The philosophy underpinning blockchain is that no person could or should be in power, as this leads to the abuses and oligarchies that we see in our everyday lives.
Instead, every user is given the ability to decide the best course of action for themselves.
2/ The Basics
Cardano is a decentralized network run by computers called "stake pools" that process the transactions. Users can support these stake pools by delegating ADA, and in turn they receive a reward for keeping the network operational. This action is called "staking".
3/ Voting for Pools
On Cardano, you never lose access to your funds when you stake. Your ADA stays in your wallet, it's not locked, it's more like a vote you continuously cast in the network - and how often stake pools get to process transactions is proportional to their stake.
4/ Future at Stake
Supporting a Stake Pool Operator (SPO) makes them better able to pursue their goals. Staking with them not only increases their chance to mint a block & get paid but indirectly promotes their vision of the chain (like @SmaugPool and pool.pm)
5/ Centralizing Forces
Some early players, like centralized exchanges, built competitive advantages and absorb delegation in a monopolistic fashion as their advantages compounded on themselves.
They weaken the network's strength by making it very difficult for new entrants.
6/ Monopoly
The problem with multipool SPOs is that there's a fixed max amount of pools that can profitably exist at given ADA prices, so stake pools are a zero-sum game. Past a point, multipool SPOs harm the network more than they could possibly contribute via other means.
7/ Multiple Stakepool Operators
It's easy to villainize SPOs with many pools at once, but they're doing the economically rational thing given the current incentive structure. Yet, in so doing, they indirectly worsen the economic outcome of everyone else on the network.
8/ Decentralization is the Crown Jewel
If the network starts being controllable by single entities, then much of the value proposition of crypto disappears as it devolves into an expensive and inefficient Excel spreadsheet, rather than revolutionary censorship-resistant tech.
9/ Retail is Looking for Alternatives
Normal people are realizing that in centralized institutions the game is often rigged against them. They're looking for fairer, more transparent systems. Crypto holds the promise of being this.
If it succeeds, institutions will embrace it.
10/ How Institutions Think
Institutions will go where there's money. If they see enough small fish in the crypto pond, they'll embrace it.
JP Morgan went from having their CEO say he'd fire any trader for holding BTC, to having its own digital payments and blockchain division.
11/ Next Evolution
If we want to expand and become more than a space for gambling, then we must guarantee a fair platform where financial applications are built - we need a decentralized network for digital assets that single entities can't tamper with & normal people can trust.
12/ Responsibility
Digital assets present a radical departure from the status quo, where users are given full control over their actions. In an age of overbearing government policies, this is a breath of fresh air and very rewarding. But not one without risks and obligations.
13/ Decentralization is Your Choice
Especially when starting out, DeFi can be very daunting. Many people default to staying in the supposed safety of centralized exchanges, or the familiarity of large social media personalities with many pools.
Yet this harms us all!
14/ MAV
Cardano's Minimum Attack Vector, or the number of entities that you need to compromise to take control over ADA, is 24. This is better than ETH and BTC but the trend has been downwards, we're becoming less decentralized and losing what makes Cardano worth investing in.
15/ Tragedy of the Commons
Decentralization is like the environment, it's much easier to preserve it while we still have it, than to recover it once lost
Someone that has several pools at once damages the ecosystem, is what they bring to the table worth the price? It depends.
16/ Conclusion
Decentralization is the primary value proposition of digital assets. It might take a while for it to be valued properly by the market, but the day will come.
It's up to us to decide whether we'll be ready when that day comes, or if we’re caught unprepared.
If you enjoyed this thread, please like, retweet the first post, and subscribe to @axotrade 🧵
Make sure to check out our past #TradFiTales series too:
Memecoin fever has gripped Cardano, and it has a lot of people confused. How is it possible that in the midst of the iciest of bear markets, there is still enough dry powder to create a speculative mania?
Today we will be discussing the economics of memecoins.
2/ On the Origin of Memecoins
Memes are units of culture, they’re small packets of information that contain a basic idea that is interesting enough to get passed on and evolve through each generation it exists in.
Memecoins, on the other hand, are tokenized viral ideas.
- Active: Where you make regular decisions to address your investing needs
- Passive: Where you fund a specific strategy & keep doing so indefinitely
Both have their benefits and weaknesses, which we will explore in this thread.
2/ Active Investing
When the average person thinks about investing, they think of active investing - of an investor finding some secret pattern in the data and striking it rich because of it. Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated than that.
DeFi will defy expectations - why on-chain identities are essential for mass adoption of #Cardano.
- Thread Time 🧵-
1/ Intro
Now that the angry dust is clearing from the contingent staking debate, perhaps it's worth discussing why on-chain identity verification can be very important to mass adoption.
It's not without its tradeoffs, but it is needed if we want to fully bloom to our potential
2/ Adoption
If you want to attract the enormous liquidity of financial institutions, you need to allow for TradFi to work in DeFi by allowing legacy operational procedures to work on-chain.
In other words, users need to have freedom to decide how and when transactions execute.
Bears are vicious creatures, you blink for a second, and they can rip away any gains you had with a single swipe.
In this thread, we'll discuss the three genres of assets and how to build a portfolio that can not only survive the bear market but thrive.
2/ Asset Genres
Whether you're talking about stocks, real estate, commodities, etc., they all broadly fall into three broad archetypes that denote their behavior within a complex system:
Cardano is entering the age of Voltaire, the age of community governance.
This is going to be a critical development period, which will, in no small part, determine the future of the blockchain.
In this thread, we'll discuss the pitfalls and solutions to governance.
2/ 1st Principles
The problem that governance seeks to solve is what is termed in finance as the "principal-agent problem" (PAP), as in when stakeholders nominate someone to represent them, but they're unsure if the agent will act in the stakeholder's best interests or their own