Sachs et la conférence de la Music Industry Research Association (MIRA) de feu Alan Krueger. M. Fell fait également partie du conseil consultatif international du Festival de jazz de Montreux, ainsi que du conseil consultatif de There With Care, une fondation qui apporte son soutien aux familles confrontées à des maladies graves.

Pour plus d’informations, vous pouvez contacter Chris Taillie, Greg Jakubik or Erica Goldish at Shore Fire Media, or Jen Styles at OneOf.