Posts from blockchain

This past Wednesday, I appeared on stage at Consensus 2019 with Paul Vigna of the Wall Street Journal and Brian Armstrong, CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase.

The topic we were supposed to discuss was why crypto has been so full of bubbles and crashes. We did talk about that but we also talked about a lot more. The discussion is about a half hour.

On Monday, I wrote:

With the crypto winter seemingly coming to an end and spring on the horizon,

So why do I think winter is behind us and spring is on the horizon?

Well you can see in the chart of the entire crypto market that there has been a meaningful move off of the bottom in the last five months.

The entire crypto market hit the low point in mid December at roughly $100bn and has rallied over the winter and spring to almost $250bn. While there is no guarantee that we won’t go back and test those lows, I do think we hit rock bottom in December.

It is also worth noting that the daily trading volumes are now higher (almost double) than they were at the height of the crypto bubble in January 2018. Investors are back in the market and pushing it higher.

And this is not just about Bitcoin. Here is the total market minus Bitcoin:

It is a very similar chart with very similar volume activity.

The most exciting thing to me is what you don’t see in these charts and that is the fact that many projects have been quietly building out their systems over the last 18 months and we will start to see new public blockchains and protocols go live over the next 6-12 months that will show the power of new ideas and new technologies that are coming to market.

I love spring.

And now a word from your sponsor:

Coinbase is a USV portfolio company, I am on the board, and I am deeply invested in this business.

Coinbase’s regulated custody subsidiary is an important part of their overall business and I am also on the board of it.

This Unconfirmed Podcast with Sam McIngvale is a really good explanation of what Coinbase is doing in the custody market and how they are developing new income earning options for their customers.

Our portfolio company Blockstack tweeted out this today:

After rounds of private comments, we’ve publicly filed for a $50M token offering with the SEC.

Upon qualification, our network and the Stacks tokens will be available to retail investors, including the US. https://t.co/OuPVbA4eJt

— Muneeb Ali (@muneeb) April 11, 2019

Given that USV is an investor and one of my partners is on the board, I don’t want to opine on this in any way.

But I do think this is an interesting development in the evolution of tokens as investable assets.

So here is a Coindesk post on this news.

I am not a fan of Orthodoxy.

I appreciate the power of religion although I am not religious personally. I respect the followers of Allah, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and other religious figures. I know that the beliefs of religious people give them great comfort and a purpose in life.

What I don’t appreciate is when a person of faith believes so deeply that they cannot tolerate beliefs that are different from theirs. I call this Orthodoxy and it has led to wars, horrible crimes, and many other bad things. It is the downside of what is and should be a very positive thing for humanity.

We see this same behavior developing in the crypto sector. Bitcoin and other cryptoassets have become a belief system. That is at the core of their value. Why would I give you $5000 of my dollars for one of your Bitcoin? Because I believe in Bitcoin and want to own it.

This faith in the value and power of cryptoassets is good. It is necessary for all of the other good things that can come of them.

But like religion, there is an Orthodoxy in these communities that borders on obsession and leads some people to be extremely intolerant of any other community or cryptoasset. The crypto community calls these people “maximalists”, a term I don’t like and don’t use.

I believe that we will see many cryptoassets emerge to solve different kinds of problems, just as we have seen many different religions develop to serve different groups of people. This diversity is good. It leads to a richness of thought and innovation that moves us forward.

If someone wants to believe deeply in one thing and nothing else, we should understand and appreciate it. But when that leads to hatred, nastiness, and ridicule, we should reject it. We should call it out for what it is and we should not accept it.

As I mentioned last week, at the start of this interview Laura Shin plays a bit of my “rant” about Ethereum losing it’s lead.

Vitalik, as is his nature, calmly reacts to it and rebuts it.

The entire interview is interesting and hopeful for Ethereum holders like me.

This past week Laura Shin did an interview with Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the Ethereum project. I am going to run a video of that conversation next week.

Laura started her interview with Vitalik by playing for him and everyone else in the room a bit of this conversation Tushar Jain and I had last fall.

So I am reblogging this conversation so it is fresh in everyone’s minds when I run Laura’s Vitalik interview next week.

While we wait for the blockchain/crypto technology to scale to the point where it can be the foundation of mainstream consumer applications (games, social media, e-commerce, etc), there is a sector where scalability is a little less important and where blockchain/crypto is starting to show some real signs of life.

In the crypto space, it is called Decentralized Finance, or DeFi for short. It includes, of course, all of the ICO activity largely built on top of Ethereum and the ERC-20 token. But it also includes thinks like Maker which is both a stable coin and a collateralized lending sytem. The collateral for the loans is what stablizes the Maker stablecoin. We also are seeing other lending offerings develop in the DeFi world and we are seeing things like hedging, shorting, derivatives, and more, all built on a decentralized platform where there are no intermediaries, no clearinghouses, and the need for trusted third parties is much less, sometimes not at all.

This makes sense for a number of reasons. While the transaction requirements of financial services applications are not trivial, they are also not as demanding as mainstream consumer applications where millions of users are transacting with each other and the system in real-time.

It is also the case that, unlike many of the new architectures that emerged over the years (mainframe, mini, client-server, web), the blockchain/crypto space has always had money at its core and making money, transacting in money, and everyting that goes along with that has been an early use case and for most people, the driving use case for this technology.

All technologies need early use cases. I do not think DeFi will be the only thing that blockchain/crypto is good for. I think we will see blockchains scale in the next few years to allow mainstream consumer applcations to be built.

But until then, DeFi is a good place to hang out. It uses all of the same technologies, architectures, and value systems that we have come to know and love in crypto. You can learn to build applications, use applications, and generally come up to speed on the sector while serving real customers, building a business, and, hopefully, making money.

I saw Zuck’s post on pivoting to private interactions from public posts yesterday and I had a flashback to Bill Gates’s Internet Tidal Wave memo to his company almost twenty-five years ago.

I have always seen a lot of Gates in Zuck. They both have this incredible ability to see someone else’s product and realize that they need to build their own version of it.

But copying someone else’s product is a lot easier than copying someone else’s business model, particularly when you already have a fucking great one that makes you and your shareholders billions of dollars a year.

It will be interesting to watch Zuck do what Gates was ultimately unable to do – completely reboot the company’s business model to position itself to win the next wave in tech.

In the case of Gates, it was the pivot from paid software to free advertising supported software (aka – the attention economy that we are now paying for).

In the case of Zuck, it will be the pivot from monetizing attention to monetizing the protocol. The good thing is he is headed in the right direction, and surrounded some of the smartest people I know in crypto. The bad news is when you have this anchor called a legacy business model, it means making the right moves and making them quickly a lot harder.

Here is an example of one of those choices Facebook will need to make and make correctly:

If @facebook’s stablecoin goes the private blockchain route it will be to #crypto what @Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was to the Internet.

— Chris Burniske (@cburniske) March 4, 2019

In any case, it is game on. Being on the verge of 60 years old means I have seen this game play out at least once before and so I have a frame of reference to observe it. That’s really great. It is an exciting time again in tech.