Token Daily Capital Newsletter # 6

TWEET OF THE DAY

"Global Coin Research is delighted to announce our new book: 'The Small Handbook to Asia Crypto: on Local Ecosystems, Trends and Regulations'!" 

- Joyce Yang put together a data-rich, 89-slide deck covering Asia's crypto scene over here.

   
IN BITCOIN
 ⚡️ Bitcoin's next technical leap Will likely either be soft-forked in or will be a Bitcoin upgrade that imports the UTXO set according to Adam Back. 
 

⚡️ Lndmon 
You can now export and visualize metrics from your lnd node thanks to Bitcoin/Lightning developer Valentine Wallace. Lndmon is a drop-in monitoring solution for your lnd node. The tool also allows routing node operators to monitor the activity of their channels, relative fee levels in the network, and more. 

Who knows, once Lightning channels are uncapped and users can lock in more BTC, there might be a small window of time where you can turn a decent profit by detecting poorly routed (high-fee) channels and offering a slightly cheaper alternative. 

      
IN ETHEREUM
 🔹 Metamask Delivers its Mobile App Beta
Nine months after their announcement at Devcon4, Metamask has released its beta mobile app. The app includes an experimental InstaPay feature that enables L2 zero-fee payments using Connext state channels. 

🔹 EIP-2025 Controversy As Ethereum developers start to review the different proposals to improve the Ethereum protocol (EIPs) for the upcoming Istanbul hard fork, one proposal, EIP-2025, has sparked a lot of debate. EIP2025 suggests creating a 1000 ETH dev fund by assigning part of the block reward, 0.005 ETH per block, to a specific multisig address. This has been met with backlash from prominent Ethereum folks like Eric Conner and Ameen Solimani.

🔹 Approved Scalability Proposal EIP-2028 EIP-2028 was approved for the Istanbul hard fork.  The proposal reduces the gas cost for transmitting data on Ethereum from 68 gas/byte to 16 gas/byte which is expected to deliver significant scalability improvement to a number of L2 solutions.

🔹 Privacy on Ethereum
There seems to be a new wave of privacy features and tools coming to Ethereum. In addition to the Heiswap Ethereum mixer that launched on testnet a couple of weeks ago, a new mixer called Tornado.Cash was just announced. The new mixer uses zk-SNARKs to anonymize the mixer operation.  

Privacy Coins 
 🔹 The Z/Y-Cash friendly split The Zcash community witnessed a friendly network split to create a new currency called Ycash. The goal is to show early opposition to extending Zcash founder reward beyond 10% of the total Zcash supply. The network split occured on July 18th, with the Ycash network implementing replay-protection to prevent accidental reply of Zcash transactions on Ycash or vice versa.  

The split-off YEC coin started trading on a small number of exchanges and is currently below $4 (compared to ~$70 ZEC price). 

🔹 Grin's First Hardfork The MimbleWimble-based coin performed the first of its four scheduled hard forks on July 17th. The hard fork main goal was to update its GPU-friendly mining algorithm (AR29) to prevent ASIC manufacturers from designing chips targeting the algo. So far, Grin's dual-algo mining strategy has been working according to plan. The strategy aims to slowly increase the share of the ASIC-friendly mining algo (AT31) until it constitutes 100% of the network after 2 years. 

Read of the Day
📚 A Mega-thread on Blockchain Analysis Tools As the use-cases of cryptocurrencies grow, the generated data grows as well and at a much faster rate. An increasing number of tools is available to help analyze that data to obtain meaningful insights. Anthony Sassano curated a list of tools that serve Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and general crypto. 

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY
 Can DAOs be more agile than traditional firms? 

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) offer an innovative organizational structure whereby structure, governance, and operations are hardcoded into a smart contract. A DAO is governed by its shareholders that abide by a set of rules, and there isn’t a central authority that controls the organization.

DAOs decrease coordination costs and circumvent most bottlenecks that exist in hierarchical organizations today. For example, most decision-making processes/ideas are controlled by key managers within a traditional organization. But innovative ideas and decisions also come from lower-ranking employees, though they often don't make it far.

DAOs could enable decisions to be crowdsourced instead so organizations can respond quickly to threats and attacks. Take for example Ameen Solemani's case when he created MolochDAO. His core focus was to respond to areas where Ethereum needs the most development so that it can deliver Ethereum 2.0 before the upcoming smart contract wars. In his report, he brought up the notion that there isn’t a coordinated and efficient way to respond to grants and proposals. On the Epicenter podcast, he also mentioned that the proposal submission process for the Ethereum foundation is an arduous and time-consuming process. If fast execution is needed to deliver Ethereum 2.0, then a new funding process should respond to those needs.

Enter MolochDAO

MolochDAO is a grant-coordinating decentralized system that allocates and funds areas of development for Ethereum. It was developed to coordinate decision-making processes so that funds could be allocated quickly in areas of need. In order to join MolochDAO, you need to be invited by an existing DAO member. The members will then review your background, reputation, and other metrics to see if the potential member could be resourceful for the overall group. Once voted-in you contribute capital which gives a number of shares in the DAO. The shares enable all members the ability to propose, vote for proposals or leave the DAO by self-destructing its shares. Once a funding proposal is accepted, it receives shares in the DAO that can be immediately converted into ETH. Essentially, MolochDAO collapses an organization into a singular decision-making process while incentivizing its members to enter and leave efficiently. 

Could MolochDAO enable Ethereum to move faster?

MolochDAO could enable Ethereum to move faster by coordinating decisions, bringing unique participants and adding a fixed-time function. Currently, developers have a few ways to apply and receive grants, such as Gitcoin and the Ethereum Foundation. However, both organizations have unique organizational structures and motives that can detract time and focus. For example, members in the MolochDAO can add and vote in proposals within a 14-day time frame. This gives the entire member base a chance to express feedback while executing on a fixed time. Since the launch of MolochDAO in April, there have been roughly 76 proposals submitted. Out of the 76 proposals, 6 proposals were awarded a total of 249 shares to work on Ethereum 2.0. MolochDAO currently has 65 members and a diversified member base that consists of leaders, organizations, funds, and developers.  Each member has a unique outlook on how Ethereum 2.0 should be designed and implemented. MolochDAO plans to coordinate those unique outlooks while getting consensus and funding developers quickly. 

Sign up for Token Daily Newsletter to learn more.