/ Insights
/Delegated Proof of Stake: Features and Tradeoffs
Distributed ledgers don’t easily scale. That fact has become readily apparent in the last few years as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others have faced serious challenges as they attempt to increase the speed and throughput of their platforms.
Each of the major smart contract platforms is making a unique set of trade-offs. These trade-offs are not simply the presence or absence of specific features, but rather represent fundamentally different views of what trustless computation means.
/Podcast: Kyle and Tushar on Epicenter
Kyle and I recently joined Meher Roy and Brian Crain on the Epicenter podcast. It’s one of our favorite crypto podcasts. Here’s the link.
There are three types of cryptoassets: stores of value, security tokens, and utility tokens. General-purpose stores of value should be valued using the equation of exchange because these currencies are independent monetary bases. Examples include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, Dash, Monero, and Decred.
Today, blockchain interoperability is virtually non-existent. If you want to move value across chains, you must do so by moving tokens into a centralized exchange, trade on the exchange’s in-house ledger and then withdraw the new asset on a new chain. This process is slow, expensive and involves substantial counterparty risk.
IOTA is a digital currency project that aims to be the backbone of the internet of things (IoT). It is touted as having a “post-blockchain” architecture. While IOTA shares some similarities with many blockchain projects, its design does not include blocks or a single, linear chain.
Stablecoins have been one of my major areas of interest since I got involved in crypto. I first learned of Bitcoin when I was studying abroad in Argentina in 2014. At the time, Argentina was in the midst of a currency crisis that had resulted in widespread inflation, and Argentinian citizens were still reeling from a 2001 market crash that ended with the government freezing bank accounts for a year.
/Podcast: Kyle on the Flippening With Clay Collins
Clay Collins, CEO of Nomics Finance, recently asked me to join him in wide ranging conversation on his new podcast, The Flippening.
In August, we published an analysis of XRP, the native token of the Ripple network. We presented a bearish view of XRP tokens. A quick summary: Ripple, Inc. – the company that builds and maintains the Ripple network – has built a blockchain-based system that banks use to issue IOUs and settle debts. XRP has two uses: to pay fees on the Ripple network, and as a “bridge currency” for value transfers between any two institutions that don’t have a trusted relationship.
0x is a protocol for decentralized exchange (DEX) of ERC20 tokens. ZRX is the native token of the protocol. At its core, 0x is a system of smart contracts that can be used by anyone—it is open-source and completely free to use.