This specific paper resulted in a company, Surety, and a patent: the first blockchain patent, with the use case of time-stamping digital files - a use case much touted about today, but that has been possible to achieve since the 90's. The WSJ takes a super cool look at a paper mentioned in the Bitcoin paper. The Eureka Moment That Made Bitcoin Possible I’m an e-resident of Estonia, so we’ll keep you updated on what it will look like in the end. In any case, an ICO for a national cryptocurrency is just a pure idiocy, while instead having a crypto-fiat, especially if with different value systems and different distribution than the current fiat is an idea that intrigues us a lot. Reading the title made us go “Thank god”, but then reading the article made us go ?Īpparently Estcoin won’t be a new “currency” but it will still be some kind of token that “will proceed as a means for transactions inside the e-resident community”. I think that’s enough for security tokens this week! Estonia Scales Down Plan to Create National Cryptocurrency So he’s main point is: yes, it’s technically possible, but why on earth would you use a blockchain for that? “The token itself is an abstraction that derives value not just from the asset itself, but from the institutions that assure that abstraction maps to the value we wish to “own.”” Tokens (Don’t) Rule Everything Around Me - Thoughts On Security TokensĬontinuing on that line of thought, Parker also outlines his bearish views on ‘security tokens’, summarised neatly by this sentence: I think here the debate is starting to go round in circles because we keep calling these things ‘tokens’, when they are in fact just ‘digital securities’ and they already exist in some form.
Michael however admits some new types of tokenized securities uniquely enabled by decentralized protocols would indeed by interesting (eg a security NFT representing a single wine bottle or vintage). Michael’s argument is that all the beautiful things security tokens are supposed to enable or solve are already largely possible today, or there’s a very good reason why they are not implemented already in traditional securities (ie feature rather than bug). This is a contrarian post that we missed last week and that would have been a great counter to Stephen McKeon’s “The Security Token Thesis” covered in our previous issue. ?Thoughts What the Heck Are Tokenised Securities? If the $4B value is true, then this was the most masterful fundraise ever created, with the daily sale auction gimmick. Would be really nice for total transparency to have an official final sum from the company verified by reputable auditors. PPS: Stefano is still massively skeptical about the $4B sum, given the rolling nature of the offering and the opportunities for arbitrage, but Block.one clearly states in the EOS FAQ that they would not engage this practice, promising an independent 3rd party audit at some point. PS: Tezos betanet is also coming very soon. In the meanwhile, we keep scratching our heads, but perhaps we are just too old school: with the Ethereum network at a unique junction, the real Dapp platform war is probably just about to unfold and may indeed be played according to a whole new set of rules.
Not to mention the dozens of EOS related scammy phishing emails that we all got in the last few days, and many fell for sadly. The Twitter EOS account denied the delay saying most bugs had already been fixed, while Dan Larimer offered $10k in bounties for finding other ‘critical bugs’.
No lack of last minute drama either, with news of ‘ epic vulnerabilities’ in the code spreading online this week suggesting the long awaited launch could be delayed. From now on it will stop operating it, retaining 10% of all EOS supply and 100% of the proceeds raised, without having yet clearly outlined uses of capital, beyond committing to a number of ecosystem funds to the tune of $1B.
On June 2nd Block.one has also released v1.0 of the EOS.IO Software under an open-source licence. To put things in perspective, there have been only two IPOs (with a “P”) that have raised more capital in 2018 so far, as the author points out.
The EOS madness Investors Bet $4 Billion on a Cryptocurrency Startupīy the time we publish this issue, the year-long ICO for EOS tokens orchestrated by Block.one would have ended, raising in total north of $4B worth of ether.