35 Burst results for "Blockchain"
The Crypto Overnighter
Faux Web3 Company's Scam Exposes Oversight in Bloomberg's Advertising
"OpenAI's ChatGPT has gained immense popularity worldwide. Sadly, this has led to the explosion of numerous deceptive applications. These are applications that lure users in with clever advertisements before defrauding them. One such instance involves BlockGPT. And as you can guess by the name, BlockGPT is a Web3 company inspired by ChatGPT. They were also recently exposed for orchestrating a rug pull scam, resulting in the theft of $256 ,000 in pre -sale funds. The lack of a proper disclaimer on Bloomberg's part has also drawn criticism. The platform allowed a paid press release promoting the fraudulent project to be published on their website without adequate warning. Certek is a blockchain security firm. They confirmed BlockGPT's fraudulent nature. Now, PexShield is another security provider. They further corroborated the rug pull claims by revealing that more than 800 Binance coins raised in a pre -sale contract were transferred to Tornado Cash. BlockGPT issued a press release earlier this month. In that release, they outlined their goal of developing a blockchain -based artificial intelligence system similar to ChatGPT. Unfortunately, this press release was initially distributed through Globe Newswire. That meant it was automatically scraped and published on Bloomberg. Now, it's important to highlight that the article published on Bloomberg lacked clear indicators that could have alerted readers to its status as a paid press release rather than a genuine news article. In fact, the website did not include any explicit disclaimer or indication of paid content. BlockFence is a security aggregation provider. They criticized both Bloomberg and Bloomberg Crypto via Twitter, urging them to provide a more prominent disclaimer and to conduct due diligence to prevent the future publication of fraudulent projects.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Why Elizabeth Warren Is Wrong About Crypto and the Fentanyl Epidemic
"Featured story is an opinion piece by CoinDesk's Daniel Kuhn. Our piece today is entitled, Why Elizabeth Warren is Wrong about Crypto and the Fentanyl Epidemic. For a while, crypto's role in the illegal and gray area drug trade seemed swept under the rug, or at least it was not getting the attention it could have, which is good and which the Fed shuttered back in 2013. It's good because some people have a tendency to moralize about drug use, and the less crypto is linked to crime in general, the less the entire industry will be stigmatized. However, it would arguably be better to be upfront about such things, assuming they're going on, as data now suggests. If crypto ever has a shot at finding a killer use case, or mass user base who understands why blockchains are important. U .S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, is calling for a greater crypto crackdown following new research from blockchain analytics firms Chainalysis and Elliptic that found Bitcoin and Tether, or USDT, have become cornerstone to the global fentanyl trade. These are the same research companies that put out annual reports showing a fraction of a fraction of crypto transactions can be tied to illicit use. Quote, crypto is helping fund the fentanyl trade and we have the power to shut that down, Warren said, continuing, it's time. End quote. The Senator is a longtime critic of crypto, who recently made an incomprehensible anti -crypto army campaign part of her re -election bid. But does the Senator have a point? I already know what the crypto faithful will say. Chainalysis estimates less than 1 % of total crypto transactions are related to crime, so it doesn't matter if Chainalysis is now saying there's evidence. At least $37 .8 million worth of crypto was sent to drug manufacturers in China since 2018. But hold that thought, we'll get back to it. First, let's try to place crypto's alleged use for drug sales in the context of the global drug trade. To start, it's difficult to judge just how large the fentanyl economy is, because it is, by nature, kept mostly out of sight. But if Chainalysis and ellipsis figures are to be meaningful, they need context. According to one source Chainalysis cited, total quote chemical exports, end quote, from China, assumed by most authorities to be the largest manufacturer and exporter of black and gray market drugs, surpassed $100 billion in 2021 alone.
The Breakdown
Bitcoin Prehistory
"All right, friends, welcome back to another Long Read Sunday. This week we are focusing in on the work of a radically under heralded writer. That is Byron Gilliam, or Gilliam if I pronounced it wrong, Byron, I apologize. Byron is the primary newsletter writer for Blockworks and pretty consistently combines Bitcoin, crypto and macro in a way that is extremely enjoyable to read. Today, to give you a little taste of Byron's writing, we're going to do a piece that looks backwards and a piece that looks forward. We start, of course, with the backwards. The piece is from a newsletter called Crypto's Family Tree on May 30th, and it kicks off with a Chinese proverb. To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root. The good news of crypto's long ancestry. Newsletter readers, I've learned, are a savvy bunch. So if I were to ask what the first blockchain was, I'm confident you'd immediately suss it out as a trick question and decline to answer. Unless that is, you've heard of Surety, which offered a blockchain -based timestamping service for digital documents starting way back in 1995. If, like everyone else, you associate blockchains with the distributed computing systems that are Bitcoin and Ethereum, you might question how Surety could classify as such. Running algorithms on a decentralized set of computers would have been impractical in the dial -up era of the 90s. But that's not the only way to do it. Surety held customer documents on its own servers, but achieved trustlessness in a most analog manner by printing its hashes once a week in the classified section of the New York Times. That admittedly does not sound very useful by today's standards. One week block times? But I offer it here as evidence that the history of blockchains predates Satoshi's white paper of 2008. And as a fun fact to drop into conversation at your next crypto conference. But here's an even funner fact to wow your crypto friends with. That first blockchain is itself predated by smart
The Breakdown
Wait, Crypto Caused the Fentanyl Crisis?!
"Moving over to crypto, the US discourse continues to be defined by toxic politicians. Elizabeth Warren has found yet another way to jam her anti -crypto agenda into the limelight, this time unbelievably blaming crypto for the opioid epidemic. During a Senate banking hearing where senior administration officials were assembled to discuss how to counter China across national security, economic security, and foreign policy, Warren took the opportunity to question a Treasury official about crypto's use in purchasing fentanyl precursor chemicals from Chinese manufacturers. According to recent data, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic identified 90 China -based firms willing to supply fentanyl precursors and found that around 90 % of those firms accepted crypto payments. Elizabeth Rosenberg, the US Treasury Department's Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, answered Warren's question about the trade by acknowledging that quote, The reason why they would find this appealing is the same reason that other financial criminals would find it appealing, which is to say there's an element of pseudonymity that they seek. Now, getting to her real point, Warren responded with a renewed call for lawmakers to reconsider her digital asset anti -money laundering act, stating that the bill would be reintroduced in this Congress. Warren's bill would, of course, put in place onerous restrictions on the use of crypto to the point that some suggest it amounts to an attempt to ban the technology from US shores. Now, the Senator has precious little support for such draconian legislation, reportedly unable to even find sufficient sponsors among her colleagues to bring the bill to the Senate floor. Warren put a stamp on her point, saying crypto is helping fund the fentanyl trade and we have the power to shut that down. It's time. Lady of Crypto writes, Saying crypto funds fentanyl trade is baseless and an obvious play on people's fears. Cash has been used to fund drug trade for centuries. Not only is cash used to facilitate drug transactions, you can also roll it up and snort some drugs. Cash is the perfect tool for buying and using drugs. Ban cash. But crypto? A blockchain is a public ledger, which makes it far less attractive for facilitating drug transactions.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Sam Altman's Crypto Project Worldcoin Raises $115M
"We love talking about WorldCoin. It's really surging into the headlines in recent weeks, largely around the hype and interest relating to artificial intelligence, AI. Now, word of this raise had been leaked a little bit. According to sources, this is going to be in the works and enough. Today, they announced that they've raised $115 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital and involving A16Z, Bain, Capital Crypto and others. Let's talk about WorldCoin. I think this is less a bet on the value of another coin and more a bet on the importance of systems that may counteract the rise of AI. That's very much a big part of what is being announced here by Blockchain Capital in a post written by Spencer Bogart. He talks about this proof of personhood concept as being the real secret sauce behind this project as the AI rises up. I'm going to toss this one straight to Jen for her initial thoughts. WorldCoin certainly been in the news quite a bit of late. What do you make of its most recent back end? $115 million. This is crazy. I feel like we haven't spoken about a raise this big. In at least a year, maybe we have all the days just kind of blend together for me. But Zach, you're right. I think about two weeks ago, we spoke about this new product that they launched that offered up a solution for authenticating humans in the age of AI through this biometric retina scanning orb. I think it's really interesting how they've been able to pull their narrative together. Now they're offering a solution to an issue that we've been discussing as AI accelerates faster and faster. They also have this crypto wallet that's part of their product that's supposed to be this really stripped down, much simpler way to hold your coins and store your assets. I think that they've developed a really interesting narrative, especially given what's going on in the news right now with wallets and AI. They have some big backers here. They have A16Z. I think I saw Bank Capital there. I think that they probably were able to craft a really compelling story, get that in front of VCs and raise this money. I think it's a strong and good bet for VCs who are waiting out the bear
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Josh and Jesse Berger Talk All Things PKT
"These two gentlemen that are here today have been fighting to get on there and get some visibility for a year now. I met you both gentlemen last year walking around. And I have with me Josh Berger and Jesse Berger. The Berger Brothers. The Berger Brothers. Is there another one? There is a third Berger. There's a third Berger. I saw him on the emails. Who's that one? He's the younger Berger Brother. You don't take him with you? He's got a kid, so we got to, you know, he needs a babysit, you know. Got to babysit. That's funny. We need someone to keep the train on the tracks while we're out here in the trenches hustling and spreading the gospel of packet. That's it. That's what we're here for today is talk about packet and it's spelled PKT. That's correct. But it was interesting is last year I ran into you. We were talking over at a lounge and it was so exciting because at Consensus of 2022 had like 20 ,000 people. It was just amazing to be able to run into everyone. And there's so many people here today. We have more room here to mingle and walk around, but you've come such a long way in a year with this product, with this amazing, what would you call it? A portal Wi -Fi. How are you packaging packet? Yeah, so it's a mesh Wi -Fi technology and there's really two key parts to this. There's the baseline protocol, the blockchain, which is called packet and it's an ecosystem fully decentralized. There's no foundation. There's no company. There's no investors. It's like the true decentralized type protocol, similar to Bitcoin. It's code on GitHub. Anybody could download it for free and make essentially money off of your internet. And then within that ecosystem, a company that Josh and I and Jeremy founded, as well as our other co -founder, Caleb James Delisle, who's one of the original protocol creators and lead dev, started PacketPal. And PacketPal, the whole premise was building software and hardware to make it really easy for people to participate in the packet ecosystem.
Bitcoin Audible
Mint the Future With Taproot Assets by Ryan Gentry
"Let's get into today's read. And it's titled. Mint the Future with Taproot Assets version 0 .2 by Ryan Gentry. Today we are excited to announce the latest release of the Taproot Assets protocol daemon, formally Taro. Taproot Assets version 0 .2 provides the core set of features for developers looking to issue, send, receive and discover assets on the bitcoin blockchain, currently on testnet with mainnet support coming soon. We first released the Taproot Assets draft specification a year ago and continue to be grateful for the reception from the amazing bitcoin developer community. Bitcoin developers, we appreciate your continued support as we bitcoinize the dollar and bring multi -asset support to the lightning network. This core set of developer features consist of these flagship items. Sending and receiving with novel virtual partially signed bitcoin transactions or VPSBTs. Discovering and publishing assets with the initial universe APIs. Maximum chain space efficiency with multi -asset mints, sends and receives. Stability and scalability improvements. Now that the release is available for download, we will propose the finalized Taproot Assets spec to the community as a formal series of VIPs. Merge Taproot channels, publish a blip describing added interaction for lightning functionality and finally launch the first testnet Taproot Assets payment channels on lightning. We are incredibly excited to release these new lightning capabilities to the developer community as a new tool to bring bitcoin to the
The Breakdown
Bitcoin's New Governance Challenge
"All right, Friends, well, as it is Bitcoin conference week, I thought why not do an LRS all focused on Bitcoin. So today we have two essays both sort of grounded in the recent feast bikes and both really focused on what happens next and more specifically what sort of additional emphasis on layer twos we might need as a Bitcoin community. The first piece was written by coin desk Michael Casey and is called frogs, fevers and fees, Bitcoin's new governance challenge. Michael Wright's this is why we can't have nice things. Just when we thought we'd learned our lessons from the blow ups of FTX, three arrows capital, Celsius at all, meme coin fever strikes again. Crazy crypto casinos are back. People are making ridiculous gobs of money from tokens based on a frog image, while others stand to lose massively as a rational bidding takes hold. At this time, the fever is not only infecting greedy human minds, but messing with the functioning of the most valuable blockchain in the world. The ability to create tokens based on the new BRC 20 standard, which was enabled by Bitcoin's taproot upgrade, has fostered a variety of new Bitcoin based meme coins, many mimicking those released on other chains that have recently experienced wild price movements. This past week, for example, the Ethereum based Pepe coin rose almost 5 million %, then lost 50% off its highs. This follows the creation of the ordinals protocol, which gave rise to Bitcoin based data inscriptions that function as non fungible tokens. These use up a lot more data than a basic Bitcoin transaction, which means they're driving up Bitcoin fees. Bitcoin miners have lately been earning more from transaction fees than from their routine 6.25 Bitcoin block reward, and that means if you want to send a small amount of Bitcoin on chain, it won't be accepted or you'll have to pay a prohibitively exorbitant price for doing so. I can hear Elizabeth Warren's anti crypto army snickering. These crypto Bros are so obsessed with mooning into lambos, that they're destroying what they claim to be this technology's core purpose as a better form of money and value exchange.
Unchained
Wizards Vs. Laser Eyes for the Future of Bitcoin
"What's the vibe over in Bitcoin Miami given what's happening on chain this time of year? So I think that this year there's probably going to be a significant clash between the laser eye maxi tribe and sort of the magicians, the wizards. So Mia and my cofounder udi were sort of thinking about how can we amplify that situation even more. So what we've been doing with this NFT project that we have is that in order to get whitelist in our project and we don't do the usual thing where people are people are active in Discord or stuff like that. We have a specific thing called the wizard school. So in the wizard school, people do quests like sending a lightning transaction, interacting with the Bitcoin system. And the most recent quest that we launched was to wear a wizard hat to the Bitcoin Miami conference. So take a picture of yourself with a wizard. Because I think what's happening right now is that the existing laser eye tribe, they really blame all this original stuff on the wizards, even though they were the ones that sort of went develop, deployed and went to bat for taproot for years, and then didn't find a use case for it for years until someone thought, okay, why don't we just, why don't we just treat this upgrade as an arbitrary data blob and just feed any random stuff into the blockchain. And that's where the taproot wizards came in and said, okay, let's do some magic with this arbitrary data. So they think that we are destroying the chain, which they're the ones that's sort of got the upgrade into Bitcoin. So we just we've already been seeing a lot of animosity from their camp and there's been tweets that they've made to the effect of hunt a wizard if you see one in Miami, so we thought, let's just flood the conference with wizards. Let's show them how many we are. Let's make it a part of the wizard school to show up in a wizard hat so that maybe we'll make them feel outnumbered. What exactly do they get if they show up in a wizard hat and take a selfie? They get a slightly higher chance at a whitelist for our NFC collection.
The Breakdown
Binance Quits Canada Over Regulatory Issues
"Let's not bury the lead. Binance has quit Canada. Citing unsuitable regulatory conditions the world's largest exchange will no longer be available for Canadian residents. In a tweet on Friday afternoon, binance said, unfortunately, today we are announcing that binance will be joining. Other prominent crypto businesses in proactively withdrawing from the Canadian marketplace. We would like to thank those regulators who worked with us collaboratively to address the needs of Canadian users. Albeit a small market, it held sentimental value for us as the home country of our founder. We had high hopes for the rest of the Canadian blockchain industry. Unfortunately, new guidance related to stablecoins and investor limits provided to crypto exchanges makes the Canada market no longer tenable for binance at this time. We put off this decision as long as we could to explore other reasonable avenues to protect our Canadian users, but it has become apparent that there are none. So I think at this stage, it's worth trying to get a little bit of the history and context for binance in Canada. Obviously they are identifying some recent limits and new guidance, but there is of course a history here and it's worth knowing. Luckily, Canadian crypto lawyer Jacob Robinson did a threat on exactly that. He writes finances founded in 2017 at which time Canadian residents had access to the platform for crypto transactions. On March 29th, 2021, the Ontario securities commission notified crypto asset trading platforms that they had until April 19th to contact OSC staff to discuss regulation. These discussions revolved around bringing crypto asset platforms, operations into compliance with Canadian securities laws. The collapse of quadriga and an investigative report led to quote regulatory takeaways applicable to crypto asset platforms, which spurred these conversations. But this common in talk actually led somewhere. There are ten registered crypto platforms in Canada, and many more gave pre registration undertakings with plans to register.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Enterprise Blockchain Consortium Led by Digital Asset and Big Players
"Going to talk about some enterprise blockchain stuff. Digital asset, which in my opinion is one of the more poorly named companies in the space is leading a consortium with Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, and others to make interoperable private blockchains for the institutional sector a thing. Enterprise blockchain is back. Maybe it never went away, but it's a bit different now. And this speaks to the difference that we find ourselves here in 2023, relative to when we found ourselves in 2019 back when some of these initial ideas were floated. This one, I think you're seeing a lot of the interoperability conversation take place as you look to stitch together all these various institutional blockchains that are doing stuff over there in enterprise land. I'm going to toss this to will. Maybe it has a spicy take. I don't know, is this new news? Is this old news? Is this exciting? Is this a rehash? What we saw last time around? What's your thoughts? Certainly not exciting. And to your point, yes, one of the worst named companies in the space. And possible to find anything about these guys. But they are very good at getting money. I will say, looking at their team, they've been around since 2014. And the most recent fundraising series I could find. Again, this could be incorrect because it was super hard to Google anything about digital assets. The series D, they raised a $120 million back in 2022. That's a lot of money for someone who seemingly has to put out a lot of products. And that's a lot of these enterprise blockchain products. We work with a lot of high profile names. We raise big rounds and some people use us out there in the ether to move money back and forth between bakes, maybe take our word on it. That's mostly what we've seen to date. I think there has been some stuff from my Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, about their quorum chain, and how they're using this Ethereum fork of sorts to move stablecoins back and forth themselves instead of using their own bank network they use a blockchain based bank network, but a lot of the stuff is this Hamilton mold, but it's put out some sort of enterprise blockchain solution, which slaps the money on top of it and call it a day.
The Breakdown
Is the SEC's Proposed Crypto Custody Rule a Threat to the Industry?
"We're starting with what I see as one of the big crypto battles right now. It's something that might seem subtle, but I think could actually have a pretty dramatic impact. I am talking about a new proposed SEC crypto custody rule. And to get a sense of the significance, I'd point to this tweet from Tyrone Ross, who wrote, I really don't think folks understand how damaging this particular part of the new custody rule is for the space as a whole. No adviser in their right mind will attempt to comply with this. So what is going on? Well, a group of crypto players, including the blockchain association, andreessen Horowitz, and coinbase have all filed letters calling for major revisions to the SEC's proposed changes to custody rules. Jake javins gave the blockchain association tweeted, in February, the SEC proposed a new investment adviser custody rule that would restrict capital formation and put U.S. investors at greater risk. Today, the blockchain association filed a comment letter explaining how the proposal both contradicts the SEC's mission and violates federal law. Miles Jennings, the general counsel at andreessen Horowitz wrote on Friday, we filed a comment letter to the SEC's safeguarding custody rule. We did not mince words. The proposal is another misguided and transparent attempt to wage war on crypto, and if past, it will result in investor harm, market inefficiencies, and poor capital formation. Coinbase's chief legal officer Paul grill wrote earlier this year, the SEC proposed major revisions to a rule requiring RIAs to hold client assets at qualified custodians. Today we're adding our comments to the pile to explain where this proposal is misguided and how it can be improved.
The Breakdown
Bitcoin's Ordinal Inscriptions Creates $1B Token Market
"Ordinals came out a few months ago, and they were an experiment that assigned each satoshi a unique number and used the witness portion of the Bitcoin transaction to quote unquote inscribe arbitrary data. So that could be text, images, et cetera. This is why they are called ordinal inscriptions. People started using them to create what is effectively a version of NFTs on Bitcoin. Although some think they're even cooler than NFTs because the actual data itself is on the Bitcoin blockchain. Well, a couple months ago, a pseudonymous developer named domo experimented with the idea of using inscriptions to create a rudimentary form of token issuance. This he called BRC 20, probably referencing ERC 20, which is Ethereum's token standard. Since then, thousands of these token collections have popped up. They're basically all meme coins. They're all experiments, but some of them are actually getting valuable. At least in the sense of people being willing to spend real resources for them. Over the last week, the total market cap of BRC 20 tokens have gone from the tens of millions, which, by the way, still would have been a lot just because these things are lines of text to near on a $1 billion this morning. The biggest collection the original order has a market cap approaching 300 million all on its own and a 24 hour volume over 5 million. Now there are severe debates going on about this. On the one hand, some folks think that this is a huge boon for Bitcoin in that it's driving up fees, which is good for minors and chain security, it's demonstrating what a scarce resource Bitcoin block space is, and it's creating incentives to solve scaling issues with layer two. On the other hand, there are folks who are aghast and see it causing congestion and crowding out other quote unquote more legitimate use cases for Bitcoin. Now, I put more legitimate in air quotes because of course, legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder and in the will of the free market.
What Bitcoin Did
Investing in Gold and Bitcoin With Lawrence Lepard
"As I compare and contrast gold to Bitcoin, gold has a couple of advantages. One is there's no ongoing energy cost to holding coins. Coins are mined. The energy spent, you got the coins. That's it. No more. Bitcoin, you buy the Bitcoin, you know, if you just hold it in HODL it in an address, you're not paying anything, but there will be an energy cost. Somebody's got to pay for that transaction when you choose to sell it. In the sense that there'll be some kind of a sats fee, so to speak. And more recently in the blockchain got rather backed up after, you know, Silicon Valley bank blew apart. I saw some transactions going through at 5, 700, $700 of transaction. So that's worth keeping in mind. But in all other respects, I think Bitcoin is so far superior that I recommend everybody have a shitload of Bitcoin. And I recommend older people in particular have some gold because generally speaking, older people don't like to see enormous volatility. I mean, I have clients for 70 or 80 years old. If I told them, hey, you're a counts down 80%, but don't worry, it's going to come back. You know, they shoot me, right? Well, yeah. They might not have a whole cycle left in them. Well, that's right. That's exactly right. You've got to have a longer time frame. But to be completely fair, I mean, if I were 30 years old, I'd probably be 90% Bitcoin 10% cold.
The Bad Crypto Podcast
Advancing Global Crypto Innovation With Sheila Warren
"It was just about three years ago that our guest today was last on the show, and at that time she was the head of blockchain for the World Economic Forum, where she occasionally interface with the clause Schwab, it's a bugs and you will be happy and she is now with the crypto council for innovation. She is the CEO and her name is still, Sheila Warren, Sheila, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me and Joel and Travis. You've idea of eating the bugs? No? The time had come for a change and been almost 5 years and I really wanted to be in a place where I could always say what I truly, truly thought, which as you know, I didn't really hesitate to do at the forum. I got a long leash there, but I wanted to be more of an advocate that I felt I was able to be in an organization that was that's objective. That's actually officially objective. Very nice. Yeah, so now. So this is cool. So you have to was a crypto for innovation dot org. Crypto counsel for innovation is crypto counsel dot org. Same Twitter handle as I always had at Sheila underscore Warren. But yeah, I've been in this role now for a little over a year. And we are an evidence based advocacy organization that's focusing on trying to get sound crypto policy around the world. I mean, really. So it isn't really that different, I think, from what my goals were in previous roles, even predating the forum, just trying to get responsible policy in place. But the strategy I can use now is obviously very different. Do you feel like your hands were somewhat tied with the WF, where, you know, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to eat an elephant, right? You're monitoring and changing policy all around the world. You're not just like Caitlin long and saying, all right, let's do Wyoming. Let's go everywhere. And so this is far for you more freedom and liberty to do what you want to do. You know, yes and no, right? 'cause I think here the connections that so that's a really interesting question I love that you asked that. So the answer is always complicated and I'm a lawyer by training so you don't ever get to give you a yes or no answer. But it is yes and no. It's yes from the standpoint of I truly believe that crypto governance, crypto economics, the blockchain, are all going to underlie most of our systems moving forward. But I think the connection with other systems is actually even more important now than it ever was.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Sui Network Officially Launches
"Let's start off with a long awaited launch of an L one sui, which for those of you paying attention is one of two blockchains that functions using the move language, basically it was born out of Facebook's Libra stablecoin project. But anyway, we called in the first line of buzzy layer one project in this article that Liz our coindesk reporter wrote about it. But it has not launched without controversy. It has a $2 billion valuation, a token that kind of has this confusing distribution. I don't know who it went to. This sweet token, they didn't do an AirDrop, which is something that's kind of the norm these days. Also, its speeds were slower than its main competitor called app toss, another one of these Facebook, I guess birth, I don't know. It came from Facebook, it's another one of those, it's kind of hard to explain how it all comes together. But anyway, yeah, curious if you guys have any takes on this whole sweet thing. May not launches are exciting, they're often rocky. There's been very few that have gone off without a hitch. I know apps also had some issues at launch, but yeah, the idea here, I think, is that there's this new generation of more performant blockchains that court people with various programming languages that aren't solidity and are obviously a bit more friendly to web two developers. And that's sort of the pitch, right? And there's several chains out there that are making essentially the same pitch and it's essentially that. Hey, we're faster. We're better that we can get devs from the broader world rather than just those Ethereum nerds who code and solidity, right? Whether or not any of that will pan out is very much to be determined, right? I think Ethereum as the leading smart contract blockchain is looking pretty good. It has that critical mass of developers who are building stuff and launching stuff, but there are certainly these L ones who are looking to get in on some of that euphoria and craziness that we saw during the last cycle with Solana and others. So we certainly within that sort of cohort of chains that wants to be bigger and better. We saw some headlines that sui is allegedly a Solana killer as Solana wasn't Ethereum killer when it launched
The Breakdown
New York Magazine Finds Evidence of Operation Choke Point 2.0
"Let's shift to our story today, and it is a bombshell. Last night, gen Vietnam from New York magazine dropped a story all about operation choke .2. And while some have commented that they were surprised that this particular piece appeared in New York magazine, they clearly haven't been following Jen. Jen has been covering crypto for more than 6 years now for numerous publications and has a very good read on the industry. She also went to northwestern as an undergrad, so obviously, you know, she has game. Anyway, we'll come back to Jen's story in a moment, but we have to move a bit farther back. I don't think that any of you listening to the show right now won't be familiar with the idea of operation choke .2. Operation choke point was an Obama era program that basically used political pressure to block unwanted or unloved industries out of banking access. So it was things like payday loans or gambling or pornography, right? That program was eventually halted during the Trump administration, but the seeds of it clearly remained. In fact, one of the people in charge of architecting operation choke .1 would go on to become the head of the FDIC under Biden. There has been a strong suspicion among the crypto crowd that ever since the collapse of FTX, there has been a largely coordinated push to block out legal crypto businesses from having access to the banking industry. It has at times seemed very transparent and has at other times just been reflected in what feels like impossible to ignore coordinated actions. Well, trying to get a little bit more information about how real this thing is. On March 16th, Jake stravinsky, the chief policy officer at the blockchain association, wrote today, blockchain association sent freedom of information act request to the fed, FDIC, and OCC demanding information about the unlawful de banking of crypto companies. We're also collecting evidence of de banking. Here's the situation. There are troubling reports of crypto companies having their bank accounts closed, often with no notice and no explanation. They've struggled to open new accounts, too. This disturbing trend suggests that regulators are trying to cut crypto entirely out of the banking system.
The Breakdown
Don't Ban Crypto! The Case for Pro-Innovation Regulation
"Regular listeners will have heard me reference a number of times a recent essay in foreign affairs by professor Hilary Allen called the case for banning crypto. Hillary Allen is a Professor of law at American university and she has appeared numerous times in front of Congress as a congressional witness about the crypto industry. The point being that she's not some fly by night critic. She is a respected and legitimate voice in Washington, D.C.. Her argument is quite clear in this piece. It's that as the subtitle says, blockchain's risks far outweigh its rewards. I don't need to go through piece by piece or line by line. A few weeks ago, I read a couple of rebuttals. It is notable that she threw many of the arguments that crypto advocates have right back in their face, including the idea that America could lose leadership and push crypto companies overseas. Alan basically says we shouldn't want them here because this isn't an industry we should want to be a leader in. I don't think that the point of this piece was actually Hillary Allen thinking that she could get people to ban crypto. I think the point of this piece was to shift the overton window to include banning crypto as an option. If that's the case, it's obviously very important to have voices who are also respected in Washington. Bring the conversation back to a more middle ground. And for that, we turn to the blockchain association's Kristen Smith. Kristen is extremely sharp. You can go see her in my holiday interviews from last year, and she has just published a piece on coindesk called the case for regulating not banning crypto. Kristen writes, American university professor Hilary Allen, who recently wrote an article titled the case for banning crypto in the influential publication foreign affairs, is part of a very small cohort of, quote, crypto banners, working toward that end. In addition to engaging the media, Alan and her peers are pushing the argument that crypto does more harm than good while speaking with federal agencies. She is testifying before the congressional hearing on the future of digital assets on Thursday afternoon. The case for banning crypto is a pipe dream. It won't happen by Allen's own admission, blockchain is a general purpose database technology that supports a $1 trillion industry, employing thousands globally, nonetheless, the efforts to ban rather than regulate crypto have only backfired and harmed Americans.
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"Know what you would call it, like a badge of trust. Is that kind of a fair way to put it? Yeah, I mean, it's really good one because actually what brought me into this space. In the first place, blockchain was called open badges. So that's sort of the first use case that this sort of really got me into the space was the idea was blockchain for educational credentials. And the schema specifically was open badges. And so the idea was that by anchoring credentials to a blockchain, there are some improved characteristics for people. I thought that was ridiculous at first. But then looking into it more, what it was doing was solving the essential and availability of this well-known in the educational space open badges schema. So open badges historically, the most common form of verification was directly hitting an issuer website to say like you say you've completed a course in the course provider gives you an open badge. And then say you use that to go apply for a job, then what would happen is that the potential employer, if they wanted to verify it, they would be directly hitting URL of the course provider, right? And so that brings in a lot of risks like just short term availability, the site is down or something. But then also what if they are not practicing good hygiene around storage of the credentials? What if this issuer goes out of business? So and then there's also concerns around tracking. You can the issue of a credential can learn a lot by what you're doing if they're standing up a site that gets pinged every time you go use it.
The Cryptoshow - blockchain, cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and decentralization simply explained
"blockchain" Discussed on The Cryptoshow - blockchain, cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and decentralization simply explained
"Coinbase is launching a new blockchain initiative. And in this video, I want to talk about 5 things that stick out for me. I want to talk about if I see value in this, if I don't devalue this, I want to talk about up sites, risks, potentials, whether you should be investing in this new blockchain if you actually can invest. And a few of my other thoughts. So dive in. I'm at the airport, by the way. So if in the background, if you in the background, here's a nice because I'm on a business trip for two days. And so I found out about this video here at the airport. Okay, so first and foremost, what happened? Coinbase announced that they are launching layer two built on top of the optimism stack on top of Ethereum. It's obviously going to be open-source. They announced that just yesterday. When you look into the GitHub, you see that they make the testnet life three weeks ago so the data announcing this and they are planning on going into the mainnet, they're talking about in the summer. So that's kind of the timeline here. Just looking at the guitar at the moment, it looks like there were 5 comets being done, some renaming. So not all too much to be on is so far. In the whole process. Now, absolutely key and this is just crazy because people are already trading some base token that does not that's a total different token. They are not going to be creating their own token. It's purely going to be centered around Ethereum. That's going to be interesting when I talk about bullish bearish opportunities, risks, and so on. So as a whole, it doesn't look all too planned out for too long. Because Brian Armstrong is CEO a couple of months ago still said that they are not planning any kind of blockchain initiative and now they go out and doing one. So it seems in the last couple of months, maybe with the SEC. They're kind of going this route, then so that's kind of what we know so far. So let me go into some speculation on my part. Why are they doing this? What is their motivation behind it and so on? I think on the one hand, they want to have a possibility to escape the C 5 regulation. Now we have seen there's a lot from Gary gensler from the SEC and so on. So that could be a big opportunity to kind of escape that regulation. The second part, obviously there's a lot of crypto natives coming in, coinbase has a 100 million users, more or less, about 10 million of them trade on a daily basis on a regular basis. So they want to offer something for them. They want to capture that market. And obviously they want to be in control of that ecosystem. So this is a bit of the motivation. They're building on top of Ethereum, which makes, in my opinion, most sense for them as well. They work with the optimism team. So I think that's all very much aligned. So that's obviously a bit of the motivation behind this, kind of being able to escape some of the regulation, have some possibilities add more customers. Great. So let's talk about potential upsides, potential downsides. Who's going to win in all this? Well, obviously I think the entire DeFi sector as a whole is going to win. I think Ethereum is going to win. Everyone that's building on top of theorem. Any kind of layer two, I think, will also win. There will be strong network effects. So if you're investing in defecting, I think that's going to be a big winner. I was the optimism Assyrian this kind of system. A big question is going to be how much is coinbase going to be able to pull actual users over attract builders, attract projects, so we're going to have to see that. But I think that's going to be definitely the winners. And then obviously what's the risks who are the losers? I do think that all the other layer ones here are really being put under pressure. So all the Ethereum competitors, they, in my opinion, really lose from this deal in partnership, coinbase is one of the largest players. They're going to bring massive massive attention to Ethereum with that. So to me, these are some of the biggest losers. Big risk here though in all of that is regulation at the moment regulation has stopped globally at the protocol level. So blockchain so far haven't been regulated. This could change now, right? Gary gensler, the SEC could step in and say, listen, we're going to regulate the protocol level as well now. We want to stop what coinbase is trying to do here. And obviously, that is a big risk out of all of that. Yeah, but as a whole, I think this is very, very bullish. Now, obviously, there are very critical voices already. Where these critical voices coming from mainly obviously from the Bitcoin kind of side of things, because it makes sense, bitcoiners are a bit scared of that now. And I was the media cerium kind of competitors. Now what's one of the criticism here? It is that the way this is structured right now is extremely centralized. There is this it's not like a coordinator. This is not that way, but the system that swords that transactions and that system in theory could completely halt the chain. At the moment, this is completely controlled by coinbase. So there is at least at the beginning. Zero blockchain and everything is basically a centralized database. They need to decentralize that down the line. So let's see if they're doing this, how they do in this, what's their process in this? So this is, I think, a bit of the criticism. But as a whole, I think this is very bullish for its DeFi space. I'm very bullish for anyone working with your layer twos. And so I think it's quite exciting. Please do not fall for scams to tell you that you can invest into a base token, so you have to be extra careful with that. And yeah, obviously on the company side here, at cake, we're going to be looking closely into that. Maybe looking at some partnerships, maybe looking into what we can do there. I think on DeFi chain side as a community, it's going to be quite interesting to see kind of network effects there, strengths there. So as a whole looks quite good. So yeah, data also from China, looking quite promising, so that's interesting. Yeah. So not much else to add. I hope you're staying healthy, staying safe, having a good end of a week. And yeah, I'm going to go and catch my flight. So with that, see you soon at the next video. Subscribe, like, comment. Obviously, subscribe to the podcast, if you're listening to the audio version, and then I'll see you soon. Thank you so much. You're truly Julian bye bye. Unfortunately, we are already at the end of today's episode. If you find the crypto show helpful and would like to continue being a part of it. Don't forget to subscribe so you are notified when we have the next episode out. If you want to do me a huge favor, please leave a review. It literally only takes a few seconds, but it helps the podcast platforms to rank this show. Hear you next time Julian
Cryptocurrency for Beginners: with Crypto Casey
"blockchain" Discussed on Cryptocurrency for Beginners: with Crypto Casey
"Sweet. Back to the question, could a new blockchain based society make the world a better place? Yes. It's possible. And we need to start doing our part to educate people to create more awareness about corruption and central banking, corruption and big business, corruption and government, and how almost all the media. We are consuming what's created by them to distract us, keep us poor. Keep us numb and keep us done. We need to help each other learn about how the world works now so we can make changes to create a better future. If more people were interested in and understood the implications of a blockchain based society, the only persons that would not want it are the persons who rule the world right now. Banks, corporations, and the government. Because blockchain replaces a lot of what they do, and it keeps them honest. Blockchain allows each and every one of us to transact directly with each other without the need for third parties, like banks. It also allows us to store value without the government being able to prevent us from using it by freezing it or by outright taking it. Basically, blockchain technology is an open, decentralized, transparent record keeping system. That ensures everyone has equal access to information, which eliminates the need for intermediaries by proving a level of accountability. That is currently not present or possible in traditional centralized systems that are used today. In a blockchain based society, corporations would no longer have the ability to wield the same level of power and influence as they do now. The transparency of the blockchain would hamper corporations lobbying activities to sway political decisions in their favor and the decentralization of the blockchain would ensure that people's voices and interests are taken into consideration. Because of open public, decentralized and transparent blockchains were in place. It would force the government incorporations to be more honest. Because we would all be able to see where every single penny of our tax dollars go, or where every single new dollar that is printed goes. And if you don't know how new money is distributed, check out this video guide for beginners, about a phenomenon known as the candy and effect. And how our current monetary system is designed to keep us poor and keep the people closest to the money printer, corporations, and their bought and paid for political cronies, rich. By clicking on the link above. Nice. Even if we don't get to a fully blockchain based society in the near or distant future, we still need to educate each other and spread awareness of how everything around us is designed to oppress us. Check this out. If you've ever taken courses on economics, you learn that a market economy is
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"Back on the topic of trends and analysis to say what's in crypto, like NFTs, Dex, wallets, and so forth. Have you noticed more traffic in any one in particular or maybe what are your thoughts on where you see some of the trends going? So overall, the numbers are down, right? With a lunar hack with the prices being depressed, that's just a thing across the board. So I would say it's new use cases that's really exciting, right? If you look at the NFTs, NFTs have dropped in pure dollar terms, but haven't really dropped an eth or sold terms. So if you look at the native currency. So they're not really down per se, right? In dollar terms, yes, they are. But it is all they're not really down. So I would say these emerging use cases, which are yet to be discovered yet to be fine product market fit is where a lot of the excitement is. If you look at the games that are coming on the blockchain, shrapnel announce something a couple of days ago. We were the first to index these avalanche subnets. So these app chain thesis. This is like brand new. We've indexed those app changes and if you look at the games that are on these app, it's really exciting. These are brand new use cases, brand new technologies that didn't exist. 6 months or a year prior. So what this is going to do is it's going to really, really grow the space massively. In the grand scheme of things, I think it's important to put everything in context. So if you look at the number of developers in the entire world, something like GitHub has 30 million developers on their platform. Something like the blockchain space has 300,000 developers, so that's 1% of the entire developer base. And something that covalent has about 35,000 developers on the platform. So it's .1%. So we are .1% in our mission to create to get developer adoption. So .1%. So we haven't even started. In our mission to make blockchain data accessible, we are probably heading to the front door and maybe putting our shoes on. We haven't even left our House. So I would say it's so early, so nascent in a lot of these things that I think the growth is yet to come. Wow, that's kind of astounding, really. I mean, are we going to have enough developers? Are they even out there? What is it going to take to attract more talent? Man, that's wild. Did you have a background in coding at all when you were younger? Yes. I've been programming pretty much all my life. So since my teens, but not professionally, I went down the pharmaceutical route and it was mostly data, but even today, you know, I'm not, I quote once in a while, but I think our software engineering team are more capable at it than I am. So when I want to explore new ideas, I just whip up simple prototypes and stuff, but nothing serious. Yeah, well, that's good. The reason I ask is, you know, I've got children and sometimes I wonder, you know, should I set them down this course? Because they've shown an interest in it. And it's just so much potential and like you said, there's just not enough developers yet. And I'm just kind of curious, you know, for maybe a younger people or people who are a little bit older and want to switch careers, you know,
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"Like data products like covalent. NFTs were, I think there was just cryptocurrencies back in 2017. Now, NFTs is a whole big thing by itself. So a lot of these things are coming in as an infrastructure level, which didn't exist in the previous cycle. So the next cycle that we new use cases that breaks the existing infrastructure and will start to level up. So I think we're still two cycles away from applications, holding ground before it's mass market. If you look today, there's probably 10 million crypto users. That's it. Just 10 million crypto users. And with game fi and NFTs, the next cycle, maybe they'll get to a 100 million users. If you look at the existing players that are coming in, to get to a billion users, I think it's two cycles away. So that's my take on the timeline. Really good take. It's interesting about infrastructure because sometimes I just marvel at how it's working right now. It's like, all right, yeah, it's working. That's amazing. When are we going to break it? At what point are all of these different blockchain projects going to start slowing down the Internet for everybody else in the world?
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"Is the taxation use case where you want to understand essentially the cost basis of your positions across all of the digital assets that you own. And then use an engine to calculate your tax liabilities. So that's a very popular use case and we see a lot of crypto tax providers using covalent as a data source. To enable that use case. It's fascinating actually, because it just kind of makes me think this is going to be an incredibly powerful tool for historians going forward because never before in the history of humankind have we had the ability to track something of value so well and say there is something in the future that historians want to see how many times did this NFT exchange hands in the past we had auctions and we had people who made a lot of money verifying if things were real or not and you had to trust this piece of paper that was from the 1800s and signed by so and so but now we're going to have quantifiable data and you can see how many different times it was transacted and it just kind of has my mind spinning thinking about all the different historical use cases it might have. Sorry, it's kind of a tangent there. No, you're exactly right, I think there is a lot of value in having a ledger that's immutable. And that's cryptocurrency secure. So it can be tempered with people are not changing the facts. After the fact, it's a legit record of what is actually happened. Yeah, as far as the wallet interface, is that something that's just kind of like a baseline code for developers to make their own version or do you have a wallet that you provide for them to use? Yeah, so we provide a bunch of things, but we don't provide that end user interface because we want to encourage a diverse set of viewpoints on these wallets and I think NFT style wallets need to be designed as an NFT viewer, game fly related wallets need to be designed with a gaming team. So we don't want to constrain what developers and users come up with. So what is a magical thing about covalent is a unified nature of the API. So this hundreds of blockchains out there in the world today, right? There's just lots and lots of watchings. And all of these blockchains are unique and bespoke in their own respective manner. Sometimes they're teeny differentiated, sometimes it's a great differentiator on how it works. For example, Ethereum was proof of work. It recently moved to a proof of stake, so that's more energy efficient. But from our perspective, I think there has to be one single unified interface to access all of this data. So the person who is consuming this data does not need to know the nuances of that blockchain under the hood. They don't really care if it's proof of work or proof of stake or any other technological bits, because all they want is the data. And they want to understand the data and showcase that data and do the research on data or build their tools. So covalent is
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"Encrypt that information on a watching or have any kind of privacy. So I think those kinds of entities. Even today, even salaries of civil servants are put on in a public ledger and a database. And it's published on websites. I know that's definitely the case. Down in the states and here in Canada so you can just go look up any employees, salary and the benefits and so on. And then that's what it should be, right? Anything that's funded by taxpayers money, you owe it to the citizens to disclose that data and have transparency. But private businesses, private individual, I think it's more of a barrier to adoption if everything is out in the public. I don't want other people to judge me for how I spend my money. I need my privacy. So I definitely think on an individual level, it's a barrier. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Like you said, most of the data people put on the Internet is easily trackable anyways, but going through the blockchain, I think, is a much more sound way to do it. We're seeing like an explosion the last couple of years I suppose by now of NFTs, different financial approaches, sort of DeFi, you know, there's so many wallets. There's so many new chains. It seems like it just seems like a really good tool to be able to see what's going on. You know, I can only imagine the power that this would bring to different individuals and companies. If you wouldn't mind just kind of walking me through what a new user would experience an onboarding type scenario. Yeah, so let's take a step back and understand what the landscape looks like. In my opinion, there's three verticals that are right for blockchain adoption. And it's starting to happen. The first is this D 5 FinTech kind of merge where you have traditional FinTech companies that are starting to adopt blockchain technologies, show the digital assets and so on. Recently, Robinhood announced a reptile. So that's pretty exciting. There's more and more of these companies coming in. And if you look at the younger generation, they have their energies. They have stablecoins and they want to see everything in one single portfolio. Viewer. So that's like a thing that's happening, which is pretty exciting. The second is the whole NFT craze. And what's exciting here is not just the face profile pictures that are all there was a big hype about that last year. But it's all these big brands like Tiffany's and DAG that is now issuing loyalty points as NFTs on the blockchain. And if you look at the sales for some of these NFTs, they're in the tens of millions of dollars. So not just primary sales, but secondly sales as well. So there's a whole economy that is starting to emerge around that, which is pretty exciting. And then the third thing is the game flight space where multiple doubly triple-A studios are now building a blockchain component to expand their portfolio of applications and games that they have on mobile games on console games, maybe social games, and then now blockchain games, where you have that P2P kind of training, custody of the assets is stored by the user and so on. So that's generally our parley on how we see the market evolving where we see a lot of traction. We have over 4000 customers on the covalent API today. So with that as a context, what covalent
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"So initially, our idea was that we would target the crypto native use cases. Now, people who are only live on the blockchain. And then eventually what will happen is traditional businesses will adopt blockchain technology. So now our vision opportunity is any business that has digital assets on their balance sheet. They don't even have to be a crypto company. They don't have to have a process and a blockchain. They just need to hold on to stable clients example. We'll require covalent somewhere down the stack. So that's really what we're seeing the markets play out. Aggregating data from over 32 blockchains over thousand decentralized applications, I'm sure much more to come in the future. Some people are really, I don't know what the term would be, but they're really good at keeping receipts. They're really good at putting everything in excel. They're very organized. Yeah, organized. There you go. Do you think that it's something that maybe people who aren't organized could help them become organizers? Is this something that's more for a particular type of person? Sorry, that's kind of a bad question. No, it's actually a great question. So I'll take a different take on the question. So the idea is that would it get people more organized? And I think yes, because the blockchain never forgets. Everything that's on the blockchain is immutable. So you can go back to any point in history and then figure out what exact that transaction is. And the flip side of this is that blockchains are actually bad for elicit behavior for terrorist funding for money laundering. Because the blockchain never forgets it leaves these breadcrumbs that can never be erased. So when the regulatory bodies come and say, there's a lot of illicit behavior happening on blockchains that's actually false because as a percentage, there's not a lot of money laundering that happened in the blockchain because everything is quite transparent. Everything is public, everything is traceable.
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"But blockchain show is a podcast that demystifies cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technology. Welcome to the blockchain show. How are you? I'm doing great. Pleasure to be here. It's great to have you here. I suppose maybe a good way to get started before we talk about covalent. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background, how you got interested in blockchain. And we take it from there. Yeah, great question. Great place to start. So I'm a physicist by training and worked on cancer drugs for about half my career. And I got a little disillusioned with that industry because of the way pharmaceuticals are financed and products taken to market. It takes about a decade to take a product out to market, which I felt like my life was slipping away. So I made the move into databases and just general cloud data infrastructure about a decade ago. And that's where I got my training wheels on. About four years ago, a friend of mine pointed me to a hackathon, a database hackathon that was here in Vancouver. And Vancouver rains a lot so this is a sunny or a rainy Saturday morning. I show up to this hackathon and decide to build something. And build a quick hack over those two days. And ended up winning that hackathon. So that hack is what is today covalent. And it was quite accidental because if it were not raining, if my friend didn't tell me about this, if, you know, just the timing, I would not have entered the crypto industry because I thought from my experience in blockchains, which I'm used to tens of thousands of transactions per second to 15 transactions per second on Ethereum was kind of a joke. So I mostly wrote it off and it was that hackathon that brought me in. And then there's a full journey after that, but that's how I got into that space. So you had the initial idea at the hackathon or was it kind of in your mind before? I had an idea that I wanted to just play with and test out. And in my experience in the industry, it doesn't matter what industry is for a new technology to be adopted by existing businesses, you need an on ramp. You need some kind of middleware. You need some kind of interface that allows your existing tools existing, talent, existing processes, to work with this new technology.
Tascha Labs Podcast | Crypto Investment through Macro Lens | Web3 | Blockchain
"blockchain" Discussed on Tascha Labs Podcast | Crypto Investment through Macro Lens | Web3 | Blockchain
"So once you're on this page, by the way, I'm not a front end designer, okay? So this is like a really ugly looking page. I know, but this is like, you're not here to appreciate the beauty of the web page where you're here to for a specific purpose, which is to find out how much that blockchain or the web three platform that you're interested in is worth. So if you read my previous article on those of you or if you listen to the previous episode when I talk about this valuation methodology, you will know that basically this model takes like three types of input, first of all, you need to put in an input of how much what's the adoption level that is proxied by daily active addresses or and or daily transaction volume. Number of daily transactions. So that's the number one input is adoption level of the platform and the second input you need to put in is what I call the platform markup. This is basically a measure of the platforms mode or at least a perceived mode that generally consensus level perceive the mode by most investors, right? So older platforms like if varian blockchain or Bitcoin blockchain, they will have higher markup than newer platforms like optimism or near or polygon. So here under this form input fields, you will see that I put in all the reference values for the for the markups for different chains in the original model. So what you can do is just look at this list of values for the markups and just you can just pick one that is closest to that you think like in terms of platform mode is closest to the one that you want to evaluate. So we will go to we'll go through an example. A little bit later. So don't worry about this. And the third input you need to put in is the crypto market condition, which is proxied by the total crypto market cap. Okay, so let's do a short walkthrough by an example, all right? So let's say, for example, I want to evaluate how much arbitrage is worth. I know arbitrum right now, it doesn't have a token, right? So but let's say if arbitrum issues a token platform token tomorrow and it's used to pay transaction fees on the platform, how much would the market cap of that token be? So that's the question that we try to answer, right? So then our first task is we want to find out the daily active addresses and the daily number of transactions of arbitrage. So the platform that I like to use is Artemis which basically gives you a list of popular blockchains and how much daily transaction numbers. So but you can use any other any other tools that you can find like the Ethereum compatible blockchains that EVM blockchains they usually have some type of clone of either scan that will give you these daily transaction numbers and so on. But other platforms you can find out on their own dashboard as well. But let's just say we find these on Artemis and here for arbitron, the latest daily activities is about 45 thousand. And the daily transaction number is about
Software Engineering Daily
"blockchain" Discussed on Software Engineering Daily
"Like an ID and address that is essentially kind of anonymous as far as identifying the actual person behind that transaction. Yeah, I've been hearing a lot about identity management in particular with blockchain and that is one particular use case, and that is the ability to create an identity that is shared among multiple independent applications without any single application owning that identity. So you can control your identity, nobody else controls it. I'm assuming there's lots of other examples like that. As well too. So how does blockchain do this? How does blockchain inherently work? In the 32nd view, not the 36 hour view. Yeah, I mean, you basically have a network of computers that are all essentially running the same application. And if I make an update to the state of that application or the state of that quote unquote like database or the blockchain that will then kind of propagate throughout the network and then the nodes of that network will come to a consensus and they will update the state and then if someone else tries to read that later on that hopefully they're going to kind of then get that updated value. And there's different ways. So like when you think of the origin of a blockchain, it was really just a single use case. It was basically cryptocurrency. You had Bitcoin. I'd like coin. Most of these implementations were just digital scarcity. They were like currencies. I guess you could say. And then we had after these basic use cases, Ethereum kind of came around and this idea of a smart contract and a shared computer that allowed you to not only have tokens or currencies, but also state and execution and smart contracts and essentially run applications on this distributed network. So if I wanted to build out even something like we might think of as a traditional web application like a blog, I could kind of build that data model into this smart contract deploy it to this shared computer and then everyone could access that and everyone could read that. And it was more than just obviously keeping up with a ledger of values, which was kind of the original use case. And I think we're continuing to evolve past that. You know, I think the use cases are becoming broader and broader as the technology is getting better and more efficient, less energy a lot of the issues that you be stopping people from being interested in blockchains had to do with the energy that was used by proof of work. Most blockchains are either already using or moving towards environmentally friendly consensus. So we're continuing to really evolve what a blockchain is. And even how they work. And I think that some of the stuff we're going to talk about today goes beyond the current architectures of blockchains and to kind of where we think the future of architectures are looking. But like essentially like when you think of the blockchain, going back to your original question, you have like four core mechanisms, you have data. You just have data that's stored. You have the consensus, which is essentially the ordering of that data. And then you have an execution layer that kind of runs the logic of to kind of come up with the current state of what the data actually looks like for users to consume. So every time you save something into a blockchain, it gets stored, every transaction is kind of like saved in that ledger. But you can't really just read all of that and come to a conclusion of what all that means, you know? Because you kind of are just keeping up with all of these changes. You need some type of calculation to determine the current state. So the execution environment of the execution layer is kind of give you that. So when you think of Ethereum, the Ethereum virtual machine kind of is that. You have all these transactions that have happened over time. But you can't really just go and read those without and determine what the state is. You need some type of execution environment to kind of like essentially process all of those transactions, give you the final outcome of what has happened. And then you kind of use that as your state, I guess you could say. To a cybercriminal, the
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"That's terrible. Some people are just not very nice. Ruthless. Yes. That's a better way to put it. And it's all transparent too. You can go and what's interesting about blockchain is it's a public ledger and you can see the transactions happening in real time and seeing where they go. I mean, that's one good part about it is the forensics you could see where the funds go and sometimes you can kind of track it's harder to get the funds off the chain without going through some I guess like coin joins or through some what's called tornado cash, but we talk about that later on but yeah it's hard because you could see where the money is going and try to catch them on the way out. I can tell there's a lot of thoughtfulness that goes into this and probably an incredible amount of work engineering wise. And this is a really fascinating topic we could probably spend the whole podcast just talking about this, but it's up to you if you wouldn't mind telling us how you were addressing some of these vulnerabilities or maybe just maybe we should just direct people towards your company that might be easier. Yes, no, actually another really cool thing about this industry and what I like it. I like it too, is because not only is the attacks come sometimes transparent. But the identifying the vulnerabilities is transparent and we have a GitHub of our penetration test reports or what we found that is public for people to see, which is kind of weird if you're coming from the traditional security background, usually pen test reports are confidential information, hit top secret, they never released. And in this, in this community, it's like marketing materials sometimes. We just got our pen test report done. Here's the vulnerabilities they found and we fixed them and they're released as bringing instilling confidence in investors or the people that they did their due diligence for the audits. So that's sometimes directing if you anybody here would like to see that. We have GitHub dot com slash Hal born security. There's hundreds of public penetration test reports and that can skim through and see the types of vulnerabilities, how they were found, how they're fixed, and it's a really good research material there to see the way we address it to kind of talk through the workflow that is when we work with a client. We find out where the target assets are, look at the smart contracts or the blockchain code, and we'll do it on ourself, identify the vulnerabilities and it's kind of like a constructive two way communication of find it, fix it, retest until it's at a state that we both feel comfortable with for risk level. And then it's kind of publicized and pushed to the network or pushed to the blockchain network for Google to start using. So that whole process is usually private until the release and then it becomes public. That's really cool. Would you say that education is something that you enjoy? Oh 100%. Yeah, I love even though at sands and being an author of the sands course for blockchain. SEC 5 5 four is blockchain spark project security is, and I teach this, I'm still a student for life.
The Blockchain Show
"blockchain" Discussed on The Blockchain Show
"A talented engineer tomer has been part of the stellar ecosystem since 2017 and has led a plethora of partner integrations and contributed to projects such as horizon. Steller's API and stellar X stellar sticks. Tomer, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? Doing pretty good, Ethan. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah, well, it's great to have you here. I'd like to learn a little bit about your background. We've talked about stellar before, but before we get into the development foundation, if you wouldn't mind, just maybe tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to be in this role. Sure thing. So I'm tomer. I'm originally from Israel. And prior to stellar, I was a researcher at a place called the media lab and MIT, which is this cross disciplinary research institute, I worked on a bunch of things like visual media analysis and digital fabrication. Actually worked a bunch on the project for 3D glass sprinting. And even though blockchain was always around MIT, I never actually dabbled in blockchain. This all changed in 2017. I was visiting San Francisco and I met up with a friend from MIT who also happens to be a Bitcoin core contributor. And was working with stellar at the time. And he said, I should really meet with the stellar guys because they're building some really interesting things. My immediate reaction was eh, I'm not actually a Bitcoin guy, I don't do blockchain, Bitcoin is probably dead. This was middle of 2017, and it was a bear market. And what Jeremy, my friend told me was that I'm being an idiot. And that saying that you're not doing blockchain in 2017. It's kind of like saying that you're not doing the web in the early 90s. So it's a fairly stupid statement I should stop saying it. And I did the following day met up with Jed founder of stellar and then David the chief architect. Or to sign the story. And I was really impressed. I knew nothing about blockchain at the time. But and I didn't know that Jed was a bit of a mini celebrity in the space. But what he told me is that he built in the late 90s, something called E donkey 2000, which I don't think it was so big in the states. It was this file sharing app, but in Israel where I'm from, it was pretty huge. So I was like, oh, you're that guy. So I learned about technology learned about the mission and packed up my stuff from Boston and moved to San Francisco within the week. And I've been with stellar ever since. Wow. You said since 2017? Yeah. Yeah, that seemed like a pretty kind of like a pivotal year. I remember, that was really the first time where I started having friends and family start taking an interest in the topic and I still get them talking to me every once in a while. I had a buddy come out and we were chatting over breakfast and it had some different views.
Veteran on the Move
"blockchain" Discussed on Veteran on the Move
"And like are they. I still don't quite get what some picture of funny looking guy open. It's on the blockchain there for not. Now it's worth more money I know we're not really here to talk about. Nfc's but it's part of that putting contracts on the blockchain or something like that. Can you explain that. Yeah totally so. I i mean the idea of nfc. At non-refundable tokens basically. You have a record of something that exists on a bar. Chen at its core. That's what it is. Basically a token non fungible. So you can't break it up. It's basically like a time stamp a document in a way this publish to the world. No one can change it right now. What what it represents is where some of the controversy columnist because some of the earliest entities actually came about from there is a fun. Project crypto kitties on on a theorem which is basically you have a non fungible token of a digital cat and there were many of these digital cats who created these cats would then go and meet with each other and create offspring cats and all these statements Immutable records on the blockchain. And it was just a fun game. That's that's all is but from there that actually spawned entire industry. Now what you can represent art on blockchain and he could consider the not to be like the token of authenticity right. That doesn't change that you can see the providence of that piece of artwork from is creation through the basically the chain of custody of it right in all of these things are just digital records that are on watch and then you can think of some of the other like very useful and a teaser. Those they represent digital items that are natively digital. So you can pick up your mat a magic sword and a video game pre pre blockchain pre entity you would have Content creators renew games actually creating grading these digital pieces of our work digital items that go into games and it was really tough for them to prove..
The Bad Crypto Podcast
"blockchain" Discussed on The Bad Crypto Podcast
"Okay. I understand. usually that'll do it. You know usually they'll get there. Yeah and we'll we'll have to jump in and empties later but it's Yeah this this whole and then then you throw in theory and for me. I didn't ever really conceive that. Could work fulltime and crypto at all. I i thought it was just a money thing. Then because you were a chippendales dancer right. That's how you manage you know all about paper money and having a but you know this. This whole premise of smart contracts and computation. Taking place on a blockchain. Just blew my mind. And that's when i realized. Wow there's there's so much you were just scratching the surface. An even people today are like us too late to get in and it's like it's not too late to get into the space in any capacity. Now this isn't. I'm not talking about investing. I'm talking about just learning getting involved working participating right and and investing two entirely different realm that i will not touch at all But what. I'll tell everybody is. This is the early days. Yeah very much so in. It reminds me of you know the beginning of the internet in the beginning of the web and everybody said this isn't gonna work. People aren't going to shop online. You know they're going to go to the library. They're gonna read books that are physical and of course we know how that that all ended. So you know you've gone onto found accompanied today to To bring about some solutions to some problems and so Without sunday too much like a commercial. Let's go ahead and just hit up on what is scale right now so scale i think one easy way i'll give you two ways to access what scales with skill so the skill network on one hand can make a theory and run faster. K can do that by adding more blockchain's around a theory. The other way to think about it a scale was actually if we need a world that can support billions of users. We need many any blockchain functioning. They can all talk to. each other. Scale is a blockchain network that doesn't run one blockchain at runs many many many boc chance and actually a limitless number of those blockchain's and one thing also does it connects to the ethereal network and the theory network actually helps support the scale network. There there are these intertwined entities and and and decentralized descent as networks effectively. And what it can do as it can help bring incredibly high speed transactions and fte's smart.
The Main Column
"blockchain" Discussed on The Main Column
"Supply chain in distributed ledger technology of gained widespread media attention in recent years with much of the spotlight fall in on bitcoin. And other crypto currencies. Sectors beyond the crypto bubbler. Now recognizing the potential for positive disruption to traditional ways of working investment in blockchain technology within the energy sector is predicted to exceed five point. Eight billion dollars by two thousand twenty five to secure returns on their investments in this technology blockchain developers are seeking to monopolize their technology using patent-pending systems around the world however patent statistics show that blockchain developers are narrowly focused on fighting for a stake in limited territories which presents a window of opportunity for industries such as oil and gas that operate beyond those countries. Seeing the densest. Filing a blockchain patents. So this podcast explores the key concepts of blockchain the use case in evidence for blockchain technology in the oil and gas industry the current state and future of the blockchain patent landscape. And what this could mean for the sector so first off. What is blockchain blockchain at its. Core is a distributed digital ledger the digital ledger stores data while keeping an unalterable record of what data has been stored over time each block on the block chain stores. Its own respective data. The type of data will be specific to what the blockchain is being used for and could include the details of a transaction or a smart contract each block points to the previous blocked by keeping a record of the previous blocks ide- thereby forming the chain. Another block is added to the chain. Each time new data is generated so decentralisation now the blockchain systems has appeared appeared network that does not require central forty to dictate and manage the digital ledger instead. The digital ledger is distributed amongst the system participants who managed the blockchain between themselves to ensure that the participants are working with a common true digital ledger. the blockchain system operates on a consensus basis. This means that the true ledger will be the ledger. That at least half of the participants agree upon as such participants can add blocks to the digital ledger if it can be validated by the other participants. Therefore the blockchain system encourages trust and transparency between the parties involved without having to rely on a central authority immune ability and security so the various cryptographic techniques used in blockchain. Make it very.
Insureblocks
"blockchain" Discussed on Insureblocks
"Our listeners. Who haven't yet you or heard you on insure blocks. Could you please give democratic deduction on yourselves perhaps Donna i thanks. Thanks for having us back for another edition. This is great My name's stanford same the domain architect for supply chain at novartis Looking at technology Evaluation and selection also on emerging technologies. That's where it goes to the block chain. And and i have another role. Which is the industry project leader of the farmer. Ledger project which focused on blockchain adoption in the healthcare industry. Excellent marco. yeah hi. This is margaret cuomo. I'm working to same group as dan but the with a little bit different focus. I'm part of what we call the plight. Technology innovation this team trying to bring in new technology into the into novartis in this case. I am focused on blockchain's responsible blockchain in new artists. And my second or other role in familiarize is be co lead architect for the blocker in cloud. Thank you both in his great. Avi bosa back on the show. So as he recalled the first question we all ask. Our guest is to define what is blockchain. But here's i'm curious to know how your definition may or may not have changed since our first podcast back in august two thousand nineteen. Dan do you wanna have a go at it. Yeah actually a. I've i've refined my blockchain definition a little bit and and and what i usually know or how i introduced. Blockchain is with the five days and mark just loves this definition but the five as stand for asset. We're talking about not. Just cryptocurrencies is assets but also add data or or or medicine products. Which can be exchanged on you. Know district distributed ledger technology. So blockchain's good for asset. It's good for audit. This is the immutability aspect that we can't change anything after it's been written to the blockchain very relevant for for our industry Automation so use of smart contracts to eliminate non value adding steps