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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.

At scale, Numerai’s fund is exposed to every model and a diversified portfolio without the risk of relying on a single and imperfect model.

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 am excited to see how zero knowledge cryptocurrencies like Zcash interact with the extant regulatory landscape. I think it’s important to remember that these techniques provide privacy that (IMO) is a *requirement* for a *business* use case..... With zero-knowledge proofs, privacy and transparency are very much compatible. You can prove properties of transaction flows in zero knowledge.

Bitcoin continues to be misunderstood by many people in the cryptocurrency space who want it to be more than it has to be for it to succeed. . . . Yes, Bitcoin has all sorts of drawbacks as a blockchain, but it is the one cryptocurrency with a widely understood use case: censorship resistant store of wealth. Fiat currencies, precious metals and real estate (including land) all have more government control and/or are more difficult to move around and transact in than Bitcoin. With everything crazy that’s going on in the world politically, the demand for censorship resistant wealth storage is high and growing.

Decred’s consensus algorithm is a hybrid proof of work, proof of stake system that’s different from Bitcoin’s, in that Bitcoin is only proof of work.

In proof of work, the machines that run the network and verify transactions are the ones that ultimately have all the governance power. That alienates the actual users because if you hold bitcoin but don’t have a machine plugged into the network, then you don’t have that much of a say.

A hybrid proof of work-proof of stake system is a system of checks and balances between the users and the machines, in that the machines in Decred are producing blocks much in the same way that Bitcoin’s machines are producing blocks, but each block has to be vetted and validated by the proof-of-stake layer and the proof-of-stake layer, which is driven by the asset holders, the holders of the Decred coin.

Credit has greased economic wheels for millennia, and Maker is the world’s first 100% software-based, community owned and operated credit facility. As a family of smart contracts operating on Ethereum, the system offers secured loans of equal cost to anyone in the world. The by-product of loan generation is dai, a stablecoin collateralized using on-chain rules and assets.

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.

Today marks a big milestone for the Algorand Core Team and Algorand Foundation. They conducted the first on-chain Algorand auction and it came off without a hitch....

The auctions themselves are meaningful in several ways. They show off a capability that is built natively into the Algorand blockchain. This capability will be useful for all sorts of auctions, not just of Algos but of other items. This is a novel way of combining price discovery with ongoing funding for the development of Algorand

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.

To me it all goes back to the internet—what does the internet want to be and it wants a currency. It’s always wanted a currency, it just hasn’t had the technology until ten years ago [in the form of Bitcoin]. [Now it has] something that is uniform, has the right principles behind it, and has a lot of people who are passionate enough to make all these sacrifices to [Bitcoin] for a greater good beyond themselves.

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.