Learning Market N°1
Here are some of my recommended reads, Twitter threads and podcasts, with brief summaries and comments.
We are definitely going through a lot of pain in crypto. No one knows when (or if) it’s going to end.
Some people call it a Bear market. Others the Build market.
I call it the Learning Market.
Time to study, learn, and be one step ahead of everybody else when the next bull run hits.
In this new series, I’ll be sharing some of the content I read and listen to.
I’ll provide some of the key points too.
By no means these “summaries” are supposed to give you the entire knowledge of the article/whitepaper/document. They are meant to spike your curiosity.
If something interests you, go ahead, read it all, and go far beyond.
Reach out if you don’t get something. We can all learn together.
3 Recommended Reads
1) Back to the Basics: Uniswap, Balancer, Curve by Kirill Naumov
Uniswap was inspired by an idea of an automated market maker posted by Vitalik Buterin in 2016.
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are decentralized exchanges that create pools of liquidity (tokens) deposited by users and price the assets within the pool using algorithms.
Balancer is an AMM that allows the permissionless creation of liquidity pools with up to 8 tokens in any ratio. In simple terms, while Uniswap pools consist of two assets, Balancer extended the idea and created a formula for pools of n assets with arbitrary weights.
Curve Finance aims to provide sufficient liquidity with little slippage for like assets (for example, UDSC and UDST).
Also, understand the Curve Wars.
2) Metaverse Land: What Makes Digital Real Estate Valuable by a16z
Metaverse platforms can give our digital spaces a sense of physical structure and geography, creating new ways to explore and interact within them.
People use digital spaces when they create opportunities not available in the “outside option” of the physical world. This means that the value of those spaces is determined by the activities people want to engage in there, and how the affordances of digital space support those activities.
The metaverse will always be the go-to when it affords experiences that are not available in the physical world.
Digital real estate has always had value. What’s different about web3 is that digital asset paradigms like NFTs make it possible for individuals to uniquely own – not just rent – specific pieces of digital real estate and metaverse land and locations for private or shared use.
Metaverse platforms have their own forms of scarcity. The value of a piece of metaverse land and real estate is given by how people’s activities inform its use.
What matters is how people will use the metaverse’s various spaces; how well-suited a digital space is to those activities; and how overall valuable those activities are to users.
The ability to create beyond the boundaries of classical designs (or even physics) is one of the biggest benefits of digital space. Some metaverse worlds’ principal benefit will be in the freedom they give users to build whatever they want.
Digital land can be especially valuable to users when it sits atop a platform architecture that’s already popular.
3) Axelar, Bridges, and Blockchain Globalization by Haseeb Qureshi
Blockchain interoperability is more than a feature — it is the conduit through which the blockchain economy will undergo “cross-chain globalization.”
For emerging blockchains, bridges are essential to the inflow of assets and users.
If two-way bridges are banks, how do these banks compete? It’s simple: they compete on the sizes of their balance sheets (including the implicit “state” balance sheet). The biggest, most capitalized bank is going to be the most trusted, and will ultimately earn the confidence of its users.
The true endgame is generalized cross-chain messaging. When any blockchain can trustlessly talk to any other, it will enable a great deal more cross-chain commerce and activity than we see today.
In the future, web3 may feel the same way the Internet does — there’s just the application you’re interacting with, and the rest is abstracted from you.
Axelar is a universal interoperability layer that connects L1 blockchains through a decentralized network.
Why Haseeb is bulish on Axelar?
Axelar is a fully-fledged PoS network with its own native token.
The security of Axelar is backstopped by the robustness of its PoS validator set.
Their cryptography and distributed systems backgrounds are world-class.
Correctly delivering cross-chain messages and correctly reporting the state on multiple chains is the essence of why cross-chain interoperability is hard. Axelar tackles this problem head-on, and with a full-stack solution.
The potential network effects in a generalized cross-chain messaging network may be more powerful than the virtuous cycles we saw in the rise of alt L1s. A truly cross-chain universe enables more diversity of applications, assets, and composability across all dApps.
3 Twitter Threads
1) DeFi is like onions!
2) Macro predictions for 2022:23
TL;DR —> Fiat is going down and BTC will be the world reserve currency
3) How Umami Finance Offers 20% APR on USDC
TL;DR —>They use a delta-neutral strategy.
3 Podcasts
1) The Crypto Renaissance Has Begun, with Joshua Rosenthal - Empire
2) Marc Andreessen & Chris Dixon of a16z | Reinventing the Internet - Bankless
3) How Osmosis Is Trying to Improve the Crypto User Experience - Unchained
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