Why do we fight? A framework suggests deeper reasons — By Yassine Elmandjra and Arjun Balaji Conflicts raging within “crypto” are endless. Heated debates take place on a wide spectrum of issues, with little attempt to devise compromises acceptable to both sides. Interestingly, it is the same people who consistently position themselves on opposite sides of these issues. From monetary…

Grading Grin among a sea of cryptocurrency distribution models — By Hasu and Arjun Balaji When Grin launched in early January after years of anticipation, it faced material pushback from prominent Bitcoiners who labeled it a “VC coin” and compared it to offerings from the 2016/18 ICO era. We think that criticism is unjustified as Grin’s launch was one of…

A historical and technical overview — MimbleWimble, a blockchain protocol focused on fungibility, privacy, and scalability, was released in the wild in July 2016 on IRC channel #bitcoin-wizards by pseudonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor. The paper proposed a novel way of combining transactions to improve the privacy features in a public blockchain. Jedusor’s paper was built on…

My thoughts on the state of crypto in 2018 and where we’re headed — As another year wraps up, I started writing an email to close friends and investors on the “state of crypto” and my forecasts. As it got longer, it turned into this sprawling post. A few notes: This write up contains wide-ranging theses and obvious biases (my own) and is by…

Reorganizing the firm presents new principal-agent problems — The Zcash founder’s reward is likely the best founder-alignment mechanism that has been designed in the (brief) history of crypto-networks. The majority of participants in today’s cryptocurrency ecosystem weren’t around for the initial launch of most of these networks — a time where any project launching without a fair mining…

Let’s stop playing pretend and start building — Crypto projects are raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but they’re rarely treated as real fiduciaries. Investors have relaxed due diligence because of “liquidity” in the form of a never-before-seen greater fool to hand off poor investments to. Combined with inexperienced mostly-dev teams, first time founders, and Series…

Wait, did we just put Beanie Babies on a blockchain? — Short answer: kinda, yeah. Paintings, sculptures, coins, dinosaur bones — people have long put their money into artifacts that help define their identity since the beginning of civilization. The talk of the town over the last several months has been around digital or “crypto-collectibles”. One definition of crypto-collectibles from Decentraland:

An ELI5 explanation of ASICs, decrypting marketing speak from the tech. — “ASIC resistance” has been a popular buzzword that many alt-coins use to describe their relative advantages. As with much of the technical jargon used when describing different cryptocurrencies, it’s important to distill this to first principles. Is this marketing speak or a legitimate feature? What are ASICs? 🤷 ASIC stands…