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Over the last year, Fortnite has pushed the boundaries for large scale synchronous online virtual worlds via concerts (Travis Scott and Ariana Grande on Fortnite). In hindsight, these concerts will be looked back on as the first mainstream precursors to the full blown Metaverse (shout out to The Sims and Second Life for trying this before the world was ready).
A blockchain is a database with unique trust-minimization properties. Like all databases, there are two kinds of operations: reads and writes. Most of the discourse to date around scaling blockchains is about writes. This is often measured as transactions per second (TPS). For example, Ethereum supports 15-30 TPS, Binance Smart Chain supports up to 160 TPS, and Solana supports up to 50,000 TPS. Investors have invested billions of dollars to scale blockchain writes.
This essay assumes familiarity with Nick Szabo’s essay on Social Scalability, Vitalik Buterin’s essay on Weak Subjectivity, and Haseeb Qureshi’s essay on Why Decentralization Isn’t As Important As You Think. This essay is not a rebuttal of Szabo’s essay.
Building on the success of our first venture fund, we’re proud to announce that Multicoin Capital has raised a new $100M venture fund to back entrepreneurs building companies (equity), and protocols (tokens) in and around the crypto space. We have been investing out of this vehicle for several months already.
Helium is a new crypto economic protocol that underpins a new business model deploying and managing wireless networks at about 100x lower cost than traditional top-down telecom business models. The first wireless technology supported by Helium is LoRaWAN, a popular technology for IoT devices. Multicoin Capital co-led the Series C round in Helium Inc in 2019 along with USV.
Multicoin Capital has accumulated a large position in RUNE, the native token of THORChain, a decentralized cross-chain automated market maker (AMM). RUNE represents one of our largest public positions.
I’m excited to announce Multicoin Capital’s investment in OXIO. We led OXIO’s $3.5M seed round last year, and now the company is emerging from stealth following a $12M Series A financing led by two of the top VCs in Latin America, monashees and Atlantico Capital.
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A year ago, I illustrated [the Web3 stack as I understood it at the time. I have learned more, and the ecosystem has evolved since then, so I decided to update the Web3 stack. Whereas the 2018 Edition was just a flat visualization of a single instance of the Web3 stack, the 2019 Edition aims to show the Web3 stack as a set of interoperable networks. In order to do this, I organized the 2019 Edition into 4 images (plus a bonus), starting from a narrow view, and zooming out from there.
Earlier this year we published an analysis on Binance and Binance Coin ($BNB), which was the culmination of several months of research and diligence. Since then, we’ve carefully watched as the company has continued to grow at an astonishing pace. To the casual observer, it’s easiest to explain Binance’s rapid growth using Reid Hoffman’s words in Blitzscaling.
/Privacy Is a Feature, Not a Product
Privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in and of itself. Users should not have to take balance sheet risk (e.g. by selling some BTC or ETH for ZEC) on less valuable and less secure cryptocurrencies in order to achieve financial privacy. This essay will argue that general platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum already offer sufficient privacy guarantees for most users to never need niche privacy-focused blockchains.