Obol Networkis in the Blockchain Infrastructure Industry

Obol Network

This rundown has been compiled using data from several reports and databases, including Pitchbook, Galaxy Research, CryptoRank, InnMind, and Cointelegraph. Major Highlights Funding Continues to Decline: The Crypto VC market is still facing headwinds as investors are cautious, with Q2 2023 attracting $2.32 billion in funding, slightly lower than the previous quarter. Mixed Valuations: The number of completed crypto VC deals increased in Q2, but pre-money valuations continued to decline, reaching $17.93 million, while the median crypto VC deal stood at $3 million in Q2 2023. Web3 Dominance: Web3 Gaming, NFTs, and the Metaverse are high-interest segments, this nascent crypto niche recorded the highest number of deals in Q2 2023. Crypto VC Landscape: Despite headwinds in 2023, the US remains the leading destination for venture capital funds in the digital asset industry, with over $2 billion invested this year. Crypto Winter Continues: 46% of respondents in a survey carried out by InnMind believe that the crypto winter will persist throughout 2023, with market recovery expected in 2024. Crypto VC Funding Overview The has continued to face headwinds this year, with more investors shying away from the digital asset industry. According to the latest data from , Q2 2023 attracted $2.32 billion in funding, down from the previous quarter, which was slightly higher at $2.6 billion. crypto VC landscape Pitchbook Valuations and Number of Deals Show Mixed Trends The number of completed crypto VC deals increased from 439 in Q1 to 456 in Q2. This is the first time the figure has gone up since the market peaked in Q1 2022 when over 1,200 deals were completed during that quarter. However, on the other hand, the pre-money valuation for deals in the digital asset industry has continued on a downtrend, reaching $17.93 million, while the median crypto VC deal stood at $3 million in Q2 2023. Top 5 Crypto VCs by Capital Invested in Q1 2023 According to a Q1 2023 from the InnMind Web3 startups and VC platform, the same players from last year are still dominating the action. Here are some of the VCs that have invested the most funds into crypto startups this year: report - Invested $136.2 million in Q1 funding 10 startups, including EigenLayer, Term Labs, Avalon Corp, Chaos Labs, MSafe, Azra Games, Alongside, Architect, Obol Labs, and Alkimiya. Coinbase Ventures - Invested $131.5 million in Q1, some of the projects funded include Voldex, Alongside, Towns, Believer, Capsule, and CCP Games. a16z - Invested $107.8 million in Q1 to fund 9 projects: Mask, YGG, Inverse Finance, Beldex, Conflux, Tonstarter, Radix, So-Col, and Alchemy Pay. DWF Labs - Invested $75 million in Q1 into 6 projects namely Alkimiya, Caldera, Monad, Kaito, OP3N, and Econia Labs. DragonFly Capital - Invested $53.5 million in Q1 funding 10 projects: MSafe, Quasar, Open Forest Protocol, Quantum Temple, Sleepagotchi, Cedro Finance, OrbLabs, Monad, 3RM and Strider.’ Shima Capital Crypto VC Fundraising is at its lowest since Q3 2020 Evidently, crypto VCs have not invested a lot of funds into the market this year. This is due to a sharp decline in the amount of newly injected capital and new funds. Data from Galaxy Asset Management reveals that the number of new funds in Q2 2023 was only 10, with the total amount raised falling below $1 billion. Source: Galaxy Asset Management As expected, the decline in fundraising amounts has affected the average fund size, which currently stands at $236 million compared to $343 million in 2022. Meanwhile, the median fund size has halved from $100 million to $50 million. High Ticket Crypto VC Funding Rounds in 2023 While 2023 might have started on a low note for both the global and crypto VC industry, there have been several notable raises this year: Blockstream, a company specializing in digital asset infrastructure, $125 million in January through a convertible note and secured a loan to fund its mining co-location services. secured In March, Ledger, the prominent crypto hardware wallet provider, successfully $109 million in a series C funding round extension. attracted Taurus, a digital asset infrastructure provider serving financial institutions in Europe, $65 million in a Series B capital raise with Credit Suisse leading the funding round. raised Scroll, a Layer 2 Ethereum network working on a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) scaling solution, a $50.0 million late-stage VC round in March from prominent investors, including Polychain Capital and Sequoia China. secured Funding Rounds by Investor and Category As for the number of funding rounds, data from CryptoRank shows that Polygon Fund has participated in 29 funding rounds this year, closely followed by DWF Labs and Coinbase Ventures, both at 28 rounds each. It is also noteworthy that most of the funds were allocated toward blockchain service and blockchain infrastructure projects. Seed Stage Rounds Accounted for the Lion’s Share Seed-stage funding rounds have attracted the most capital this year, accounting for 33.82% while pre-seed and series A raises stood at 8.97% and 7.5% respectively. Crypto VC Investments by Segment & Region , NFTs, and the are still an area of high interest, this segment of the crypto market recorded the highest number of deals in Q2 2023 followed closely by Lending, Investing, Exchange, and Trading companies. Web3 Gaming Metaverse However, when it comes to the amount of capital invested, it was vice versa: trading and investing companies carried the day, while Web3 infrastructures came in second. The US Leads in Crypto VC Raises and Funding Rounds Despite regulatory uncertainty, the US remains the leading destination for venture capital funds targeting the digital asset industry. This year alone, over $2.1 billion has been invested in crypto startups based in the US. Undisclosed locations follow at $1.2 billion, and in third place is the United Kingdom with $602.93 million. InnMind Survey: Web3 Most Potential Niche and Crypto Winter to End in 2024 A recent survey conducted by InnMind, involving 147 professional VCs in the digital asset industry, reveals that the majority of participants believe Web3 infrastructure startups hold the most upside potential. More interestingly, 46% of the respondents believe that the crypto winter or the period of 'nothingness' will continue for the rest of 2023, and it is unlikely that we will see the market bouncing back until next year. Closing Thoughts The crypto bear market has undoubtedly impacted the availability of venture capital over the past year. However, it is essential to highlight that there remains notable activity in value-based projects focusing on Web3, especially in the metaverse and NFT segments. As we look ahead, the outlook on whether substantial capital will flow into the digital asset industry this year remains uncertain. That said, there is a higher likelihood that many investors will remain cautious and stay on the sidelines for the rest of 2023. Also published here.

Crypto VC Landscape in 2023: Adapting Strategies Amidst the Winter

Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions. As y’all know, I don’t fuck for free. While I love disseminating knowledge about macro and crypto for free on this blog, I gotta eat too. Bubbly water in the clerb ain’t cheap. In December of last year, I launched my crypto family office, . I hired BitMEX’s former head of corporate development, , to run around the world looking for worthy crypto projects to invest in. Our goal is to invest in early stage projects that will deliver excess returns over just holding Bitcoin and Ether. Maelstrom Akshat Vaidya Moving forward, every once in a while, Akshat will grace readers with a thinkpiece on a crypto vertical that he is very excited about. Obviously, we are shilling our bags, but we’re also trying to educate the market on why the problems these projects are trying to solve are important to the goal of furthering decentralization. Ultimately, we want to help power the teams that will completely destroy — *ahem* I mean, offer an alternative — to the parasitic, rancid TradFi financial system. The below thinkpiece speaks about the overall movement to decentralize validators of the Ethereum network. This space is super exciting, and I expressed a bullish view on the Ethereum Merge via increasing the percentage of Ether in my portfolio and purchasing LIDO (the governance token of Lido Finance). In the back of my mind, though, I always worried that Lido was not sufficiently decentralised, and that once the market started caring about this, the coin would tank. After Akshat invested in Obol and ether.fi and explained his rationale for doing so, I knew it was time to dump my Lido position, which I did recently. Read on to understand our thought process in more detail. Shapella’s Show: ETH Staking’s Coming Shake-Up By: Akshat Vaidya, Head of Investments @ Maelstrom “Not your keys, not your crypto” has been the industry’s motto for as long as I’ve been in this space. But time and time again, traders, customers, and even founders and name-brand fund managers continue to fuck this up. Far too many keep repeating the same mistake again and again, cycle after cycle, of giving up control of their private keys — resulting in billions of dollars worth of lost or stolen funds (from Mt. Gox to FTX, and ). everything in between Prior to DeFi Summer (circa 2020), clients typically lost funds on poorly managed or outright fraudulent CeFi exchanges. But in 2021–2022, this issue reared its head in a new way — with a number of so-called “decentralized” (but still ultimately custodial) cross-chain bridges (e.g., the $586MM BNB Bridge exploit). Once again, individuals that voluntarily gave third-parties access to their private keys got rekt, and were reminded once again that “code is law.” compromised, to the tune of $2.5B Giving up access to our private keys — to either centralized or “decentralized” entities — is a compromise any of us should have to make, given infrastructure capabilities inherent to blockchains. not Yet here we are in 2023, playing with fire all over again in our collective thirst for easy ETH staking rewards. Post-DeFi Summer, we have come to expect yield on our crypto — particularly on our ETH, and even more so now given recent Fed rate hikes. However, since setting up a validator is still hard , customers have found themselves forced to make a false choice between using staking services that are dangerously custodial in nature, and simply letting their ETH sit idle. Worryingly, have chosen the former, entrusting their private keys to the likes of services like Coinbase, Kraken and Binance; and ETH liquid staking derivative (“LSD”) protocols like Lido Finance. To be fair, these custodial projects have served as important stepping stones towards the trustless, decentralized future of ETH staking. However, they also prioritized speed-to-market at the expense of exposing stakers to potentially substantial operator, regulatory and security counterparty risks. [if you’re working on elegant solutions to help bring down technical barriers to solo-staking, ] ping me too many 1) fully-centralized 2) proto-decentralized The Shanghai-Cappella (“Shapella”) upgrade, set to take hold in the next 24 hours, will allow stakers to withdraw staked ETH for the first time (at a rate of 0.4% of total staked ETH per day). (~15% of all ETH in circulation, worth tens of billions of dollars) is about to be unshackled from the previously mentioned risk-prone, custodial staking business models of the past. These incumbents have the most to lose in terms of their existing market share of staked ETH, and possibly the least to gain from the tens of millions of forthcoming ETH about to be staked over the coming years. And of these incumbents, Lido — the largest and first proto-decentralized LSD protocol — might be the biggest (slowly) ticking time bomb of them all. Fortunately, that false choice ends starting now. 18 million+ ETH Let’s unpack how Shapella might pave the pathway for Lido’s ETH staking dominance to crack. Lido, which accounts for ~75% of all ETH locked in LSD protocols, and ~30% of staked ETH overall, is essentially built upon stakers’ faith in the trustworthiness of node operators: Stakers deposit ETH with no contribution from node operators ; (unlike Rocketpool’s model, where node operators contribute 16 of the 32 ETH for each validator) Node operators, not stakers, generate keys , and execute the staked ETH:ETH redemption process *;* ( ) including both BLS private keys, as well as validator keys on a voluntary basis The implication being, that stakers do not hold a direct claim on either their ETH or staking rewards, but only over a pool of hypothetical assets generated by the protocol itself (analogous to the business model of cross-chain bridge Wormhole, ). hacked last year for ~$321MM of its own similarly hypothetical ETH-derived asset To be clear — Lido works because node operators choose to play ball. Period. If node operators, for whatever reason, are unwilling or unable to exit their validators in order to give you “your” ETH or “your” staking rewards, you’ve got a problem. Of course, there are meaningful steps Lido has taken to mitigate the risk that a major event — such as a hack compromising validator keys, or regulatory/legal action preventing node operators from releasing ETH — spirals out into a market panic. . But regardless, ultimately node operators can simply refuse to exit, effectively rendering “your” staked ETH illiquid and inaccessible for a period of time, with limited downside risks borne by node operators. […At least by design. Lido’s entire redemption process will only be tested live, at scale, for the first time starting April 12th after Shapella, since it’s thus far been a one-way street] TL;DR: Lido’s revenue model (and that of its node operators) depends on you not only giving up your private keys, but also bearing the majority of the risk. All for just…4–6% yield on your precious asset. Sound familiar? Fortunately, this is a risk none of us need to take anymore. Lido was architected well before we knew what we do now — i.e., that . We now know that it is not possible to simply create a smart contract-controlled redemption mechanism as a workaround. So, what if we could do it all over again post-Shapella? Knowing what we know now, how would we design Ethereum staking services that are both and ? withdrawal credentials sitting on the execution layer is not enough to make an LSD protocol non-custodial non-custodial still scalable We launched Maelstrom, the family office of BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, in December 2022, amidst the wreckage of numerous collapsed custodial business models, to invest in projects fixing what went wrong. We are backing teams committed to delivering on the full potential of blockchain — a scalable, privacy-enhancing, decentralized, non-custodial and interoperable stack of infrastructure capable of unleashing new trillion dollar markets across various use cases. To that end, we are starting with primitives, and investing in ETH staking infrastructure projects that compete directly with the two risk-prone custodial business models described above (both fully-centralized and proto-decentralized); and those that are complementary with these same legacy incumbents to help them (as well as new entrants) further decentralize. 1) 2) Maelstrom’s debut investment was in an early-mover in that second category, a project that isn’t competing with either the Lidos or the Coinbases of the world, but rather tooling them to eliminate single points of failure. , an investment we closed in January this year, is helping solo-stakers as well as fully-centralized, proto-decentralized and genuinely non-custodial services alike further decentralize. Obol’s distributed validator technology (“DVT”) middleware allows validator keys to be “split” among multiple node operators, effectively creating a “multi-sig” validator that can be run simultaneously across a collection of machines. These multi-validators still “speak” as one to the Beacon chain, avoiding penalties or slashing, while improving redundancy, security, and decentralization across the ETH staking space. More . Obol Labs [see next bullet] here , on the other hand, is our first investment in a project aiming to bring about a stepwise evolution from the legacy custodial models of both Lido and Coinbase. ether.fi is building one of the first (and other PoS networks in the future). In a post-Shapella world, where stakers are able to freely bounce from staking service to staking service to chase the highest yield, ether.fi circumvents the impending race to the bottom by competing on something other than just APY. With ether.fi, stakers generate and control their own keys throughout the staking process from creation to redemption, and can exit validators to claim their ETH back at any time, preventing node operator malfeasance. I.e., “your keys, your crypto.” ether.fi’s non-custodial model reduces risks for all parties, including node operators who will no longer be required to keep wallets connected or rely on a trusted middleparty for coordination. More on the mechanics . ether.fi genuinely non-custodial, delegated staking services for Ethereum here Maelstrom is building a long-term investment portfolio of infrastructure companies that will serve as the foundation of our trustless, decentralized future. Giving up your private keys is a compromise you need to make in order to participate in any decentralized ecosystem. The existing, legacy players in ETH staking — be they centralized or proto-decentralized — had prioritized speed-to-market during this past crypto Summer. But storm clouds are swirling over these incumbents, as new projects offering trustless, truly non-custodial ETH staking solutions are being built and scaled this Winter. And with today’s Shappela upgrade, the shackles are finally coming off. not

Shapella’s Show

In this article, we explore custodial, semi-custodial, and non-custodial staking services and review the industry's leading non-custodial protocols for ETH 2.0 staking. Ethereum (ETH) has enjoyed a remarkable run this past decade - making it one of the top-performing assets for investors. As Crypto enthusiasts and believers in ETH's potential remain steadfast, anticipation builds for continued success far into the future. Investors looking for maximum returns in the ever-volatile crypto market have found their answer with decentralized finance, commonly referred to as DeFi in the industry. DeFi offers enticing yields and financial flexibility, allowing ETH holders to pursue the most lucrative opportunities. However, in light of recent industry developments with FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, and others, DeFi is no longer as appealing to the average investor. Consequently, many are now seeking profitable alternatives that offer a higher degree of security and peace of mind. Ethereum 2.0 is spearheading a rapidly expanding industry estimated to be worth $40 billion in 2025, according to . This presents a golden opportunity for savvy investors seeking passive income streams by staking ETH tokens! JP Morgan data For that reason, Pooled Staking continues to be a top choice for ETH holders as it offers an attractive combination of convenience and accessibility. With Liquid Staking, ETH holders are in complete control. They can exit their staked position anytime with the simplicity of a token swap. And despite the presence of custodial staking services (like Coinbase, for example), the recent events in the industry have propelled non-custodial ETH staking protocols (like SafeStake) to become a major force. Custodial vs Non-Custodial ETH Staking ETH 2.0 staking is a great choice for anyone looking to turn their ETH assets into a passive income stream. As an Eth2 validator, you'll be rewarded with fractions of ETH every ~7 minutes for helping secure the network. These rewards can add up and lead to substantial profits over time! In the most basic terms, the better a validator performs, the higher the staking yields. Therefore, when selecting a staking provider, it’s important to consider a number of factors in your decision such as shared rewards, fees, attestation and effectiveness rates, slashing protection and remediation measures, and perhaps most crucial, user private key management. As ETH becomes increasingly popular, the importance of security for users and investors on all scales cannot be overstated. Protecting these valuable assets is now a priority like never before. When considering a third-party staking service, we recommend researching their level of security and examining their key management policy. These are the factors that ultimately determine the safety of your crypto coins. Types of Third-Party Staking Services A centralized staking service that manages the entire ETH staking process on behalf of the user. They retain ‘custody’ of their users' private validator keys and withdrawal keys. Risks: severe slashing penalties, reduced overall rewards, increased likelihood of an attack on user keys. Custodial: Some staking services claim to be non-custodial but still retain custody of user validator keys, but not their withdrawal keys. Risks: severe slashing penalties and reduced overall rewards. Semi-Custodial: A staking service that provides streamlined Eth2 validator setup and management, but allows its users to retain both their private validator keys and withdrawal keys. Non-Custodial: Staking your assets with a custodial service can be risky, as trusting them to keep your private keys exposes you to potential threats. Make sure that the staking provider you select is the right fit for you. In addition, in centralized custodial services, the risks of a cut-off are even greater, so that their rewards can be severely affected and therefore their capital staked. While DIY solutions may incur individual consequences for mistakes, escrow and semi-custodial services can deliver a more significant negative impact on the entire user base if they make errors. ETH 2.0 staking services can be especially vulnerable to security risks if they are centralized. This year, these risks have been highlighted as DeFi protocols experienced devastating losses due to hackers exploiting singular points of vulnerability and stealing users' funds intended for passive income generation. Non-Custodial Staking Services (for ETH 2.0 Staking) Custodial and semi-custodial ETH 2.0 Staking options like Rocket Pool, Lido, Stake Fish, and those offered by CEXs (centralized exchanges) are capturing a large share of the market. However, their centralized nature creates an obstacle to true decentralization in this emerging industry. Solutions are now available that ensure the security and reliability of user funds without granting control to any third parties, while promoting decentralization at the same time. Let's explore some groundbreaking developments we are making in this space! SafeStake SafeStake is a decentralized staking infrastructure and protocol that maximizes staker rewards by implementing DVT (Distributed Validator Technology). With its unique non-custodial approach and commitment to security, this protocol is emerging as a groundbreaking solution in the ETH staking industry. It provides unparalleled levels of protection for users running validators by never taking control of their keys. Instead, SafeStake splits a validator key into shares and distributes them over several nodes run by independent operators to achieve high levels of security and fault tolerance. The cutting-edge protocol's frameworks are written in Rust, a top programming language in the industry, and maintain optimal performance in the face of transactional demand by preventing memory-related bugs and vulnerabilities. Coupled with the use of HotStuff for underlying consensus, the protocol keeps validators secure and online to perform Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake consensus tasks while minimizing the likelihood of validator cutoff. SafeStake provides a powerful solution for ETH holders, allowing them to maximize rewards while keeping their funds secure. By reducing periods of inactivity and providing protection from malicious withdrawals, SafeStake safeguards your potential profits in the ETH2 staking ecosystem. Additionally, SafeStake utilizes a threshold signature scheme a trusted dealer. By eliminating the trusted dealer, SafeStake removes another potential point of failure present in some other staking protocols. without This effectively eliminates the possibility that a validator’s rewards can be stolen. Because Ethereum’s Beacon Chain allows multiple deposits for a single validator public key, it does not verify that they all have the same withdrawal credentials. This can allow a malicious actor that has access to the validator’s private key to specify the withdrawal credentials for the validator and steal its rewards. Join the as a validator or operator to help us test while earning STATE tokens and entering to win ETH prizes! SafeStake Galileo testnet With Distributed Key Generation (DKG), SafeStake arranges the threshold signature scheme validation private key in a way that prevents any single entity from holding it or recreating it. Currently, the protocol (running on Stage 1 of our testnet dubbed ‘Galileo’) allows any user to participate in Ethereum 2.0 staking by depositing 32 ETH and choosing a group of four operators (an Operator Committee) to manage their validator. In the relatively near future (Q2 2023), we will introduce Stage 2 of the Galileo testnet that will drop the 32 ETH deposit requirement down to 8 ETH, enabling a lower threshold to kick off a Validator on the Beacon chain and the 'Pooled Validators’ with derivative tokens. An optional feature will allow users to receive sfETH liquid staking tokens in return. These tokens are fully liquid with all of the implied benefits, allowing users to trade or sell them whenever they want while generating passive income while they do hold them. In addition, DVT technology bolsters the entire Ethereum Proof-of-Stake network by providing an extra layer of decentralization and security to ensure reliable transactions. Blox Staking Blox Staking is an open-source, non-custodial staking platform for Ethereum 2.0. Staking with Blox doesn’t require key sharing. Blox has no control over their users’ private keys as the protocol never stores validator private or withdrawal keys, ensuring no compromises on custody. Instead, a dedicated remote signer is stored on a cloud account, like AWS. The remote signer, KeyVault, holds the private validator key and executes duties sent from the blockchain via a Blox node. Users can manage their validators and check a performance monitoring dashboard with the Blox Live desktop app. The Blox infrastructure ensures relatively consistent connectivity to the blockchain and manages signing requests for each user’s personal KeyVault instance. This configuration empowers validators to optimize staking returns, minimize risks, and keep complete control over their assets. One of the major limitations of the protocol is that it only supports a 32 ETH deposit to participate in ETH 2.0 staking. Obol Tech Obol is a trust-minimized staking protocol for public blockchain networks based on Distributed Validator Technology (DVT). DVT enables validators to configure clusters with active-active redundancy, an improvement on the widely used configuration of active-passive redundancy. This is achieved by being able to split a validator key across multiple independently operating instances and utilizing threshold signing to perform consensus duties. You can think of this as enabling your validator to operate like a multi-sig, removing single points of technical failure including: Availability Failure Validator Key Compromise Distributed Validator nodes operate together as ‘clusters’ through the inclusion of a distributed validator middleware client called Charon. Charon's job is to coordinate what each validator signs, and reconstitutes the partial signatures into an aggregate signature for the Distributed Validator. Distributed Validator Clusters are multi-operator, fault-tolerant clusters of servers running Ethereum Execution clients, Consensus clients, Distributed Validator clients, and Validator clients. Combined, they enable a subset of servers to fail and recover, without a Distributed Validator on the cluster going offline. Obol’s mission is to evolve DVT by offering a protocol that enables a sustainable public good by increasing the security and resilience of public blockchain networks. The network is designed to offer developers, institutions and individuals, including, custodians, DeFi protocols, DAOs, financial institutions, and home-based validators, a scalable layer to configure, monitor, and deploy their own multi-carrier participation clusters without the need to coordinate multiple carriers or manage complex infrastructure configurations. Conclusion Ethereum 2.0 staking services offer a variety of different approaches depending on how their developers have integrated users into the product experience when building out ideas and offering support. Security is key when navigating today's billion-dollar ETH staking industry and its plethora of staking options. Cryptocurrency provides plenty of opportunities for financial freedom but also comes with its own unique set of risks. Without taking the necessary precautions to protect your assets, it's easy to get left behind in this volatile market. Safeguard yourself by ensuring nobody else has access to those precious private keys!

Great Options for Generating Passive Income With Ethereum 2.0

Running own staking nodes has lots of risks and needs a large amount of money to start. It is hard for individuals to maintain a 24/7 online server and not do anything wrong causing penalties. To help individuals easier to stake and earn rewards, there appears staking-as-a-service. Node providers will take care of the infrastructure and users only need to stake their funds. Node providers provide node operation services. They provide service to individuals and liquid staking derivatives. To individuals, node providers charge a monthly node operation fee or commission fee. To liquid staking derivatives, node providers usually get a percentage of the staking rewards. Lido explains how they choose node operators. There are lots of node providers in the market. They differ in the following aspects: Fee Supporting assets Reliability and safety Source: Staking Rewards Big players have already established large user groups, good reputations, and safe operation records. It is hard for new players to take a large market share. : Big market players believe the opportunities for small players are the following Better UX Supporting long-tailed assets Providing services besides staking, like ecosystem updates, simple financial engineer tools, information websites, and data analysis tools Though small players are hard to compete with large players, : large players do face some challenges Risk of centralization Compliance Security and operation risk Decentralization is the key to a network. If several node providers have a major stake in the network, these node providers are a stratum for cartelization. questions this in his passage “ ”. @djrtwo The Risks of LSD To build a decentralized and permissionless product, compliance is a big problem. . fish believes that “due to how staking looks like fixed income in some sense, this could invite regulators to consider validators closer to financial entities than miners. If this occurs, then there would be no way for validators to stay compliant without becoming a fully licensed custodian and guarding delegator access (which again, may technically be impossible to enforce)” in the “ Stake. 2021 staking ecosystem report” Node operators put safety first because the safety incident can cause asset loss. In Jan 2021, ETH2 validators got slashed due to a bug. Here is the recent slashing history for ETH2 validators. Source: beaconcha.in Node providers are trying to increase the stability of the infrastructure with new tech like SSV. The secret shared validator network is a tech that can reach active-active redundancy. All validators in the network actively produce new blocks. The mechanism is like a multi-sig wallet. Source: OBOL Other techs used for slashing prevention are the local slashing protection database which records messages causing slashing, and remote slasher which records all attestations and blocks received. From the , users do care more about reputation than cost, and node providers are trying to improve their reliability in order to build their reputations. Staking Rewards survey Source: Stake Rewards Also published . here

Node Providers

How Your Data is Stored, or, The Laws of the Imaginary Greeks

Quickbooks Online vs. Xero and 5 Alternatives for 2023

Towards a Knowledge Graph economy. The Year of the Graph Newsletter, Summer 2020 These past few months have not been kind to any of us. The ripples caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are felt far and wide, and the world’s economies have taken a staggering blow. Is there hope? And what’s that got to do with graphs, you might ask. Knowledge graphs have become an iconic technology trend for a reason. Knowledge graphs exemplify the emphasis on knowledge, and connections. In the current state of the economy, knowledge-based and remotely delivered activities have an advantage over service-based ones requiring real-world interaction. Whether this is necessarily a good thing is another issue entirely. In any case, we have to note the fact that knowledge graphs seem a natural fit for the unofficial title of the foundation on which a next-day economy can be built. That’s the thinking behind Meetup on September the 23rd. Steering towards a knowledge-based economy – how knowledge graphs can catalyze digital transformation and AI in the enterprise and beyond. Connected Data London’s A UBS Information Architect will talk about a data revolution – the emergence of the decentralized Enterprise Knowledge Graph to vastly increase data connectivity. The CEO of Franz Inc will outline the future of AI in the Enterprise is tied to Entity-Event Knowledge Graphs for Data-Centric organizations. A Knowledge Engineer from Engine B will show how Knowledge Graphs can be used for Data integrity, innovation and digitalization in professional services. Towards a knowledge-based economy: how Knowledge Graphs can catalyze digital transformation and AI in the enterprise and beyond Digital transformation and AI may have become overworn buzzwords that mean very little. In essence, however, they’re more needed than ever for businesses that want to survive and thrive in a new economy. In this Connected Data London Meetup, we take a look at how Knowledge Graphs are redefining digital transformation and powering AI in the enterprise and beyond. Case in point: Intuit is on a multi-year digital transformation journey to become an Expert Platform company, combining symbolic AI and machine learning. Its Tax Knowledge Engine allows domain experts to specify logic using Knowledge Graphs in a declarative and modular way. Intuit Tax Knowledge Engine: Practical AI for a Smarter and More Personalized TurboTax We share a technical overview of Tax Knowledge Engine, the key innovation we’ve pioneered to make TurboTax smarter and more personalized for 37M+ consumers. Beyond business, Knowledge Graphs have a role to play in organizations of all sizes and shapes. This includes the UN, championing Knowledge Graphs for Social Good. Furthermore, the Emerging Tech Lab (ETL) of the Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) has . embarked on several projects that explore how to store knowledge in graphs Applying knowledge graphs for social good You might wonder how a KG can reduce poverty or improve health. The answer is in the insights that Knowledge Graphs let us draw. Knowledge Graphs provide a means to understanding context, and that is the key to comprehending SDG data The GOV.UK team explored graph databases and knowledge graphs for their applications. The goals were to collaborate with other teams and communities to help them find content more easily, to build products and apps that allow further insights about the content, to upskill colleagues and drive culture change to make better use of data, and to provide early adopters with access and training to help scale use of data apps and product. One graph to rule them all Initially, we experimented with representing user journey data in our graph and then added other, previously siloed, data sources. In the context of a graph, all metadata was added as node properties. At that point, we had the early makings of a knowledge graph; a rich, canonical source of data that brings together datasets from across GOV.UK and the wider world. Another testament to the importance and timeliness of Knowledge Graphs, Graph Databases, Graph Analytics and Graph AI: the Noonies nomination. are Hacker Noon’s way of recognizing the tech industry’s top writers, thinkers, hodlers, leaders, and makers. George Anadiotis, the Year of the Graph Newsletter curator, has been nominated for Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year in Analytics. The Noonies is built for technologists to read, write, and publish. It’s an open and international community of 12,000+ contributing writers publishing stories and expertise for 4,000,000+ curious and insightful monthly readers. This nomination comes as a recognition of the importance of the topics the Year of the Graph spreads knowledge on. If you want to show your support, cast your vote! Hacker Noon Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year – ANALYTICS The Tech Industry’s Greenest Awards. The Noonies are Hacker Noon’s way of recognizing the tech industry’s top writers, thinkers, hodlers, leaders, and makers and you’ve been publicly nominated for: Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year – ANALYTICS If you want to learn more about Knowledge Graph modeling, then these books may be what you need. The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, one of the most highly regarded books in this domain, just got a new release. Datasets and queries mentioned in the book are available online, too. Ilaria Maresi encountered a range of challenges on her Knowledge Graph data modelling journey. If you are wondering what is a asemantic model and why you should consider building one, you can / check her book, in which she shares lessons-learned Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, Third Edition Fabien Gandon joins Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler, bringing with him years of experience in global linked data, to open up the story to a modern view of global linked data. The most widely used Knowledge Graph schema is . If you want . schema.org, which just had a new release – v.9 to get started with schema.org, a little bit of history may help If you have already mastered that, then you may be interested in a way to get your brand in Google’s Knowledge Graph without a Wikipedia page, or in . learning practical NLP while building a simple Knowledge Graph from scratch with Python How to Get Your Brand in Google’s Knowledge Graph Without a Wikipedia Page Make sure you set out who you are and what you do clearly in the copywriting on your About Us page. Add Schema.org markup – make it as detailed as possible and cite sources that confirm. Get significant coverage in multiple independent, reliable, secondary sources. Knowledge Graphs power the medical domain too. PubMed is an essential resource for the medical domain, but useful concepts are either difficult to extract or ambiguous. This hinders knowledge discovery. To address this, . a PubMed Knowledge Graph was built Traditionally, Knowledge Graphs have been curated manually by experts, but machine learning can speed up the process. Here is a a review of advances in machine learning for constructing biomedical knowledge graphs. Advances in machine learning for constructing biomedical knowledge graphs By representing biomedical information as nodes, and the relationships between nodes as edges, KGs can be used to map out relationships between biomedical concepts to understand drug-target interactions or identify genes that play a role in disease progression. Advancements in Natural Language Processing and Graph machine learning powered by Knowledge Graphs is something Michael Galkin has been keeping track of. Here he summarizes the latest research from ACL 2020. In a similar vein, Sergei Ivanov summarizes the . highlights from KDD 2020, from a graph and recommender systems perspective Knowledge Graphs in Natural Language Processing @ ACL 2020 Did something change in the KG & NLP field comparing to ACL 2019? Yes! I would summarize this year’s contribution as: Knowledge graphs demonstrate better capabilities to reveal higher-order interdependencies in otherwise unstructured data Michael Bronstein is a Professor at the Imperial College London and the Head of Graph Machine Learning at Twitter. He recently started a series on blog posts on Graph Machine Learning, on topics such as , the issue of , and temporal graph networks. graph neural network architectures that can work on very large graphs depth on graph neural networks Temporal Graph Networks Many real-world problems involving networks of transactions of various nature and social interactions and engagements are dynamic and can be modelled as graphs where nodes and edges appear over time. In this post, we describe Temporal Graph Network, a generic framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs. Some notes on Graph theory. Centrality measures are an important tool to analyze networks. Analysis can be done with simple topological measures that score nodes by their importance as a part of the big network. Here is the . And to top it off: more graph theory, this time 10 graph algorithms, visually explained. definition and the tradeoffs involved 10 Graph Algorithms Visually Explained Graphs have become a powerful means of modelling and capturing data in real-world scenarios such as social media networks, web pages, and locations. If you have a set of objects that are related to each other, then you can represent them using a graph. Graph databases have been making progress. We have new releases from and ArangoDB, the , and . Dgraph general availability of Neo4j on Google Cloud new visual capabilities for AWS Neptune by integrating Jupyter Notebooks Graph, machine learning, hype, and beyond: ArangoDB open source multi-model database releases version 3.7 A sui generis, multi-model open source database, designed from the ground up to be distributed. ArangoDB keeps up with the times and uses graph, and machine learning, as the entry points for its offering. Analysis on data from different databases requires some kind of cross-walk or mapping. Mappings are a big deal for ontology too. Unfortunately mapping is fraught with problems. Here Chris Mungall introduces SSSOM: A Simple Shared Standard for Ontology Mapping A simple standard for sharing mappings Within the Open Bio Ontologies project we attempted to avoid the mapping issue by promoting reuse of ontologies and concepts from ontologies. However, not all ontologies are in OBO, and not all ontologies in OBO are perfectly modular and non-overlapping, so mapping remains a necessary evil. Data ingestion typically comes before mapping. Here are a couple of simple but useful tools for data ingestion, enabling users to convert CSV to RDF, , and . query RDF datasets & documents in arbitrary formats make diagrams from SPARQL queries Converting CSV to RDF with Tarql Quick and easy and, if you like, streaming. A year or two ago I learned about Tarql, which lets you query delimited files as if they were RDF triples. Inrupt exists to drive a course-correction of the web, using the tools and principles embodied in Solid. Those tools and principles are very much based on W3C and Semantic Web standards, applying them to shape a new era, built on the web but encompassing much more. Inrupt just released new beta versions of its software. Inrupt Beta Goes Live Inrupt is pleased to announce that the following products are now available for Beta evaluation. Feedback received during this Beta period will influence the roadmap for General Availability. Enterprise Solid Server: designed for mission critical workloads, demanding use cases. PodBrowser: app enabling users to navigate/manage data in Pods. Javascript Developer Libraries Lest we forget, we are still living in COVID-19 times. People are using Knowledge Graphs to consolidate medical knowledge: in addition to , is another effort that leverages a Knowledge Graph. COVID Graph Corona Why Other researchers have created an , integrate them as RDF under a simple ontology built on top of OWL-Time, GeoSPARQL, SIOC, and link the resulting dataset to linked to data providers such as Wikidata. Another contribution: a knowledge base of 8M+ Covid-related tweets. automated process to retrieve COVID19 data from public sources TweetsCOV19 — A Knowledge Base of Semantically Annotated Tweets about the COVID-19 Pandemic A publicly available knowledge base of 8M+ tweets between Oct’19 – Apr’20. Metadata and entities, hashtags, user mentions, sentiments, URLs shared using RDF/S vocabularies, facilitating knowledge discovery tasks What would reinventing email as a graph look like? The interface for email conversation traversal is usually a linear column of timestamped message excerpts with nested replies inlined within message body. Ryan Bell created InboxGraph, a property graph representation for email Constructing directed graphs of email conversations The interface for email conversation traversal most often takes the form of a linear column of timestamped message excerpts with nested replies inlined within the message body. This is an excellent way to visualize the newest messages awaiting a response or action, but fails to illustrate the community structure and information flow within an inbox. To get the Year of the Graph Newsletter in your inbox, subscribe . here

Knowledge Graphs Exemplify the Emphasis on Knowledge and Connections

On the train ride to Davos, the influential Swiss town in the middle of nowhere. I flew into Zurich from Bangkok so I was not ready for the cold at all. The economic mood hasn’t been so bright leading up to 2019’s World Economic Forum at Davos. We are very far along the risk curve and are left with a paucity of “alpha” to uncover, leaving the economy at its most fragile state after the unexpected Trump Rally. I often get asked where to park one’s treasury, and I can provide little input (not equities, not gold). The world today is still injured with the events of a mystical 2008 past, and the recent hit in the market leave us in weak confidence. Our collective memories and melodies are mystic not born in relation to reality, but transforms our rose-colored glasses into drenched red optics. Our recollections of overnight economic uncertainty grounded the necessity of order in this dystopian world of corporate manipulation and billionaire self-interest. Laissez-fair market rules could not uphold and preserve the American Dream — so rules were demanded and anger was warranted. In our fresh fear of inflicted and repelled injustices, we looked to authorities to punish the evildoers and to return to a safer past. This opposition of liberty versus mechanism recalls similarities to a more violent age: “In the age of the 30-Year War, Thomas Hobbes was moved to celebrate the Leviathan State, with the monopoly of legitimate force as the redemption of society. Surely it was better to concede to a monarchical state, in security of persons and property, than to see order drown in civil strife.” Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 If I had to pinpoint a pattern this year at Davos, however, it wasn’t about institutions or organizations. The language has shifted significantly downstream, in the issues that we discussed and the sentences we crafted. Thematically and fortunately, many of the conversations that I was personally hearing at Davos were uniquely about the in the light of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: namely I admit this may well have been selection bias, but the thematic discussion of network power is rooted at the individual-user level. We begin to look not at institutions, but in ourselves- governance in our health and in our work. It is through these convictions that we look in the year ahead of us, with the international New Year resolutions blending into our personal objectives. individual mental health, blockchain, philanthropy, free trade. WEF’s online topic map of the next revolution that was a preamble to Davos 2019 A Walk down the promenade The Promenade at Davos this year was full of lively discussion and excitement for the new year. Trump tweets were fantastic conversational icebreakers, and his absence made one less distraction for more fruitful, issue-oriented discussions. Typical discussions ranged from tech somehow solving all problems to the permanence of the US-China trade war, with an exceptional focus on mental health (+50 claps for Johnson&Johnson, Wellcome Trust, Nasdaq, and a number of others), philanthropy (anyone with +$10m) and free trade and speech (Tradeshift, nations, I guess everyone?) and of course blockchain (GBBC, Consensys, Caspian Week, Tradeshift, I guess everyone?) For especially the foremost topic, mental health, we see that social networks are not necessarily about who connected, but rather who . The structural holes emerge, the gradience of fast and slow growth in certain regions begin to appear like in the First Industrial Revolution. The type of hierarchies are inevitably being seen our new economy. At the individual level, we see similar instances of populism, antagonistic trade and degrading mental health. As much as I want to say that Davos was about tech and blockchain, it was more about what “language” will be used in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Yes, the tech conversations were dumbed down (AI, ML, blah blah), but people give too much discredit to the conversations happening here — decision makers are open to listening, as long as they can digest the issue. is is not a bit The Lounges: I spent some time in and around the Consensys’s new clothes, Tradeshift’s very strong presence, Caspian Week’s focus on Eurasia trade beyond OBOR, all the journalism-hosted parties to NASDAQ’s nifty branding (the CEO is a rockstar) and lastly the Blockchain Economic Forum: guest speakers hating BTC (Schumer, Roubini) and the crowd loving fair governance and trustlessness of man. I like how we now default to the fact that if someone become evil, one become evil in the age of attention seekers and twitter preachers. can will The diluted “herd is coming” narrative was in 5th gear in the blockchain ride (in recent news, ) as seen by all signs at Davos. There are implications beyond just adoption, however. Perhaps there is a growing dependence on institutions in the desperation of the crypto bear market that will ultimately decenter the participant — I take a look at the obvious divides and surprising reconciliations from the conversations at BEF. Arjun Balaji’s discourse about was at full steam, but was not as bitter as one might expect. Samsung exacerbates the Kimchi premium conflicting visions Blockchain Economic Forum LAToken invited various anti-crypto dialogue despite their own blockchain— when I inquired to Matias, the Senior Content Manager at LAToken about the invitees, he said “it’s mostly good for the ecosystem to argue.” Refreshing to hear. At the tail-end of the week, I arrived at Blockchain Economic Forum, where LAToken generously invited ( ) Hackernoon to examine the review the scene: I came to report. There were a lot of conflicting thoughts and shaking heads, but also many shaking of hands and respectful follow ups that I overheard. and partnered with First, BCG Digital’s Jeff Schumacher said BTC is useless on CNBC, and reinforced it again at BEF. Looking deeper into motivations, it’s probably an indirect marketing stunt in favor of DFinity’s use-case given the group’s outsized involvement with that initiative. So, yay blockchain, nay BTC. The second highlight event was keynote speaker Roubini who always carries his controversialism with him wherever he goes. As a practitioner who started from Wall Street (but now a blockchain proselyter), I can empathize with some of his main points: central and fractional banking can indeed provide deeper liquidity pools and centralized efficiencies as long as they remain “independent” from the government (therefore a global central bank crypto currency will destroy all competitors). And he’s right, the banking system does fine— it works and worked decently well. Nevertheless, the trauma of the 2008 reverberates in his thinking. Our dependence on centralized authorities is only to disorder through the concentration of authority that was widely employed by government powers after 2008 (Dodd-Frank to REMIT to MiFID). We can not continue to put band-aids to protect the participant’s interests. forestall As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen described, economists and sociopaths (social morons) aren’t so distinguishable given their fully utilitarian mindset — you will see on all offshore banking websites all these agreeable discussions between conspiracy theorists, fiat minimalist cryptoheads and economics PhDs. Roubini puts results over the construction process, and knows exactly what the off-chain banking system can create. Yes, it works based on empirical and theoretical values — but only in the world that we know. Central and fractional banking is indeed the current best system to reach the deep liquidity needed for a US-Leviathan world order, and one that I do not necessarily oppose. My friend Charlie at Reserve described what the daily fear intake was like during the Cold War and doesn’t sound so savory. , New York University Stern School of Business. Nouriel Roubini As expected at an event called “Blockchain Economic Forum,” the public retaliated in an distraught manner with their questions: pulling examples from New Zealand’s failed central cryptocurrency, Zimbabwe’s government-fueled inflation, and Venezuela’s need for BTC. To them, these examples illustrate the divide between the government and minting authority as a fragile, “recommended” line in the long-run, putting immutable governance at precedence over “mere” efficiency. Sure, I like the audacity, what kind of underdog-loving American doesn’t. But I don’t like how they push aside all painpoints that the banking and security industries had to go through to achieve what it is today. Most financial laws are usually reactive instead of pre-emptive — from Glass-Steagall (banking) to Sherman (monopolies) to a proper Chinese Wall (insider trading laws, which really started in 2001) — to exacerbate even more, a deeper look into insider trading rules is not that the action is “ ” but rather that it will hinder market liquidity: utilitarian over ethics. I agree with the public in the long run as reactive processes have their limits. I want to see more practical approaches. A more balance panel (which I describe later) goes into the realities of the problems in a conciliatory manner. unethical Nevertheless, at the convergence of points on where the future lie, Roubini was a bit short. He claims fintech can be the useful equipment for solving the future. I agree. Looking at history, the M1 supply was essentially created by ATMs, a “fintech” product. In the Q&A though, Roubini said we can depend on the Internet for this source of innovation and fintech-driven liquidity. Yet the internet was originally designed to be decentralized, and now he rejects that same proposition. The Internet, were it to be owned by a single corp, would never have had the J-curve Cambrial explosion without being the open portal to a public space. But it took (is taking) a while before everyone finally accepted that the Sun is the true center of our planetary system. While centralized systems may work as a robust solution with immediately beneficial effects, decentralized processes produces an antifragility that can permits immeasurable ecosystems. What arises is this mentality of an “institutional glut.” Institutional Glut In the award-winning book ( , ), the authors coin the term “institutional void”: structural pain points in emerging markets that a business should focus on paving over with ingenious solutions to unlock unprecedented value. Examples could be using order brochures + local delivery (even mule-wagons) to overcome mountainous, rural road infrastructure as a way to compete against hypermarket delivery systems. Winning in Emerging Markets Krishna Palepu Tarun Khanna Fact: The US is not an emerging market. Counterpoint: maybe it could be after self-driving trucks destroy all of mid-America micro-economy cities. To play the foil in everyone’s fantastical dreams of the institutional money coming into blockchain, is the dangers of overinstitutionalization — the same things we saw in Too Big to Fail. After 2008, we tried to “stabilize banks” but I’ll tell you being on the other side that the people that are suffering the most are the legal and credit departments in the banks than just the traders and bankers (power just moved from banks to PE shops). Prayers to those who are drowning in +1,000 page regulatory documents, those poor recent law grads to test their patience and sacrificed trees for paper (disclaimer: we at ABC Platform push for green practices). It became a worldwide movement with a bit of Hegelian dialectics playing its course: government bloats the bulge bracket banks and behemoth companies with over-swerving, reactionary laws -> the banks buy each other up and companies immediately move toward tax inversions (2013–2014), the people are then affected by downstream costs pushing the offshore banking industry. And then issues pile on issues, starting with this vicious spiral of centralized authority piling centralized issues on another centralized party. Satoshi didn’t see all this collateral damage pan out — he just saw the beginning of the fall, and decided to create a decentralized solution for a centralized issue. And centralization as Haseeb Qureshi recently placed it. But I digress. isn’t all so evil as one might suggest The mindset that Roubini holds is short term, and doesn’t acknowledge the future power of decentralized systems as a means of creating newer forms of liquidity that isn’t found in being just a globalized resource, but by dependable trust. Trusted speculation can be a very powerful force for spending. Nevertheless, the cryptocurrency defendants are so bulletproof either — they have some serious issues to solve before we come all come to a “winner.” The blockchain public sees a longer horizon with more deontological roots, putting the economic surplus created by immutable governance and uncorruptable laws superseding centralized systems in the long run. No “economic model” could have extrapolated the success of the personal computing era of the 80’s in creating the the phenomena of the internet in the 90’s. We are left to believe that we face before us an ultimatum (albeit a reductionist one) with lean pickings… We continue depend on a national central banking system (US, maybe China?, etc.) We depend on an intra-national system (UN, consortium of banking, SDRs, World Bank) We depend on a participant driven network (decentralized protocol) …but are we so pushed back to a corner? Ariel said that I shouldn’t start with “which currency” question first though, but rather “what uses” first — yessir. The synthesis is between the lines Round Table: , Author Monetary Economics in Globalized Financial Markets, , National Bureau of Economic Research, co-editor Journal of International Money and Finance , Advisor to the Governor of the Bank of Canada , Associate Professor of Economics , Assistant Professor for Financial Economics, Ecole Polytechnique CREST The Board and Monetary Policy for Decentralized Currency Prof. Dr. Ansgar Belke Joshua Aizenman Stephen Murchison Ariel Zetlin-Jones Linda Schilling This is where LAToken’s selection team did a great job in bringing together different opinions that arrived at a solid agreement. While Roubini’s arguments are often repetitive at every conference he talks in, this panel was refreshing to hear as they actively though of possible remediation to debates happening beforehand — a new framework of thinking. Ariel, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, nails some major issues with the current blockchain regime, asking about feasibility rather than disregarding this all as impossibility — we don’t need to jettison the baby out of the bath water. The thinking was like this: Make crypto’s basic tenants work, like as a proper medium of exchange Decide if we need/want a global cryptocurrency Understanding how to manage or control the supply of tokens (not necessarily for fiscal policies, but general transactional feasibility) , Associate Professor of Economics @ CMU. I spoke with him before the event, and he’s been quite involved with a few blockchain initatives like Sweetbridge and PNC Bank —so not his first rodeo Ariel Zetlin-Jones Do we truly need a singular, global cryptocurrency? This board of governors implored a need-based first approach to the simple question: does the world require it? Why not embrace our heterogeneity over imposing this homogeneity that increases diversification risks? Does the Peruvian economy correlate to, say, Armenian trade that it would warrant that both live under a single currency? I completely agree in theory, but maybe less in format and font: this cartographic exercise is not limited to only geopolitics in the 21st century but to more creative divides such as industry vertical and common liquidity horizontals. Back in the old day, until a sovereignty was established in the past, men would seek their welfare by force. The supreme importance of state, in order to suppress such violent realities, is no longer valid in this world and, as such, should not necessarily be the contours we draw in all our policies today. Perhaps the underlying motivation for a collaborative economy is one based on a mutual interest: in virtual video gaming world or a gambling competition. Issued currency may not be tied to another nation or intra-nation, but rather economically valued intrinsically which is what we do in our own proprietary algorithms at ABC Platform. This can be a bit hard to imagine since we always price our things to the USD or EU or any other currency. But before that, we have to make sure such (crypto) currency can act as a proper medium of exchange, as the governors say. Learn more about the they should have videos uploaded this week. BEF Davos 2019 Program here, In an age past, Hobbes might have pushed for a monolithic regulatory state as it was the better option of two evils, such as anarchy. As we see the citizens of Western democratic posterchilds questioning the results of their own voting mechanisms, 2020 Davos will have an even longer list of issues to confront for their decade. We are beginning to realize that the people can no longer push these responsibilities away and must take it to ourselves to address — perhaps it is our turn to steal the golden fleece from the Argonauts but this time it cut up into shared goods, not just for Jason. For example, we at ABC Platform look at the opportunity to now exit this Hobbesian “lesser evil,” depending not on centralization processes (ie trade finance financing by government-controlled banks) and to exit and reinvent the system entirely by empowering the user-participants, not trusting overseers. Most of the world and the leaders at Davos, it seems, are thinking in this modernizing direction. I am excited to see where technology can take us, but I am even more excited to see how people self-organize in this new reality. Is the history of computers not more exciting when told through the lens of the inventors and communities? Turing, Englebart, Jobs, Gates, Berners-Lee, Neumann, etc. I was happy with the entire week at Davos. I got some lifelong contacts and made some great industry partnerships and had some fruitful conversations on ideas for our own platform, which we will be announcing through my company, , in the next few months. I thank again the LAToken platform for making this event possible and for inviting me. I wish them all the best in their next event. Feel free to learn more about what they are doing on STOs and token tradability on their website ABC Platform Hackernoon www.latoken.com. Looking forward, -D

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