Coinbase

Monero (symbol XMR) is the current leader of the privacy-focused digital currencies.

Late last year, USV invested in Numerai, a hedge fund that uses data scientists all around the world to “crowdsource” stock price predictions. I blogged a bit about Numerai then.

If that business model wasn’t cutting-edge enough for you, the Numerai team has now gone a step further and issued a crypto-token called Numeraire to incent these data scientists to work together to build the best models instead of just competing with each other.

The success of Tether, despite severe flaws in centralization and lack of transparency, is the only rebuttal necessary. There’s strong demand from the crypto community for a decentralized stablecoin; that is undeniable.....

By success, I mean that there's now over $1B worth of Tether trading volume/day and it's the 4th most actively traded cryptocurrency by volume:.

One of the few coins I'm excited about, with an innovative solution to decentralized governance. Decred is basically Dash done right. 😂 Consensus is more decentralized than Dash and is enforced.

Decred provides unique features that are not currently available to Bitcoin and has a strong focus on development.

0x is pretty interesting.

0x is a great project, there is a lot of hype around it though. Wouldn’t call it underrated

0x is an exciting project with a strong team focused on development.

To be clear, I don’t think Steem has this all figured out. I don’t own any Steem (or at least I don’t think I do). And I think they have made things a bit too complicated with their tokens and incentives. To their credit, they have taken steps to simplify things, and they are headed in the right direction.

I took a look at Nano currency recently. Pretty neat. Every account has its own blockchain. It focuses on fast and free transactions for payments. Uses PoS for double-spend protection and PoW to fight spam. The challenge is to keep it decentralized.

When product usage is growing despite a mediocre UX, it is typically a good idea to start paying attention if you're an entrepreneur or investor (see BTC over the past 9 yrs).

It is still quite early, but feels like @augurproject is on to something

MakerDAO is more than a stablecoin project. Trustless margin trading provides public information previously only accessible to exchanges

All private transactions. More tested privacy tech [than Zcash]. No tax on miners to pay investors. No high inflation . . . better investment.

Numerai is one of the first examples I have seen where the clear endgame is a product for AIs.

Bitcoin is one of the most important inventions of all time and has launched a global movement. It's awesome to see an entire ecosystem spring up around it, but Bitcoin is my first love.

Bitcoin remains the most popular asset on Coinbase among new customers and longtime hodlers alike. It's great to see steady progress continue, including lightning network adoption and more.

I believe we’re still at the beginning. The white paper signaled the start of a movement and the full promise of Bitcoin is still yet to be realized.

My view is that the centralized collateral approaches (TrueUSD and Digix being the two most well-known) are not socially scalable enough to be liquid on a global scale in the long run, but they could serve certain customer bases and also be good collateral for more decentralized approaches.

Tezos is a remarkable project because it enables coin holders - the true owners of the network - to align interests around improving the protocol through on-chain governance. In 2018, Tezos is going to amaze everyone.

I believe that Ethereum, Tezos, and other smart contract platforms will coexist as they each aim to serve different purposes and the token holders have different ideals. When cross-blockchain infrastructure like Cosmos and Polkadot are fully developed, we will hopefully see Ethereum and Tezos tokens move freely between both platforms.

Ethereum was the first thing to me to come along [after Bitcoin] and create something with capabilities so new that it was worth adding [to Coinbase]. Allowing arbitrary programs is amazing, fiddling with block time/inflation rate is not.

[T]he future is thousands/millions of cryptoassets like we have millions of apps and websites but very few base networks. This mostly looks like assets being built on top of Ethereum at the moment.

[B]itcoin as a payment system is just one of the potential applications of the network. To cap Bitcoin’s value here would be like saying that the Internet, in the early days, was only as valuable as its ability to send email in a more efficient way than fax or snail mail. Bitcoin is valuable as a currency because of the economic efficiencies the Bitcoin network is already creating as transactions flow over it. As with the Internet, more applications will flourish which will make the Bitcoin network, and thus Bitcoin as a currency, valuable.

The Internet enables decentralized distribution of data. Bitcoin enables decentralized proof and transfer of ownership.

Bitcoin took off because it preached Ideology. Ethereum took off because it preached Practicality.

The fallacy is in thinking one is RIGHT and the other is WRONG. A new social construct needs BOTH.

The free movement in and out of cryptocurrency communities is crucial if we want to maintain the open, inclusive values that the industry was built on. Today 99% of crypto-to-crypto exchange volume is happening on centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance. Trusted 3rd party bridges work well for some people, but censorship, security breaches and theft have proven to be major problems that users of centralized exchanges face. A self-sovereign bridge that connects cryptocurrency communities is an important piece of infrastructure that the space needs. This is where the Cosmos SDK, the Cosmos Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol and Tendermint come together.

Every project that uses the Cosmos SDK can gain interoperability in the Cosmos network by utilizing the IBC and connecting to a hub. The Cosmos Hub will be the leading hub at the onset, but there may be many hubs over time that connect different zones. If you are building a Bitcoin peg zone like Nomic, you can use IBC to connect to the Cosmos Hub and make BTC interoperable with any token also connected to the Cosmos Hub. You could imagine interfaces on top of a widely connected hub to make the decentralized exchange of any IBC-enabled token (not just ERC-20) possible. This new construct removes power from centralized exchanges and empower cryptocurrency users to freely move in and out of different communities.

We are also seeing signs that users like using crypto-assets in mobile and web apps. Kin, built by our portfolio company Kik, has become one of the most used cryptocurrencies in the world.

Gnosis has been quiet on the prediction market front but should not be forgotten. They’ve been building pieces (DutchX, Safe, dxDAO) that could all come together to enable prediction markets in coming months.

Cosmos fundamentally believes that it’s impossible to get everyone to agree on a single set of rules to govern a world-wide economic network. This is already evident in the real world where you see multiple forks of Bitcoin being created because of philosophical and political disagreement. On the other hand, in Ethereum’s case, we’re seeing that stakeholders can’t agree on the right form of governance or have a tendency to resist formal governance, which can be counter-productive and slow down the progress of development.

Cosmos tries to solve this by enabling interoperability among many sovereign blockchains, even and ESPECIALLY if they have different governance policies. Therefore, social AND economic scalability is one of the core value props of Cosmos. It give its users and developers the ultimate freedom and potential for permissionless experimentation.

As the decade ends, the biggest unicorn of the 2010s wasn’t Uber, Airbnb, or Snap. It was Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the one protocol that has found lasting product-market fit. In terms of a censorship proof digital store of wealth, there is nothing that comes close to Bitcoin. There are some protocols, like the privacy-focused ones, that offer similar and in some cases better use cases. But for the most part, Bitcoin is our digital gold.

[Crypto is] not a zero sum game. I think EOS has a shot at crypto gaming and social networks, which are lower stakes and higher volume than ETH's ICOs and [decentralized finance], which is in turn lower stakes and higher volume than BTC (digital gold).

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin are the bellwether cryptos. They are the only coins that are traded on every major crypto exchanges and can be stored on every hardware wallet.

Easily buying and securely storing other coins is really a PITA.

Crypto dollars, like other crypto assets, ride on crypto rails. I can send my crypto dollars from my Coinbase wallet to your Coinbase wallet, your Ledger wallet, or many other crypto wallets.

USDC is built on Ethereum and is an ERC-20 token. So it uses crypto standards to ride on these crypto rails.

But more than all of that, USDC are programmable dollars. This is a big deal. Kind of like the difference between an MP3 file and song on a cassette tape. Once an asset is natively digital, without any strings attached, and can be programmed and routed digitally, interesting things happen.

If you have cash balances in your Coinbase account, consider using at least some of them to buy USDC. Then send them around to friends and family. It will feel like using Venmo today. But that is just the start of a lot more to come once programmers start building apps that accept USDC and other crypto assets.

I am actually bullish on DAI. Track record has been good and has dispelled many initial concerns.

The switch from physical mail to email increased speed 1000X and changed the metabolism of business.

Getting a ~1000X improvement in settlement times via ETH (1 day to 1 minute) is similar. I’ve already seen millions of dollars of txs where same minute settlement changes things.

At Earn, we would be on the phone with a client. They would send (say) $100k in ETH. We would hit refresh and see money hit on-chain. We would then send $10 paid messages to 10,000 users.