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I recently spoke with Lingo Co-Founder & CEO, HM Rawat, about the potential impact of Web3 on community empowerment. In our conversation, we also touched on the uniqueness of Web3 rewards, its challenges, and how a novel approach could shape the industry. I hope you find the discussion insightful. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into Web3. From selling MP3 CDs at school to exiting Mauritius’s fastest-growing Subway franchisee chain of 12+ restaurants, I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. Heading marketing and sales at HMRawat Communications, our family business, was a milestone in my journey. During my time there, we secured over 80% of Mauritius’s mobile phone market share and achieved a 300x YoY revenue growth for the Madagascar unit. The Seychelles unit also saw a 1500x growth. Now, I’m applying all the lessons I learned over 30 years to build and scale Lingo. It’ll help fill Web3’s marketing gaps—the reason I entered this space. While the underlying tech is growing 2x faster than the Internet in the 90s, it’s not transforming as many lives as it can. Loyalty schemes feature heavily in Web2’s attract-extract models. How are Web3 rewards different? The global loyalty management market was roughly $10.5 billion in 2023. It’ll possibly grow at over 9% till 2030. But consumers will only get a tiny share of this revenue, as usual. Web2 loyalty schemes are extractive because they work within walled gardens owned and controlled by centralized entities. Consumers mostly receive points or token money that have limited redeemability. You can use them at partner stores only, for example. Web3 rewards, on the contrary, can put real value in the consumer’s hands. Consumers can trade loyalty tokens in secondary markets or exchange them with their friends. That’s the power of interoperability. Plus, on-chain revenue models are usually transparent and verifiable, enhancing accountability. Have Web3 rewards evolved fully? If not, what are its main challenges? No. Lingo will take Web3 rewards over the line but there’s still a long way to go. Inferior design and sub-par incentives are the main problems. The inability to sustain rewards and engage communities long-term is a key reason why over 72% of projects from the 2020-2021 bull market have died. Web3 projects typically have Ponzinomics for economic models. They constantly need to onboard new users to maintain rewards, etc. This is very dangerous in volatile, cyclical markets like crypto. It’s also unsustainable. Moreover, Web3 rewards don’t have enough real-world utility yet. They’re even inferior to centralized Web2 rewards in some ways. Meaning, communities don’t have the incentives to stay loyal long-term. Speculation and frothy practices are more prevalent instead. How does Lingo solve these problems? What’s unique about its approach? We’re solving the root cause, i.e., Ponzinomics. The lack of intrinsic value and solid foundations fuel the problems we discussed so far. Lingo fixes that. We’ve developed a new model that’ll generate tangible community rewards using Real World Assets (RWAs). The algorithm supporting Lingo’s circular economy invests transaction fees into high-performing RWAs and the returns go to the rewards pool. It ensures compound growth. Consumers will earn $LINGO tokens that they can redeem for real-world rewards by staking, etc. This system works irrespective of market conditions, making it robust and sustainable. We’re already seeing strong support for our vision and novel approach. Over 140K consumers have joined the waitlist. Our Twitter and Discord communities have 84,000+ and 50,000+ members respectively. We have 100+ brand ambassadors and raised over $5 million via private rounds. What’s in it for the community? How will Lingo change the experiences of end-users? Lingo users get passive, risk-minimized access to the RWA industry, which is expected to cross $16 trillion by 2030. Early adopters will further reap the benefits accruing from our first mover’s advantage. Consumers can access Web3’s largest rewards ecosystem with Lingo. This means special benefits at 3000+ brands like Nike, IKEA, Spotify, Uber, Netflix, and more. Our solutions will be available in 80+ countries, powered by Fizen and our 100,000+ hotel network. I’ve spent 12+ years building solutions and services for global consumers. Our Co-Founder, David Amsellem, built John Paul — the world’s top premium loyalty program that Accor Hotels acquired for $150 million in 2016. Over the years, we’ve both learned the importance of ensuring top-notch user experiences. That’s our priority at Lingo. Plus an awesome team of blockchain researchers, developers, and advisors is helping us turn vision into reality. We’ll unleash next-gen Web3 incentives. Community members will be the biggest beneficiaries here — it’ll be a win-win for consumers and partner brands. And finally, distributed governance gives users a meaningful say in the platform’s policies and financial models. We welcome anyone who’s ready to surf the tide. I recently spoke with Lingo Co-Founder & CEO, HM Rawat , about the potential impact of Web3 on community empowerment. In our conversation, we also touched on the uniqueness of Web3 rewards, its challenges, and how a novel approach could shape the industry. I hope you find the discussion insightful. Lingo HM Rawat Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into Web3. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into Web3. From selling MP3 CDs at school to exiting Mauritius’s fastest-growing Subway franchisee chain of 12+ restaurants, I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. Heading marketing and sales at HMRawat Communications, our family business, was a milestone in my journey. During my time there, we secured over 80% of Mauritius’s mobile phone market share and achieved a 300x YoY revenue growth for the Madagascar unit. The Seychelles unit also saw a 1500x growth. Now, I’m applying all the lessons I learned over 30 years to build and scale Lingo. It’ll help fill Web3’s marketing gaps—the reason I entered this space. While the underlying tech is growing 2x faster than the Internet in the 90s, it’s not transforming as many lives as it can. Loyalty schemes feature heavily in Web2’s attract-extract models. How are Web3 rewards different? Loyalty schemes feature heavily in Web2’s attract-extract models. How are Web3 rewards different? The global loyalty management market was roughly $10.5 billion in 2023. It’ll possibly grow at over 9% till 2030. But consumers will only get a tiny share of this revenue, as usual. roughly $10.5 billion roughly $10.5 billion Web2 loyalty schemes are extractive because they work within walled gardens owned and controlled by centralized entities. Consumers mostly receive points or token money that have limited redeemability. You can use them at partner stores only, for example. Web3 rewards, on the contrary, can put real value in the consumer’s hands. Consumers can trade loyalty tokens in secondary markets or exchange them with their friends. That’s the power of interoperability. Plus, on-chain revenue models are usually transparent and verifiable, enhancing accountability. Have Web3 rewards evolved fully? If not, what are its main challenges? Have Web3 rewards evolved fully? If not, what are its main challenges? No. Lingo will take Web3 rewards over the line but there’s still a long way to go. Inferior design and sub-par incentives are the main problems. The inability to sustain rewards and engage communities long-term is a key reason why over 72% of projects from the 2020-2021 bull market have died. 72% of projects 72% of projects Web3 projects typically have Ponzinomics for economic models. They constantly need to onboard new users to maintain rewards, etc. This is very dangerous in volatile, cyclical markets like crypto. It’s also unsustainable. Moreover, Web3 rewards don’t have enough real-world utility yet. They’re even inferior to centralized Web2 rewards in some ways. Meaning, communities don’t have the incentives to stay loyal long-term. Speculation and frothy practices are more prevalent instead. How does Lingo solve these problems? What’s unique about its approach? How does Lingo solve these problems? What’s unique about its approach? We’re solving the root cause, i.e., Ponzinomics. The lack of intrinsic value and solid foundations fuel the problems we discussed so far. Lingo fixes that. We’ve developed a new model that’ll generate tangible community rewards using Real World Assets (RWAs). The algorithm supporting Lingo’s circular economy invests transaction fees into high-performing RWAs and the returns go to the rewards pool. It ensures compound growth. Consumers will earn $LINGO tokens that they can redeem for real-world rewards by staking, etc. This system works irrespective of market conditions, making it robust and sustainable. We’re already seeing strong support for our vision and novel approach. Over 140K consumers have joined the waitlist. Our Twitter and Discord communities have 84,000+ and 50,000+ members respectively. We have 100+ brand ambassadors and raised over $5 million via private rounds. What’s in it for the community? How will Lingo change the experiences of end-users? What’s in it for the community? How will Lingo change the experiences of end-users? Lingo users get passive, risk-minimized access to the RWA industry, which is expected to cross $16 trillion by 2030 . Early adopters will further reap the benefits accruing from our first mover’s advantage. $16 trillion by 2030 $16 trillion by 2030 Consumers can access Web3’s largest rewards ecosystem with Lingo. This means special benefits at 3000+ brands like Nike, IKEA, Spotify, Uber, Netflix, and more. Our solutions will be available in 80+ countries, powered by Fizen and our 100,000+ hotel network. Fizen Fizen I’ve spent 12+ years building solutions and services for global consumers. Our Co-Founder, David Amsellem, built John Paul — the world’s top premium loyalty program that Accor Hotels acquired for $150 million in 2016. Over the years, we’ve both learned the importance of ensuring top-notch user experiences. That’s our priority at Lingo. Plus an awesome team of blockchain researchers, developers, and advisors is helping us turn vision into reality. We’ll unleash next-gen Web3 incentives. Community members will be the biggest beneficiaries here — it’ll be a win-win for consumers and partner brands. And finally, distributed governance gives users a meaningful say in the platform’s policies and financial models. We welcome anyone who’s ready to surf the tide.

Connecting Web3 Rewards To Real-World Assets - A Discussion With HM Rawat

**SINGAPORE, Singapore, March 13th, 2024/Chainwire/--**SynFutures is a leading decentralized derivatives exchange, today announced the Trading Grand Prix (TGP) Competition, setting a new record with the largest stablecoin prize pool ever offered in decentralized finance (DeFi) history. With 500,000 USDB in rewards, the competition marks a monumental milestone following the launch of SynFutures V3 on Blast, which garnered over 300,000 registrations and more than $24M in TVL in just one week. The TGP is designed to spotlight SynFutures’ new Oyster AMM (oAMM), a fusion of automated market-making with an onchain order book model, setting a new benchmark for capital efficiency in DeFi. Historically, the gap between DeFi and CeFi has been pronounced, with the latter often outpacing in efficiency and user experience. Powered by the novel oAMM, SynFutures V3 bridges this divide, heralding a new era where DeFi can compete head-on with its centralized counterparts. An Eight-Week Marathon of Skill and Strategy. Beginning March 12, 2024, and ending May 7, 2024, the competition invites all traders to navigate the volatile seas of decentralized perps trading, leveraging SynFutures’ unmatched efficiency to secure their spot among the legends of the trade. Each tournament stands alone, offering fresh chances to win weekly USDB prizes, with up to 10,000 USDB awarded to the top trader. TGP also features a Masters Tournament, drawing in luminaries from the DeFi community and leading firms. Particpants include @jandx_, @RoofHanzo, @CMSholdings, @Awawat_Trades, @CL207, @keyboardmonkey3, @mattomattik, @nanixbt, @izebel_eth, @_jaechung, @cryptoethan, and @ResearchKronos. This elite gathering underscores the competition's significance, providing an onchain stage for the best to showcase their strategies under the most dynamic of market conditions. Rachel Lin, Co-founder and CEO of SynFutures, reflected on the inception of the trading competition. "Having seen so much success with our V3 launch on Blast, we wanted to celebrate this milestone by doing something unprecedented in DeFi. The Grand Prix isn't just a competition; it's a testament to our belief that DeFi can offer a trading experience as rich, if not richer, than CeFi. This competition invites the trading community to experience our new platform's capabilities firsthand." As the Grand Prix beckons, all traders are invited to partake in this historic event, vying for a piece of the half-million USDB prize pool. It's more than a competition; it celebrates strides toward a decentralized future, underscored by SynFutures' unwavering commitment to innovation, efficiency, and community. In addition to the TGP, users on SynFutures can earn up to 3x the rewards potential through the Expanded Oyster Odyssey (OO) program. Traders and liquidity providers will be rewarded with Blast, Blast Gold (Big Bang developer airdrop allocation), and OO points. A breakdown of the rewards distribution can be found . here Users can visit the for more information on , leaderboard updates, and registration details. SynFutures blog The Grand Prix Trading Competition About SynFutures SynFutures is a decentralized perpetual futures protocol that facilitates open and transparent trading on any assets and listings instantly. The V3 Oyster AMM launched the industry's first-ever unified AMM and onchain order book model. Backers include Tier 1 Web3 institutional investors Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Dragonfly Capital, Standard Crypto, and Framework Ventures, and the team has extensive experience at global financial institutions, fintech companies and blockchain technology companies such as Alipay, Bitmain, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Matrixport, and Nomura Securities.  Learn more: | | | | | | Website YouTube X Discord Telegram Github Press Kit Contacts CMO Mark Lee SynFutures mark.lee@synfutures.com Head of Content Greer Rodriguez SynFutures greer.rodriguez@synfutures.com This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here.

SynFutures Launches 500,000 USDB DeFi Trading Competition Following V3 Launch

Introduction Making the cluster highly available and minimizing downtime is fundamental for any modern service. In the context of , achieving high availability involves the deployment and distribution of resources across various levels within the infrastructure: Azure Kubernetes Service Regions. Creating multiple clusters in different Azure regions is the most expensive yet reliable option. Zones. Availability zones can be used to improve single-cluster availability. Nodes. At this level, we can distribute workload between virtual machines. In this article, I’m going to focus on zone resiliency. In Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), zone resiliency plays a crucial role when we need to achieve high availability of applications. Before diving deeper into networking and storage aspects of AKS zone resiliency, I’d like to touch upon some common terminology. Availability zone I could invent my definition here, but in fact, availability zones are best described in the Microsoft documentation: Azure availability zones are physically and logically separated datacenters with their own independent power source, network, and cooling. Connected with an extremely low-latency network, they become a building block to delivering high availability applications. Availability zones ensure that if there's an event impacting a datacenter site—for example, if someone cuts the power, or there are issues with cooling—your data will be protected. In short, availability zones operate independently, ensuring that a failure in one zone does not affect the others. Such isolation significantly enhances fault tolerance and application availability. Not all regions have the same number of availability zones: while most have three zones, some have two or even one. Control plane A Kubernetes cluster consists of two main parts—the control plane and the nodes. Both components can use multi-zone availability. The control plane is automatically distributed among zones. I found two different statements in Azure documentation on how this distribution works: It’s distributed between all available regions. It’s distributed between zones you have nodes in. From a practical point of view, these approaches have no big difference because, normally, we will have nodes in all the zones. Node pools We can specify zone parameters when creating a Kubernetes cluster. This would affect the system node pool only. az aks create … --zones You need to specify zone parameters for every zone you create. az aks nodepool add … --zones The most obvious option is always to select all three zones for each node pool. It works fine in most cases, but some limitations related to networking and storage may arise. Let’s take a closer look at each type of limitation. Zones and networking Let’s say one of our pods needs access to the internet. There are several ways we can configure outbound networking in AKS: Load Balancer NAT Gateway User Defined Routing The last option can be implemented in several different ways: you can route your traffic to that would be zone-redundant, or you can route your traffic to a single VM that wouldn’t be zone-redundant. We’re not going to cover all possible options in this article. Azure Firewall Using multiple zones per node pool works fine with the Load Balancer option because Azure Load Balancer is a zone-redundant resource. Yet, it doesn’t work that well with the NAT gateway. Virtual network in Azure is zone agnostic, meaning that it exists in each zone, and it’s safe to use one virtual network (or virtual network subnet) in multizone scenarios. However, the NAT gateway is always deployed in one zone, meaning that even if nodes are distributed among the zones, they are still connected to a single virtual network subnet and a NAT in a single zone. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to connect multiple NATs to one subnet. to overcome this limitation is to create three node pools instead of one and assign one node pool to one zone. The solution In this configuration, you must connect each node pool to a separate virtual network subnet. The configuration with NAT is more complicated, so there should be a solid reason to choose it. To understand why it can be beneficial to use a NAT gateway, we need to dive deeper into the outbound traffic architecture in Azure. According to Azure , there are four outbound traffic options. documentation Here, we can see that the load balancer is production-grade; however, NAT is the best. The reason for that is very well described in the section of Azure documentation titled And below. What are SNAT ports? In brief, when you have only a small subset of nodes that actively use outbound connectivity, you can face port , meaning that new outbound connections will fail. For example, you have a pod with a replication factor of 5 and 120 nodes in a cluster. Each pod replica can open about 500 connections to the database simultaneously. All other pods in a cluster don’t actively use outbound connectivity, and we have only one IP address assigned to a load balancer. exhaustion In this configuration, each node could create only 256 connections to the same destination IP and port because all the ports have been statically allocated among all the nodes. So, only 256 connections out of the required 500 would be opened. The exact configuration with the NAT gateway will be able to establish all necessary connections because the port would be allocated dynamically based on actual demand. One IP address gives us 64000 ports, and the demand is 500*5=2500, which is more than enough. This can be a problem even for relatively small but highly loaded clusters. For a cluster with 1 to 50 nodes, only 1024 ports would be allocated to each node. Of course, if all the pods and nodes use outbound connectivity in the same way, static distribution is not an issue, and you need to add more public IP addresses to the load balancer or NAT. Here is the full PowerShell script to create the described configuration: # Variables
$RESOURCE_GROUP="dt-test-cluster"
$LOCATION="westus2"
$VNET_NAME="dt-vnet"
$SUBNET1_NAME="dt-subnet1"
$SUBNET2_NAME="dt-subnet2"
$NAT_GW1_NAME="dt-natgw1"
$NAT_GW2_NAME="dt-natgw2"
$PIP1_NAME="dt-pip-natgw1"
$PIP2_NAME="dt-pip-natgw2"
$AKS_CLUSTER_NAME="dt-aks-cluster"
$NODE_POOL1_NAME="dtnodepool1"
$NODE_POOL2_NAME="dtnodepool2"

# Create Resource Group
az group create --name $RESOURCE_GROUP --location $LOCATION

# Create Virtual Network and Adjusted Subnets
az network vnet create --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $VNET_NAME --address-prefixes 10.1.0.0/16 --subnet-name $SUBNET1_NAME --subnet-prefix 10.1.2.0/24
az network vnet subnet create --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --vnet-name $VNET_NAME --name $SUBNET2_NAME --address-prefix 10.1.3.0/24

# Create Public IPs for NAT Gateways
$publicIP1 = az network public-ip create --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $PIP1_NAME --location $LOCATION --sku Standard --zone 1 --query publicIp.id --output tsv
$publicIP2 = az network public-ip create --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $PIP2_NAME --location $LOCATION --sku Standard --zone 2 --query publicIp.id --output tsv

# Create NAT Gateways in different zones and associate them with the subnets
az network nat gateway create --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $NAT_GW1_NAME --location $LOCATION --zone 1 --public-ip-addresses $publicIP1
az network nat gateway create --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $NAT_GW2_NAME --location $LOCATION --zone 2 --public-ip-addresses $publicIP2
az network vnet subnet update --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --vnet-name $VNET_NAME --name $SUBNET1_NAME --nat-gateway $NAT_GW1_NAME
az network vnet subnet update --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --vnet-name $VNET_NAME --name $SUBNET2_NAME --nat-gateway $NAT_GW2_NAME

# Create AKS Cluster with two node pools in different zones and assign subnets
$subnet1Id = "/subscriptions/$(az account show --query id --output tsv)/resourceGroups/$RESOURCE_GROUP/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/$VNET_NAME/subnets/$SUBNET1_NAME"
$subnet2Id = "/subscriptions/$(az account show --query id --output tsv)/resourceGroups/$RESOURCE_GROUP/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/$VNET_NAME/subnets/$SUBNET2_NAME"

az aks create --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $AKS_CLUSTER_NAME --node-count 1 --enable-addons monitoring --generate-ssh-keys --nodepool-name $NODE_POOL1_NAME --vnet-subnet-id $subnet1Id --zones 1 --outbound-type userAssignedNATGateway
az aks nodepool add --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --cluster-name $AKS_CLUSTER_NAME --name $NODE_POOL2_NAME --node-count 1 --vnet-subnet-id $subnet2Id --zones 2 Please note that this script is not production-ready because only the parameters related to the outbound networking were configured. Once the configuration is created, you can test it with the following commands: az aks get-credentials --resource-group dt-test-cluster --name dt-aks-cluster
kubectl run ubuntu --image=ubuntu -- sleep infinity
kubectl run ubuntu --image=ubuntu2 -- sleep infinity Then, log in to both of the images with: kubectl exec -it ubuntu -- /bin/sh And run apt-get update
apt-get install -y curl
curl http://httpbin.org/ip As we have two node pools and don’t have an affinity, the scheduler will distribute pods between different node pools. So, the first curl should give you one of the public IPs and the second — another IP. Zones and storage Another potential pitfall is storage. The most common and convenient way to persist data in Kubernetes is to use a storage class and persistent volume claim. In Azure, several built-in storage classes, such as Azure Files or , support network remote storage. In addition, several storage classes support the so-called Managed Drive, which can be treated as VM’s local drive. Azure Blob Storage Let’s say we created a persistent volume claim (PVC) on the Azure default storage classes: .
We can use the following command to understand what Azure storage we actually use: managed-csi-premium kubectl describe sc managed-csi-premium
Name:              	managed-csi-premium
IsDefaultClass:    	No
Annotations:       	<none>
Provisioner:       	disk.csi.azure.com
Parameters:        	skuname=Premium_LRS
AllowVolumeExpansion:  True
MountOptions:      	<none>
ReclaimPolicy:     	Delete
VolumeBindingMode: 	WaitForFirstConsumer
Events:            	<none> This class connects Managed Drive to a node VM. We can understand this because provisioner is used. The storage is . This disk has local redundancy, meaning your data is stored only in one region. disk.csi.azure.com Premium_LRS Let’s imagine that something happened to VMs in Zone 1, but the storage in Zone 1 is unaffected. In this case, we will also lose access to the data because cross-zone disc connections are not supported in Azure. The best approach to avoid such an issue is to use ZRS or zone redundant storage. For this type of storage, Azure synchronously replicates every write operation across all the zones, so we always have three up-to-date replicas. There is no such storage class by default, so we need to create one. kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
name: test-for-article
provisioner: disk.csi.azure.com
parameters:
skuname: Premium_ZRS
allowVolumeExpansion: true
reclaimPolicy: Delete
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer The storage class we used mounted a managed disk to a virtual machine. We can use other provisioners, for example, , to mount a file share. For such provisioners, data can be accessed from any zone. file.csi.azure.com For the provisioner that mounts a managed disk to a virtual machine, we can choose one of the following SKUs: disk.csi.azure.com Premium_LRS Premium_ZRS Standard_LRS StandardSSD_LRS StandardSSD_ZRS UltraSSD_LRS PremiumV2_LRS As you can see, we have LRS and ZRS options. For the that mounts a file share in the Azure Storage Account, there are three additional : file.csi.azure.com SKUs available Standard_GRS: Standard geo-redundant storage Standard_RAGRS: Standard read-access geo-redundant storage Standard_RAGZRS: Standard read-access geo-zone-redundant storage These three options replicate data in different regions. It can be useful in case of problems with the whole region, but the failover is manual. It may cause some data losses because of the asynchronous nature of the cross-region replication. Conclusion Zone resiliency in AKS is pivotal for ensuring the high availability of applications. When addressing AKS zone resiliency, you should consider the following limitations and best practices: Networking Azure Load Balancer is inherently zone-redundant, facilitating seamless deployment across multiple zones. On the contrary, the NAT gateway, which provides the best outbound traffic characteristics, is zone-specific. Implementing it requires creating separate node pools for each zone and tying each to a unique virtual network subnet. Storage The best approach to persisting data in the AKS zone resilience cluster is to use zone redundant storage. You may need to create custom storage classes to get zone redundant storage. While AKS offers various tools to ensure zone resiliency, it is important to consider which approaches will suit your cluster's technical characteristics and requirements best. Properly configuring node pools, understanding the intricacies of outbound traffic, and employing zone-redundant storage solutions can help achieve a genuinely resilient AKS deployment.

Zone Resiliency in Azure Kubernetes Service

CYRUS SACRIFICES HIMSELF FOR THE SAKE OF THE “ALIENS”

Decentralized Finance, or , refers to the use of distributed ledger technology to recreate and enhance traditional financial systems in a decentralized manner. It eliminates intermediaries and enables individuals to engage in various financial activities, such as lending, borrowing, trading, and much more. They do this directly with each other by using smart contracts, or with automated agents that operate independently from humans. DeFi DeFi offers numerous advantages over traditional finance. It provides financial services to the unbanked and underbanked, enabling greater financial inclusion. Additionally, DeFi eliminates the need for intermediaries, reducing costs and enabling faster transactions. It also promotes transparency by allowing users to verify transactions on public ledgers. is, maybe, the most popular activity in the DeFi industry. Also known as Yield Farming, It operates on the principle of incentivizing users to contribute their digital assets, such as cryptocurrencies, to liquidity pools without intermediaries. Liquidity Mining is a practice that involves providing liquidity (funds) to decentralized platforms in exchange for monetary rewards. These pools are automated agents (they come by different names on different platforms, e.g. smart contracts on Ethereum, autonomous agents on Obyte, Chaincode in Hyperledger Fabric) usually holding a pair of tokens for others to exchange. For example, : to provide liquidity, you need to buy and deposit any amount of the pair in the pool. The funds will be used by others to “swap” or exchange between different coins without intermediaries, while you’ll get a share of the involved fees and additional rewards. This facilitates efficient trading and enables various DeFi protocols to function seamlessly. GBYTE-WBTC Must-know concepts of DeFi and Liquidity Mining Going a bit more “inside” the bowels of these activities, there are some that you need to know before starting. Terms like AMM, APY, CEX, DEX, LP, TVL, governance, impermanent loss, and leverage will repeat in all your journey and different platforms. basic concepts Automated Market Maker (AMM) It’s a decentralized exchange mechanism that uses algorithms to set prices based on the available liquidity in a liquidity pool, facilitating automated trading without relying on traditional order books —like those from centralized exchanges. Annual Percentage Yield (APY) It’s a metric used to measure the total amount of interest or returns earned on an investment or deposit over a one-year period, taking into account compounding effects, fees, and other factors. This percentage is mostly available to check at first sight in any DeFi platform. Centralized Exchange (CEX) It refers to a digital asset trading platform that operates under the control and authority of a central entity (like a company). It typically requires users to deposit funds into their accounts, and trading occurs through an order book managed by the exchange. Binance and Kraken are CEXs. Decentralized Exchange (DEX) It’s a digital asset trading platform that operates on a decentralized network, typically utilizing autonomous automated agents. It allows users to trade directly with each other without the need for intermediaries or central authorities. and on Obyte are DEXs. Oswap.io ODEX Liquidity Provider (LP) It’s an individual or entity that contributes their coins to a liquidity pool on a decentralized exchange or lending platform, facilitating smooth transactions and earning rewards in return. Anyone can be an LP. Total Value Locked (TVL) It’s a metric used to measure the total amount of funds locked or held within a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol or platform at a specific time, indicating the level of participation and value within the ecosystem. Statistics sites like DeFi Llama and DeFi Pulse use this measure (in USD). Governance and Voting It’s not an exclusive concept of DeFi, but it’s quite important here. It's the process by which participants collectively make decisions and influence the direction of the protocol. It involves token holders voting on proposals, such as protocol upgrades, parameter changes, and allocation of funds, to achieve consensus and shape the platform's development. Usually, each DeFi platform has its own governance token to allow voting. Impermanent Loss When providing liquidity to a pool, it refers to the temporary reduction in the value of your assets compared to their value if you had simply held them outside the pool, due to price fluctuations. It could be "permanent" if you exchange the tokens at a negative fluctuation point. Leverage and Margin Leverage in DeFi platforms allows users to amplify their exposure to assets by borrowing funds to increase their trading position. Margin refers to the collateral or funds users need to provide as a percentage of their borrowed amount to enter leveraged trades. Classic leverage comes with a risk of liquidation if the market moves against you, however, since version 2 (the current version) provides leverage without liquidations. Oswap.io Now, if you’re ready, you can also check about how to profit from the different types of liquidity mining available in the ecosystem. It’s easy, it’s decentralized, and it’s quite rewarding too! our guide Obyte Featured Vector Image by Storyset / Freepik

Educational Byte: Understanding the Basic Concepts of DeFi and Liquidity Mining

Byte educativo: comprensión de los conceptos básicos de DeFi y minería de liquidez

Octet éducatif : comprendre les concepts de base de la DeFi et de l'extraction de liquidités

शैक्षिक बाइट: डेफी और लिक्विडिटी माइनिंग की बुनियादी अवधारणाओं को समझना

教育バイト: DeFi と流動性マイニングの基本概念を理解する

Byte Educacional: Entendendo os Conceitos Básicos de DeFi e Mineração de Liquidez

Byte giáo dục: Hiểu các khái niệm cơ bản về DeFi và khai thác thanh khoản

教育字节：了解 DeFi 和流动性挖矿的基本概念

Real Time Data Processing: Easily Processing 10 Million Messages With Golang, Kafka and MongoDB

The Bitcoin mining industry is undergoing a significant transformation, and at the helm of this change is . This revolutionary platform, built by seasoned miners, is the first eco-friendly Bitcoin mining pool. PEGA Pool It stands out not only for promoting renewable energy use but also for providing substantial financial incentives to its participants. PEGA Pool's founders, equipped with extensive mining experience, understood the potential of renewable energy in revolutionizing the industry. They envisioned an eco-friendly and profitable Bitcoin mining landscape, a space where decentralization is genuinely achieved, irrespective of fossil fuel-based energy constraints. PEGA Pool is the embodiment of this vision. As a trailblazing initiative, PEGA Pool, being the first eco-friendly Bitcoin mining pool, encourages the use of renewable energy. They reward miners who adopt renewable energy by offering a 50% reduction in fees. This initiative stimulates more miners to transition towards cleaner energy sources, fostering an environmentally sustainable Bitcoin mining industry. It also promotes the establishment of a truly decentralized mining network independent of fossil fuel availability. PEGA Pool's commitment to Bitcoin's decentralization is intimately connected with energy sources. Fossil fuels may not be feasible for mining in all regions, and renewable energy becomes a profitable and sensible choice. Offering lower fees for renewable energy use, PEGA Pool is steering Bitcoin mining operations toward global distribution. This renewable energy push is beneficial for the environment and instrumental in further decentralizing Bitcoin. But PEGA Pool's environmental stewardship extends beyond just incentivizing renewable energy. They also have a carbon offset scheme for miners who use fossil fuels. In such cases, PEGA Pool contributes to tree planting efforts to counterbalance the carbon emissions from these mining activities. This strategy displays PEGA Pool's proactive approach to addressing the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining while promoting sustainable practices for the future. Moreover, PEGA Pool is recognized for providing one of the highest-paying options within the Bitcoin mining pool ecosystem. Their generous financial incentives, combined with their commitment to renewable energy, make them an attractive choice for miners looking to maximize their earnings while reducing their carbon footprint. PEGA Pool's sustainable and profitable approach to Bitcoin mining has not gone unnoticed. They're proud to be the leading sponsor of the upcoming Mining Disrupt conference, taking place in Miami from 25-27 July 2023. This event will serve as a significant platform for anyone interested in Bitcoin and mining to learn, network, and discover the latest industry innovations. As a key sponsor, PEGA Pool will share their inspiring vision and transformative work with the global mining community. In summary, is shaping the future of Bitcoin mining. By prioritizing renewable energy, incentivizing sustainable practices, offsetting carbon emissions, and providing substantial financial rewards, they're catalyzing a movement toward a decentralized and eco-friendly Bitcoin network. PEGA Pool PEGA Pool is a testament to the fact that Bitcoin mining and environmental sustainability can coexist profitably, paving the way for a new chapter in Bitcoin's story. : Vested Interest Disclosure This story was distributed as a release by Ascend Agency under HackerNoon’s Brand As An Author Program. Learn more about the program . here

PEGA Pool: Championing Bitcoin Decentralization Through Renewable Energy Mining and High Returns

PEGA Pool: Defender la descentralización de Bitcoin a través de la minería de energía renovable y altos rendimientos

PEGA Pool : défendre la décentralisation du Bitcoin grâce à l'exploitation des énergies renouvelables et à des rendements élevés

PEGA पूल: अक्षय ऊर्जा खनन और उच्च रिटर्न के माध्यम से बिटकॉइन विकेंद्रीकरण को चैंपियन बनाना

PEGA プール: 再生可能エネルギーのマイニングと高い収益を通じてビットコインの分散化を推進

PEGA Pool: defendendo a descentralização do Bitcoin por meio da mineração de energia renovável e altos retornos

PEGA Pool: Vô địch Bitcoin phi tập trung thông qua khai thác năng lượng tái tạo và lợi nhuận cao

PEGA Pool：通过可再生能源开采和高回报支持比特币去中心化

INSECTS AND MUSHROOMS

THE ROTIFERS

Half-stunned, Bradley lay for a minute as he had fallen

The decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem has rapidly grown in popularity in recent years, offering a range of investment opportunities and financial services to anyone with an internet connection. One of the most popular activities in DeFi is yield farming, where investors can earn high returns on their crypto assets by participating in various protocols and liquidity pools. In this article, we'll dive deep into the mechanics of yield farming and provide a few tips on maximizing returns. Disclaimer: The author works at Sturdy Finance (mentioned below). Please DYOR before making any financial decisions.. What is Yield Farming? Yield farming is a process in DeFi that allows individuals to deposit their cryptocurrency into DeFi protocols and liquidity pools to earn returns in the form of interest, rewards, and governance tokens. You can compare it to a savings account at a bank, except instead of depositing money into an account, individuals deposit their crypto into a liquidity pool. By depositing into these pools, they are effectively providing funding to DeFi projects, and in exchange, they receive a portion of the fees generated by the project as the yield on their investment. The Mechanics of Yield Farming Let’s dive deeper. The process of yield farming is facilitated by smart contracts, self-executing agreements written in code and stored on the blockchain network. These smart contracts automate the marketplace where users can lend, borrow, and exchange tokens. When an investor deposits their assets into a liquidity pool, it becomes available for other users to borrow and trade on automated market maker (AMM) platforms. The borrowed liquidity can potentially generate profits for the borrower if the value of the coin they trade with it changes. The interest charged on the borrowed liquidity is split between the depositors as interest and the protocol, which keeps a portion as trading fees. The returns an individual earns depend on the amount invested and the specific protocol rules. Apart from paying interest, protocols also incentivize deposits by offering governance tokens that give depositors a say in the protocol's decision-making process. Experienced DeFi users often deposit the rewards they receive from various protocols into yield farming pools in pursuit of higher yields. By continually depositing rewards into these pools, users can earn even higher yields on their investments over time. The Benefits of Yield Farming The most obvious benefit of yield farming is high returns. With compound interest, bonuses, dynamic interest rates, growth of the DeFi ecosystem, and lower barriers to entry, it is more profitable than traditional investment. Other benefits include: Investors have flexibility in terms of the type of assets that can be deposited, as well as the duration of the investment. Users can choose the investment strategy that best suits their needs and risk tolerance. Flexibility: Yield farming provides liquidity to the cryptocurrency market, as assets deposited in the liquidity pool can be traded on decentralized exchanges. This helps to increase the liquidity and stability of the market as a whole. Liquidity: The smart contract technology used in yield farming automates many of the processes involved, such as depositing and withdrawing assets, earning rewards, and calculating interest. This reduces the risk of errors and makes the process more efficient. Automation: Farming often involves the use of governance tokens, which give investors a say in the decision-making process of the yield farm. This allows for a more democratic and transparent investment process. Governance: What Are the Risks? One of the main risks is the high volatility of the cryptocurrency market. When the price of an asset in the pool changes, the value of the liquidity provider's investment can also change, even if the overall value of the pool remains the same. This can lead to a situation where the liquidity provider experiences a loss, even though they have not sold their investment. This loss is referred to as impermanent loss. For example, consider a liquidity pool that holds equal amounts of Asset A and Asset B. If the price of Asset A increases relative to Asset B, the value of the pool may increase, but the value of the liquidity provider's investment in Asset B may decrease. In this case, the liquidity provider experiences an impermanent loss, even though the overall value of the pool has increased. Additionally, there is a risk of smart contract failure, where bugs or vulnerabilities in the code can result in the loss of funds. Plus, the decentralized nature of yield farming also means that there is no central authority to turn to in case of disputes. Finally, yield farming requires a strong understanding of the underlying protocols, their functioning, and the associated risks, which can be challenging for novice investors. Maximizing Your Returns Diversifying your investments across a range of protocols and liquidity pools can help reduce your risk and increase your potential returns. To do so, you’ll need to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in DeFi and carefully research the protocols and liquidity pools you're considering; this will help you identify potential risks and participate in projects that’ll maximize your returns. For example, is a positive-sum protocol that converts borrower's deposited collateral into an interest-bearing version (ibToken) through staking in a separate protocol. The ibToken generates yield, which is harvested daily and distributed to both borrowers and lenders. Lenders receive yield in-kind and borrowers in the yield token. For those new to farming, the protocol is a great starting point– users benefit from high, stable yields with low risks. Discovering projects like this requires deep participation in the community and venturing beyond those bigger names like . Sturdy Finance Aave Lastly, regular monitoring of your investments is crucial. This includes checking for changes in interest rates, rewards, and governance tokens, as well as monitoring the overall performance of the protocols and pools you're invested in. Yield farming presents an exciting opportunity for investors to earn high returns on their crypto assets. By taking a mindful approach, including thorough research, diversification, and consistent portfolio monitoring, the inherent risks can be effectively managed. With that said, I’m not an expert/professional and highly recommend you do your own research before making any financial decisions. Keep these insights in mind for a rewarding and lucrative farming experience. 🧑‍🌾

An Intro to Yield Farming: Understanding the Mechanics and Maximizing ROI in the DeFi Ecosystem

Una introducción a la agricultura de rendimiento: comprensión de la mecánica y maximización del retorno de la inversión en el ecosistema DeFi

Une introduction à l'agriculture de rendement : comprendre les mécanismes et maximiser le retour sur investissement dans l'écosystème DeFi

यील्ड फार्मिंग का परिचय: यांत्रिकी को समझना और डेफी इकोसिस्टम में आरओआई को अधिकतम करना

イールドファーミングの紹介: DeFi エコシステムにおけるメカニズムの理解と ROI の最大化

Uma introdução à agricultura produtiva: entendendo a mecânica e maximizando o ROI no ecossistema DeFi

Giới thiệu về Yield Farming: Hiểu cơ chế và tối đa hóa ROI trong Hệ sinh thái DeFi

增产农业简介：了解 DeFi 生态系统中的机制并最大化投资回报率

After the collapse of FTX, users began to withdraw funds from centralized exchanges. This has led some crypto projects to be warry to list tokens on them. It seems to them that all CEXs may start to go bankrupt, which is why companies are looking toward listing on the DEX. In the article, I explain why there is no reason to panic and why centralized exchanges are more suitable than DEXs for listing tokens. Centralized Exchanges Have More Users When users get into cryptocurrencies, they often register on centralized exchanges, such as Binance or Coinbase. CEXs have a variety of cryptocurrencies, good trading volume, and liquidity. Centralized exchanges are intuitive and convenient for most users, so they have a much larger audience. Whereas, decentralized exchanges are complex, require specific knowledge, and are used by a more professional audience. Major crypto exchanges have disclosed some of their financial statements to reassure investors. Binance, CoinBase, Kraken, KuCoin, and others have decided to show that they have been audited for reserves and confirmed their stability so that users do not withdraw billions of dollars from their wallets. Regulators urge not to trust these reports, but in general, they should convince investors that it is not worth panicking ahead of time. If you list a token on the DEX, there is a risk of losing the attention of a large audience. Even though, sometimes, listing on a CEX can be a complex task. At this point, some projects decide to list on a decentralized exchange because it seems easier and cheaper. Listing on the DEX may work well for some projects but can be less effective for the majority of others. Why Listing on the CEX Can Be More Profitable The fact that centralized exchanges have more users gives better opportunities for the projects. But there are several other reasons to use them. Centralized Exchanges Promote Projects CEX makes a lot of efforts to advertise and promote new coins. It announces the listing on the website and social networks. They also offer additional marketing activities and contests, staking, and farming programs. There Are More Costs on Decentralized Exchanges At first glance, it may seem that listing on the DEX will be free, but it is not. First of all, you will need to create a liquidity pool. It depends primarily on the type of the project and can range from 50,000 to millions of dollars.  The liquidity pool should be about 300-700 thousand dollars to build trust with a user. This is a lot of money, which not every startup can block in the pool in the current market. The company will have to invest this money from its assets, as users of decentralized exchanges are afraid to invest in the liquidity of a new project. There Are a Lot of Bots on DEX Exchanges Decentralized exchanges are flooded with bots like “sniperbot” and “sandwichbot”. The first one flushes liquidity from the pool at the moment of listing, and the second one tries to earn on every market maker's deal. Because of this, the project will have to look for third-party software solutions to keep bots from working or put up with costs. Market-Making Costs On centralized exchanges, the commission for transactions is much lower than on decentralized ones. And some CEXs even offer accounts with zero commissions for market making. The swap fee is higher on DEXs, and it is also worth taking into account the blockchains fee, which can differ dozens of times. Therefore, market-making will require significant investments. The listing platform depends on the token being listed It is impossible to give general advice on which project suits for listing on CEX or DEX. It depends on the project. There are niche crypto companies, such as projects in the field of GameFi, which are more convenient to choose a decentralized exchange. Listing the project on exchanges should always be part of the development strategy. If you need help with your listing strategy, do not hesitate to contact me.

Deciding What Kind of Exchange Is Best for Your Token

Keeping the holiday spirit alive, here we are with more prizes for our fantastic community 🎁 🎁 Round 3 results of the by mParticle and HackerNoon are now live! Growth Marketing Writing Contest For those who are reading about this for the first time - mParticle & HackerNoon are excited to host for marketers and product managers. Growth Marketing Writing Contest Here’s your chance to win money from a whopping $12,000 prize pool! It could be any story on . We highly encourage you to write on #growth-marketing Product Management, Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Growth Marketing, Data Engineering, and Data Management. mParticle is a real-time AI customer data platform that powers your entire marketing stack with high-quality customer data. Request for a demo today! The Growth Marketing Writing Contest: November 2022 Nominations & Winners For selecting the top 10 nominations, we picked all the stories with the tag on HackerNoon, published in November 2022. Then we chose the top stories using 60:30:10 weightage respectively to: #growth-marketing Number of hours read The number of people reached The freshness of the content Here are the top 10 nominations: by Growth Marketing Vs Performance Marketing @dailyabay by 4 Steps to Build a Web Analytics Measurement Plan @mikhailkirilin by Nudge Theory Best-Practices For Business (With Examples) @darragh by 18 AI Marketing Softwares Your B2B Needs to Try Today @darragh by Secrets to Growth Marketing Data Engineering – Even in This Down Economy @manish8227 by 5 Steps to Increase Your Sales Department’s Efficiency @alexsolo by How Latin American Startups Can Make Their Own User Data Their Growth Superpower @marialejads by FTX Raised $1bn With This Pitch Deck in 2021. Let’s Review It! @sergey-baloyan by An Intro to Blockchain/Web3 Marketing in 2023 @dariavolkova by How to Use AI for Your B2B Marketing @darrag The winner in first place is: https://hackernoon.com/nudge-theory-best-practices-for-business-with-examples?embedable=true People value what they currently possess more than what they don’t yet own. We’re more motivated by potential losses than potential gains. For example, a majority of people will exert more effort to prevent the loss of $10,000 than to acquire $10,000 because the satisfaction lost is more overpowering than the satisfaction gained with the same amount. Wow , you have your three stories in the top 10 this month. Well-deserved win! You have won $1,000! @darragh In the second place, we have another excellent writeup: https://hackernoon.com/ftx-raised-$1bn-with-this-pitch-deck-in-2021-lets-review-it?embedable=true The first thing that catches your eye clearly is . There are no complicated backgrounds, animations, or illustrations. Just a light background and text. Nothing distracts from the content. Nothing should. the minimalistic design Psychologically, it is easier to make the reader focus on the things he needs to be focused on. In investment Pitch Decks, it's the numbers. And there will be numbers, lots of numbers. Congratulations, - you’ve won the second position and $600 in the growth marketing writing contest. @sergey-baloyan In the third place, we have: https://hackernoon.com/how-latin-american-startups-can-make-their-own-user-data-their-growth-superpower?embedable=true LatAm’s founders’ resilience is unmatched and the increasing adoption of tech solutions is a clear indicator of greater potential in the region and businesses’ willingness to adapt to the current digitization era. Early-stage startup data analytics tools help fuel investments and attract greater partnerships that consequently help the population uplift its quality of life. By showing well-informed data-based business strategies local founders and interested VCs are paving the way toward sustainable growth. Yay, ! You have won $400. @marialejads We will contact all the winners shortly. Want to know more about all the running and upcoming writing contests? Visit today! See y’all in round 4 of the growth marketing writing contest next month. contests.hackernoon.com

The Growth Marketing Writing Contest: Round 3 Results Announced!

Concurso de redacción sobre marketing de crecimiento: ¡se anuncian los resultados de la ronda 3!

Concours d'écriture sur le marketing de croissance : les résultats du troisième tour sont annoncés !

विकास विपणन लेखन प्रतियोगिता: तीसरे दौर के परिणाम घोषित!

グロース マーケティング ライティング コンテスト: 第 3 ラウンドの結果が発表されました!

O Concurso de Redação de Growth Marketing: Resultados da 3ª Rodada Anunciados!

Cuộc thi Viết về Tiếp thị Tăng trưởng: Đã công bố Kết quả Vòng 3!

增长营销写作比赛：第三轮结果公布！

Growth Marketers, Assemble! The second round results of the are here! Growth Marketing Writing Contest For those who are reading about this for the first time - mParticle & HackerNoon are excited to host a for growth marketers and product managers. Growth Marketing Writing Contest Here’s your chance to win money from a whopping $12,000 prize pool! It could be any story on . We highly encourage you to write on #growth-marketing Product Management, Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Growth Marketing, Data Engineering, and Data Management. mParticle is a real-time AI customer data platform that powers your entire marketing stack with high-quality customer data. Request for a demo today! The Growth Marketing Writing Contest October 2022 Nominations & Winners For selecting the top 10 nominations, we picked all the stories with the tag on HackerNoon, published in October 2022. Then we chose the top stories using 60:30:10 weightage respectively to: #growth-marketing Number of hours read The number of people reached The freshness of the content Here are the top 10 nominations: by Product Marketer vs. Growth Marketer vs. Content Marketer: How to Choose Your First Marketing Hire @oluwasegunoyebode by 16 Growth Marketing Hacks For Crypto Projects & Start-Ups @darragh by How Salesforce’s Partnership With Meta Gives Rise To Conversational Commerce @malcolmx by Growth Hacking Can Be the Difference Between Life and Death @scott-d.-clary by Microsoft: A Worthy Competitor Or A Killer Of Startups? @malcolmx by The Three Questions Every Entrepreneur Should Ask Themselves @scott-d.-clary by Why Visual Marketing is Still the Best Way to Get 69% of Customers @claidai by Why Professions Are Adding Analytics to Their Skillsets @jacquic by What is Growth Marketing? @juxtathinka by Product-Led Strategy That Guarantees Business Growth in Any Industry @samuelj The Growth Marketing Contest Round 2 Winners With 20k+ reads and a tag, the winner in the first place is: #hackernoon-top-story https://hackernoon.com/product-marketer-vs-growth-marketer-vs-content-marketer-how-to-choose-your-first-marketing-hire?embedable=true ‘Sounds like it's gonna be SEO spam but surprising turned out to be a well-researched article’ - HackerNoon Editor Congratulations, , you have won $1,000! @oluwasegunoyebode The second place is won by: https://hackernoon.com/growth-hacking-can-be-the-difference-between-life-and-death?embedable=true “Great interview and an interesting case study” - HackerNoon Editor Yay, ! You have won $600! @scott-d.-clary Last but not least, we have the following story in the third place: https://hackernoon.com/why-visual-marketing-is-still-the-best-way-to-get-69percent-of-customers?embedable=true ‘Data, and numbers!’ - HackerNoon Editor Congratulations, , you have won $400 and third place in the growth marketing writing contest! @claidai We will contact all the winners shortly. Want to know more about all the running and upcoming writing contests? Visit today! See y’all next month. contests.hackernoon.com

The Growth Marketing Writing Contest: Round 2 Results Announced!

Concurso de redacción sobre marketing de crecimiento: ¡se anuncian los resultados de la segunda ronda!

Concours d'écriture sur le marketing de croissance : résultats du deuxième tour annoncés !

विकास विपणन लेखन प्रतियोगिता: दूसरे दौर के परिणाम घोषित!

グロース マーケティング ライティング コンテスト: 第 2 ラウンドの結果が発表されました!

O Concurso de Redação de Growth Marketing: Resultados da 2ª Rodada Anunciados!

Cuộc thi Viết về Tiếp thị Tăng trưởng: Đã công bố Kết quả Vòng 2!

增长营销写作比赛：第二轮结果公布！

Gains Network might be cryptocurrencies’ next Cinderella story. Their product, the gTrade platform, offers decentralized leveraged trading with insane multipliers. Besides crypto, it synthetically hosts a variety of products including forex trading pairs and high demand US stocks like Tesla, Amazon, and Apple. Gains Network pitches gTrade by claiming it’s decentralized, but that’s not entirely true, yet. In the following article, we’ll analyze the leveraged trading platform to determine if it comes with inherent risks. In any case, gTrade simplifies matters by relying on a single liquidity pool. It offers an unbeatable product in leverage terms: 50x on stocks, 150x for crypto, and up to 1000x on forex trades. The Gains Network product also pays liquidity providers a yield that oscillates between 15% and 50% APY. Those earnings come from liquidations and trading fees, not from liquidity mining or the Gains Network inflating the $GNS utility token. Which makes all the difference. The main concept behind gTrade is the certainty that traders will lose more than they’ll win, which sounds about right. The problem is that the system is dependent on that fact, and that seems to pose a systemic risk. It's a vulnerability, and those can be exploited and attacked in ways still unimagined.The Gains Network’s gTrade relies on a central DAI vault, which acts as the counterparty to trades on the network. $GNS is their native token - stakers currently earn a percentage of trading fees and in the future will operate the protocol through decentralized governance. The system incentivizes users to keep their funds in the GNS/DAI LP, DAI vault, and GNS staking pool through #RealYield shared with them from the platform’s revenue. The defines what the company does as delivering “innovative DeFi ecosystem of products on Polygon,” and that’s the other key element in the equation. The Ethereum layer 2 solution offers many advantages, low gas fees being one of them. However, Polygon is not perfect, and the blockchain has stopped producing blocks before. For hours. An outage like that could give a leveraged trader a heart attack. And it implies a centralizing force at the blockchain level, which is not ideal. Recently, Gains Network announced that they’ll soon be launching on Arbitrum, which has received considerable attention from decentralized trading enthusiasts. Gains Network official site What is gTrade and what can I do with it? According to , gTrade is a “decentralized leveraged trading platform” that’s “liquidity-efficient, powerful, and user-friendly.” The characteristic that sets it apart is its “synthetic architecture.” That means, the user never takes ownership of the asset or borrows funds to access, leverage and multiply potential returns. All trades are over-collateralized. None of the trades impact the asset’s overall price. Users trade straight from their own wallets and don’t go through KYC identification procedures. Gains Network According to Gains, “The protocol revolves around the ecosystem's ERC20 utility token (GNS) and ERC721 utility token (NFTs). GNS and the NFTs are designed to be actively used within the platform (utility) and to allow ownership of the protocol through revenue capture & governance (soon).” The Gains Network has sold . The NFTs “offer increasing levels of boost to the LP rewards and Single Sided Staking. 1500 NFTs in various categories Without an NFT, the APY (or the APR if compounding daily) you see displayed on the staking page will be the average APY you receive based on the previous week of rewards. With an NFT, you get a bigger share of rewards with the same capital.” In the future, the gTrade to become “the most adopted decentralized leveraged trading platform.” They plan for the organization to transition into a DAO and for $GNS to transform into a governance token. That DAO’s goal would be “to create great DeFi products that bring revenue that can be distributed in a $GNS staking pool.” So, holders will make bank if everything goes right. Gains Network wants It’s a big “if,” but, if it does, Gains plans “new products like its own casino and metaverse.” And users will be able to “create governance proposals to receive funding from the governance and create cutting-edge products.” The product’s early adopters have been greatly compensated so far, and it seems like they’re a big part of the Gains Network’s future plans. Last but not least, as mentioned above, Gains plans on deploying gTrade in Arbitrum soon. For those keeping score, that’s another Ethereum L2 solution that’s against most of its competition, with several cool DeFi projects running on it. also gaining ground $GNS, A Utility Token That Wants To Be More The $GNS is the central element in the Gains Network contraption. To present it to us, they offer . The $GNS “started initially as the $GFARM2 token on Ethereum, which was fairly distributed in an ETH pool and a GFARM2/ETH LP pool. The dev fund and the gov fund had a 5% share of the token distribution (10% total). It was later bridged to Polygon, and had a 1:1000 split to $GNS.” And they really want you to know that “over its lifetime it has been net deflationary.” a history lesson The idea behind the gTrade platform is similar to that of an algorithmic stablecoin like the ill-fated UST. In Do Kwon’s contraption, the Luna token was the $UST counterpart. The system maintained equilibrium by burning Luna to create $UST and viceversa. In the Gains Network’s leverage trading version, the system uses $GNS and $DAI. And it does a similar balancing act with the prizes for the winners and the penalties from the losers. As it: they explain “When you win, it is taken out from our DAI trading vault. When you lose it is used to buy $GNS and burn it when the trading vault is overcollateralized (over 110% full). A 100% full vault is a vault that has the full balance that users deposited. When trades are opened, the vault balance rises.” The difference is, $GNS is no longer minted when the DAI vault is undercollateralized - their system was reworked after seeing the fallout of UST. The theoretical supply cap for $GNS is 100,000,000. The number is a failsafe mechanism and should never be reached. The initial supply was 38,500,000 GNS and that number has been decreasing since the protocol’s inception. However, the issuance schedule depends exclusively on the gTrade platform’s users performance. How Does gTrade Work? As we already established, gTrade uses synthetic assets and the only liquidity is a $GNS and $DAI liquidity pool. A typical trade in the platform would go like this: 1. Open a $500 short on $ETH using 20x leverage. 2. The system consults the oracles, determines the price, and asks for the required collateral in $DAI. The oracles consult at least 7 exchanges to filter out distortion. 3. Since you’re a winner, let’s say $ETH tanked a little and you were wise enough to close the short at a 20% lower price. 4. gTrade calculates your earnings and pays you in $DAI from the vault. By using such a system, the user never buys the asset nor does the user borrow funds to create the leveraged trade. As the traders lose, and most will, the $DAI vault gets to a point in which it’s necessary to put the money to work and use the extra $DAI to buy $GNS and then burn it. In the end, the $GNS token dilutes if users win too much and deflates when traders lose. And that’s the main reason that the Gains Network gets to claim that “over its lifetime” their token “has been net deflationary.” Trading fees fund the liquidity pool rewards that keep people’s $DAI in the system. NFT bots, affiliate programs, and others also get paid from the protocol’s revenue. In fact, the system uses approximately half of the fees that the gTrade platform generates to pay for rewards of various kinds. Comparison to Luna’s Architecture The way gTrade works is similar to an algorithmic stablecoin, but the question is, does it carry the same systematic risks? In a subject, the Gains Network framed the situation in an interesting and surprising way: medium post about the Luna “It’s been a very tough week for most people in the space, between LUNA going to 0, $UST depegging, $USDT risking a depeg, and the bloodbath in the markets. But you probably already know. This has created unprecedented conditions which allowed slightly more than $1m in profit to be realized on the LUNA/USD pair on gTrade.” In the same breath, the Gains Network admits to a concerning level of centralization. The Luna situation and the downturn in the bitcoin market at the same time, created “a slight panic in the community, which could have led to a negative feedback loop if we hadn’t acted immediately.” The Gains Network’s actions were to pause “minting of the $GNS token by the DAI vault.” They also “more than tripled the APR on the DAI vault, giving everyone time to digest what happened.” That cushion time sounds good, but it screams of centralization. And the Gains Network’s reasoning behind the decision revealed an unexpected vulnerability in the system: “some of the altcoins we were offering were unprofitable to the protocol, as they weren’t liquid enough and therefore gave a significant edge to traders, which was higher than the fees generated from the volume.” Could this happen again on a larger scale? Gains Network delisted more than a few coins to prevent this in the future: “We have delisted $LUNA, $AAVE, $EOS, $YFI, $CRV, $DASH, $NEO, $THETA, $TRX, $ZRX, $XMR, $FTM, $APE, $SHIB, $BAT, $CHZ, $AXS, $COMP, $ZEC, and $ICP. Please note that they can be relisted in the future if they respect our listing requirements again. Most were delisted because the market downturn reduced their liquidity and market cap significantly.” In the same post, the Gains Network admits to further vulnerabilities, even more centralization, and to tinkering with the product: “It is also now clear that we cannot rely on minting $GNS to collateralize the vault, as it can start a potential death spiral every time.” “The solution is not to rely on $GNS, but to rely on additional $DAI, which we were already doing, but not enough due to relying on minting. This means increasing the overcollateralization ratio to at least 130% so that we can easily stomach 30% drawdowns.” “This is real collateralization because the DAI is there and we can use it. It is an insurance fund against drawdowns.” The gTrade architecture was at this time (May 2022) comparable to the Luna model, but they’ve since made changes to address those vulnerabilities (as seen above). Unfortunately, these changes weren’t made in a decentralized manner, as their DAO governance is not yet live. The overall sentiment toward gTrade’s swift action during the UST situation was positive, but for some it was a concerning indicator of centralization. Buy / No Buy Recommendation Trading derivatives with leverage is not going to go out of style. This is a product with infinite demand and the Gains Network has treated its early investors very well so far. However, the gTrade platform is at a delicate balance and comes with perpetual risk. People are willing to take the counterparty risk because they’re well incentivized, and gTrade offers an unbeatable product. Just as long as everything goes the way it’s supposed to. It’s a risky proposition, but now you know what you’re dealing with. If your risk appetite is strong and decentralized leverage appeals to you, consider using the Gains Network’s services.

Overview of the Gains Network and Its GTrade Platform: Is it the Future or is it Too Risky?

Descripción general de Gains Network y su plataforma GTrade: ¿es el futuro o es demasiado arriesgado?

Présentation du réseau Gains et de sa plateforme GTrade : est-ce l'avenir ou est-ce trop risqué ?

गेन नेटवर्क और इसके जीट्रेड प्लेटफॉर्म का अवलोकन: क्या यह भविष्य है या यह बहुत जोखिम भरा है?

Gains Network とその GTrade プラットフォームの概要: それは未来か、それともリスクが高すぎるか?

Visão geral da Gains Network e sua plataforma GTrade: é o futuro ou é muito arriscado?

Tổng quan về Gain Network và Nền tảng Gtrade của nó: Đó là Tương lai hay Quá Rủi ro?

收益网络及其 GTrade 平台概述：是未来还是风险太大？

Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA Chap. 3 - NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA I I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened to me. In the beginning—the sheets are still here on the table, grimy and dogs-eared and old-looking—I said I wanted to tell myself and the world in which I found myself, and I have done my best. But whether I have succeeded I cannot imagine. All this writing is grey now and dead and trite and unmeaning to me; some of it I know by heart. I am the last person to judge it. As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy I have given to vain things. I think of my industrious scheming with my uncle, of Crest Hill’s vast cessation, of his resonant strenuous career. Ten thousand men have envied him and wished to live as he lived. It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking. And now I build destroyers! Other people may see this country in other terms; this is how I have seen it. In some early chapter in this heap I compared all our present colour and abundance to October foliage before the frosts nip down the leaves. That I still feel was a good image. Perhaps I see wrongly. It may be I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that finds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of our time. How they will look in history I do not know, how time and chance will prove them I cannot guess; that is how they have mirrored themselves on one contemporary mind. II Concurrently with writing the last chapter of this book I have been much engaged by the affairs of a new destroyer we have completed. It has been an oddly complementary alternation of occupations. Three weeks or so ago this novel had to be put aside in order that I might give all my time day and night to the fitting and finishing of the engines. Last Thursday X 2, for so we call her, was done and I took her down the Thames and went out nearly to Texel for a trial of speed. It is curious how at times one’s impressions will all fuse and run together into a sort of unity and become continuous with things that have hitherto been utterly alien and remote. That rush down the river became mysteriously connected with this book. As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallel manner to be passing all England in review. I saw it then as I had wanted my readers to see it. The thought came to me slowly as I picked my way through the Pool; it stood out clear as I went dreaming into the night out upon the wide North Sea. It wasn’t so much thinking at the time as a sort of photographic thought that came and grew clear. X2 went ripping through the dirty oily water as scissors rip through canvas, and the front of my mind was all intent with getting her through under the bridges and in and out among the steam-boats and barges and rowing-boats and piers. I lived with my hands and eyes hard ahead. I thought nothing then of any appearances but obstacles, but for all that the back of my mind took the photographic memory of it complete and vivid.... “This,” it came to me, “is England. That is what I wanted to give in my book. This!” We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out of our yard above Hammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment, and headed down stream. We came at an easy rush down Craven Reach, past Fulham and Hurlingham, past the long stretches of muddy meadow And muddy suburb to Battersea and Chelsea, round the cape of tidy frontage that is Grosvenor Road and under Vauxhall Bridge, and Westminster opened before us. We cleared a string of coal barges and there on the left in the October sunshine stood the Parliament houses, and the flag was flying and Parliament was sitting. I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind as the centre of the whole broad panoramic effect of that afternoon. The stiff square lace of Victorian Gothic with its Dutch clock of a tower came upon me suddenly and stared and whirled past in a slow half pirouette and became still, I know, behind me as if watching me recede. “Aren’t you going to respect me, then?” it seemed to say. Not I! There in that great pile of Victorian architecture the landlords and the lawyers, the bishops, the railway men and the magnates of commerce go to and fro—in their incurable tradition of commercialised Bladesovery, of meretricious gentry and nobility sold for riches. I have been near enough to know. The Irish and the Labour-men run about among their feet, making a fuss, effecting little, they’ve got no better plans that I can see. Respect it indeed! There’s a certain paraphernalia of dignity, but whom does it deceive? The King comes down in a gilt coach to open the show and wears long robes and a crown; and there’s a display of stout and slender legs in white stockings and stout and slender legs in black stockings and artful old gentlemen in ermine. I was reminded of one congested afternoon I had spent with my aunt amidst a cluster of agitated women’s hats in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords and how I saw the King going to open Parliament, and the Duke of Devonshire looking like a gorgeous pedlar and terribly bored with the cap of maintenance on a tray before him hung by slings from his shoulder. A wonderful spectacle! It is quaint, no doubt, this England—it is even dignified in places—and full of mellow associations. That does not alter the quality of the realities these robes conceal. The realities are greedy trade, base profit—seeking, bold advertisement; and kingship and chivalry, spite of this wearing of treasured robes, are as dead among it all as that crusader my uncle championed against the nettles outside the Duffield church. I have thought much of that bright afternoon’s panorama. To run down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end. One begins in Craven Reach and it is as if one were in the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and Hampton Court with their memories of Kings and Cardinals, and one runs at first between Fulham’s episcopal garden parties and Hurlingham’s playground for the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is English. There is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities of the home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop over, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches of mean homes right and left and then the dingy industrialism of the south side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses, artistic, literary, administrative people’s residences, that stretches from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums. What a long slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses crowding closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, the architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come out into the second movement of the piece with Lambeth’s old palace under your quarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridge is ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a moment the round-faced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and New Scotland Yard squares at you, a fat beef-eater of a policeman disguised miraculously as a Bastille. For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing Cross railway station, heart of the world, and the Embankment on the north side with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorian architecture, and mud and great warehouses and factories, chimneys, shot towers, advertisements on the south. The northward skyline grows more intricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for Wren. Somerset House is as picturesque as the civil war, one is reminded again of the original England, one feels in the fretted sky the quality of Restoration Lace. And then comes Astor’s strong box and the lawyers’ Inns. (I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged along the Embankment westward, weighing my uncle’s offer of three hundred pounds a year....) Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 bored her nose under the foam regardless of it all like a black hound going through reeds—on what trail even I who made her cannot tell. And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded of the sea. Blackfriars one takes—just under these two bridges and just between them is the finest bridge moment in the world—and behold, soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over a jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogether remote, Saint Paul’s! “Of course!” one says, “Saint Paul’s!” It is the very figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved, detached, a more dignified and chastened Saint Peter’s, colder, greyer, but still ornate; it has never been over thrown, never disavowed, only the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have forgotten it, every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the barges, go heedlessly by regardless of it, intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut blackly into its thin mysteries, and presently, when in a moment the traffic permits you and you look round for it, it has dissolved like a cloud into the grey blues of the London sky. And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you altogether. The third movement begins, the last great movement in the London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is altogether dwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and the great warehouses tower up about you, waving stupendous cranes, the gulls circle and scream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters, and one is in the port of the world. Again and again in this book I have written of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration and stupendous accidents of hypertrophy. For the last time I must strike that note as the memory of the dear neat little sunlit ancient Tower of London lying away in a gap among the warehouses comes back to me, that little accumulation of buildings so provincially pleasant and dignified, overshadowed by the vulgarest, most typical exploit of modern England, the sham Gothic casings to the ironwork of the Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance and confirmation of Westminster’s dull pinnacles and tower. That sham Gothic bridge; in the very gates of our mother of change, the Sea! But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the third part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and precedence; it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening reaches through a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world, a monstrous confusion of lighters, witches’ conferences of brown-sailed barges, wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars, and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of dock open right and left of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it all are church towers, little patches of indescribably old-fashioned and worn-out houses, riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of townships that were long since torn to fragments and submerged in these new growths. And amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensive desire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one feels that the pressure of commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, and first this man made a wharf and that erected a crane, and then this company set to work and then that, and so they jostled together to make this unassimilable enormity of traffic. Through it we dodged and drove eager for the high seas. I remember how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name of a London County Council steamboat that ran across me. Caxton it was called, and another was Pepys, and another was Shakespeare. They seemed so wildly out of place, splashing about in that confusion. One wanted to take them out and wipe them and put them back in some English gentleman’s library. Everything was alive about them, flash ing, splashing, and passing, ships moving, tugs panting, hawsers taut, barges going down with men toiling at the sweeps, the water all a-swirl with the wash of shipping, scaling into millions of little wavelets, curling and frothing under the whip of the unceasing wind. Past it all we drove. And at Greenwich to the south, you know, there stands a fine stone frontage where all the victories are recorded in a Painted Hall, and beside it is the “Ship” where once upon a time those gentlemen of Westminster used to have an annual dinner—before the port of London got too much for them altogether. The old façade of the Hospital was just warming to the sunset as we went by, and after that, right and left, the river opened, the sense of the sea increased and prevailed, reach after reach from Northfleet to the Nore. And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the eastern sea. You speed up and tear the oily water louder and faster, siroo, siroo-swish-siroo, and the hills of Kent—over which I once fled from the Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp—fall away on the right hand and Essex on the left. They fall away and vanish into blue haze, and the tall slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowing sturdy tugs, are all wrought of wet gold as one goes frothing by. They stand out, bound on strange missions of life and death, to the killing of men in unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and the phantom flash of unseen lights, and presently even these are gone, and I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space. We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass—pass. The river passes—London passes, England passes... III This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clear in my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely personal aspects of my story. It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and sorrows. But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion something drives, something that is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out of it.... How can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and so immaterial. It is something that calls upon such men as I with an irresistible appeal. I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my destroyer, stark and swift, irrelevant to most human interests. Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort ont of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and nations, epochs and civilisation pass each making its contribution I do not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme. It is, a something, a quality, an element, one may find now in colours, now in norms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It emerges from life with each year one lives and feels, and generation by generation and age by age, but the how and why of it are all beyond the compass of my mind.... Yet the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove, lonely above the rush and murmur of my engines, out upon the weltering circle of the sea. Far out to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron of warships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept them hull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the watery edge of the globe.... I fell into thought that was nearly formless, into doubts and dreams that have no words, and it seemed good to me to drive ahead and on and or through the windy starlight, over the long black waves. IV It was morning and day before I returned with the four sick and starving journalists who had got permission to come with me, up the shining river, and past the old grey Tower.... I recall the back views of those journalists very distinctly, going with a certain damp weariness of movement, along a side street away from the river. They were good men and bore me no malice, and they served me up to the public in turgid degenerate Kiplingese, as a modest button on the complacent stomach of the Empire. Though as a matter of fact, X2 isn’t intended for the empire, or indeed for the hands of any European power. We offered it to our own people first, but they would have nothing to do with me, and I have long since ceased to trouble much about such questions. I have come to see myself from the outside, my country from the outside—without illusions. We make and pass. We are all things that make and pass striving upon a hidden mission, out to the open sea. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (1996). Tono-Bungay. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/718/718-h/718-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org, located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA

It could be the end of Bitcoin. By Tokenomics Engineer Eloisa Marchesoni, There has been a lot of buzz lately about an imminent nuclear threat from Russia; the fact is that, according to various sources, Moscow is subtly moving toward Europe. Be it a nuclear train, nuclear submarine, or the four “Topol” intercontinental mobile missile launchers - not to mention the nuclear power plant that has been on the brink of exploding for months - there is clearly a cause for concern. In times like this, the health of our bitcoins is the probably last thing we would consider worrying about; however, I know many can’t help but ask, “if the Internet blows up tomorrow, what will become of my crypto?” - and that is a fair and legitimate question. Connect the Dots The Internet backbone consists of many networks owned by a myriad of companies. Optical fiber trunk lines consist of many fiber cables bundled to increase capacity, or bandwidth. Fiber-optic communication remains the medium of choice for several reasons. The real-time routing protocols and redundancy built into the backbone are also able to reroute traffic in case of a failure. These backbones are interconnected at various Internet Exchange Points (IXP) around the world. The resilience of the network comes from the redundancy of these nodes: they form an Optical Mesh Network. With mesh networking, the distance between two nodes does not matter as long as there are enough nodes in between to pass the message along. When one node wants to communicate with another, the network automatically calculates the best path. If a node can no longer operate, for example because it has been removed from the network or because a barrier blocks its ability to communicate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, either directly or through intermediate nodes. 51% Bad Guys The blockchain is resilient by definition, utilizing peer-to-peer networks and distributed systems which include registers to store transactions. Its structure is designed as a digital log file and stored as a series of linked groups, called blocks. Each individual block is cryptographically locked with the previous block. Once a block has been added it cannot be altered, unless a simple majority of 51% of the blockchain participants agree to do so. Here is where the main consensus mechanisms come into play and where we define the majority – Proof of Work, which is based on computing power, and Proof of Stake, which is based on assets. In the transactions field, a brings huge risks to the continuity of the blockchain system a potential security hazard. 51% Attack Fortunately, if for any reason a supervillain were to commit to destroying Bitcoin, they would be required to possess half of the current computational capacity. So let’s entertain this possibility, and hypothetically the following legitimate instances: In theory, the attacker could: Prevent anyone from mining valid blocks Reverse blockchain transactions Potentially double-spend transactions previously seen in the chain Prevent other transactions from succeeding The attacker, though, could not: Handle non-possessed assets Prevent or reverse transactions (they’ll show as 0/unconfirmed at least) Create assets out of thin air Last but not least, changing historical blocks (namely, finalized transactions before the attack), would be exceedingly difficult even by controlling the blockchain. Older transactions are exponentially unchangeable, and impossible to modify before a checkpoint, where they become permanent. The Anecdote: A Georgian Lady For years mining unused copper cables for scrap has been an everyday money-making practice in the former Soviet Union, similar to the countless people stateside collecting bags of plastic and recyclables from street waste bins. At one point a group of entrepreneurs took it upon themselves to drive tractors through an abandoned nuclear test field in Kazakhstan ripping up hundreds of meters of cables. In 2011, an elderly woman scavenging near Tbilisi damaged a fiber optic cable in search of copper to sell as scrap. Georgia in those days provided 90 percent of the connectivity to Armenia, and the disruption was so severe that it also affected Azerbaijan, totaling 4 million people offline for 12 hours, which, all in all, given the damage and lack of redundancy, was not too bad. After all these years, the Internet network is more resilient due to the increased node redundancy, because something done by accident could be far worse, if done on purpose. Net Split What we mentioned earlier is a concrete and striking example of , that is, the force majeure disconnection of one or more nodes in the Internet backbone. If the disconnected portion is extensive, it might be possible to maintain the connection within the area, which would remain disconnected from the rest of the world. Net Split If such a Net Split would happen nowadays, Armenian citizens could continue to send and receive Bitcoins, unaware of being in an exclusively Caucasian network. Should the Armenian blockchain be brought back online again and able to connect with the rest of the world, the transactions in the blocks that rollback would likely be added to the mempool (in the memory list of unconfirmed transactions). If the same amount has been spent on both forks of the blockchain (Double Spending), the transaction on the “losing fork” will be lost, since the network will reject it for trying to spend an already spent output. Furthermore, if anyone would travel from one Split-Country to another, he would inevitably join the other fork. In the case of a perpetual, irrecoverable split, we would be effectively dealing with two different currencies. To avoid chaos, it would be better for one of the forks to adopt a different software client. 51% POW & POS Attacks The current combined hashrate of the entire Bitcoin compartment is traveling at 235 EptaHash/s. In total, this means that it would take a minimum of $10 trillion in hardware to get to 120 EH/s and launch a 51% attack, without considering the huge costs of power, maintenance, staffing, and cooling. A similar remark should be made for Ethereum, which has recently moved from POW to POS. Whereas the previous 500 TeraHash/s and roughly $5 trillion in hardware would be enough to launch such an attack, with POS it would require $9 trillion stacked, with the ongoing risk for the attacker to see the rules rewritten, as in the case of Ethereum's hard fork that led to the creation of its "Classic" counterpart in 2015, where The $60 million that had been exploited was mounded up. It might seem that in the current state of affairs, it is impossible to launch 51% attacks, but is that really the case? What would happen in the wake of an extreme collapse of the network’s hashrate? “I will attack Oceania with five tanks” Any good Risk player knows that once Oceania is taken, winning the game becomes a piece of cake because it consists of 4 states that are well defensible as they are accessible only from Siam. But scarcity of connections is not a good thing in all fields. What if, for some reason, a bad guy decided to disconnect the whole of Oceania. Upon examination of the submarine Cable Map, it turns out that it would only take out 5 IXPs to blow up the Internet in at least Australia, New Zealand, all the surrounding archipelagos, and most of New Guinea. We can speculate on the blockchain-level repercussions thanks to an old post of Satoshi Nakamoto: “If the network is segmented and then recombines, any transactions in the shorter fork that were not also in the longer fork are released into the transaction pool again and are eligible to get into future blocks. Their number of confirmations would start over. If anyone took advantage of the segmentation to double-spend, such that there are different spends of the same money on each side, then the double-spends in the shorter fork lose out and go to 0/unconfirmed and stay that way. It wouldn’t be easy to take advantage of the segmentation to double-spend. If it’s impossible to communicate from one side to the other, how are you going to put a spend on each side? If there is a way, then probably someone else is also using it to flow the blockchain over.” Exploiting a Net Split The Oceania case, applied to the Bitcoin network, is not so worrisome given and considering the low hashrate on that continent; if indeed the two networks were disconnected for a certain amount of time, the one with the chain having done the most work would prevail. Things would not go so smoothly, however, if there were a blackout in North America (45% global hashrate). Russia, Kazakhstan and China (38%) could easily enact a 51% attack on the rest of the world, and even if the U.S. and Canada came out of isolation, the North American fork would still be the loser, causing immeasurable damage to the economies of these countries. Mix’n’Match A temporary blackout could be the lesser of evils, however, because if the «Oceania» scenario were to occur, there would be nothing to stop the Asian trio from Double Spending on both branches of the blockchain with the complacency of agents based in North America: all they would need to do is get their act together first. Rogue miner attempts to overcome the split could be blocked by implementing Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, keeping them from reacquiring control of the chain. If the hashrates of the two split networks were nearly equivalent, someone could alter the balance without too much effort through Reverse Bribery Attacks. It could be possible to rent some of the computational power of the opposing side, to shut it down and gain 51 percent control by subtraction. The possibilities for an attack at this juncture are plentiful: an extended Net Split would involve the simultaneous presence of the same digital identity on two different networks. This event could allow malicious attackers to take possession of the orphaned ones, having the legitimate owners helpless on the other chain. Russia nukes Ukraine Scenario Certainly, Putin was not very happy on his birthday to see his favorite bridge knocked down by Zelensky: he could easily respond, perhaps with a small tactical nuclear bomb on Snake Island.
Of course, the U.S. would respond, while China would try to take over Taiwan. In the best case scenario (i.e., that after a few nukes everyone would stop), we could find ourselves in a similar scenario to the one described above, with a Western and an Eastern Internet disconnected from each other and an Oceania loyal to the U.S. but probably isolated from the rest of the world by 5 well-placed blows. As we have seen, all the assets on the various blockchains could be double-spent on both forks by those capable of doing so, but it would still be a loss-making move, as a more than 50 percent collapse in the value of both branches is to be expected. Blockchained Disarmament Instead of being one of the first victims of a nuclear holocaust, blockchain could be one of the main deterrents. The verification of the decommissioning of a nuclear warhead implies an enormous amount of data. The inspectors must record status and locations of the warheads, details of the inspections and facilities. To maximize trust in the process, these data must be stored in a reliable and persistent way. Among other things, a Nuclear Blockchain could: Create an immutable, encrypted ledger for objects subject to treaty control. Serve as a cryptographic repository for national declarations, allowing parties to disclose sensitive data in a gradual manner Function as an international trust-building measure, allowing any third party to verify disarmament data without seeing it. Deliver a safe layer for a private IoT composed of location sensors and environmental monitors, enabling real-time tracking of remote sites and automatic alerts to participants in the event of violations. Space Nodities Satoshi Nakamoto reminded us earlier that a single globally visible node would guarantee “the unforkability” of a blockchain, so why not actually implement it? There are already 2300 Starlinks in orbit, securing the resilience of the Internet, and it wouldn’t take much effort to make them Bitcoin nodes, perhaps even loading each one with 32 Ethereum in POS. They could still become military targets, but would it be worth taking them all down, risking a scenario like the one in the beginning of the Gravity movie? About Eloisa Marchesoni is a Tokenomics Engineer focusing on token model architecture, token macro-/micro-economics structure, crypto market simulations and gamification strategies for Web3 businesses. She is currently a partner to VCs and accelerators, while also working as an advisor to self-funded crypto startups, which she has been doing since 2016. Eloisa

If the Internet Blows up Tomorrow, What Will Become of my Crypto?

Si Internet explota mañana, ¿qué será de mi criptografía?

Si Internet explose demain, qu'adviendra-t-il de ma crypto ?

अगर कल इंटरनेट बंद हो जाता है, तो मेरी क्रिप्टोकरंसी का क्या होगा?

明日インターネットが爆発したら、私の仮想通貨はどうなる？

Se a Internet explodir amanhã, o que será da minha criptomoeda?

Nếu Internet bùng nổ vào ngày mai, điều gì sẽ trở thành tiền điện tử của tôi?

如果明天互联网爆炸，我的加密货币会变成什么？

MR. BRITLING CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION

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