Recommended read.
“Peter Thiel is always on the lookout for billion-dollar ideas hiding in plain sight. Well, DeFi is a trillion-dollar idea hiding in plain sight. Maybe even a few hundred trillion depending on how you want to measure it.
DeFi (Decentralized Financial Services on Ethereum) is a programmable fintech platform. Ethereum’s smart contracting capabilities and token standards combine to enable an incredibly powerful (and open) set of developer tools for building new financial technologies.
Every assumption about fintech today assumes SWIFT’s continuing role as the dominant global financial router. Visa sits in the middle of a powerful multi-sided network among banks, merchants, and consumers.
Once a job is done — and credit cards do their jobs very well — it takes a 10x improvement to get users to switch, and, in a three-sided network, that 10x is 10^3.
In the DeFi economy, Ethereum addresses replace both SWIFT codes and bank accounts. The DeFi stack re-routes the value that traditionally accrued to the Visa network and banks back to the merchants and consumers. The best part? Merchants and consumers get better banking and financial services. Banks become unnecessary middlemen.
That’s just the sort of 1,000x improvement that can break even seemingly well-entrenched network effects.
With infrastructure adoption beginning now but direct user adoption not yet here, it’s clear that the DeFi platform is still in its gestation phase on the Perez Curve. And you don’t need to be on the Midas List to figure out what comes next.
So when will the institutional capital show up in DeFi? Could it be as simple as institutional capital returns to the industry when the retail price of ETH rises again? Many crypto VCs think so.”
“There are many DeFi projects that are flourishing this year. Lets take a look at the 7 DeFi projects that have grown the most in these first months of 2020, and are performing better this year.”
“It’s an open question whether the blockchain platform and its enthusiastic community can take the wider world into the next era: the decentralized equivalent of the industrial revolution.
By most measures, the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing an impressive growth spurt.
According to analysis by Glassnode, the majority of ether transactions are now used to pay for a variety of smart contact commands rather than simple monetary exchanges between so-called externally owned accounts. That, along with a reduction in large-scale “whale” ether accounts, suggests transactions on Ethereum are now more connected to utility than to speculative activity.
Despite all this progress, the Ethereum economy is still just a tiny dot within the $88 trillion global economy. If it is to change the world, scalability and adoption need to happen. If the Ethereum community is to achieve its sweeping goal to create a decentralized economic system, it must function at scale. All hinges on Ethereum 2.0.“
See Also: Eth2 Development Update – Onyx Testnet
“On June 15, Compound users began earning the application’s new governance token, COMP, for all cryptocurrency lent to others on the app and also for all borrowed. Users rushed to get the first disbursements of COMP because the liquid supply on the market is so limited.
This drove many users to supply Compound with considerably more capital, and in most cases, for those users to turn around and borrow against that capital, so they could earn COMP both for borrowing and lending.“
See Also: The COMP Rush Explained (Video)
See Also: Ivan on Tech on COMP Yield Farming (Video)
“In 1996, there were over 8,000 public companies listed on exchanges in the United States. Fast forward to 2020 and there are only approximately 4,400 — a drop of 46% despite the fact that the S&P 500 quadrupled in value.
The additional scrutiny that comes with being a public company, and byzantine U.S. equity market structure are all partially to blame. Fortunately, the pace of formation of private companies is at a record high and entrepreneurism is alive and well.
While we champion the formation of new innovative companies, the shift from public to private ownership has had the negative side effect of locking out most public investors from the rewards of ownership. With large companies going public later, private investors reap most of the financial gains by the timeshares that are available on a listed exchange.
Security token exchanges would allow blockchain technology to simplify the complexities of custody, clearing and trading. The outcome is a simple exchange listing venue with price discovery that has the potential to encourage more issuers to go public to reach new investors. In turn, investors would benefit by gaining access to previously closely held assets — a virtuous circle for capital markets.”
“Zerion has spent almost two years building an interface that can track your entire DeFi portfolio from one place and show you complete transaction history.
At the click of a button, you can export a CSV of your entire portfolio history, categorized by the kind of transaction taking place – such as lending, borrowing, or adding liquidity – and then further sorted into an accounting type for taxation purposes.”
“Today eight technology companies from seven different emergent economies will receive an investment of Ethereum cryptocurrency from the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund.
UNICEF’s crypto-enabled investment vehicle has given these companies 125 ETH, worth approximately $28,600, to use in scaling or prototyping their respective technologies over the next six months.
We are seeing the digital world come at us more quickly than we could have imagined – and UNICEF must be able to use all of the tools of this new world to help children today and tomorrow.”
See Also: Ethereum Foundation Makes Second Crypto Donation to UNICEF
The Disrupt 