1confirmation Portfolio Product Update (Q1 2018)
Our fund thesis is to invest in the products that the cryptocurrency community wants and needs right now. There’s a passionate community of crypto-natives who have strong demand to use products that empower people globally in new ways and we’re focused on supporting teams building these products.
After six months investing, we’ve backed five projects and they all fit that thesis. One of the projects has a live product and four are still pre-product but making good progress towards launch.
Here’s an update on the status of the products:
MakerDAO: On December 18th, 2017 the Dai stablecoin went live on the Ethereum Mainnet. People are now using the Maker CDP system every day to get leverage on their ETH, and people are using Dai every day to store value in a stable cryptocurrency. There’s ~$14.9M Dai outstanding and ~$500K worth of Dai trading daily on decentralized exchanges like Paradex and Radar Relay, which use Dai as the quote currency that other tokens are priced in. ETH is the only collateral used in the system currently and despite ETH decreasing in value by over 80% since it all-time high in January, Dai has stayed stable.
The major product improvement coming in the late Q2/early Q3 time frame is the transition to multi-collateral Dai, which will allow the total market value and volume of Dai to greatly expand by first adding DGX as collateral (a gold-backed ERC20 token) More types of collateral will be added in the future. As the ecosystem continues to build out around Dai (see Oasis Direct above as one example of a useful product built on top of Dai), we think Dai has a real chance to be a foundational stablecoin for the decentralized web.
1protocol: The cryptocurrency community needs a simple, trustless way to earn interest for staking coins and the 1protocol team plans to offer this product, with a target launch sometime later this year.
Such a product can only exist if there are legitimate stake-based networks live in the market and those do not really exist yet. The team has been tinkering with different protocols but hasn’t yet found the right one to launch a product with — more soon!
dYdX: The team is hard at work building a decentralized derivatives protocol and is targeting a Mainnet launch in late Q2/early Q3 this year. Trustless shorting of ERC20 tokens is something that the ecosystem strongly demands and that is what dYdX is building.
Basecoin: Basecoin is another stablecoin project that is taking a different approach to achieving price stability: an algorithmic monetary policy that adjusts the supply based on the price of the coin. You can read the whitepaper here: http://www.getbasecoin.com/basecoin_whitepaper_0_99.pdf
Basecoin is currently pre-product, but plans to launch a Testnet in the near future.
bloXroute: The team announced the project a few weeks ago, and is is now hard at work proving out the scalability solution with various blockchain teams including Bitcoin Unlimited. The goal is to have a live test net integration by late Q2 or early Q3 to prove out the viability of this scalability solution. By focusing on optimizing the p2p networking layer of the blockchain stack, the ultimate goal is to make many blockchains useable for every day transactions by billions of people..
We’ll be sharing this 1confirmation portfolio product update quarterly and hope to be sharing many more live products in the coming months!
