Four things no one tells you about dapps; a short and utterly hilarious bit of crypto fiction from Ben Munster, Lightning Network hiccups, Wyoming enacts innvoative crypto law and PolkaDot is the toast of ETHDenver
Welcome to the Daily Debrief. I am still in Denver where my Tinder date robbed me at gunpoint last night and today is Valentine’s Day. Will ETHDenver never begin?
Our Stuff
Long the bankers. In a resounding affirmation of the blockchain by Wall Street, JP Morgan announced that it was issuing its own stablecoin today. Hulk Copeland provides a good explanation of what it all means and why this is the biggest thing to hit the Cryptoverse since Satoshi pooted forth Bitcoin’s genesis block. Pray thee, read it HERE.
Whither, dapps? Adriana H gives us four insights about dapps, explaining why decentralized applications have yet to take the world by storm, or even generate much interest at all. Her piece offers a blueprint of what’s next in the dappy universe and is well worth a read if you were wondering why you’re still using Twitter rather than one of its decentralized clones. Read here now.
Blockchain: A Valentine’s Day Story. Today, I made history: Decrypt published its first short story, a laff riot—with a crypto mcguffin—written by me! While some people are off “reporting” about JP Morgan and its ludicrous “stablecoin,” others, the sensitive artistes, the real writers, are coming up with original, groundbreaking satire. Here is just a short sampling of blurbs I’ve received this far:
“Comedy gold!”—Ronny Munster (my dad)
So proud! Black Mirror has already reached out and is interested in rendering a screenplay. READ IT HERE FIRST. You’ll be glad you did.
Other Stuff
Greased Lightning. Via our old friend, professional blockchain hater David Gerard, who suggests gently that perhaps Lightning Network-style payment channels aren’t ready for primetime. “They sucked in practice,” Gerard sniffs, pointing skeptics to a blistering Medium post written by Mikhail Nikulin, co-founder and CTO of the Lykke Exchange.
The Blockchain State. Per Caitlin Long, of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition: That state just enacted law that allows people (and more importantly, institutional investors and companies) to have direct ownership of digital assets and digital securities, rather than having to rely on an intermediary. Wyoming has the most innovative crypto laws in the country and is attempting to woo startups to the state.
PolkaDotting. All anyone wants to talk about as ETHDenver gets underway is PolkaDot. I am sure you already know that PolkaDot is sort of an Internet of Blockchains, and attempts to interconnect them all. But what do I know? You really should read today’s Medium post from PolkaDot’s Jack Platts, which does a good job of explaining what all the fuss is about.
The innovations of Bitcoin and Ethereum were powerful enough to inspire waves of developers and entrepreneurs to join the crypto industry, however both systems quickly found their limitations. Polkadot surmounts these limitations not by providing the final general-purpose blockchain, but by providing a composability framework for blockchains to communicate.—via Jack Platts on Medium
Ol’ Stick in the Mud Nouriel Roubini. The NYU professor tweeteth:
In which way has the new alleged JPMorgan crypto coin anything to do with blockchain/crypto? It is private not public, permissioned not permissionless, based on trusted authorities verifying transaction not trustless, centralized not decentralized. Calling it crypto is a joke
Debrief springs forth fully formed from the mind of Ben Munster, who occasionally also writes it. Email him the names of the best places to buy weed in Denver at ben@decryptmedia.com
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Crypto sleuthing firm Chainalysis has added support for Crypto.com’s Cronos blockchain, its native coin CRO, and all CRC-20 tokens that trade on the Cronos chain to its Know Your Transaction service.
This marks the latest upgrade to the Chainalysis KYT service, which flags suspicious and high risk transactions for compliance teams at traditional and crypto financial institutions. The service counts Robinhood (HOOD), BNY Mellon (BK), PayPal (PYPL) and Genesis among its clients.
Cronos is an inte...
It's pretty well known that lots of crypto people have moved into Clubhouse, the hot, audio-based social media platform. The biggest group? Black Bitcoin Billionaires, which claims 17,000 members.
Now Square Inc., via its CashApp, is partnering with the group's organizer, Lamar Wilson, to create more Black millionaires through Bitcoin via “Operation: Satoshi Millionaire.” The month-long campaign began February 4 and focuses on getting Bitcoin into the hands of more Black families, and educating...
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Poyo no! There’s a scammer running amok on Augur. “Poyo,” a mysterious figure associated with a wad of defunct markets, has been exploiting the prediction market’s “invalidity rules,” in which funds staked on badly worded/constructed markets are redistributed evenly to bettors once the market is shuttered. By deliberately designing these markets to guarantee their failure, Poyo has been profiting off this redistribution of funds...
