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Top shelf
Enterprise solutions EY has unveiled a new Ethereum-based, enterprise-grade blockchain solution called the OpsChain Network Procurement. The platform is designed to enable companies to run private end-to-end procurement activities by allowing buyers and sellers to operate as networks, while automatically tracking volumes and spend and utilizing agreed terms and pricing. The platform utilizes open-source software including the Microsoft-backed Baseline Protocol and operates on the public Ethereum blockchain, CoinDesk's Sebastian Sinclair reports.
Massive Stimulus Package If you own XRP, then we have a little something to share. To mitigate the economic downturn, Ripple has launched stimulus packages for its investors, through the Community Incentive Plan and Support Outreach Program. Previously reserved for enterprise customers, a batch of over $5.2 billion XRP is now unlocked for RippleNet users. You can register by whitelisting your address, enabling you to enjoy returns of up to 27%. There's no time to lose since funds are limited.
Rising Stars With the vision of attracting more users, the Stellar Foundation had approved the strategy of rewarding new and old users with additional Lumens. The long due Staking Plan, thankfully, has commenced now during global distress, thereby relieving investors. The foundation has injected billions of XLM out of which, whatever is unused, will be assigned back to the Foundation's reserve. Users will be incentivized with the help of a time-based staking algorithm as described in their blog post.
Under The Radar Under the pressure of the ongoing federal investigation of its "wash trading" practices during the initial EOS allocation, Block.One is resorting to soliciting forfeiture of its digital assets in favor of the current holders. While this is a clear attempt to dodge legal responsibility, the company is also hoping to evade the overdue taxes and possibly enormous penalties, that are yet to be disclosed. Since it seems that all accounts are eligible for the somehow forced redistribution, and keeping in mind that the funds are limited, we invite EOS holders to check out the following article.
DeFi goes NFT The excitement in DeFi has shifted to the NFT market, CoinDesk's Brady Dale reports. NFTs, one-of-a-kind tokens made possible by Ethereum's ERC-721 standard, have not captivated investor attention until quite recently when people realized these digital collectibles could be used for yield farming. Platforms like NIFTEX have enabled NFT indices, Rarible has added a native token and Uniswap's liquidity pools are creating new avenues for financialization – a trend Dale traces back to John Lyall's MEME experiment.
CoinDeskU Universities are often key to getting new industries off the ground, providing the infrastructure to take paradigm-shifting ideas to the next level. But in blockchain and digital finance technology, how do they measure up?
Introducing CoinDesk U, a ranking of the top 20 schools identified in our research in collaboration with Mousebelt.
During a special CoinDesk Live episode on Oct. 6, we will release the results of the first CoinDesk U ranking. We are inviting students from around the U.S. as well as representatives from student club networks, the crypto industry and leading institutions to discuss traditional academia's relevance and support for the financial technology poised to fuel Web 3.0.
Watch CoinDesk Live: Can Old Schools Teach New Tech on CoinDesk.com, Twitter and YouTube. Learn more.
Growing the pie Uniswap is now bigger than the entire decentralized finance space just two months ago, as the trading protocol becomes the first to pass the $2 billion milestone. Uniswap clocked the record figure just after midnight (UTC) Monday, according to crypto rankings website DeFi Pulse. The next biggest DeFi project, peer-to-peer lending platform Maker, trails slightly behind Uniswap at $1.96 billion in total value locked (TVL), according to DeFi Pulse. There's now more than $11 billion in TVL in the DeFi ecosystem, with Uniswap making up approximately 18% of that.
Join CoinDesk Research for the fourth and final episode of How to Value Bitcoin, our live webinar series covering Bitcoin fundamentals.
On Oct. 6, Delphi Digital head of research Yan Liberman will dive into collective profit and loss taking (CPLT), hodlwaves and the ins and outs of the money analysis. Register to join How to Value Bitcoin: UTXO-Based Fundamentals (Part 2).
Market intel
Exchanges down? The balance of bitcoin on major exchanges has hit its lowest levels since November 2018, potentially signalling a bullish view from bitcoin holders, as they move to longer-term holding strategies, such as cold wallets. Additionally, a rise in new investors during the coronavirus pandemic has led to a growth in "white glove" services, meaning fewer bitcoin on exchanges and more in managed portfolios. Another possible explanation? Bitcoin is being moved to tokenization solutions for use in the DeFi ecosystem, CoinDesk's Muyao Shen reports.
invest: etheruem economy The move to ETH 2.0 will bring the Ethereum network ever closer to fulfilling its original vision: that of a "world computer" that plays host to a parallel, decentralized financial system. Will it be the rocket fuel that takes Ethereum's financial engine mainstream?
CoinDesk's invest: ethereum economy virtual event Oct. 14 will address the ramifications for investors of the sweeping changes underway within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Keynote speakers and panelists including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman and CEO Heath P. Tarbert will offer deep dives into Ethereum's adoption of a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, sharding and other elements of its impending 2.0 upgrade, as well how the new framework impacts the rapidly advancing business of DeFi, stablecoins and decentralized exchanges.
Joon Ian Wong, a member of the social token incubator Seed Club and former CoinDesk events organizer and reporter, writes about the future of media, as part of the Internet 2030 series.
Substack won't save us... Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of "content" and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.
The solution, according to various media innovation prognosticators, is the "passion economy." The argument goes that, since anyone can create content now, it follows that the lumbering media institutions of the past will be unbundled and replaced with a swarm of individuals: Smart, sharp, upstart newsletter writers, podcasters and maybe even TikTokkers. Substack will save us… hopefully.
But there's just one problem. The tooling of the legacy web isn't fit to usher in this new era of publishing. If we believe that first we make our tools, and then they make us – that aphorism so often misattributed to Marshall MacLuhan – we must examine each layer of tooling involved in creating and distributing our stories. This is the media stack, as the polymath provocateur Balaji Srinivasan calls it.
And the media stack as it exists today is found wanting. The most powerful layers of distribution, payment and production remain entangled in oligopolistic platforms where the platform's owners – not the creators fueling those systems profit the most.
How to cut through those bonds? You guessed it, this is where I make an argument for cryptocurrencies. An open-source, internet-native monetary layer is the makeweight that could tilt value back in favor of writers, broadcasters and other creators, as well as the communities that support them.
This is the notion of the "Renaissance creator," as Jarrod Dicker of the Washington Post has called it. Every writer is also a publisher. The roles are flattened to optimise for agility and impact. But the model can be taken one step further. Sari Azout, of Level Ventures, argues for a "participatory economy" where fans benefit alongside media creators.
We see an early glimpse of how cryptocurrencies can tie fans and creators together with a preliminary "lean token design" proposed by the Web 3.0 tinkerer and my colleague Brian Flynn. Media creators today can issue their own cryptographic token and design distribution and incentives around it to trigger a virtuous cycle for themselves and their fans. A simple token economics model could help media creators bootstrap funding for new projects, reward early fans and rally communities towards a common goal. In short, communities should be tokenized.
But these are early days. Just as bitcoin has offered us a decade of permissionless value-transfer over the internet, years more of exploration for more equitable and more creative media products lies ahead of us. And that's both a challenge and a gift.
Have an idea for what the future of the internet will look like, reach out to daniel@coindesk.com.
XRP, XLM, EOS - 3 blockchains that take the spotlight with their Community Programs for distribution and staking