/ Writing
Multicoin Capital recently announced an impressive list of new investors, of which we are excited to be a part. Crypto is a unique asset class that requires an investor to combine the skills of a venture capitalist and a hedge fund. Like a VC, you have to evaluate team, technology, market size, competitive dynamics, and go-to-market.
/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.
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.
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.
/Vinny Lingham Joins Multicoin Capital as General Partner
We are extremely excited to welcome Vinny Lingham (Twitter, Linkedin) to Multicoin Capital as General Partner. Vinny is the CEO of Civic, a solution for identity verification on blockchain.
/Crypto Franchising: Out with the New, In with the Old
Franchising is a widely understood model for retail food businesses. Many of the oldest and most successful retail food businesses in the world are franchises: McDonald’s, Subway, etc...