Messari's Weekend Wrap Up đ - Unqualified Opinions
self care, sleep, good content, and new features
Your daily snapshot from our OnChainFX markets dashboard.
Itâs Friday. Weâre keeping things light and teeing up our weekend reads and listens.
In 2019's first episode, Katherine takes an interesting dive into Hong Kong's crypto ecosystem with Leo Weese, President of the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong.
They talk 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. (13 minute listen)
Listen and subscribe to all of our podcastsâ on Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, and Google play here.
đ Messariâs weekend reads:
How the Artificial-Intelligence Program AlphaZero Mastered Its Games - James Somers
Would Bitcoinâs mass adoption fundamentally transform the financial system? - Bitmex Research
Clustering Cryptocurrencies with Affinity Propagation - Sebastian Quintero
Market outlook fundamentals vs price - Alex Woodward
The big long: Crypto jargon & adoption - Ellie Frost
Why building a quant fund in crypto is harder than people think - Ali Hamed & Ateet Ahluwalia
đ¨ New features on messari.io:
Weâve been hard at work adding features that help bring transparency and smarter decision making to the cryptoasset space.
Hereâs what we have rolled out recently:
Real time prices
Real-time asset prices are now live across the site! Check out our OnChainFX dashboard to see the most up to date price information.
Export to CSV
Want to do your own analysis or just prefer working in a spreadsheet? You can now export any view directly to CSV. Head over to the dashboard and click âexport selections to CSVâ in the top right corner.
Supply curves
One of the reasons we started Messari was the complete lack of recognition that crypto had a massive hidden inflation problem with ICOs.
Our supply schedules pull directly from the teams closest to some of the industryâs top token protocols. Weâve worked with them to bring you what we think is the most detailed information on token supply and inflation. Check out our profiles for Zilliqa, Civic, Melonport, Mainframe, Aion, and District0x to better understand outstanding token supply at any point in time.
Let us know what you think and as always, have a good weekend, yâall.
- The Messari Team
P.S. Share. Subscribe. Tweet at Messari for feedback, comments, or questions.
Messari Compression Algorithm
Content and thoughts from around the web as summarized by the Messari team.
đŚ [Analysis] The Fed should seize blockchainâs potential - Eswar Prasad
Cornell professor Eswar Prasad argues for a proper exploration of a federal cryptocurrency. To Prasad, distributed ledger technologies offer efficiency and speed that could deter illicit activity, prove cheaper than printing presses, and increase both speed and efficiency of the central bank, in turn making payments easier to conduct and verify. A blockchain dollar would offer better monetary policy surveillance tools and decrease volatility through better central management. (share or read more)
đ [Analysis] On The (in)Stability of Stablecoins - Bob McElrath
Bob McElrath identifies fractional reserve policies with stablecoins as the key creator of volatility and systematic risk. Stablecoins are synthetic assets pegged against other currencies, typically fiat, to create stable purchasing power relative to other goods. Stablecoins have existed for quite sometime, just not cryptocurrency versions. To date, 66 countries back their currency with U.S.D. reserves, while 25 back with the Euro. These pegged currencies are kept stable via the purchase and sale of treasury bonds which are IOU's to the government of origin.Â
Stablecoins operate similarly, with an unfortunate caveat. To maintain stability, the âauthorityâ behind a stablecoin must buy and sell the underlying asset, often algorithmically. But the amount an authority should buy depends on price, which depends on distribution variance, and in crypto, itâs not easy to pin down variance. The only tenable solution, therefore, is keeping a full reserve of the underlying asset for each synthetic asset on the market. (share or read more)
Quick Bits (Don't read that, I read it for you)
Choke Points (Exchange News)
đ Crypto unicorn Circle facilitated some $24 billion in trade volume via their over the counter (OTC) trading facilitator, Circle Trade, in 2018. Circle Trade executed over 10,000 trades between 600 parties over 36 different assets. Overall, the company claimed it was serving over 8 million customers in 195 countries, and facilitated $75 billion in 2018 transactions. (share or read more)
đ Binance Launchpad will be introducing about one new token launch per month to its users in 2019 beginning with BitTorrent and Fetch.AI according to a recent announcement. Binance will vet new projects and then place them on Binance Launchpad for token purchases of the new projects. (share or read more)
Startup Signals (ICOs, Cryptos, and Startups)
đ Digital trading platform DX exchange will use Nasdaqâs financial information exchange to begin offering tokenized stocks next week. Tokenized stocks will be based on the Ethereum blockchain and will be backed one to one by stock in various major companies like Amazon or Facebook. (share or read more)
đŚ New privacy coin Beam launched Jan. 3. One of two highly anticipated new cryptocurrencies, Beam uses Mimblewimble privacy technology, making transactions confidential and virtually untraceable. Another privacy coin, Grin, is planned to launch on Jan. 15. (share or read more)
The Powers That Be (Legal/Reg/Policy)
đ¨đł The People's Bank of China (PBoC) has issued concern about the declining use of cash for consumer transactions. Digital payment methods, particularly Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay, have become the exclusive medium of exchange across some pockets of China. (share or read more)
Did I miss something?
Send me the link, your twitter handle and your best imitation compression algorithm write up. If I like it, Iâll include your bit next issue (with attribution).
Podcast Recap
đ§ ICYMI on the Messari podcast, Katherine sat down with Tian Li (co-founder, DDEX) to talk about the decision by the DDEX team to fork away the 0x protocol and carry on with their own implementation of the protocol, named Hydro. Tian also addressed the decision to remove to 0x token, and what the short term future looks like for DDEX.
Listen and subscribe to all of our podcastsâ on Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, and Google play 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. Head over to our new feedback tool and let us know what you think!
đ We're Hiring:
We need data engineers who want to bring transparency to crypto!
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!
Join Our Community:
If you are interested in helping us crowdsource token project details, or want to join our community to share your expertise, weâd love to have you on board! Take a second to fill out an application and we will get back to you soon.
Going forward, weâll be capping new members at 15 each week to keep things running smoothly. If you havenât heard back, you are probably in the queue.
Like what you read? Share it! Hate what you read? Let me know @MessariCrypto.