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.
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.
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
If you’re a complete beginner, with the intention of setting up a testnet STX miner for the first time using a Windows PC, you’re at the right place. Follow these easy step-by-step walkthroughs to get your STX miner set up and running!
Before you begin, check that you have the necessary software installed on your PC:
Rust, Microsoft C++ Build Tools 2019(C++ build tools), Git , node.js, curl and Python
Tutorials that I’ve relied upon while writing this walkthrough
Once you have all software installed, power up your command prompt and insert your first command:
git clone https://github.com/blockstack/stacks-blockchain.git
#This is to download stacks blockchain files on to your computer
The release of the Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, gave rise to a new technology(Blockchain), and initiated a movement towards greater decentralization.
Bitcoin started off within a niche community of cryptographers and computer scientists, but gradually expanded across the globe to individuals from all walks of life. The beauty of decentralization is the inclusiveness that the community offers to everyone, where anyone who believes in the project is welcome to be part of it, through hodling(misspelling for hold) the token and/or contributing to the project in other ways.
What is DeFi?
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been in the spotlight in recent months, with several DeFi projects gaining traction and their tokens soaring in prices have attracted a lot more attention. But what exactly is decentralized finance and what can it do that traditional finance couldn’t?
DeFi represents an ecosystem of financial applications that are built ontop of blockchain networks. Financial applications ranging from borrowing/lending, to owning fractional assets through tokenization and peer-to-peer transactions.
Bitcoin protocol, the world’s most secured blockchain network and the highest profile cryptocurrency(bitcoin) is where most people first learnt about blockchain technology. I’m certainly one of them, having stumbled upon bitcoin in 2016 and went down the rabbit hold to learn more about the mechanism powering the Bitcoin protocol. Blockchain technology which powers the Bitcoin protocol stretches across multiple domains such as cryptography, computer science, economics, finance and more. What makes the Bitcon protocol the most secured blockchain network is the underlying Proof-of-Work(PoW) consensus algorithm, which have the most nodes(miners) running the network in the industry. Miners compete against each other(by solving mathematical puzzles through computing power) to complete transactions on the Bitcoin network and be rewarded with bitcoin. The complexity of the puzzle increases as 1) users on the network increases, 2) increase in computing power as more miners decides to run the network, 3) and the increase in network load. The hash of each block contains the hash of the previous block, which increases security and prevents any block violation, thus the term blockchain. A quick look at Bitcoin protocol’s 2 main security metrics 1) Total Hashrate and 2) Network Difficulty, shows that they are at an all time high.