Technology, Finance, Entrepreneurship
For folks who’d like to dive deeper into the intricacies of yield farming on Arkadiko, read on as I share my experience interacting with Arkadiko.Finance.
The front-end of Arkadiko Protocol went live at Stacks block 34620, after connecting your hiro web wallet, you’re greeted with a sleek UX where a tutorial prompt will walk you through the basic functions of Arkadiko. At launch, users are able to open a vault, swap digital assets, provide liquidity in pools and staking of DIKO.
The rise of every new technology or industry comes with added regulatory scrutiny, as we’ve witnessed with the internet, social media, ridesharing,and many other sectors. Regulators are treading a fine line between regulating it with the right approach, which will enable the industry to prosper and gain mainstream adoption, or by over-regulating it, which may inhibit its potential. Finding the right balance when navigating through areas for regulation in new technologies can be challenging but a task that regulators need to embrace. New technologies and industries can bring massive benefits to the community through economic growth, improved quality of life, etc but at the same time without adequate regulations, bad actors may thrive in extracting value from genuine participants. The following quote illustrates the thinking behind regulating with the right approach: “Speed limits and traffic lights provided public safety but also helped cars become mainstream. It is only with bringing things inside—and sort of clearly within our public policy goals—that new technology has a chance of broader adoption”. The current regulation outlook revolves around two key areas: 1) KYC/AML compliance and 2) classification of securities.
Internet is this amazing intangible thing that enables the world to be connected, and with every additional user connecting to it, its value increases exponentially. As for the new user who just gained internet access, it’s like opening an ever-expanding encyclopedia and a phone directory that allows you to connect with almost anyone across the globe, all packed into a device the size of your palm. The computing power you possess with this palm-sized device is multiple folds of what Apollo had when it embarked on its mission to send humans to the moon for the first time. It certainly sounds utopian to anyone who first hears about the internet and mobile computing, about the limitless possibilities this innovation can bring to mankind. It surely is, when the public first discovered the internet when the world wide web became mainstream, the euphoria kickstarted the dot com era, and a generation of new companies and business models were created that drastically improves our way of life.
Stacks 2.0 went live on mainnet in January 2021, and in less than 9 months the Stacks Ecosystem has grown tremendously with diverse sets of communities aggregating across different niche areas. Developers from around the world started building on Stacks Protocol, secured by the Bitcoin Network, with applications from DeFi to Supply Chain Management, Art, Utility Tools and more.
I’m creating this post to document the growth of the Stacks Ecosystem, with quarterly Ecosystem Map updates, so stick around for the latest Stacks Ecosystem updates!
1st Version of Stacks Ecosystem Map, as of September 2021:
Shopping has historically been identified as therapeutic, which helps in emotion regulation and better well-being, a term more commonly known as retail therapy. Additionally, it’s always part of the thrill to shop around to find the best deals, looking for matching credit card reward points, or exclusive offers. That serendipity of finding a good deal just makes shopping all the more fun, a period for bonding among family/friends, a time to chill out and relax, but more importantly an activity that intrigues your senses by finding what you love and owning it.
vc.DAO
Venture investing as we know it has a rather high barrier of entry especially for those who do not already have existing networks in the ecosystem or are located in geographical areas that do not have a vibrant venture community.
While crypto has certainly democratized venture investing to a certain extent, due to various factors(e.g. regulatory requirements, uncoordinated community, etc) and rightly so, that we’re witnessing venture investing in the crypto space reverting from its ICO days to more institutional-based. Only when a project matures and progresses to its “decentralizing phase” that public sales are conducted and access is opened up to the broader community. This seems like the best solution thus far, given the lack of clear regulations governing the space to prevent bad actors from exploiting participants.
The following is an idea that I’ve been tinkering with for some time and thought could be an attempt in democratizing venture investing for the community using blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) structure.
The Problem:
Aspiring investors currently face a high barrier of entry into the industry due to 1) lack of access 2) lack of capital, 3) lack of knowledge/operational experience. The leverage an individual private investor has in negotiating for an allocation in a private fundraising round is minimal, relative to institutions and professional fund managers. The value that an individual private investor can provide to prospective investees is limited as compared to institutions given the limited resources and capacity an individual can afford to commit to an investment. Therefore, in order to bridge this disparity between private investors and institutions is where a DAO-powered investment fund could potentially find value in.
Satoshi Nakamoto gave us the Bitcoin Network and a new incentive model – tokenomics which allows users to bootstrap network effects. For the past 12 years, tons of innovation, and experiments have gone into understanding and utilizing blockchain technology and incorporating tokenomics into their products and communities.
There were several attempts to build living communities from the ground up via tokenomics, but none have gained traction and/or endorsements from government officials. Recently, during the Bitcoin 2021 conference, Patrick Stanley Founder of Freehold announced the launch of CityCoins – with Miami being the first city to launch its own coin $MIA. This is probably the first serious attempt in incorporating tokenomics into a city, with significant interest from the community(2,000+ signed up within days) and the endorsement of Mayor Suarez of Miami. While we’re used to tokenomics applied to crypto products and services, e.g. DeFi, Crypto-games, NFTs, etc. MiamiCoin has taken a step further by marrying crypto tokenomics to a city’s treasury fund. While it’s definitely a novel use case that could potentially unlock several new solutions to solve existing problems faced by cities (e.g. misaligned incentives of various stakeholders) and drastically improve the lives of its communities, a more comprehensive understanding of how CityCoins work could help inspire folks to tinker how crypto-tokenomics can be applied in real life. In the following paragraphs, I’ll dive into how tokenomics can potentially be applied to cities, what makes it unique, some potentially game-changing use cases, and considerations that the cities would have to look into.
Hyperinflation brings about detrimental effects to societies, as prices of all goods and services rise rapidly over a short period of time, whereas your income and savings remain stagnant, thus leading to a significant decrease in purchasing power very quickly.
Globally, there are several countries plagued by hyperinflation or generally high inflation due to unsustainable monetary policies, fiscal policies, which led to the devaluation of their local currencies in foreign exchange markets thereby eroding the purchasing power of the government, businesses and its citizens. This sets off a ripple effect where the state would no longer be able to afford to maintain public goods, businesses unable to compete internationally and individuals no longer have the purchasing power to improve their lives, thus leading to an economic collapse and social breakdown.
In the article below, I set out to make a case on how countries plagued by hyperinflation can overcome it through the adoption of Bitcoin and reap the benefits of paying Bitcoin as a universal basic income (UBI) through Stacks’ Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) mechanism.
Non-fungible token(NFT) has been the talk of the town since the turn of the new year, especially with the sale of Beeple’s US$69 million NFT art at Christie’s. NFTs was largely popularized by Rare Pepes, Crypto Punks & Cryptokitties on the Ethereum blockchain in 2017 but do you know that the history of NFTs can be traced back to 2012 on the Bitcoin blockchain(Colored Bitcoin). Where Yoni Assia discussed coloured coins as unique and identifiable and was part of the “Genesis bitcoin transaction”.
So what exactly is a Non-fungible token?
Fungibility is most commonly defined as “an item is replaceable by another identical item”. E.g. Fiat currencies, a 20 dollar bill has the same value as another 20 dollar bill where users do not differentiate them and counterparties do not possess any discrimination against one over another 20 dollar bill. Non-fungible is the exact opposite of this, where each item is unique on its own, and people place different value on each item. In the physical world, items that are non-fungible ranges from artwork, music, to personal items where they are largely non-fungible. Non-fungible token represents ownership of a digital asset that is unique on its own on the public blockchain. A more in-depth discussion about what NFTs are can be found in the NFT bible.
I’ve created some Stacks education materials that addresses some of the common questions that end users may ask when they first come across Stacks and/or using dApps built on Stacks blockchain. I’ve kept it in a very basic modular format, with the aim of allowing creators and developers to freely use them and build on top of it for their own need.
Each folder contains: Video with narration, Video without narration, Audio-only, Text only