Re-reading our timely DeFi Guide reminded me of how much simpler things were back then. After all, lending someone money or swapping one token for another isn’t exactly rocket science. DeFi builders do an invaluable job lifting finance into the digital age, but the products they create fall into a well defined and well researched design space — with occasional blockchain...
The DeFi Guide
Value locked in DeFi on Ethereum exploded from 1B US$ in May 2020 to almost 4B in July. The DeFi craze put so much pressure on the Ethereum blockchain that we’ve constantly seen gas prices above 60 Gwei over the past few weeks. Ethereum users are currently burning more than 5,000 ETH in fees per day (more than 1.6M US$) A single project, led by one man, has grown from...
Ren: Can You Keep A Secret?
Ren (formerly Republic Protocol) has been a staple of our altcoin portfolio since inception of the Mountains and Valleys strategy. At the time of writing, the price of $REN is on a run and important parts of the project made it to mainnet. A good time to explain our continued fascination with this project. On a quest to make the project’s promises more tangible, Ren have...
Origin: Airbnb, Uber, Amazon on the Blockchain
Origin’s whitepaper is a bleeding heart cry for unstoppable markets. The “Why?” section that takes up a good quarter of the paper even mentions people cooking Meth in Airbnb homes (yukk), and Airbnb refusing their services to KKK members (double yukk). A good argument can be made for an unstoppable global marketplace. With the advent of the www, content and human...
KAVA: Maker for Cosmos
Kava is a crypto lending and stablecoin platform with strong similarities to Ethereum’s Maker DAO. Once launched, the platform will allow users to deposit crypto and mint stablecoins in return. Like on Maker, the underlying financial vehicle is called a CDP, a Collateralized Debt Position. The user will deposit crypto assets worth more than the stablecoins he...
MATIC: Plasma, FINALLY?
Matic helps improve dApp usability by bringing scaleable and near-instant blockchain transactions to Ethereum. Blockchain scaling is a complex subject, and Matic’s ambitions even go beyond helping scale Ethereum. We’ll need to unravel several concepts until we can fully understand what Matic does and why the project is important. Understanding Matic Plasma Plasma is a...