Today’s podcast is on @danrobinson’s [4] medium post “Ethereum is a dark forest” [1] (the reference being of course the famous book from the Three Body Problem series [2,3]) where he describes how in Ethereum’s mempool everyone raising the head gets sniped.
I started writing a paper on the Uniswap protocol, and in particularly how it imposes a bleed on its liquidity providers, akin to the bleed option traders with negative Gamma experience. The full paper is here but below is the non-technical summary and conclusion.
Today’s podcast is about Thomas Naegele’s assessment of EU law, and Liechtenstein law in particular, with respect to security tokens and their (in)ability to be traded on regulated trading venues. Warning: my pdf of the post clocks in at 67 pages plus 40 pages of references.
A few days ago we had the reorganisation of the Ethereum Classic chain that was initially attributed to the mistake of a miner who has been disconnected from the network for 12 hours. Turns out it was an attack, and he or she made $5.6m out of it. Interestingly the playbook followed is well known [3], ht @edmund_schuster.
In our series on interesting deals in the STO space, today a particular gem because of the unusual asset class and the people involved. Asset class first: this is a security token [1,2,3] giving the investors economic interest in an online game called Infinite Fleet. This security token is not to be confounded with Infinite Fleet’s in game currency [4]. In terms of people involved there is obviously Samson Mow who is heading Pixelmatic, the developer of the game, and who also has quite a high profile as CSO of Blockstream, a crypto infrastructure company. The backers include Adam Back, Blockstream’s CSO, Max Keiser, of the Keiser Report, and Charlies Lee the founder of LiteCoin who famously sold his holdings just before the market crashed.
The main deal platform seems to be BnkToTheFuture [5] who has supported quite a lot of companies raising fund in the crypto space, including Kraken [6,7]. The issuance is a SAFT, but they are planning to use the Liquid Network [10] eventually. Also involved STOKR [9] hence the deal being registerd both in the US and in Luxemburg.
For those interested in the legal framework under which the offering takes place, STOKR seems to only have an agent payments license from the French ACPR.
tZero [1] – the subsidiary of Overstock who is one of the most active players in the STO market – just updated their investors, and whilst this do not make a particularly happy reading it provides good insights into what is, and is not, happening in the STO market at the moment [2,3]. This comes after a very positive update only in June [4], and might be related to real estate tokenisation not delivering as expected [5].
After the podcast on German ship finance I made two weeks ago [1] I have come across another German platform because of an pretty extensive interview in BTC Echo [2] and some other news in German media [5]. It turns out that those guys have been around for a while, there was a very good article on them in February [3] and an even earlier one last October [4], so it might well be that this is part of a concerted media push.