First Published on @IOSG Medium on Jun 4, 2020

Welcome to our bi-weekly newsletter date from 22end May to 4th June.

🐱‍👤IOSG Insight

(1/4) Announcement:

So happy to announce that IOSG VC joined Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA)@EntEthAlliance last week. EEA is one of the largest global community of blockchain leaders, innovators, developers and businesses. By joining EEA, we will make a wider connection to all startups and deeper contribution to the EEA as well.

(2/4) Insights of India blockchain market development

We are currently seeing DeFi Solutions projects such as Instadapp appearing in India. They almost started their projects in the most barren areas of India when they were in the bear market of the crypto market, so the founders of these projects are people who consider crypto as their long-term career. At present, Indian developers (including those young people who are still in universities) are more like doing things like AI rather than blockchain. There are many people in India without bank accounts, and the popularity of mobile phones in India is very high, so India is a very potential market, and we believe the crypto market in India will change dramatically in 2–3 years.

(3/4) Decentralized Storage industry

According to Juniper Research, a well-known data market research organization:

“the rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, increasing to almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.”

In the past ten years, most of the Internet’s data has been transferred to “cloud storage”, and most of the data for the applications we use every day is stored in centralized servers owned by Amazon, Google, Microsoft,etc. In Web 3.0, developers are turning to decentralized storage to avoid censorship and the risks of server outages and hacking attacks. Web 1.0’s innovation was driven by people’s need of an “information pool” that can be accessed, indexed and browsed by everyone around the world. The innovation driving Web 2.0 is that commercial companies like Google and Facebook insert various content in the global “information pool” and even provide scalable resources and routing traffic to consolidate their own moat.

Therefore, the paradigm shift of data storage scenarios has occurred, and a series of new decentralized storage technologies have emerged including: Storj, Sia, Filecoin, Arweave, etc.Then the innovation that drives Web 3.0 is the tens of thousands of individuals as information providers start to be feel not satisfied with the truth that centralized entities create huge value based on their personal information but what they get in return is even nothing but losing the actual data custodian.

(4/4) What’s new with Libra 2.0

We believe that Libra will never be passed by governments if it is based on the previous version. The reason is very simple, Facebook, relying on its 2.7 billion users of social network, has a strong social appeal. Once Libra, a super sovereign currency issued by a single enterprise, succeeds, it will make Facebook and Libra Association behind it extremely powerful, even surpass the U.S. government and compete with traditional reserve assets like U.S dollar.

Libra takes the initiative to embrace regulation, which seems to be a compromise, but actually becomes more mature. Different from bitcoin and other stable currency like USDT as we are familiar with, Libra chooses a better way to build a global payment system based on blockchain, sticks to the long-term goal of financial inclusion, and sets a model for future cross region blockchain financial projects.

🐱‍🐉Industry

Genesis Launches Derivatives Trading Desk. Genesis, an industry pioneer and leader in digital currency trading and lending, today announced it has launched a derivatives trading desk.Read more.

Ren Announces the Launch of RenVM Mainnet. Ren, the open protocol that enables the permissionless and private transfer of value between any blockchain, announced today that its core product, RenVM, is now live on mainnet. RenVM is the only decentralized finance (DeFi) project designed to bring cross-chain assets to the Ethereum ecosystem, beginning with BTC, BCH, and ZEC.Read more.

Matic Launches Mainnet Aiming to Bring More ‘Firepower’ to Ethereum, The India-based Matic Foundation announced via a blog post that it had brought 10 nodes online, the first volley of a network Matic hopes to grow tenfold.Read more.

Uniswap announced the mainnet launch of Uniswap V2, introducing new features like price oracles, flash swaps, and liquidity pools for any ERC20 token pair. Read more.

Visa has filed a patent application to create digital currency — potentially using Ethereum as the blockchain.Read more.

Libra adds former FinCEN head as general counsel. Prior to joining Libra, Werner was the founder and CEO of GRH Consulting and held leadership positions at several financial institutions, including HSBC and Goldman Sachs, where he was the enterprise executive for policy, privacy, and regulatory relations.Read more.

Venture Capital investment firm Accolade Partners has launched a fund of funds to provide exposure to blockchain opportunities.Read more.

dYdX’s perpetual bitcoin swap market reports a volume bump days after launching($22 million). The perpetual swap market contract now controls over $1.2m USDC, roughly 0.17% of circulating supply.Read more.

🐱‍🚀 Our portfolio companies

IoTeX, the blockchain platform of the Internet of Things, released the announcement of pre-launch of the main network GA. At its core, the IoTeX platform is compatible with trusted data and trusted devices, meaning that developers don’t have to repeat some complex architectural work and can focus on business logic, economics, and industry-related issues.Read more.

The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents additions of USDC-B and TUSD as collateral types, community greenlights, and more.Read more.

W3F Initiates Launch: Polkadot is Live.Read more.

Cosmos and Algorand tokens were added into Coinbase Custody staking support. The move allows Coinbase Custody’s clients to stake the two tokens and earn passive income.Read more.

Kava’s DeFi lending platform will go live on 10th June, offering DeFi service to BNB holders for the first time.Read more.

🦄 About IOSG

Founded in 2017, IOSG Ventures is a research and community-driven concept.we are focusing on Open Finance, Web 3.0, and cross-chain industry. We have over 60 investments and been actively involved in various developer & DAO communities. We invest in top teams with innovative ideas, operational excellence, and a robust community, and always supportive to IOSG portfolios to grow local communities in China, the US, and Germany.

If you would like IOSG Venture to consider your project, please send a summary of your project along with a pitch deck and/or white paper to [email protected]

Follow us on Twitter.