Daily Coin Update - Monday, June 4th 2018

Daily Coin Update Monday, June 4th 2018 Coin Value 24h Change 24h Volume Mkt Cap (BTC) Bitcoin $7,712.71 +0.9% $5b $132b (ETH) Ethereum $619.35 +4.33% $2b $62b (BCC) BitConnect $0.7019 -2.85% $1k $7m (XMR) Monero $168.90 +1.18% $42m $3b (DASH) Dash $329.77 +1.66% $75m $3b (XRP) Ripple $0.6946 +7.96% $443m $27b (NEO) NEO $56.34 +0.41% $89m $4b Unsubscribe  |  Edit coins Missing something? Comments? Suggestions? Email me at ohad@ohadron.com coindailyupdate.com

Worse than trolls

Our weekly opinion piece and overview View this email in your browser   CoinDesk Weekly is sponsored by  June 3, 2018 Crazy train   The combination of social media's rise as a primary source of market information and the proliferation of different crypto coins has created something worse than trolls: Monetized trolls. Read more in THE TAKEAWAY below.   TOP TRENDS ON COINDESK Countdown to EOS By the time you read this, Block.One may have finally published the code for the $4 billion EOS project, nearly a year after the team began raising funds. But as of this writing, it's unclear exactly when the hotly anticipated new blockchain network will actually launch. For the curious but perplexed, CoinDesk's Brady Dale has written a handy guide to watching the historic event unfold in real time. The week leading up to the event has been a nail-biter. First, an internet security research firm said it had found "a series of epic vulnerabilities" on the EOS platform. Within two days, EOS said it had patched most of the reported bugs and that it expected the mainnet launch to stay on schedule. Another issue is governance, or more specifically how members of the community can participate in it. In EOS' "delegated proof-of-stake" model, users with wallets can vote for the 21 validators that will serve as the rough equivalent of bitcoin's miners. But the voting process is opaque – unless, perhaps, you're a coder who's not intimidated by command lines.  If successful, EOS could become a formidable competitor to ethereum, which is one reason there's so much excitement about the project. But there's still a lot that could go wrong, and CoinDesk will be monitoring the situation closely as it progresses. Check our Twitter feed for the latest updates. All this uncertainty appears to have put a damper on pricing of the placeholder EOS tokens that run on top of ethereum – they've been trading in a narrow range. As a reward for bearing with the drama, though, EOS holders can expect airdrops of various other tokens built on top of the new network. Lots of them. Whether that's the digital equivalent of free candy or junk mail is perhaps a matter of taste. See all CoinDesk stories ⭐ CoinDesk Weekly Sponsor ⭐   Your Data. Your Life In the current system, your personal data is sourced, held, used and swapped by third-party providers. The Pillar Project is an ambitious project to return ownership of personal data to you. We do this through decentralized blockchain technology, starting with a token wallet. Learn More QUOTE OF THE WEEK "It's just a circular maelstrom of money." – VC Meltem Demirors, on how crypto startups and investors end up putting money into each other, rather than attracting new capital. THE TAKEAWAY Michael J. Casey is the chairman of CoinDesk's advisory board and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT's Digital Currency Initiative. OK, Ardor fans. You have your wish. Your favorite token is getting a mention on CoinDesk.  Not, perhaps, for the reasons you want. But they do say all publicity is good publicity. So there you have it.  The response to my column last week on Layer 2 solutions was mostly positive with the usual dose of critics. But it was the Ardor tribe who caught my attention when one reader's tweet complaining that I hadn't mentioned that next-generation blockchain platform prompted others to pile on with accusations of my bias and ignorance. It got me thinking about how financial self-interest, which has always skewed people's perceptions of the media they consume, is taken to a new level when crypto tokens are involved. I do believe blockchain technology and related ideas around prediction markets and reputation will one day help us sort through the free-for-all of competing truths that the social media age has produced. But for now, I worry that all we're doing is creating a global brawl of angry people, all believing that they and only they own the truth.  This is really not about Ardor. (From what I can tell, Ardor's framework for enabling "child chains" makes an interesting contribution to the evolution of crypto technology.) What this is about is how people invested in the multiple tokens attached to competing projects that similarly claim to be making some quantum leap in blockchain capability come to passionately believe that theirs is superior to everyone else's and deserves more prominence than it's getting. In Ardor's case, it's the holders of the main platform's ARDR token as well as those invested in the child chain Ignis token. But I could just as well be talking about holders of ETH, XRP, IOTA, BCH and yes, BTC.   Fanatical, blinkered investors are nothing new, of course. It once was the case with GE's shareholders – definitely, not any more. It's always been so for investors in Warren Buffet's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, and in this past decade we've seen it with Tesla. But there are two factors that make the phenomenon more extreme in the age of cryptocurrency.  The first is the sheer volume of coins and the large retail investor base they attract.   The second is that social media is now the primary means by which market-relevant information is distributed. And social media, for better or worse, is essentially anarchy.  Combine these two and you end up with something worse than the troll armies that already cause such public angst around social media. You get monetized trolls.  The scammiest way this plays out is with bots. Bailey Reutzel's great little survey of some classic spam bot moments in "Crypto Twitter" shows how distorting the combination of crypto and social media can be. But there's also lots of human-led ugliness: anonymous trolls disrupting healthy dialogues with ad hominem attacks and coin-pumping tweets filling our news feeds.  Now I believe that, eventually, anarchic social media might evolve to point where it's far superior to the traditional media model that preceded it.  And as I mentioned, blockchain-based "proofs" and skin-in-the-game staking systems might one day help us sort through this mess.  Under the old, centrally-managed system, where news organizations filtered the important public information before it reached its intended audience, there was an inherent constraint on the amount of information available. And there was an access problem.  So, just as ICOs have shown how access to capital might be democratized, one could argue that social media has also created a potentially more democratized model of access to publishing systems. (I say "potentially" because in many respects what has happened is we've shifted power from the old news establishment to a new form of media behemoth: the follower-rich celebrity – think Donald Trump, or Justin Bieber.) However, with no viable, decentralized mechanism as yet for rewarding honesty and good behavior, or for processing information so that some kind of consensus can be formed around it, we're left with noise. Worse, there's a broken feedback loop in which metrics such as the market cap of a token or the followership of a social media account reinforce and confirm people's biases. We saw it with the XRP mob that jumped on the New York Times' Nathaniel Popper after he cited bankers saying they weren't using the token associated with Ripple. The mob was unleashed, ironically, by a former co-editor of Techcrunch and now vocal Ripple fan – Michael Arrington – who vehemently claimed that Popper must have made up his quotes. The swarm of XRP fanboys was unmoved by the logic that for a reporter at the Times to do such a thing would be professional suicide – read about Jayson Blair for background on this.  Or there's the IOTA gang that collectively pumped out an alternative narrative that my colleagues at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative who'd discovered flaws in IOTA's hashing algorithm were conflicted by business interests. Or the gang of ethereum supporters who took as gospel truth Vitalik Buterin's claim that CoinDesk is complicit in enabling crypto scams. Attacks on the press have happened for as long as it has existed. That's not a bad thing per se. Any functioning society maintains a vigorous critique of media organizations. Some form of bias is unavoidable in media coverage. It deserves to be questioned.  But news organizations are no longer the all-important filters they once were. They represent one, increasingly small sector of a vast array of sources claiming to offer relevant information. And unlike those other individual and corporate sources, news organizations – the good ones at least, those that can get beyond their owners' and their advertisers' interests and practice sound journalism – shouldn't be captured by the same heavily financial biases.  So it's disturbing that we've gone from discovering Facebook's #fakenews problem to the appropriation of that term by those who peddle the view that mainstream media is the main source of disinformation, to the even more extreme scenario in which a market for information is composed of participants with tokens whose value they want to protect.  If we're going to tokenize everything, which may or may not be a good idea, this cacophony of competing truths peddled by different self-interested mobs will likely get even worse. What happens when celebrities and companies and dictators have their own coins, with armies of rabid supporters doing their bidding in this battle for truth? Decentralized solutions to this are still a long way off. I'm not totally sure how we stop this train for now, except to make a plea formed by my own, unavoidable pro-journalism bias. I humbly ask that people in the crypto community have a little more respect for journalists who, while far from perfect, are at least trying to produce news and content that's not skewed by their or anyone else's investments. Without them, what have you got?  – Michael J. Casey Share Tweet Beyond CoinDesk...   OTHERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A hospital in Scotland has opened "a rehabilitation program for people hooked on trading digital currencies like bitcoin," MarketWatch reports. Perhaps this condition should be called moon-o-mania, or maybe Lambo fixation disorder? The New York Times has an investigative piece on Envion, a $100 million ICO project that was supposed to be "among the more legitimate outfits " but has fallen into disarray.  Reason magazine offers a guide to using bitcoin anonymously, part of the libertarian publication's "burn after reading" issue, which also includes how-tos on building a Glock, spying on your spouse and editing genes at home. Sounds like a fine way to spend Sunday afternoon.  For a more mainstream (or, perhaps, Beltway) perspective, the latest issue of the IMF's quarterly magazine Finance and Development includes think pieces on monetary policy in the age of digital assets and the frothiness of the crypto markets. WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO Missed our webinar on the state of global ICO regulation? Listen to the replay here. We're taking Consensus on the road. Join us on September 18-20 at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore for the first international Consensus event. Register here. Send feedback on this newsletter to marc@coindesk.com. Follow @CoinDeskMarkets for price updates and market analysis. And everyone interested in keeping up with this rapidly evolving field of technology should follow our main Twitter handle, @CoinDesk.    Thanks for reading! Until next week... Copyright © 2018 CoinDesk, All rights reserved. You're receiving this email because you subscribed for updates on our website. Our mailing address is: CoinDesk 636 Avenue of the Americas New York City, NY 10011 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list Received this from a friend? Subscribe here. Share Tweet

#51: The EOS Madness

📌 An opinionated recap of the most interesting news in crypto Token Economy Got forwarded this email?  Subscribe here. Subscriber?  We'd appreciate if you could forward it to someone who would find it valuable. 🙏 All issues available at tokeneconomy.co

The EOS Madness

Investors Bet $4 Billion on a Cryptocurrency Startup By the time we publish this issue, the year-long ICO for EOS tokens orchestrated by Block.one would have ended, raising in total north of $4B worth of ether. To put things in perspective, there have been only two IPOs (with a "P") that have raised more capital in 2018 so far, as the author points out. On June 2nd Block.one has also released v1.0 of the EOS.IO Software under an open-source licence. From now on it will stop operating it, retaining 10% of all EOS supply and 100% of the proceeds raised, without having yet clearly outlined uses of capital, beyond committing to a number of ecosystem funds to the tune of $1B. No lack of last minute drama either, with news of 'epic vulnerabilities' in the code spreading online this week suggesting the long awaited launch could be delayed. The Twitter EOS account denied the delay saying most bugs had already been fixed, while Dan Larimer offered $10k in bounties for finding other 'critical bugs'. Not to mention the dozens of EOS related scammy phishing emails that we all got in the last few days, and many fell for sadly. In the meanwhile, we keep scratching our heads, but perhaps we are just too old school: with the Ethereum network at a unique junction, the real Dapp platform war is probably just about to unfold and may indeed be played according to a whole new set of rules. 🍿 PS: Tezos betanet is also coming very soon. PPS: Stefano is still massively skeptical about the $4B sum, given the rolling nature of the offering and the opportunities for arbitrage, but Block.one clearly states in the EOS FAQ that they would not engage this practice, promising an independent 3rd party audit at some point.  Would be really nice for total transparency to have an official final sum from the company verified by reputable auditors. If the $4B value is true, then this was the most masterful fundraise ever created, with the daily sale auction gimmick.

🔥Thoughts

What the Heck Are Tokenised Securities? This is a contrarian post that we missed last week and that would have been a great counter to Stephen McKeon's "The Security Token Thesis" covered in our previous issue. Michael's argument is that all the beautiful things security tokens are supposed to enable or solve are already largely possible today, or there's a very good reason why they are not implemented already in traditional securities (ie feature rather than bug). Michael however admits some new types of tokenized securities uniquely enabled by decentralized protocols would indeed by interesting (eg a security NFT representing a single wine bottle or vintage). I think here the debate is starting to go round in circles because we keep calling these things 'tokens', when they are in fact just 'digital securities' and they already exist in some form.

Tokens (Don't) Rule Everything Around Me — Thoughts On Security Tokens Continuing on that line of thought, Parker also outlines his bearish views on 'security tokens', summarised neatly by this sentence: "The token itself is an abstraction that derives value not just from the asset itself, but from the institutions that assure that abstraction maps to the value we wish to "own."" So he's main point is: yes, it's technically possible, but why on earth would you use a blockchain for that? I think that's enough for security tokens this week!

Estonia Scales Down Plan to Create National Cryptocurrency Reading the title made us go "Thank god", but then reading the article made us go 🤔 Apparently Estcoin won't be a new "currency" but it will still be some kind of token that "will proceed as a means for transactions inside the e-resident community". In any case, an ICO for a national cryptocurrency is just a pure idiocy, while instead having a crypto-fiat, especially if with different value systems and different distribution than the current fiat is an idea that intrigues us a lot. I'm an e-resident of Estonia, so we'll keep you updated on what it will look like in the end.

The Eureka Moment That Made Bitcoin Possible The WSJ takes a super cool look at a paper mentioned in the Bitcoin paper. This specific paper resulted in a company, Surety, and a patent: the first blockchain patent, with the use case of time-stamping digital files - a use case much touted about today, but that has been possible to achieve since the 90's..

It's a baker's life for me A super interesting post by the Tezos founder about the baking, delegation, endorsing mechanics that will happen in when Tezos launches. It's quite a new and different model. This new gold-mining-rush that's happening is quite fascinating, and will be even more so when Ethereum launches its own staking implementation. Who would have thought just a few years ago that we'd develop an entirely new industry of digital mining.

The State of the Ethereum Network Consensys published a state of the nation on the Ethereum network and its community.  Here's some data that stood out for us: - Metamask has over 1 million users - Truffle went from 200k downloads in Oct 2017 to 550k today - 35 million unique addresses Despite all the scaling challenges and the window of opportunity potentially opening up for competing Dapp platforms, Ethereum has so far undoubtedly managed to secure a solid first mover advantage with developers mindshare.

Does AI Art Belong in the Physical, Digital, or Crypto World? There's a brand new category of digitally native, AI-driven artistic expression that is emerging, uniquely enabled by the provable digital scarcity of blockchains.  One day in a not so distant future, you'll be visiting a Decentraland art gallery featuring the hottest crypto artist of the moment, wearing your VR goggles comfortably sitting in you armchair.

Months After Raising a $100 Million ICO Kik Founder Calls Blockchain"Unconvincing" Wait, what? After raising $100M for a non-crypto token, Kik's CEO, Ted Livingston, has the audacity of saying that there are few convincing use cases of blockchain tech, and that it isn't for everyone. 😳🤯 Livingston said that the cryptocurrency game is the only way to compete with the titans of tech. "We were playing an impossible game. You know, we were trying to deliver software to consumers, and in doing that we needed to make money to sustain ourselves," Livingston said. "But we're playing against monopolies — Facebook and Google." Look, I get it. He might even be right. I just hope that if they ever deliver Kin, it will be a massively important technological advance, because after all this money and talk, that's the bar they're setting. In the meantime, there are no dates for delivery due to technical problems with Ethereum, so they're rebuilding everything with a new blockchain that's a mix between Ethereum and Stellar..

In the World of Cryptocurrency, Even Good Projects Can Go Bad Another incredible story of a scammy ICO from the New York Times (which is doing great work on the space together with the WJS). This one is about Envion, a never-heard-before-here ICO that apparently raised $100M for some mobile Bitcoin rigs (really?). We're out of words about #1 the ability of people to come up with crazy ideas the public will believe in, which I think is a real skill and #2 said public believing in them and giving them money no questions asked. Not sure it'll ever end at this point, but if it does, it won't be a happy ending.

6 principles for designing blockchain apps for non-technical users Building blockchain apps is fundamentally different from normal web and mobile apps. But our understanding of how to do it still has to evolve. A good first stab at defining some practices comes from the winners of the Consensus Hackathon. Good read if you're trying to build consumer dapps. 1. Use user personas to frame the problem around people, not blockchain 2. Make complex data entry as easy as possible 3. Abstract away the blockchain as much as possible 4. Be transparent when dealing with irreversible actions 5. Don't hold your users up while their data posts to the blockchain 6. Remove blockchain from your name and branding

Invesco report on crypto (link will download a pdf) Invesco, the large asset manager, published a long report that includes an extensive section on the crypto asset class, opportunities and risk. Including a Q&A with Chris Burniske of Placeholder. h/t Dan Van Eck

💥Newsy stuff

- On the move. Ripple has lured Ethan Beard away from Facebook, where he headed up its developer network, to run Xpring, the XRP ecosystem initiative announced earlier in May. - Lawsuits. Axiom Zen, the creators of CryptoKitty, is being sued for stealing the idea of a Stephen Curry's crypto collectible (a campaign now paused) from Tradestar, who shared it via NDA. - M&A. It looks like the BitGo / Kingdom Trust acquisition fell through and BitGo will build its own custodian service instead. - Traction (I) Brave browser has crossed +5m downloads on Google Play, only 6 months after the 1m downloads milestone. That's some serious exponential growth: 0-1m in 14 months, 1-5 in 6 months (excluding desktop and iOS). Impressive. - Traction (II) Blockchain.com hits 25M wallets. - #BUIDL. Colony are running a global, distributed hackathon in June for JavaScript developers that want to build on the Colony Network. $25K worth of DAI in prizes. Great to see Colony out in the wild more and more. - Mining wars. Z-cash Zooko had a video chat with Bitmain Jihan encouraging him to be more transparent about his operations. These are his notes. Some juicy details in there such as Bitmain's cap table, 2017 revenues and latest valuation. - Airdropping. DFINITY is planning the largest airdrop on history, working with CoinList's newly launched compliant airdrop platform on distributing away $35M worth of tokens to its community (guaranteeing at least 100 DFN each). Not to US residents though, for regulatory reasons (ie airdrops are likely to be considered securities offering!). Is this going to be the standard in a post-ICO world?

😎 Cool new projects

Announcing TokenSets Public Beta The team at Set Protocol have launched their flagship product TokenSets on mainnet. It will initially feature 3 Sets (top 10 ERC20 tokens by market cap, stable coins and dexes) that can be bundled / unbundled and traded on RadarRelay.

Cost of a 51% Attack for Different Cryptocurrencies | 51Crypto Pretty interesting little site that emerged on the back of the recent Bitcoin Gold 51% attack. It attempts to estimate the cost of performing 51% attack on a list of networks by calculating the cost of renting enough hashing power from Nicehash to match the current network hashing power for an hour (in reality the cost could be even lower thanks to block rewards an attacked who earn while performing the attack). The results look pretty scary and mind-blowing, though not always accurate by the look of it.

Tech Update: DApp gets ERC 725 Identity, Transaction Steps, Escrow, and Reviews Origin released a massive new update, with some really cool stuff, most notably the support for ERC725, the standard for identity on top of ETH. You can try it out on Rinkeby and Ropsten here.

MoneroVision The MyCrypto team released MoneroVision this week, an open-source Monero block explorer, super simple but cool.

Curated on a Product Hunt collection!

🤡 ICO madness

The May '18 draft ICO numbers are out, as always thanks to Tokendata. It looks like it was a $1B month, plus an extra billion from EOS in their final month. Apparently lots of activity coming from Korea and, as always in recent months, many of the large ones done entirely privately (e.g Orbs $118M, Flashmony $72M and Videocoin $50M).

Headphones Maker Monster Is Quietly Planning A $300 Million ICO Just dropping a couple of excerpts from the SEC filing to give a flavour: "The Company intends to implement blockchain technology onto its E-commerce platform worldwide, which will be driven by Monster Money Tokens. The Company's blockchain-based E-commerce ecosystem is named as "Monster Money Network." As Monster further develops Monster Money Network and its blockchain technology, it contemplates to utilizing the blockchain technology for payment processing, market analysis, accounting, audit & payroll services, inventory management and shipping operation." "Monster Money Tokens are the currency to be used on Monster Money Network to purchase Monster products or pay for services. Holders of Monster Money Tokens are not entitled to vote as shareholders of the Company." "we consider Amazon, E-bay and Alibaba as examples of our main competitors with respect to the new Monster Money Network" Interestingly, tokens can be converted into equity in Monster if by June 2020 tokens are not listed anywhere or have ceased trading. I'm sure there are more juicy bits disseminated across the SEC filing, but frankly we'd rather spend our time on other stuff.

👮 This week in regulation

SEC Obtains Emergency Order Halting Fraudulent Coin Offering Scheme Another enforcement action by the SEC. This time it's addressed at Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure and its President for committing securities fraud in raising as much as $21M in an ICO. The SEC obtained a court order to halt the sale and to freeze the assets, on the grounds that the issuer has outright lied about testimonials and corporate customers in the ICO materials. For a more thorough dissection of the SEC complaint we refer you to Stephen Palley's tweetstorm. As a general rule of thumb, if an early stage pre-launch project claims to have the likes of IBM, GE, Intel, Microsoft etc as actual 'clients', always be very suspicious. But when someone claims the Federal Reserve is a client, have no doubts and run for the emergency exit.

💰New funds

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, plans $1 billion investment fund Binance have announced the imminent launch of a $1B ecosystem fund investing directly into projects and as LP into 20 other funds, contributing in BNB tokens. Apparently part of the fund's profits will be used to buy back BNB tokens, and if that's the case the performance of the fund may end up partially proxied by BNB network value (and BNB become effectively a security?). If the money will be go through Malta, that's another great win for the small country. Meanwhile, CZ passed by a few km from where we live, so the karma is all around great.

Matt Huang Leaving Sequoia Capital to Start Crypto Fund With Fred Ehrsam Behind paywall, archive link here. VCs who caught the crypto bug continue to feel antsy inside their legacy generalist funds.  So it's not entirely surprising that Matt is leaving Sequoia to start a crypto fund. Sequoia is expected to commit to the fund, but will likely continue to invest on its own in the space. Matt invested in Polychain and Metastable out of Sequoia, as well as Orchid and Filecoin's ICO. No mention of Telegram :)

$30 Million Crypto Startup Fund Launched By Mobile Game Maker Japan's gumi just announced a $30M fund who will be led by Gumi founder and CEO Hironao Kunimitsu and Miko Matsumura. gumi is a game company in Japan, but hey you can't not have your own crypto fund these days

Block.one, SVK Crypto Jointly Launch US$50m EOSIO Fund Yet another EOS ecosystem fund was announced in conjunction with the release on June 2nd. This is a $50M one in partnership with a London-based crypto fund called SVK Crypto and led by Hugh Cochrane and Shane Kehoe. "It will invest in projects that are building on the EOSIO blockchain platform, with a focus on decentralized applications (DAPPs) for social media, data ownership, data control, technology platforms, supply chains and logistics."

💸 Funding rounds

Crypto Wallet That Attracted $35 Billion Wins IDG Backing Talk about surprises. imToken has announced that they have 4m users and hold $35B in cryptocurrencies. The occasion is the announcement of their $10M Series A raise from IDG.

Crypto Platform BRD Raises $32M in Funding BRD is yet another crypto wallet, based in Switzerland with $6B in deposits. "The round included a combination of venture capital funding, with existing investor East Ventures involved the round, and a crowdsale."

ℹ️ About us

Token Economy is written and curated by Stefano Bernardi & Yannick Roux. 🤙 If you're building a new fundamental piece of technology for the future, please reach out ✍️ If you'd like to publish some of your content on the Token Economy publication, please fill out this form 🙏 If you're feeling generous you can stake some ETH on our StakeTree page, or get your friends to subscribe to the newsletter (both hugely appreciated!)

Feel free to send links to include in the next issue, or any comments you might have on this one! Token Economy · The Dolomites · 38121 Trento TN · Italy Unsubscribe | View in browser