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:
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.
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
As Stacks 2.0 is going mainnet on 14 January 2021, “The economics behind STX miners’ motivation” would be an interesting topic to deep dive into for the Stacks Protocol / Proof of Transfer. Miners are a distinct group within the blockchain ecosystem, their operation is fundamental to the integrity, decentralization of the blockchain infrastructure.
Mining in layman’s term is the very action where resources are consumed to produce a new resource(in blockchain context it would be to mint a new block). There are various form of mining in the blockchain ecosystem:
| Name | Acronym | Miner action to mint new cryptocurrency |
| Proof-of-Work | PoW | Consume electricity towards computations to mint units of a new cryptocurrency. |
| Proof-of-Stake | PoS | Dedicate economic stake in a base cryptocurrency to mint units of the same cryptocurrency. |
| Proof-of-Burn | PoB | Destroy a base cryptocurrency to mint units of a new cryptocurrency. |
| Proof-of-Transfer | PoX | Transfer a base cryptocurrency to mint units of a new cryptocurrency. |
Source: PoX Whitepaper
In the context of Stacks Protocol, which adopts the Proof of Transfer mechanism, here’s a summary of the key characteristics of STX mining and Stacking:
Clarity x Chainlink Oracle integration
For non-technical folks like myself, the term smart contracts, oracles, data feeds and how they come together are like foreign languages, yet these are critical components for the developer communities.
The recent news release from Blockstack(soon to be known as Hiro Systems), highlighted the integration of Chainlink Oracle Technology with Stacks 2.0. In an attempt to learn more about Stacks Protocol, I’ll deep dive into the technical details, digest the information and roam the web for non-technical explanations. The write up below will be my attempt to have a concise explanation and break down of the technical terms and also explore what it means for Stacks ecosystem to have Chainlink oracles onboard.
Blockstack is an open-source and developer-friendly network for building decentralized apps and smart contracts. Blockstack introduces a new mining mechanism, Proof-of-Transfer(PoX) which allows for a Proof of Work chain (in Blockstack’s case, Bitcoin) to be leveraged and extended. This opens up a wide range of opportunities for developers to build ontop of Bitcoin Network.
