1/ Long Reads Sunday 17. I don’t if it was the momentum wake of big institutional announcements, the battle for interpretation around stablecoin instability, or something else entirely, but crypto brains 🧠 popped off this week. Cancel your plans, it’s long reads time. 👇 
2/ The week kicked off with what some called the biggest news of the year - the announcement of Fidelity Digital Assets by the 3rd largest asset manager in the world. @MessariCrypto breaks down the details.
3/ It’s only one small detail, but it’s telling that on the day of the announcement, the new Fidelity group published a medium post surveying the pre-Bitcoin history of digital cash. Contextual awareness of crypto history matters for a big firm
4/ Fidelity wasn’t the only significant institutional news of the week. On Thursday, news broke that Goldman Sachs and @novogratz Galaxy had invested in competing crypto custodian @BitGo
5/ Following these two major custody announcements, @brucefenton dug in with this 10 minute video about the topic, incl. how institutional custody and “not your keys, not your coins” co-exist. Key point: many holders do not *want* to control their keys.
6/ For more in-depth analysis of the Wall St-Crypto relationship that goes beyond these banner headlines, there’s no one like @CaitlinLong_ This thread focuses on, among other things, the emergent choice of self-custody or holding with a broker/dealer
7/ The other big conversation that kicked off the week was Tether. After a couple weeks of heightened FUD, USDT started losing its peg last weekend, leading to a whole bunch of chaotic price action and speculation. I tried to sum it up on Monday AM
8/ A couple days later, the USDT price had started to stabilize, but the Qs of what it meant for crypto remained. @CarpeNoctom TL;DR’d that on the one hand, stablecoin comp is good for consumers, but on the other, USDT remains a single point of failure
9/ @zhusu and @hasufl pointed out that it appears that $600m worth of Tether has been retired in the last 9 days, and that perhaps rather than a chaotic dismantling of crypto, this is a graceful unwinding of an asset that has served its purpose medium.com/@hasufly/tethe…
10/ A few weeks ago, @Travis_Kling predicted “weaponized FUD” as those with interests in other competing stablecoins (or those who profit from volatility) could exploit USDT worries for their own gain. @CryptoMacro points out that is exactly what happened
11/ For those who want a deeper dive conversation on Fidelity, Tether FUD & more, check out last week’s Long Reads Live, featuring @Obstropolos @crypto_bobby @amandapfrankel @lawmaster @fintechfrank
12/ Another theme this past week was the global macro context of crypto, specifically China. @Melt_Dem highlights the simmering conversation about RMB as a global reserve currency & what a central bank crypto from China would mean.
13/ What would (will?) happen when Facebook launches a cryptocurrency of its own? @real_vijay explores that notion in this thread. Honestly, the scale of FB makes this conversation best suited to sit next to the idea of a central bank issued crypto
14/ The trade war has also made it to cryptoland. @APompliano pointed out that, due to two rounds of sanctions, crypto mining hardware now costs 27.6% more in America than it did in the early part of the year, which could lead to American miner relocation offthechain.substack.com/p/crypto-is-ca…
15/ Speaking of the macro context, in this essay as part of @coindesk's series on the 10th anniversary of the Satoshi white paper, @CharlieShrem reflects on the true disruption of making a non-state backed currency viable. coindesk.com/bitcoins-white…
16/ One the absolutely most fascinating pieces of the week came from @hosseeb, who asked “Why isn’t Bitcoin banned everywhere?” Ultimately exploring whether Bitcoin is not, in fact, actually a threat to sovereigns. The definition of a Sunday Long Read. hackernoon.com/why-isnt-bitco…
17/ Like I mentioned above, this week was full of <fire> essays and threads. @pierre_rochard articulates the concept of and 6 groups who comprise the “buyers of last resort” who break the negative feedback loop at the bottom of a market. medium.com/@pierre_rochar…
18/ Speaking of Bitcoin fundamentals @PositiveCrypto introduced the concept of “Bitcoin Network Momentum” which tracks the relationship between BTC price and Tx volume. Specifically, he argues that BTC daily tx volume is a leading indicator to BTC price blog.goodaudience.com/bitcoin-networ…
19/ And speaking of BTC price, @MustStopMurad shared why he believes that there is at least one more big flush to come in the market that will leave the price of BTC between $2800 on the low end and $4500 on the high.
20/ Of course, there is more to the crypto markets than price. @mattgcondon writes on @tokendaily about the implications of one of the most important concepts in the space: self-sovereign identity and true digital asset ownership tokendaily.co/blog/what-does…
21/ From the exciting technical development files, this week Monero introduced Bulletproofs. @LucasNuzzi summed up why they’re so important, noting they can increase the privacy of tx while decreasing their size.
22/ There were a number of interesting threads around Ethereum and POS as well. @econoar wrote this thread explaining why he thinks we need more discussion around the economics of Ethereum’s Casper PoS
23/ Speaking of economics, @cburniske highlighted research from @sebastianhrw on value accrual and the Fat Protocols thesis. The thread and related post have a ton of insight about the landscape, even if it remains hard to draw strong conclusions
24/ Fat Protocols was, for a time, a driving force behind many VC investment theses. To see how one firm’s thesis has evolved, check out @fabric_vc’s State of the Token Market report
25/ Checking in on another formerly hot idea, @ragnarly writes some observations about the state of security token offerings from companies who raised via STO over the past few years
26/ At least all the fund managers who drove STOs & ICOs and other 3-letter acronyms are doing fine right? Maybe not. In this thread, Pomp argues that many funds are likely to be victims of their own success and unable to reach previous returns, shut down
27/ If those sober assessments hit you just right, and you want an even bigger break from the hype train, you can’t do better than Tim May’s 30-year perspective on crypto, quotes and summarized here by @patrissimo
28/ If these assessments seem bleak, remember that destroying is a necessary part of creative destruction. The BUIDL is still strong: +@dydxprotocol new $10m raise +#DeFi member expansion + “App mining”
29/ And then, of course, there’s the real exploratory ideas. Mad scientists @lwsnbaker @pjkershawnz are back with an idea for a decentralized autonomous gaming cooperative that is a full on experiment in new types of crypto incentives medium.com/@PJKershaw/bab…
30/ The point is not just that things are interesting, but that they’re evolving in ways too numerous to possibly track - even with a 30-deep thread. And with that, we close for the week. As always, let me know what was great and what I missed. Thanks for reading.
31/ Find LRS wherever you are:
+email: getrevue.co/profile/nlw
+archive: whittemore.io
+Long Reads Live - live crypto chat 7pm EST Mondays: youtube.com/c/nathanielwhi…
+Long Reads Live podcast iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lon…
+LRL Podcast home: nlwcrypto.libsyn.com
+email: getrevue.co/profile/nlw
+archive: whittemore.io
+Long Reads Live - live crypto chat 7pm EST Mondays: youtube.com/c/nathanielwhi…
+Long Reads Live podcast iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lon…
+LRL Podcast home: nlwcrypto.libsyn.com
H/t to @MattWalshInBos for this epic cartoon.
32/ I'm getting sloppy and missed this one. This post by @mattdlockyer builds off of @Obstropolos's "Futility Token" piece from last week, and is a great recap of theses for why tokens would be valuable and where those theses stand today. hackernoon.com/money-for-noth…
