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/A Conversation with Tom Shaughnessy on The Evolution Of the Web3 Stack
Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Kyle Samani, Founder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital. Kyle discusses his predictions for the middle layer and full-stack development, attracting developers to the crypto space, how competition in the industry will develop, and a complete discussion on the Web3 Stack.
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
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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.
I’m extremely excited to announce that Multicoin Capital co-led a $15M financing in Helium with our friends at Union Square Ventures. The Helium vision is the most ambitious we have seen in the blockchain space since the advent of smart contracts on Ethereum: Helium represents a fundamentally new approach—one with a radically reduced cost structure—to deploying and managing wireless networks at scale.
Open, distributed ledgers and permissionless, censorship-resistant, trust-minimized computation are going to reshape massive sectors of the global economy. This belief led us to found Multicoin Capital in 2017, and after spending two years with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors in this space, we’ve developed more conviction in this thesis than ever before.
The best way to capture alpha as an investor is to create it. Private equity firms have practiced this for decades: groups like TPG acquire businesses and devote significant management resources to improving the business prior to selling.
On October 5, 2018, Yale, the iconic long-term investor that other endowments look to for guidance, made a historic investment in two funds dedicated to crypto, signaling to many that institutional floodgates are officially open.
This post is a spiritual successor to The Smart Contract Network Effect Fallacy. Bitcoin has a network effect. Many crypto evangelists assert that the network effect of Bitcoin is so strong that hyperbitcoinization is inevitable.
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.