It's all about automating information flows and the evolution of the crypto investor.
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Currently if you want updates on assets outside the top 10 you’re out of luck if you only follow crypto news publications and twitter.
The result is you have to follow all these projects manually.
The problem of course is that staying on top of all these projects is an extremely time consuming process that requires scouring a wide range of disparate and idiosyncratic sources for high signal information.
It’s nearly impossible to do on your own and will only become more so as this industry scales.
Industry growth means, more projects, more updates, and ever increasing complexity.
This issue becomes even more important when you consider the evolving role of the crypto investor.
Crypto investors cannot just be passive participants otherwise they’ll miss out on key governance decisions and even rewards.
Investing in protocols is an active game.
Messari Enterprise automates the process of staying on top of the top 100 cryptoassets for you.
It delivers you concise and actionable information so that you are always on top of and prepared for any and all changes for assets you hold.
In a fast moving market, Enterprise has become an essential part of my process and I don’t say that just because I work at Messari, but because it literally helps me make money investing in this market.
To me it is when a protocol is designed from the ground up so that its token is an integral part of the protocol and involved in the value creation process, rather than just serving to extract rent.
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Over the past year in DeFi there’s been a renewed interest among the community in value accrual mechanisms for tokens.
Due to a combination of opportunism and naivete, the 2017 ICO era was flush with utility tokens that attempted to jam useless tokens into new projects.
Along this line of thinking, even if a token does implement some kind of fee capture it’s much better to reinvest those earnings rather than distribute as dividends.
UNI implicitly does this by not extracting fees from LPs (fee switch off).
This industry’s obsession with dividends is a backlash to the useless utility tokens from 2017.
Yes it’s important for tokens to have the potential to accrue value.
But earnings potential is not the same as dividends.
One of the more thought provoking essays I’ve read on Ethereum in a while.
In short Ethereum wins not by challenging nation states head-on for monetary supremacy like Bitcoin, but by growing its own digital economy until it surpasses that of the dominant sovereign powers.
“History teaches us that there’s only one viable method for a challenger willing to replace the current monetary reserve: it has to grow its own economy till the point it matches, and eventually surpasses, that of the main global power of the moment — currently, the U.S.”
This is a mental model I’ve long agreed with as well.
Bitcoin - a digital challenger to gold
Ethereum - a digital challenger to sovereign jurisdictions
Bitcoin : Digital Gold :: Ethereum : Digital Economy
What’s most impressive about fair launched projects like $YFI and $SUSHI is that they were both able to create billion dollar enterprises in just months without a dime of upfront investment.
Blockchains fundamentally collapse the costs of launching and scaling networks to zero.
Decentralized computing infrastructure is powerful.
Blockchains are shared public infrastructure, and if you design the right set of rules and incentives on top of them, users and capital will self-organize to create novel institutions that are global, open, and permanent.
This is why so many people in DeFi are excited by $YFI.
It is the best example of how blockchains collapse the costs of launching networks to zero, and provide the foundation for truly grassroots, internet native, self-organized institutions.