1confirmation Portfolio Product Update (Q3 2019)

Richard Chen
The Control
Published in
6 min readSep 30, 2019

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The two most notable cryptocurrency price trends of 2019 are 1) Bitcoin dominance increasing from ~50% to ~70% and 2) BTC price fluctuating from $3.5K in January to a peak of $13K in June down to $8K today. Bitcoin maximalists view #1 as validation that there are no important projects outside of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency skeptics believe that #2 supports the fact that cryptocurrencies are only used for speculation.

We disagree with both claims. Beneath the surface, there are many important projects being built outside of Bitcoin, enabling new use cases outside of speculation. We’ve been focused on backing the teams building these projects. Here’s the latest 1confirmation portfolio product update:

This year, Augur has been working on its v2 launch, which is scheduled for January 2020. The major updates in Augur v2 include markets denominated in Dai (to eliminated ETH price volatility risk for long-term markets), faster market resolution times (to redeem earnings quicker), and invalid as a tradable outcome (to reduce invalid market scams). Augur also announced an affiliate program for v2 to drive referrals to Augur markets; when someone shares an Augur market link, that person will earn a slice of trading fees from trading activity that came from the shared link.

Source: BATGrowth

The long-awaited Brave Ads finally launched in April, in which users can earn BAT for viewing ads that are tailored to their browsing history while preserving their privacy. Brave also added a browser extension to let Twitter users tip BAT to each other using a button added to tweets. Currently Brave supports tips for users on Youtube, Twitch, Reddit, Vimeo, and Github and for creators of verified websites.

Since launch, BAT usage has shown solid growth in the number of websites and publishers supporting BAT and number of users tipping and earning BAT.

Source: bloXroute

This year bloXroute has demonstrated the effectiveness of its blockchain distribution network (BDN) at scaling layer-1 blockchains by conducting tests on the Bitcoin Cash testnet and the Ethereum mainnet. On Bitcoin Cash, bloXroute was able to propagate 32 MB blocks without issue, and on Ethereum, bloXroute reduced block propagation times by 25% on average. Currently large mining pools such as SparkPool, BTC.com, F2Pool, Rawpool, and others are using bloXroute.

bloXroute may have the biggest impact on Ethereum, which has recently seen a congested blockchain and could significantly benefit from a scaling solution. bloXroute allows Ethereum miners increase the gas limit without increasing the the uncle rate. The gas limit recently increased from 8M to 10M in the past and we hope to see a much larger increase as needed as more transactions occur on Ethereum.

Source: Commonwealth

Edgeware conducted the lockdrop for EDG tokens between June 1 and September 15 and had 1.2M ETH ($200M) locked and 4.3M ETH ($730M) signaled, the most successful token distribution we’ve seen so far. Commonwealth also launched their Reddit for governance product.

The Cosmos Hub launched in March after over four years of research and development and token transfers were enabled in April. We shared our detailed thoughts for why we’re excited about Cosmos here. Similar to how Ethereum was a catalyst for the last cryptocurrency boom by enabling complex smart contracts, Cosmos has the potential to be a catalyst for the entire cryptocurrency industry by enabling cross-chain token interoperability and instant finality.

Already, there are several high-quality projects being built on Cosmos SDK, including DLive (which has 5 million MAU), Terra, Binance DEX, Agoric, FOAM, and TruStory. Inter-chain communication within the Cosmos Network is expected to launch end of this year or early 2020.

Source: DeFi Pulse

dYdX launched v2 of their margin trading platform in April 2019, which allows users to long/short and lend/borrow ETH, DAI, and USDC. Since then, dYdX has seen growth in total value locked in their smart contracts.

dYdX also launched their own native market for the ETH-DAI trading pair in addition to sourcing liquidity as before from Eth2Dai and Radar Relay. After implementing limit orders recently, dYdX plans to implement stop loss orders and support more assets, such as popular ERC-20s, for margin trading.

Source: MakerDAO

MakerDAO has proved that a crypto-collateralized stablecoin works in practice. Since launch in January 2018 at the peak of the cryptocurrency bubble, the price of Dai has kept its peg to $1 and active Dai usage continues to grow.

The two major upgrades in the upcoming MakerDAO v2 are Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD) and Dai Savings Rate (DSR). Multi-Collateral Dai will support seven assets for collateral in CDPs — REP, BAT, DGD, ETH, GNT, OMG, and ZRX. For the Dai Savings Rate, users will be able to lock up Dai to earn interest, similar to how Compound and dYdX currently offer money market accounts. The purpose of the DSR is to affect the demand for Dai to maintain its peg to $1. Currently the peg is only maintained through adjusting the stability fee to affect the supply of Dai, and thus the DSR will be an additional tool for MakerDAO governance members to keep Dai stable.

OpenSea partnered with Formula 1 and sold a digital racecar for 415.9 ETH, the second highest NFT sale on record. They also auctioned 3–6 character ENS (Ethereum Name Service) names and had over 123.6 ETH in bids in under a week. After launching ERC-1155 support, they unlocked a host of new Enjin games that are leveraging OpenSea for their marketplaces.

The NFT space is under the radar right now but is poised to break out in the next year. If it does explode, OpenSea is well-positioned as the leading marketplace for NFTs in the world.

1confirmation pre-product portfolio

Other teams we’ve backed to date are still pre-product, but you should expect to hear more soon from Forte, Polkadot, Nervos, and more. The future is bright for use cases of blockchains beyond speculation.

About the author: Richard is a partner at 1confirmation, an early-stage crypto venture fund based in San Francisco. Sign up for the 1confirmation newsletter and don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter.

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