Blockchain Progress

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2021-03-29 20:00:24 ​​Early Investors Hodl Post-Tesla-Bitcoin Buy As Analysts Debate Hedge 'Myth'

Over the past several days, prominent analysts have argued that more early investors are choosing to hodl bitcoin (BTC) at the moment, and that BTC is a measure of wealth, and while some say that it is a hedge against inflation, others call that narrative a myth.

According to Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo, early investors, who usually like to profit from their coins that carry more dormancy, now hodl - following Tesla's USD 1.5bn-heavy BTC purchase.

Average dormancy describes "the average number of days each coin transacted remained dormant, unmoved. The higher the dormancy, the older the coins transacted that day are on average, and the more old hands are releasing their bitcoins into circulation."

Woo's tweet includes an on-chain analysis firm Glassnode's chart of average bitcoin dormancy, 7-day average, showing the moment Tesla purchased BTC. There can be seen an abrupt drop in dormancy just before the purchase, down to November 2020 level. It's still moving between the November and December levels.

As reported, there is quite a lot of debate in the crypto space and outside of it about possible effects Tesla's BTC purchase and its head's, Elon Musk's, tweets have had on crypto and their price, specifically BTC and dogecoin (DOGE). On the same day the purchase was announced, February 8, BTC went from the USD 38,000 to the USD 46,000 level. A much smaller price rise, followed by a drop, was seen last week after Tesla had announced it would start accepting payments in BTC.

In a recent Real Vision interview, Woo noted a great number of wallets just hodling BTC without ever selling them, and these often belonging to just every-day individuals holding their coins. But recently, there's been a larger move of coins from the exchanges and into self-custody, which is a sign of institutional players and high-net-worth individuals coming in, he said.

And as early investors hodl, another old discussion over BTC as a hedge and store of value has resurfaced recently.

In the above-mentioned Real Vision interview, a prominent analyst and CEO of trading firm Factor LLC, Peter Brandt, said that his goal as a trader used to be accumulating more USD, now finding it "a wrong goal" as USD is "the weakest ... most depreciating asset in the world," he said, adding:

"My mindset has really changed within the last year in terms of moving from bitcoin as a trade to bitcoin as a measure of wealth."

Brandt said that we're witnessing "history in the making" and "everybody that’s involved in bitcoin can know they’re really taking part in history," explaining: "This is just unbelievable. People get caught up in the daily motion and the daily moment of bitcoin without realizing we’re seeing a market advance, unlike anything we’ve really seen before. To have four parabolic advances on a log scale in the course of a ten-year period is just unheard of. I would challenge anybody to find a price chart of any asset or any commodity that has gone through this."

Meanwhile, Northman Trader founder Sven Henrich argued that "one can make anything a store of value if enough people agree that it is, especially if there is limited supply," giving rare post stamps and bottles of wine as examples. But is BTC a hedge against the global fiat system? His conclusion is that this is a myth.

Henrich warned that price increases, adoption and popularity don't validate a long-term thesis, and do not guarantee a winner, and "as long as bitcoin keeps running higher everyone is convinced it is a hedge." He stated,

"I submit the hedge argument is entirely unproven. Yes, percentage-wise bitcoin has performed tremendously on the way up since last year. But everything in our liquidity-soaked world has performed well and gone up. For as long as equities keep rising on the heels of unprecedented stimulus and monetary intervention then bitcoin is just along for the ride. The real test would come if equities enter a cycle of severe selling and to see bitcoin then hold its own." Open / Comment

2021-03-29 19:19:46 ​​Hacken Foundation is launching its second project disBalancer

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The token Sale Round starts on April 1st at 1 pm (UTC)!

Let’s make the industry safer together! Open / Comment

2021-03-26 20:00:49 ​​No Optimism For Ethereum In March - L2 Scaling Solution Delayed

After ignoring requests to comment on their progress, the team behind Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution, Optimism, finally confirmed that the network's mainnet public launch is not happening in March. Their new "rough estimate" for the launch is now July.

"The expedited timeline took most projects by surprise and we did not give ample notice for our community to prepare for launch. ... In our excitement, we only considered our own needs and failed to consider our partners’ timelines & requirements," the developers said today, adding that they're postponing the launch in favor of a more coordinated community launch.

According to them, an uncoordinated rush into Layer 2 without enough community preparation is dangerous and there's a risk that popular decentralized apps might get forked and launched by adversaries with the intention of defrauding users.

"Our goal is to make sure that foundational projects, infrastructure providers, block explorers, wallets, and token bridges have time to integrate, audit and test," the team said, adding that their main heuristic for opening mainnet to the broader public is "stability and ecosystem readiness."

Layer 1 (L1) is the base protocol (the Ethereum blockchain), while Layer 2 (L2) is any protocol built on top of Ethereum.

As reported, Optimism is an L2 scaling solution, which allows for the Ethereum mainnet to be 'unburdened' from the great number of transactions it has to process. It uses optimistic rollups to achieve lower fees and latency, as well as greater throughput compared to Ethereum L1 alone. The team behind Optimism was funded by venture firm a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) back in November - a round that enabled the latest Optimism hires and with them, expedited timeline.

a16z described Optimism as "an extension of Ethereum, with adherence to Ethereum development paradigms, which results in a very easy transition for developers, wallets and users." Open / Comment

2021-03-23 20:00:43 ​​Prominent Crypto Players Increasingly Angry With Heavily-Backed BitClout

The criticism against what turned out to be one of the most controversial crypto projects this year (so far) is heating up. Many high-profile players are growing increasingly angry with the new, high-profile-investors-backed project called BitClout.

The first question that was in many people's tweets in the past day was 'what's BitClout?' The questions grew in number as many well-known Cryptoverse residents started finding their own profiles on this new blockchain-based social network - and they didn't create them.

At the core of this social crypto-exchange is that users are selling and buying social coins representing the identities of people whose profile it is, that is, they're based on these people's reputations. "Every profile on the platform gets its own coin that anybody can buy and sell", says BitClout, and these are called Creator Coins.

Profiles of 15,000 people have already been scrapped from Twitter and pre-loaded into the platform, "meaning that you can buy and sell their coins even though they’re not on the platform yet," they said. The owner of the Twitter account associated with a profile can claim it.

Additionally, while one needs the network's coins to do anything there, they first need to convert bitcoin (BTC) into BitClout, but apparently can't trade it back.

Some prominent individuals with profiles on BitClout include Messari CEO Ryan Selkis, as well Anderson Kill Partners Stephen Palley and Preston Byrne. Some of them have already asked for their profiles to be taken down, stating that the sites' creators "do not have my consent to monetize my name, likeness and reputation." Palley added: "Even better, you should pull down the site completely and get written consent from people first."

Byrne in particular was vocal about this and the sites' supporters' claims that BitClout is a decentralized version of Twitter, arguing that it's far from decentralization. He referred to these Creator Coins as "shitcoins," and noted that "a good chunk of legal cryptotwitter is looking at the issue." Byrne's profile seems to have been taken down and currently can't be found on BitClout.

Meanwhile, BitClout has some big names behind it, as Coinbase, Sequoia, a16z, Social Capital, DCG, Pantera, Huobi, Winklevoss Capital, North Island Ventures, and others reportedly invested in it.

But criticism rose against them too, with some, like Bitcoin strategist at the Kraken exchange Pierre Rochard, arguing that this is funding a scam, and others, like Unchained Capital's Parker Lewis, joking that, to prove their conviction, investors should sell their BTC and buy BitCloud.

But as for it being a scam, The Breakdown Podcast host Nathaniel Whittemore argued that "it's not a scam in the sense of them going to rug pull and fuck you." Instead, he said, "it's an unholy mashup of Silicon Valley style growth hacking, sociopathy that sometimes stumbles into a good social network, and crypto."

Lastly, there are those worried about potential privacy implications once profiles are claimed.

"Clearly, the platform is fraught with moral and ethical conundrums, but hey, this is crypto. Apparently, Chamath Palihapitiya and Ashton Kutcher have already claimed their accounts, but I could easily see Elon Musk and/or Kim Kardashian, along with a dozen or so other social influencers, coming out with a class-action lawsuit," Quantum Economics founder and CEO Mati Greenspan, said.

He stressed that that American singer Ariana Grande, for example, already has USD 1.14m worth of bitclout-based tokens, however, there doesn't seem to be any way to withdraw them. Open / Comment

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2021-03-20 20:00:34 ​​NFTs Are Selling for Millions, But How Do You Tell a Diamond From a Dud?

With a non-fungible token (NFT)-based digital artwork selling for USD 69.35m, you’d be forgiven for assuming that most NFTs are worth a small — or large — fortune. However, for every multi-million-dollar NFT, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of obscure tokens sold for modest sums.

This raises an important question: with so many NFTs flooding the market, how can a potential buyer appraise the ‘inherent’ value of a non-fungible token and evaluate which types of NFT are most likely to appreciate in value?

Analysts speaking said that, while there’s as much justification to sell NFTs for high (or low) prices as physical artworks or collectibles, modelling their ‘fundamental’ value as if they were stocks is incredibly fraught. At the same time, most experts would expect an NFT market crash to happen sooner or later, even if they also acknowledge that NFTs are here to stay.

According to Messari’s Mason Nystrom, the potential value of a non-fungible token is likely to vary according to its category, and according to what it represents.

“If the NFT is a piece of art or collectible, the value is whatever the market demands. NFTs that can be utilized in games to win prizes like Sorare a digital collectible football platform trading cards have an element of utility that can be valued,” he told.

Additionally, Nystrom also noted that NFTs which represent financial products, such as Nori's Carbon Removal Credits, can be priced similarly to existing products.

When it comes to pricing — or predicting the future price of — NFT artworks or collectibles, it’s very hard to say which particular NFTs will end up attracting a high value.

Frederik Haga, an analyst with Dune Analytics said,

“Some people make a living of buying and selling art and I don't think there's any reason for that not to happen for NFTs as well. However, I do think it's fair to say that it is harder to make a model for the ‘underlying’ value of an NFT than a stock or token for instance.”

Assuming that the creator of an NFT is already a respected artist (or simply a famous celebrity), it may be fair to assume that it will command a high price. That said, predicting whether it will rise higher in the future is probably nearly impossible, while it’s also very difficult to predict which particular NFT of a famous artist or creator will end up being the most valuable.

“Even though Picasso’s life is relatively documented, there is little evidence to suggest he kept his most valuable paintings. So, even artists themselves aren’t always capable of determining which pieces will accrue the most value,” said Mason Nystrom.

For AJBell financial analyst Laith Khalaf, artwork NFTs should be bought only because the work involved holds artistic value for the buyer, and not because of any potential future profit.

“As with any purchase consumers should consider whether they are getting value for money, in terms of what the NFT is worth to them, but I wouldn’t bet on being able to sell it on at a profit. That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to, but that shouldn’t be your primary motivation.”

As Mason Nystrom added, art is inherently subjective: “It doesn’t possess cash flows, nor any sensible metrics for valuation which makes indexing a valuable portfolio strategy.”

On the other hand, he suggested that it may be possible to formulate a reasonable estimation of native tokens belonging to key NFT platforms.

“For other NFTs, it's perhaps easier to bet on NFT ecosystems — tokens that facilitate the NFT market either from an infrastructure or consumer standpoint. For example, various NFT marketplaces or NFT liquidity protocols that possess tokens present an opportunity to bet on the success of NFTs without having to purchase individual NFTs,” he said.

Nystrom suspects that, even if NFTs may outperform NFT platform/protocol tokens in percentage terms, platform tokens will capture more of the value of this market. Open / Comment