Messari’s Unqualified Opinions #24
TL;DR:
I didn’t do my homework today.
But I had a good excuse since baby #2 arrived over the weekend. In lieu of flowers and showers of bitcoin donations, please help us clean up the industry’s data. (Exchanges, wallets, and other crypto services interested in tapping our data via our free API; investors looking for a better crypto market research product; projects interested in joining our disclosures registry; or analysts game to join our analyst community, can simply reply to this email to discuss. :))
Back to regularly scheduled features tomorrow.
If there’s anything you want to see covered as a feature that we haven’t explored yet, let us know! We’re always looking for good new ideas.
- TBI
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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.
Bitcoin: Utopia vs Reality- Yan Pritzker
(h/t Token Economy)
Yan breaks down some of the utopian/idealistic thinking that exists (i.e. “Credit card companies will be destroyed”, “Fractional reserve banking will cease to exist”, etc) with some of his realistic guesses of the future. Some hard hitting truths from Yan: that in the short to medium term, the vast majority of people will store their coins in fully custodial or partially custodial solutions; that most people still need debt, and will continue to live in debt even in a hard money system; and users will continue to use credit cards and start using Bitcoin to pay their bills or take crypto-collateralized loans as their primary way of interfacing the traditional fiat world to Bitcoin.
What If Dentacoin Is More Than a Punchline? - David Morris
David explores one of the most amusing projects to come from the latest digital asset bubble: Dentacoin. In the content of other over-hyped, over-funded crypto projects, Dentacoin has actually shipped more than a surprising amount of other, more popular projects. Maybe Dentacoin jokes have a lot more mileage in them, but the projects development and corresponding perception by investors could be symptomatic of the significant work left undone in ignoring hype and elevating teams that ship.
WBTC: A Community Effort to Bring Bitcoin to Ethereum - Loi Luu
(h/t NLW, which sent Zack digging)
Leveraging the liquidity and other network effects of Bitcoin to fully exploit Ethereum’s strong application developer community is the purpose of Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC). Loi explains the community initiative behind this token with a one-to-one peg to Bitcoin and the general advantages of bridging the two most dominant blockchains. More specifically, he describes how an Ethereum-based Bitcoin substitute token can increase trading liquidity and reduce friction in dapp development.
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).
The Week Ahead
Devcon4 kicks off in Prague tomorrow: Messari’s Katherine and Qiao will both be on the ground in Prague. Our DMs are open. Crypto projects, let's meet up to talk about participating the Messari self-disclosure database; fund funds, exchanges, and regulators, would love to meet and learn about your data needs!
Blockstack Genesis Launch: The Blockstack team will introduce the genesis block of their new Stacks blockchain tomorrow. The team has executed an annual hard fork to upgrade consensus rules and release major features, but this year’s fork is notable in that it will be the distribution date of the first Stacks tokens. The genesis block will deliver 395 million Stacks tokens to purchasers of SAFTs and two private funds that were sold in Blockstack’s 2017 accredited investor crowdsale.
Community Updates
Podcast Recap
🎧 Don’t miss the latest episode of the Messari podcast out! On this pod, Katherine breaks down the latest arbitration case to come out of China's Shenzhen International Court of Arbitration, which determined bitcoin is protected under China’s existing property laws. Additionally, Zack interviews Samson Mow of Blocksteam about sidechains: what they are, what Liquid is, and how its release can impact the average crypto investor. (13 minutes long for your evening commute.) Listen and subscribe— on Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, and Google play here.
Some other great episodes are #10 (Spencer Bogart on fund performance and tokenization), #9 (Tony Sheng on his writing proecess), #6 (Jake Chervinsky’s primer on federal & State crypto regulators), #4 (Nic Carter on data integrity in crypto), and #8 (Conversations on the ground at CryptoSprings).
Find our podcast series on Apple here, Google Play here, and Spotify here.
Shameless Plugs
We want your feedback!
We know Messari can feel like a couple different products right now, and we're working to unify our features into one overarching whole. To that end, We’ve made a Trello board to take in any and all of the feedback you have for us! Have at it 🛠
We also want your opinions on how this newsletter can be improved. Give us your thoughts here!
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Join a fast growing team in NYC; work with crypto OGs, and former Bloomberg/Palantir engineers; & access a network that sets you up for the rest of your career. Apply here!
Upcoming Travel:
Hit us up in these locations:
DevCon, Prague, Czech Republic | October 30–November 2
Consensus Invest, New York, New York | November 28
Join Our Community:
If you are interested in helping us crowdsource token project details, or want to join our community to share your expertise, wed love to have you on board! Take a second to fill out an application and we will get back to you soon.
Going forward, we’ll be capping new members at 15 each week to keep things running smoothly. If you haven’t heard back, you are probably in the queue.
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