Stablecoins are on the up. If we look at stablepulse, at the time of writing, we’re at over 200B in circulating supply. Volumes are also up, both metrics at all time highs. And while the big actors dominate, their models are by no means decentralized. There’s either an element of cash in a bank, or a link to other TradFi instruments. Or if not that, some other element of centralized control, at best through a DAO. ...
Like I mentioned on LinkedIn a couple of weeks back, Dencun/4844 was Ethereum’s broadband moment. The blob transactions enabled by that hardfork network upgrade enabled a new type of storage space for unstructured data. Very soon after this change, we saw transaction prices on Layer 2s, like Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism drop significantly, often over 10x cheaper than prior to the upgrade. As Ethereum mainnet continues building on these new rails, additional transaction bandwidth will be unlocked, supporting further growth among the L2s. ...
There has been much written, discussed and argued about what cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether are worth. And there has been much nonsense, much superstition, and flawed analysis. Since we’re back in crypto winter, I feel it’s possible to write this without drowning in spam, spam by people trying to pump and dump some coin. Let’s be clear on one thing first of all: There’s no lack of scarce assets. Just because Bitcoin is limited to a 21 million coin supply, does not imply any worth. ...
Not long ago I released the NuPoW Crystal tokens, an implementation of ERC-20 tokens utilizing the new Proof-of-Work algorithm called NuPoW for token minting. The contract has no admin, and there’s no premine on these tokens. The core thing about NuPoW is that it limits the amount of energy used for mining NuPoW tokens through a collective mechanism of reward reduction managed by a chain length run measurement. It might all sound a bit complicated, but its really not, all described in more detail in the NuPoW whitepaper. ...
In “traditional finance”, we’ve got something called a derivative. In short, a derivative derives it’s value based on some underlying asset. In the “new finance” world of blockchain and DeFi, we’ve got something called a stablecoin, where the price of the coin is pegged to some underlying asset. So a stablecoin is just a derivative then, no? Usually people think of coins pegged to the USD when they hear stablecoin, but it doesn’t need to be. It could be pegged to anything, just like a derivative could use any underlying asset and definition on top. ...
While blockchain remains highly volatile, both as a technology and as assets tied to them, I’d like to take a step back and review the approach. What is a blockchain? It’s a linked list of events, linked together through some cryptographic hashing mechanism, that forever ties one block to another. And such a blockchain is helpful because it removes the need for a third-party to orchestrate the process. This construct is sequential in nature, and hence practically single threaded. While there are many very nice attributes tied to something which is single threaded, like the ease of reasoning on its current state, there’s also a lot of drawbacks. And while I think we’d all like to keep the benefits of having one smart contract call another, hence allowing for “DeFi Legos” and similar, it doesn’t allow us to solve for the scaling issues. ...
For a while I’ve wanted to write something about stablecoins, these tokens on the blockchains, that are backed by some underlying asset. Usually we associate stablecoins with those backed by a currency, like USD or Euros. But it doesn’t need to be backed by currency, it can be backed by commodities, stocks, bonds, etc. This gives you the benefit of having a token you can easily exchange, transfer and utilize in smart contracts, and also having it backed by more than just pure human emotions and speculation. ...