Multicoin Capital

In the case of XRP, we believe that the token holds little utility beyond payment of negligible fees and thus is unlikely to maintain and build value in the long-term. While we expect that XRP tokens will continue to see price spikes as Ripple Inc. makes announcements, we don’t believe that the fundamentals of the protocol will build sustained value for XRP.

Litecoin is just a Bitcoin testnet.

Seems pretty reasonable to me that almost all PoW-GPU coins that aren't ETH are prone to being 51% attacked, at least until ETH moves to full PoS, at which point it's likely to become XMR I think (could be even sooner depending on FFG economics).

I don't know that much about NEO, but I'm generally skeptical. I also generally don't care for this author but figured I'd share. NEO holders, beware.

While IOTA was one of the first major projects to build a DAG instead of a blockchain, we find that the approach taken by the IOTA team presents many reasons to be highly concerned. While DAG-based systems may form an important part of the future of the crypto ecosystem, we have reservations about the DAG implementation of IOTA, as listed above.

Quick rant on "discount tokens", eg BNB

TLDR: Discount tokens are *definitely* securities

IOTA is a scam.

Tether is a systemic risk in that if it explodes, billions of dollars could effectively disappear and cause exchange insolvencies. An alternative to Tether hugely reduces that risk.

Well, good thing Dentacoin has no leader. I'd like to see them come after our distributed community of dental-health enthusiasts.

My biggest concern [around EOS] recently has been around arbitration. Specifically, an unelected group called ECAF that issues network-level arbitration decisions.

Ethereum Classic is the worst of both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Not as secure and immutable as Bitcoin, nor as aggressive as Ethereum in making the platform valuable for development.

I can’t find a single interesting project building on ETC. Not one.

Bancor is objectively worse than all other market makers. If asset already has liquidity, it's not necessary. If asset doesn't have liquidity, then why are they inventing a pity based liquidity provider? Bancor breaks capitalism IMO and is total nonsense.

OmiseGo's penetration is tiny on a global basis, a round error really. If you think on a global scale, their lead is not significant.

Network effects and competitive moats are generally misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, there are no networks that exhibit n^2 network effects, and in fact many exhibit log(n) network effects, notably fungible asset exchanges. Bitcoin as digital gold will be subject to the perpetually sub-linear log(n) network effect, whereas Bitcoin as digital cash can achieve super-linear network effects as crypto adoption grows from <1% to 50% of the global population. The cryptocurrency that becomes the dominant store-of-value will by definition need to exhibit super-linear network effects as it grows.

Moreover, other types of competitive moats such as brand and broader ecosystem integrations do not exhibit increasing returns to scale, and can be easily overcome by a competitive network with super-linear network effects. We already have ample evidence that this is true.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen messenger apps grow in scope a lot, led by WeChat. Much of the growth has been tying payments of all forms into chat. This is natural as much chat —> commerce. Seems highly probable that we’re not that far away from major messengers - WhatsApp, Telegram, etc - building payments natively.

Kin is obviously first high profile example, but everything about Kin is wrong. The messenger that wants true adoption should implement using BTC, ETH, or stable coin directly. Those assets have much higher liquidity to fiats, which would really kickstart “banking the
unbanked” dream of crypto.

Multicoin developed a thesis around decentralized exchanges in 2H 2017, culminating in a large ZRX position going into the launch of 0x-based exchanges

Unfortunately, 0x-based DEX have not achieved meaningful market share. In our discussions with dozens of market makers, we learned that the biggest challenges are around fees to cancel orders, and lack of deterministic order execution.

The only dimension in which DAI is better than USDC or GUSD is censorship resistance. Anonymity provides censorship resistance.

There will be cheap collateralized loans available with fiat coins too, Maker is not unique there. Eg: one could borrow USDC against ETH using Dharma. Therefore anonymous fiat coins are a pareto improvement to MakerDAO and DAI. Literally better in every single way.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are closer to reality than the market realizes & will have profound effects.

For example, the Bank of Thailand & Hong Kong Monetary Authority just completed a cross border remittance test and published the results.

CBDCs will hugely weaken the monetary sovereignty of smaller nations whose citizens will more easily access alternative nations' currencies.

As more people realize they don't have to use their own government's fiat money, this will also convert some % of them to Bitcoiners.

I expect developers will create some type of cross chain type functionality which allows "wrapped CBDCs" on other chains.

This increase in the amount of programmable digital currency will allow global competition for retail financial services aka Open Finance.

Due to CBDCs I expect that the networks focused on payments and remittances such as XRP will be seen obsolete for their stated purpose.

Cosmos is a stupidity tax and value destructive to society. 100% unnecessary protocol.

[It's rendered unnecessary by atomic swaps] and also inter-blockchain compatibility is not needed. [It's an] already solved problem with Oracles for interchain and Whisper for ERC-20.

Also, Cosmos isn't necessary for synthetic tokens. The three things it claims to do—IBC, synthetic tokens and trustless swaps—are doable without another token in the middle. . . .

[C]laiming [that] "we're a blockchain of blockchains with our own token in our proprietary system" doesn't push anything forward.

If all of the things it solves can be solved using free open source standards that are emerging, why should it exist? It's like trying to charge for SMTP/HTTP.

Tezos isn't the best at anything.

It's best thing it's got going for it is a foundation with a large balance sheet

But on a technology perspective, it's materially behind in every way that matters.