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“Today, two years after Uniswap’s humble beginnings, the dawn of the global decentralized finance renaissance is upon us. The world is waking up to the power and value of reallocating trust from people into programs. Bitcoin, with its fixed 21M BTC supply cap and issuance schedule, has memed its way into becoming a store-of-value asset so well that Tesla bought $1.5B of BTC last week, and even some central banks are accumulating. Ethereum, as a credibly neutral world computer, has become the birthplace of DeFi with $40B+ deposited into open source financial programs uploaded by teams of developers all over the world. Uniswap v2 has $4B+ in total liquidity, had $1B+ in trading volume yesterday, and it was uploaded only 9 months ago. MakerDAO’s Multi-Collateral DAI (MCD), a program offering borrowers no-hassle credit against their crypto assets, has $6B+ worth of crypto asset collateral backing 2B+ DAI, their $1 pegged stablecoin. The central banks are following DeFi closely — last week the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis released a thorough research paper on DeFi, and they mentioned DAI 31 times.
The skeptics and critics were wrong. The Ethereum nerds were right. DeFi is the future of finance.
Despite the feverish imagineering of Ethereum developers, there is still one important program that we have yet to upload, a program that has existed only in the imaginations of economists and central bankers, a program that until now was so infeasible it was hardly worth contemplating building: An independent stable global reserve asset and unit of account.
There are obviously risks to using bank coins like USDC and USDT which can freeze your assets or become insolvent, but even crypto-collateralized coins like DAI, by virtue of their $1 peg, subject the holder to the inflationary policies of the US Federal Reserve. To make matters worse, the recently proposed STABLE Act seeks to regulate all $1 pegged stablecoin issuers as banks, forcing them to obtain banking licenses and hold reserves with the Fed or else potentially be charged with counterfeiting.
Today it is our great privilege to announce the launch of RAI — our fork of MakerDAO’s Multi-Collateral DAI — on the Ethereum mainnet. RAI is an asset backed only by ETH, governance-minimized, and programmed to maintain its own price stability without needing to peg to an external price reference like the USD. We believe these qualities make RAI ideal initially as an alternative to pegged-coins for use in DeFi as collateral and as a stable reserve asset, especially for programs where resilience is critical. With enough time and support from the Ethereum community, RAI could also become the Ethereum Standard — a native unit of account for the Ethereum ecosystem.
Our aspirations for RAI, however, are more profound — if RAI fulfills its purpose within DeFi and starts to earn global adoption, it could prove to be a viable solution to the Triffin Dilemma, and bring credible neutrality to the administration of a stable global reserve asset, a global public good.”
See Also: Many pieces of the Diem puzzle still missing as launch gets delayed
“The first decentralized asset management protocol where funds are owned and led by the community. Web 2.0 allowed anyone to become a creator, a YouTuber, a blogger, or a podcaster. Web 3.0 is going to turn the world into investors. Everyone can own a stake in the products they believe in, sharing the upside.
The incident between Wall Street Bets and Robinhood has again brought mainstream awareness to the inherent risks of centralized platforms. If you are not paying to use a proprietary platform, you are the product. Asset Management has to be trustless, permissionless, and community-owned. Wall Street Bets, Seeking Alpha, and Real Vision show the power of investing as a tribe. Members of these communities want to collaborate on a shared vision of the world and are willing to put their money on it.
In a group or community:
1. Participants are incentivized to find and share the best investment opportunities.
2. Other participants in the same group can endorse or downvote these ideas to ensure that only the best ideas rise to the top.
3. The best ideas will activate the pooled capital. The rewards for good ideas will be shared between the ideators, curators, and investors.
No single person can keep up with the pace in NFTs, Yield Farming, and liquidity pools all at once. An informed community on a permissionless platform is best positioned to tackle this problem. Within Babylon.finance, investors can find both the opportunities and communities that match their time, risk and liquidity preferences.”
See Also: InstaDapp: Introducing DeFi Smart Layer
“This is a hardware wallet for DeFi superusers. A step beyond a Ledger.
Traditional hardware wallets give today’s Ethereum users a false sense of security. They were designed for simple Bitcoin transfers where the only thing you needed to verify on your secure device was the recipient address. But it’s 2021 and Ethereum gives us countless ways to interact with public blockchains every day.
This includes stuff like interacting with financial services, automatically paying bills, managing accounts with different characteristics meant for either savings or daily use, and even withdrawing crypto off-chain to privately pass around like cash.
The GridPlus Lattice1 is the first hardware wallet designed for actively using crypto and signing complex messages. It’s in its early stages, but this flexible device is designed to grow alongside the rapidly evolving Ethereum ecosystem.
The most unique and exciting feature we’re delivering for the Lattice1 this year is Phonon Network—an open-source standard for hardware-enforced off-chain transactions. Phonon uses your secure hardware to turn your digital assets into real-world cash—exchange privately, instantly, and without cost until you settle back on-chain.
Phonon is a powerful tool for user privacy allowing you to place all of your Ethereum based assets into a new address without having to use a centralized exchange or TornadoCash to protect yourself.”
“Mark Cuban is on the train. Chamath is building a sizable portfolio. NFTs platforms having $50m dollar months. The NFT economy is heating up like never before. People are waking up to the potential of these assets. As a result, any savvy crypto investor should consider how they can capitalize on the current boom.
There’s plenty of ways to get exposure. You can invest directly in NFTs, acquire NFT-centric ERC-20s or NFT index funds, or even lend crypto out to borrowers who want to use NFTs as collateral.”
“Digital real estate has become a legitimate asset class, one worthy of investor consideration and one I believe is likely to appreciate exponentially over the near term.
Not only is digital real estate capable of delivering outsized returns due to its alignment with the rapidly growing crypto-investment universe, but it also appears likely to become a viable store of wealth, almost like real-world art and real-world real estate.
Investing in digital real estate captures all the positive aspects of derivative trades (asymmetric reward-risk) without the bad (recourse margin/debt), and is also an uncorrelated asset class that offsets market volatility. It is also insulated from the COVID-induced volatility of the real-world real estate industry.”
“Hong Kong-listed Meitu Inc., which makes image and video processing software, said it had purchased $22 million in ether (ETH) and $17.9 million of bitcoin (BTC), making it the first time a firm has disclosed a major purchase of ETH for its treasury.
The Board considers this a demonstration to investors and stakeholders that the Group has the vision and determination to embrace technological evolution.
The company said it’s evaluating the feasibility of integrating blockchain tech into its overseas business, including launching Ethereum-based dApps.”
“On Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called attention to a tokenized version of his first tweet. As of Saturday morning, the high bid was $2 million, made by Justin Sun, the founder of TRON.
Valuables is an Ethereum-based platform created by the social network Cent that allows users of Twitter to authenticate their tweets for sale to others. The tokenized tweets are only sold when the author of the tweet accepts a bid.
This is Dorsey’s first time showing interest in Ethereum.”
“After much speculation about whether India will introduce a blanket ban on crypto, the government has finally dropped a major hint that it will not do so. Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s Finance Minister, said yesterday on India’s business channel, CNBC-TV18, that the government’s position on crypto will be “calibrated” and it wants to make sure there’s “a window available for all types of experiments in the crypto world.”
[India’s Central Bank] will be taking a call on what kind of unofficial cryptocurrency will have to be planned and how it has to be regulated.
The Indian crypto industry sees this as the clearest sign yet that the government will not go ahead with a blanket ban on cryptocurrencies as previously feared.”
“Emerging economies are looking to transition to solar as it offers a green and cheap alternative to conventional energy sources. SustVest enables this transition in emerging economies by crowdfunding rooftop solar projects in emerging economies on its platform. We tokenize solar projects granular to the level of individual solar cells, and investors purchasing these tokens can earn dividends generated by the sale of electricity from these individual solar cells.
The Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, along with the Saudi Central Bank, is developing a state-backed bilateral central bank digital currency, “Aber.” Aber is initially set to help the UAE and Saudi Arabia make more cost-effective bank-to-bank, cross-border payments. Eventually, Aber will be used globally on China’s blockchain-based service network, or BSN, which will support future CBDCs from various countries such as the UAE.”
The Disrupt 