Here’s a thought exercise: what is the most impactful thing you could make in just 10 days? Thirty years before creating the crypto-enabled Brave browser in 2015, Brendan Eich was a young developer at Netscape, the company Marc Andreessen co-founded with fellow entrepreneur and computer scientist Jim Clark after coding the first web browser as a student at the University of Illinois. Eich was charged with creating a working prototype of a new computer scripting language in a week in order to compete with Microsoft. He succeeded, and what is now known as JavaScript is the most popular programming language, used by 68% of developers according to a survey by…
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Liquid Staking Issues & Perils
There are efforts to mitigate centralization, but extreme market volatility risks contagion
In our recent article Staking and Liquid Staking: a Primer we covered the fact that staking is rapidly becoming a substantial ecosystem of its own, including via increasing uptake from institutional investors. We explained the differences between simply staking tokens and liquid staking, which enables investors to pledge their tokens but also achieve liquidity by receiving a new token known as a liquid staking token (LST) or liquid staking derivative (LSD), which is typically deployed in decentralized finance (DeFi) to earn yield or other benefits. Sounds great, so what’s the catch? Well, in addition to the potential catches inherent in any young and relatively untested technology – crypto generally but…
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Thawing Out Cold Storage
Putting some BTC to work in DeFi while keeping the rest offline
With a market capitalization of $660 billion as of this writing, bitcoin is not only the first and oldest cryptocurrency, it’s the largest store of value – fully 53% of the total value of all cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. And bitcoin true believers are notorious for holding onto their BTC for the long term. In April the percentage of BTC that had not moved in 2 years hit an all-time high of 53%, and almost 29% of all bitcoin in circulation hadn’t moved in 5 years ($150 billion of market cap at the time). In fact, it’s a notable event when a very old BTC address sends funds for the…
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Staking and Liquid Staking: a Primer
Part 1 of Staking: benefits and challenges for the crypto ecosystem
Staking – the practice of providing one’s tokens to help operate and secure a network, usually in exchange for rewards – is rapidly becoming a substantial ecosystem of its own as the number and market capitalization of cryptocurrencies using a “proof of stake” (PoS) consensus mechanism to verify transactions continues to grow (in contrast to electricity-intensive “proof of work” chains like Bitcoin). Staked / Kraken’s State of Staking Q2 report cataloged a number of impressive growth stats. While proof of stake’s share of the total crypto market cap increased only 2% quarter over quarter to 23%: The value of staked assets rose 61% to $68 billion Market cap of the…
