(Our real-time markets snapshot courtesy of OnChainFx)
Amidst the chaos of the @MessariCrypto twitter account this weekend (sorry Eric), there was some good, if infrequent, productive feedback for us regarding last week’s XRP report. The most consistent valid critique was some version of “well, why don’t you apply this logic to all assets?”
Simply stated, we’re working on it. In fact, we will be rolling out our methodology for calculating “liquid supply” in the coming weeks.
To us, liquid supply for a given cryptoasset project is a holy grail of sorts for understanding the health of these networks.
Large, but illiquid projects like $XRP could be weighted too heavily in benchmark indices, or they could understate true inflation figures, depressing future investor returns, who don’t realize the selling pressure they’re buying into.
Zombie projects that once traded for virtually nothing could get resuscitated by a small group of individuals, then wash traded to obscene heights with a mere fraction of the supply actually being tradable. Simply because most previous holders abandoned the coin years ago.
(Side note: I still hate myself for losing $200 worth of factoids from their 2015 crowdsale, so I’m sure losses happens even more frequently in the long-tail of assets than they did in early Bitcoin.)
Today, in keeping with our goal to drive this type of thinking forward, we’ve updated Polymath’s liquid supply. This better accounts for the fact that the team recently escrowed 75 million tokens in their supply. That’s the right way to report on “market cap” and ensure the metric isn’t quite so deeply flawed.
CoinMarketCap still has $POLY’s liquid market cap at $39 million.
We believe $31 million is more appropriate.
If we want to create better indices and bring better liquidity and sanity to the crypto markets, it’s not enough to get fair prices right. You’ve got to nail supply dynamics, too, and we look forward to doing that full throttle in the years ahead.
-TBI
Another big week this week. Here’s what to watch for...
Today:
+ BitTorrent’s BTT token sale begins today on the Binance token launchpad (token overview here). In fact there are two simultaneous BTT token sales on Binance; one accepting BNB and a separate sale accepting TRX. Organic.
+ GrinCon is today, too. (Yes, there’s already a conference for Grin!) A livestream is available here.
Tomorrow:
+ Aragon’s AraCon Berlin conference kicks off with a high-powered speaker lineup. If you weren’t one of the lucky 500 who bought tickets, you can watch the conference’s livestream here. (TBI Note: This event looks legit. FOMO.)
Wednesday:
+ Stanford’s (free) 2019 blockchain conference runs Wednesday through Friday featuring presentations by industry leaders like Peter Wuille, Andrew Poelstra, and Alex Leishman. If you’re in the area and interested in attending, you can join the attendee wait list here.
Thursday:
+ Zilliqa, a new and much-anticipated player in the smart contracts platform game (#25 asset on OnChainFx) says it’s all systems go for their mainnet launch. Before Thursday, you can learn about the project via the Messari asset profile here.
+ MakerDAO is expecting to complete the rebuild of their Oasis platform, which, similar to the trading platforms that preceded it, should offer best-in-class, compliant, CDP-enabled security token trading.
Friday:
+ After a brutal 51% attack back in December, Vertcoin’s scheduled hard fork at block 1,080,000 is expected Friday. Catch up on the backstory and planned fork here.
+ Our engineers are preparing to roll out a suite of new historical pricing data and metrics related to token sales. Stay tuned this week!
-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:
Blockchain privacy: Equal parts theory and theater - Ian Miers
(h/t Token Daily)
Even after mostly dispelling all the early Bitcoin ideas of robust on-chain privacy, the digital asset space still seriously misunderstands what privacy means, which protocols lack it, and how we can do better. Ian challenges investors and developers to think deeply about our current efforts to improve privacy and protect the financial independence ethos of this entire industry.
A crypto thesis - Pantera Capital
(h/t Token Economy)
One of Pantera’s CIOs, Joey Krug, explains the importance and potential growth of the entire digital asset space in one fell swoop. Finance has yet to undergo the shakeup that the Internet brought to speech and education, but decentralized protocols like blockchains can do exactly this. Joey explains that everything stands a good chance of being disrupted though, not just money and finance—one of the last areas to be affected, in his opinion.
Against Szabo’s Law, For A New Crypto Legal System - Vlad Zamfir
(h/t NLW)
In response to a monumentally controversial post thesis by Nick Szabo, Vlad offers and equally controversial extrapolation on what governance and law mean in general but also for specific autonomous protocol environments (i.e. block chains). Unswayed by Szabo’s conservative, constrictive crypto-law philosophy, Vlad encourages innovators to take it upon themselves to “conjure up a new crypto legal system”.
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 Ryan (TBI) and Arjun Balaji sat down for over an hour to discuss what they see happening in the industry during 2019. If you are a subscriber, make sure you have caught up on our two part series and check out Arjun’s theses for 2019.
You can view the full video here and as always you can listen and subscribe to all of our podcasts— on Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, and Google play here.
Shameless Plugs
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