Nick Tomaino

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

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:.

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

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

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.

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.

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.