Welcome to our bi-weekly newsletter date from 7th to 21nd May.
🐱👤IOSG Insight
(1/3) The rapid development of blockchain gives birth to Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). In 2019, various new concepts emerge. Especially this year, we saw the birth of new compliance financing and financial asset management DAOs. We divided the existing DAOs into two categories ( Governance and Financing) and divided Moloch and its branches into four stages with the comparison. We believe that the advantages of the decentralized organization lie in its full openness, decentralized control, flexible framework, fair, open, and efficient coordination of resources. In the future, we expect more technology and innovation advancement.
(2/3) Central bank’s additional inflation is inevitable, Long gold and Bitcoin？
We see that the central banks have issued US$ 3.9 trillion in the past three months( February to May). In 2019, the global GDP was 86.6 trillion which means the amount of money issued by central banks in the past three months equal to 4.5% of 2019 global GDP. As of May 4, 2020, U.S. M2 has risen by 21.6% compared with the same time last year. Such over-issues is rare. According to the current situation, the annualization growth of M2 for 2020 could reach 20% -40%. The last significant increase in M2 like this was during World War II when the annual growth of M2 reached 27%.
Because the additional issuances caused by the epidemic are mainly directly issued to enterprises and the public, the multiplier is higher than the one at the traditional financial crisis. The current high leverage causes the government to fail to curb inflation by raising interest rates after the epidemic ends. People need a good Hedging asset for future deterministic inflation, we can see that the trend of Bitcoin since 2018 is similar to the trend of gold from 1975 to 1977( gold was just used as a safe-haven asset at that period). Therefore, some people think that investing in Bitcoin now is like investing in gold in the 1970s when it was just considered a safe-haven asset. It is likely to capture a huge upside.
(3/3) Migration from Eth 1.0 to Eth 2.0 and what will happen to Eth 1.0?
The return of staking of ETH2.0’s new asset BETH is shown in the chart below. This is a proposal that Vitalik Buterin posted on Github in April 2019. It has been added to the specification of Eth 2.0. (Source: https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/eth-2.0-economics/)
The upper limit of staking at ETH2.0 network is 134 million BETH. At this level, about 2.09 million BETH can be issued at a time. The inflation rate remains below 2% and the return rate is 1.56%. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake believes that 30 million BETH staking in the Ethereum 2.0 network is the level that will be most beneficial to the system health. At this level, the inflation rate maintains at 1% and the return rate is 3.3%.
🐱🐉Industry
Blockchain node Provider Blockdaemon raises $5.5 million in new funding: Founded in 2017, Blockdaemon offers a set of tools to help exchanges, custodians, financial institutions, and developers deploy and manage nodes on over 30 blockchain protocols, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Tezos, and Polkadot. Users can launch the nodes either on their own infrastructure or with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Platform. Read more.
General Protocols, the first Bitcoin startup dedicated to bringing Decentralized Finance (DeFi) products to Bitcoin Cash, has just raised over $1M in its seed funding round. The funding came from a variety of investors, which include legendary cryptocurrency trader Marc De Mesel and BCH thought leader Molecular. The new funds enable General Protocols to grow its Bitcoin Cash smart contract derivative product AnyHedge, scale its engineering teams, and expand its operations globally. Read more.
Libra announced lead maintainer, maintainers, and Libra Improvement Proposal (LIP). LIPs offer the Libra developer community a way to participate in advancing the features and functioning of the Libra payment system, either by proposing a change or engaging in discussion about a proposal. Proposals can address the core Libra Blockchain protocol, the Move development platform, smart contracts and systems for smart-contract verification, operating standards, APIs, and off-chain mechanisms. Read more.
Emin Gün Sirer says the AVA blockchain will scale better than Ethereum 2.0. Others say the problem is more complicated. Ava Labs completed a US $ 6 million financings in February 2019. Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, Coinbase, former CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Metastable, Initialized and Abstract Ventures founder Ramtin Naimi and other institutions and investors participated in this round of financing. AVA has officially released the public testnet Cascade, which is the first of two testnet versions in the AVA roadmap plan. Read more.
Bitcoin ATM operator Coinme raises $10 million Series A, led by Pantera Capital. The $10 million fundraise was led by Pantera Capital, which put in $5.5 million. Other investors included Blockchain.com, Nima Capital, Coinstar, and Hard+Yaka. Coinme’s ambitious future plans include expanding in worldwide markets with its cash-to-crypto product, having proved its business as a successful model in the U.S. Read more.
Bixin Unveils $65M BTC-Denominated Fund to Get More Bitcoin. The strategies of the funds that Bixin intends to invest in will be quant-based and can utilize arbitrage or trend analysis. Furthermore, the firm also hopes to develop partnerships with other firms on mining management, cloud mining and funding of mining operations in general. Read more.
Gitcoin and Panvala announced the Grants Round Five double matching results. For Gitcoin Grants Round Five, Gitcoin ran a quadratic funding experiment to showcase how Panvala can help raise more money for Ethereum public goods. Gitcoin matched all donations, and Panvala provided a second, extra match for all donations made in PAN tokens. Read more.
🐱🚀 Our portfolio companies
NEAR Foundation is announced. The first NEAR Foundation Council chose the following people for their particular blend of skills and outstanding reputation within the community. Mona El Isa: the founder and CEO of Avantgarde Finance and previously founded Melonport which built the Melon protocol. Richard Muirhead: founder of Fabric Ventures. Illia Polosukhin: Cofounder and CEO of NEAR.
Interchain Foundation Funding Program from Cosmos is re-opening. The two entities who will be supporting this restructured program are Informal Systems, recently spun-out from the Research and Development group at the ICF, and Interchain GmbH, a new fully-owned subsidiary of the ICF. In collaboration with Informal Systems, the new Interchain GmbH has been busy implementing a multi-stakeholder organizational structure, while catching up on funding applicants from the end of 2019. The result is a new, plaintext-enabled funding pipeline that opens on May 7th. Read more.
Filecoin Discover will ship hard drives in mid-June. In responde to lots of feedback on Filecoin Discover, it has made a few small changes to the Filecoin Discover program. In this first wave of Filecoin Discover, Filecoin Discover will cap the number of drives per miner at 20. After mainnet launch, they will evaluate expanding the program and willbegin shipping hard drives in mid-June. Read More.
Kyber milestone: US$1Billion worth of trades and almost 1Million transactions. Kyber Newtwork announced on Twitter that they have crossed US$1Billion worth of trades and almost 1Million transactions, performed entirely on chain. Read More.
Polkadot and Kusama introducing a new testnet: Westend. Westend is a Polkadot testnet, replacing Polkadot’s previous Alexander testnet. Westend is for all intents and purposes a testnet. You don’t need KSM or DOT to interact with Westend, making it a perfect testbed for validators to test their active validator set without fear of getting slashed or parachains to test anything before deploying on Polkadot or Kusama. The tokens on this network are called Westies and they purposefully hold no economic value. Read More
MakerDAO shuts down the Single-Collateral DAI system. Collateral DAI (Sai) system as the protocol fully transitions to the new Multi-collateral DAI (MCD or Dai) system. On March 30, Maker Foundation placed a Governance Poll to determine whether to initiate the shutdown. After the community approved the process, the protocol entered into a grace period between April 24 and May 12 for users to migrate their Collateralized Debt Positions (CDP) to MCD. Sai holders were also able to exchange their tokens to MCD on platforms like Uniswap. Sai officially shut down on Monday. Each Sai holder needs to exchange the tokens for ETH manually through the migration portal. 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]
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