LIVE Podcast + 96 Theses Teaser - Unqualified Opinions
watch me debate crypto theses tomorrow with Arjun Balaji
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At the risk of fatiguing you with yet more crypto predictions, I’ve got a couple thoughts on 2019.
Ninety six to be exact, so I’m one upping myself from last year. The full post drops tomorrow *for subscribers only.*
Three wrinkles vs. last year’s post (which I recapped last week):
a) I wanted to challenge myself to make all 96 of them tweet length. Easier to do with twitter 280 for sure, but still a bear to actually pull off. Join the conversation on twitter and reply / quote tweet your (most/least) favorites.
b) Since there were many good prediction pieces that came out over the past couple weeks, I was able to include snippets of other posts (Arjun’s, Lopp’s, et al), highlighting where I’ve agreed and disagreed so as not to prove redundant.
c) Oh, and I’m discussing / debating all of this tomorrow LIVE at 4pm ET with Arjun Balaji (who aped my "crypto theses” title and dunked on me by releasing his a day before mine was originally due out. Not that I’m upset about it or anything) on a new podcast produced by the Blockworks Group.
Watch and tweet in with your questions here with hashtag #YoTBI. (Best tweet in goes to the person who comes up with a better hashtag than that.)
All episodes will be live, so I’m looking forward to making a fool of myself much more frequently in 2019.
***
Here’s a teaser of 10% of my bets for 2019:
+ Lightning Network growth will accelerate and have its “irrational exuberance” phase (50x YoY in USD growth).
+ ETH smart contract competition from EOS and Cosmos especially will prove fiercer than many people expect.
+ ICO’s are ded; it’s all about security tokens this year.
+ If you’re into the whole #DeFi thing, MakerDAO and $DAI are the most systemically important projects in crypto.
+ Ripple won’t get into any sort of trouble whatsoever for their Ripplecoin peddling, and maybe even have a record revenue year.
+ Ethereum 2.0 will be lucky to ship in 2020. In the meantime, it’s all about ETH 1.x.
+ Messari will onboard 100+ projects to our crypto registry. (We’re closing in on 20. If you’re interested in staking / sponsoring your favorite token team, hit us up!)
+ Even if the ETF is approved, institutional custody solved, and big money gets comfortable with crypto allocations, we won’t go to the moon. The fresh money’s going to 2019’s mega IPOs for Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Slack, Peloton, Palantir, etc.
+ Privacy upgrades will cause headaches and pushback from major exchanges and hosted wallets, who might find the tech so good it hurts their compliance efforts.
+ Bonus from co-founder and noted Litecoin booster, Dan McArdle: “Nocoiner narratives around stablecoins and CBDCs obviating the need for bitcoin will become the new "blockchain not bitcoin" bear market willful-ignorance du jour.”
Want the full breakdown and plain-english predictions with more color on all of the above theses?
You gotta subscribe, help us pay the bills, and fund the industry’s top transparency effort (so the SEC doesn’t shut this whole token party down completely).
If you miss out on the full bible, no worries. You can still check out the debate tomorrow. LIVE!
-TBI
P.S. Share. Subscribe. Spread the (rational) crypto love. Tweet at me or Messari for requests, feedback, comments, or questions.
Best of the Rest - What We Missed Last Week
Every weekend, we dig through the past week’s posts from crypto’s other great sources of content to see what we missed in our own weekend reads.
Here’s us curating the curators:
Fifteen dead cryptocurrency predictions, twelve months on - Nic Carter
(h/t Circle Research)
In this retrospective, Nic Carter revisits 15 assets (of the top 100 by market cap) that he had selected in January 2018 as most likely to be “dead” by early 2019. Carter considers a project dead only if development has been abandoned and the token has seen a 95 percent drawdown. Of the 15 projects selected only two met both conditions, Bitcoin Gold and Bitconnect, while five others saw either a greater than 95 percent drawdown or abandoned development. The remaining eight projects failed to meet either of the criteria, though Carter expects only three to make it through to 2020.
Security tokens aren’t crypto’s holiday gift to digital asset regulation - H. Joshua Rivera
(h/t Token Daily)
The 2017 hype around token offerings has given way to a new focus on security token offerings (STOs) which fit into existing securities regulations. Institutional investors have been excited about STOs as a way to create liquidity in historically illiquid investments like private fund shares, though volumes in the space remain low and in many ways these potential advantages have not been fully realized. While STOs present a promising way to issue tokens within existing securities frameworks Rivera argues that they fail to tackle the most pressing issue in the crypto space; comprehensive token regulation for tokens that have functionality within a network or a specific use case outside of being a security.
The cryptoeconomic circle - Joel Monegro
(h/t NLW)
According to Joel Monegro, crypto-networks are micro-economies organized around a specific service, and regulated by a protocol. The cryptoeconomic circle is a model that can provide a way to think about how value flows between participants in these networks. The three main actors in the circle are miners (the supply side), users (the demand side), and investors (the capital side). Miners are compensated in tokens in the network for their work, which benefits users, while investors provide liquidity to miners that wish to sell their tokens. Investors likewise provide pools of liquidity for users that require tokens to access the network, and long-term holders help protect users’ purchasing power.
Did I miss something?
Send me the link, your twitter handle and your best imitation compression algorithm write up. If I like it, I’ll include your bit next issue (with attribution).
Podcast Recap
🎧 ICYMI on the Messari podcast, In 2019's first episode, Katherine took an interesting dive into Hong Kong's crypto ecosystem with Leo Weese, President of the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong. They talked about how the Hong Kong crypto ecosystem has changed since 2012, what some of the common misconceptions are about crypto in Hong Kong, and what makes this city so unique and well suited for crypto development.
Listen and subscribe to all of our podcasts— on Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, and Google play here.
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