Polygon's business development team is an absolute machine

Let's take a look at 10 of its latest partnerships 🧵👇 1/ DraftKings

The sports betting company created its NFT marketplace via a partnership with Polygon. Draft Kings also runs its own validator node with around 55 million MATIC staked.

Starkware, ZK Rollups and L3s will redefine Ethereum scaling.

Time to find out how 🧵 👇 1/ Blockchains are computational integrity machines by trust in large numbers.

Anyone can regulate a blockchain - aka check the integrity of all transactions - but this is extremely hard to scale and results in a continuous increase in the resources required to verify.

How much money do you think an artist makes for every 1M streams on Spotify?

Only $4K... and that assumes the artist owns 100% of the master, which they rarely do.

Could crypto be a solution to better monetization and innovation in the music industry? 🧵 👇 1/ Turrrible streaming economics is just one of the many challenges for artists:

- Royalties take a long time to be paid out (months)
- Record labels get 50-80% of royalties
- Lack of fanbase data
- Minimal price discrimination

You've heard the term "Ethereum Client" but you have no idea what that means...

Time to learn 🧵 👇 1/ A blockchain is a distributed ledger maintained and propagated by a network of computers that verify blocks and transactions according to an agreed-upon specification.

The network’s rules are encoded in specialized software that each computer downloads and runs.

Ethereum's censorship risk

3 potential outcomes 🧵 👇 1/ Last week, the US Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash, causing ripple effects across crypto:

- Github took down Tornado's codebase & accounts
- A Tornado developer was arrested
- USDC froze related tokens
- Infura/Alchemy/DeFi front-ends censored related addresses

USDC blacklisted several Ethereum accounts last week, freezing their token balances.

But aren't token transfers permissionless? Here's how they did it 🧵 👇 1/ Tokens like USDC are simply numbers stored on an Ethereum token contract. Very different from the physical tokens we imagine in our heads.

These token contracts, using the ERC20 standard, contain parameters/data like token supply, inflation rate and ownership balances.

How do privacy protocols like Tornado Cash work? 🧵 👇 1/ A tumbler/mixer is a service in which you can mix traceable coins with other “clean” tokens in an effort to make it harder to trace the original source.

Think of it like a blender.

Two of crypto's top traders step into a room...

@cmsholdings and @AviFelman episode just dropped 🔥

Sneak peek 🧵 ↓ 1/ Crypto has been subject to the whims of macro in 2022, trading as a levered bet on equities but with additional regulatory/contract risk.

Today, crypto is a speculation tool, and speculation tools just follow liquidity.

Bitcoin miners are fighting to stay solvent

1. What happened?
2. How are miners responding?
3. Will they survive the bear market?

We explain everything in this thread 🧵 1/ What do you do if you are a Bitcoin miner in March 2020 and you see the start of a bull run?

You raise capital, order ASICs, build infrastructure and mine that sweet Bitcorn.

He Bought $600M Worth of Bitcoin 🧵

The future of Bitcoin and DeFi by Eric Peters: 1/ DeFi, in its current form, won't exist 💡

Eric believes that if you want to bring the financial system onto crypto rails, you must implement KYC and AML.

Non-regulated DeFi will still exist, but that's not where [most] users will be.

1/ CeFi's contagion wouldn't have happened if it was all on-chain

Maybe, but it's a weak argument.

Here's why 🧵 2/ An analogy for crypto & interactions with CeFi is autonomous cars

Autonomous car designers wish only driverless cars were allowed (aka all on-chain), but human-driven cars will be on the road for the foreseeable future.

You have to plan risk mgmt & systems around this.

Crypto funds are closing shop

Breakdown as to why 🧵 1/ Hedge funds and their GPs (general partners) make money in two ways:

Mgmt Fees = a ~2% fee on a fund's AUM (assets under management)

So for a $1B fund, GPs will make $20M in mgmt fees to pay for operating expenses, salaries, etc.

1/ Is Illuvium the Pokémon of Web3?

@KieranWarwick from @illuviumio explains how Illuvium will be the first AAA game in crypto. 🧵 ↓ 2/ Illuvium ✔️

Illuvium is an open-world exploration, NFT creature collector and auto battler game built on Ethereum and Immutable X.