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Quarterly Review Q4 2018: Crypto Winter Edition

By
Nikolaus Jilch
-
Crypto Winter Edition

“The idea of having an alternative to traditional fiat money is attractive, especially today, when major currencies’ savings value is in jeopardy and the trust they require to work is declining. Central banks are no longer focused on their duty to protect money’s value and have instead bowed to the pressure spendthrift governments have put on them to finance oversized public debts.”

Princess Gisela von und zu Liechtenstein

Key Takeaways

  • Gross profit margins on mining Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen to 30% and 15% respectively. Never the less Bitcoin will not enter a “death spiral” as some critics have proposed. Enough miners are incentivized to stay in the market as the difficulty falls.
  • The rumor that Goldman Sachs’ crypto trading desk was cancelled is “fake news.” Not only is Goldman launching a trading desk, they are also working on a digital asset custody solution.
  • Due to the recent high volatility in the crypto markets demand for stable coins has increased. Various interesting projects are being worked on right now.

Crypto-winter is in full swing. In the background, the major players are working on the infrastructure while the authorities are clearing up the debris of the ICO hype.

About ten years after the publication of the famous white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, almost everything has been said about Bitcoin’s anniversary. Therefore, our greetings do not go to the mysterious inventor or inventors of the cryptocurrency, but to Alicia Florrick. The likeable (and fictional) lawyer from the CBS hit series “The Good Wife” had already dealt with a Bitcoin case in 2012. It was probably the very first Bitcoin reference in a mainstream television show. The scriptwriters deserve praise. Not only because they made Bitcoin an issue when the cryptocurrency was worth just three dollars apiece. But also, because they could explain this new innovation within a few minutes. The viewers were not only entertained, but also well informed when Alicia’s teenage children taught her about Bitcoin step by step. Something that others have often failed to replicate when it comes to Bitcoin.

When the Simpsons mentioned Bitcoin a year later, it was – of course – in the way of a joke (S25E07). The protagonist in this case was Krusty the Clown. Lisa Simpson asked Krusty if he was broke, and he answered: “Yeah, all it takes is some bad luck at the ponies, worse luck in the bitcoin market, and heavy investment in a high-end bookmark company.” This rather depressive perspective fits in well with Bitcoin’s past anniversary year.

As far as prices were concerned, 2018 was virtually the opposite of 2017. After the euphoria came disillusionment. After the boom came the bust. $20,000 was followed by $10,000. Then the $6,000 mark was held for a long time. Until the end of November. Then it went rapidly down – triggered by a dispute in the Bitcoin Cash Community. Bitcoin slipped into the $3,000 area. The media published obituaries. Like so many times before. Explanations of what Bitcoin actually is are no longer necessary. Bitcoin has actually arrived in the mainstream. It was a long way. The colleagues from “Breaker Magazine” have compiled a whole list of Bitcoin references in pop culture from the past ten years. They ask, “What does Bitcoin in the mainstream actually mean?” Is it about the price? Is it about using the cryptocurrency in the coffee house? Or is it about fame? We also ask ourselves these questions.[1]

The Crash and the Consequences

Since Bitcoin was first mentioned in “The Good Wife”, the price has risen by more than 10,000 percent. The first ten years of the cryptocurrency are actually an incredible success story.

But all this does not seem to interest anyone after the depressing year 2018. Bitcoin had to celebrate his birthday with a tear in his eye. Recently, there has even been debate about a death spiral. Some argue that miners will simply stop their activities if the price falls below the cost of production.

“Once Bitcoin’s price falls below its cost of mining, the incentive to mine will deteriorate, thrusting bitcoin into a death spiral. That is, without the mining activities supporting the ledger that maintains the records of who owns what — bitcoin is, after all, a set of encrypted numbers that cannot establish the ownership of anything — bitcoin will become worthless.”[2]

Atulya Sarin

This view of things is not new. The same debate has been going on since 2011. Today, the industry is much bigger, but the answer to the scaremongering remains the same. As then, the prophets of Bitcoin’s death overlook the nuances in the game theory behind the cryptocurrency. Satoshi Nakamoto prepared the network very well for a rapid drop in prices. After 2016 blocks, the difficulty is adjusted. If the price drops and the number of miners shrinks, the software is designed to make mining easier for the remaining miners. The argument of the death spiral is based on the assumption that the price could fall so quickly that the system does not adjust difficulty in time – and the miners give up. But there are solutions for this problem. Andreas Antonopoulos explains:

“If the miners wait until the difficulty retargets and the difficulty becomes less, then each miner who waits makes more profit because in the new scheme they have a greater percentage of the mining power than they did before.”[3]

In addition, one must consider: Mining costs are not the same everywhere, each miner has his or her own calculations. Some might even be able to temporarily mine at a loss. And if all else fails, there is still the option of a hard fork, which would allow the immediate adjustment of the difficulty. That would be the last resort.[4]

Of course, this does not mean that all miners did survive the fall in prices unscathed. The situation is quite dramatic. Bitcoin miners are used to huge gross profit margins of up to 50 percent. Since the fall in prices, the situation has become tougher, as BitMEX has calculated. Currently, profit margins are only 30 percent for Bitcoin and 15 percent for Ethereum. There are also a number of mining companies that have misjudged the situation and already went bankrupt. The cleansing of the market during the price decline does not only apply to crypto projects, but also to the mining sector.[5] The CIO of BlockTower Capital, Ari Paul, explained on Episode 95 of Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast that mining as an industry is not profitable because miners compete with each other in a zero-sum game.[6]

And when it comes to Bitcoin as a currency, things look even grimmer. Around Bitcoin’s 10th birthday in October, plenty of experts lampooned Bitcoin’s irrelevance as a means of payment.

“In 2018, cryptocurrencies in general have sharply limited relevance, if any, to the way that money is moved around the world. Bitcoin is an undoubtedly valuable commodity and is by far the highest-profile and most important of the cryptocurrencies, but it is not actually a currency in any real sense. It is used for some payments, mostly peer-to-peer, between parties for whom the anonymity of Bitcoin is important, or between the remaining true believers in the global potential of the system.”[7]

Samuel Murrant, GlobalData’s payment analyst

But that’s a very one-dimensional view of Bitcoin – and Murrant knows it too. He follows up: “Bitcoin is far more like gold than it is like money – it is a store of value, considered precious due to its rarity, and traded among investors to profit from changes in its perceived value over time.”

Bitcoin has therefore created its own asset class: crypto. The fact that a bubble burst at the beginning of the year cannot be denied. Air is still escaping. In our very first report in December 2017, we warned of the ICO boom and its consequences. In the March issue of this year we wrote an article entitled “Is there a crypto winter threatening us?” Currently, the northern hemisphere is not only in a meteorological winter, but globally we are seeing the second deepest crypto-winter after the bear market of 2014 and 2015. This adjustment may have run its course, although that’s too early to call. .

From an economic point of view, this is positive: after a bubble, only a crash can lay the foundation for new, sustainable growth. Unfortunately, however, crypto, which Morgan Stanley now also sees as an “institutional asset class”, is so young that we have little experience of how long such an adjustment could take.[8] We can only wait and see how the big players position themselves for the next phase. And, as we have been documenting regularly for more than a year, there is a hell of a lot going on.

The second sector, where Bitcoin and blockchain have undoubtedly innovated, is payment traffic and the area of currencies in general. Not necessarily because Bitcoin has asserted itself as a means of payment. We know that didn’t happen. The real breakthrough is mainstream acceptance of digital currencies per se and “private” digital currencies in general. So much is happening here that even the central banks can no longer just idly watch. In a digital world, cryptocurrencies, and privately issued stablecoins in particular, offer an alternative to the Euro, Dollar or Pound.

Bitcoin has also significantly influenced a third sector: cybercrime. Unfortunately, Bitcoin’s second appearance on “The Good Wife” in 2013 was already about a ransomware extortion. The good news: Supervisory authorities are cracking down on fraud in crypto. From our point of view, this is very positive for the sector. 2018 may have been depressing in terms of prices, but this leads to an automatic market cleansing, and it gives the cops time to hunt scammers. The SEC even punished celebrities for advertising scamcoins for the first time. More about that later.

Asset Class and Adoption

As Michael Novogratz, one of the best-known crypto investors, puts it: “One thing you learn in this process is that everything takes a little longer than you hoped it would.” We won’t see the $10,000 mark again this year, the Bitcoin bull recently said. His company, Galaxy Digital Holdings, has already posted more than $150 million in losses this year. But Novogratz, one of Wall Street’s best-known Bitcoin supporters, won’t give up.[9] On the contrary: Novogratz, himself a former Goldman Sachs partner, recently invested in BitGo Holdings – together with the investment bank. Goldman and Galaxy Digital Ventures hope that the start-up will provide a solution to the still unsolved problem of custodianship of cryptoassets. US regulators require money managers to store assets in so-called “qualified custodians”. The traditional players in this sector have so far stayed away from the crypto market for fear of hackers and the legal uncertainty that still prevails.[10]

” If you were investing in any other asset class, you’re probably not worried about the asset just disappearing – but this one, people still have that fear,” said Mike Belshe, BitGo’s co-founder and CEO in an interview with Bloomberg. His company has now collected around $70 million through fundraising. The Palo Alto-based company was founded in 2013 and offers digital wallets that require multiple signatures for transactions. Offline safes for Bitcoin and other currencies are also available. The company currently manages 75 different cryptoassets and a total volume of around $2 billion dollars. But the entry of Novogratz and Goldman could take BitGo to a whole new level.

Goldman is certainly one of the most courageous banks on Wall Street when it comes to Bitcoin. “We believe that a custody offering is a logical precursor to digital asset market making,” said Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally. Reports that Goldman has cancelled its plans for its own crypto trading desk in view of the price drop have led the bank to deny this as “fake news”. Allegedly Goldman is also working on their own solution for Bitcoin custodianship. One thing is certain: as long as these questions have not been clarified, the crypto market will remain closed both to the “normal” retail investor and to almost all institutional investors. In this issue we dedicate an entire chapter to safe custody solutions that already exist or are going live soon.

Another important player who wants to compete against Goldman in this area is Fidelity Investments. The company, which manages $7.2 trillion in customer funds in its traditional business, established its own crypto subsidiary in October. Under the name Fidelity Digital Asset Services, customers will be able to trade Bitcoin on various stock exchanges at the best prices. Cold storage, i.e. safe storage without an internet connection, could be part of the package right from the start.[11]

“If you look at the existing market infrastructure, it’s heavily skewed toward the needs of retail investors and early adopters of the space. The time is quite good for this announcement. We’ve seen a real acceleration of demand over the last couple months.”

Tom Jessop of Fidelity

Fidelity has been experimenting with Bitcoin since 2014, and they have even mined hundreds of Bitcoins. In the Fidelity canteen you can now pay with Bitcoin. “The question is, how do we stay ahead of the competition? How do we innovate and bring new products onto the platform,” asks Jessop.

It is by no means the case that all institutional investors are merely sitting on the sidelines and waiting. In fact, institutional investors may have replaced high net worth individuals as the largest buyers of cryptocurrencies. These trades usually take place directly between investors and large miners or people with large Bitcoin fortunes. According to current estimates, this over-the-counter (OTC) market sees a daily volume of $250 million to $30 billion dollars.[12] For comparison: According to “coinmarketcap.com”, cryptoassets worth around $15 billion are traded daily on the exchanges. Some of the stock exchanges listed there are however not considered to be very reputable and their figures should be viewed with skepticism. At the University of Liechtenstein, a comprehensive analysis is currently being carried out on this subject, which deals with the actual market depth of the asset class. The results of the study will certainly be a topic in one of our next issues.

There is no doubt that the OTC market has also suffered from the price decline. Nevertheless, growth can be observed here, says Jeremy Allair, CEO of Circle Internet Financial in Boston: “We’ve seen triple-digit growth enrolling in our OTC business. That’s a big growth area.” This growth is likely to continue as long as institutional investors enter the market. Because they often need more coins than are offered on the exchanges. Or they are afraid of moving the price too far by buying or selling big amounts. That’s why they look for trading partners.

None of this is hidden from the big Wall Street banks. We’ve heard about Goldman and Fidelity. But it looks like Fear of Loss (FOL) is quickly transitioning to Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America Merrill Lynch are also reportedly working on their own Bitcoin products to meet customer demand.[13] Russia’s Gazprombank is also venturing into the market via a subsidiary in Switzerland.[14]

And then there are the big US universities that manage their income and donations in endowments. 96 percent of university money managers still say they don’t want to touch the crypto market. But some of the big names like Harvard, Stanford and MIT are already in business.[15] The same goes for Yale. The elite school recently invested in the Paradigm Fund, which was launched by former employees of Coinbase, Sequoia Capital and the Pantera Capital crypto fund. A total of around $400 million is invested in this fund. However, it is not known how much of this comes from Yale’s $30-billion-dollar purse. But the step is significant, because Yale’s money is managed by David Swensen. Swensen is considered a pioneer among institutional investors and has managed some of the best performing college endowments over the past decades. He focuses on long time horizons and often on markets with low liquidity assets. Many other universities try to imitate him. Under Swensen, Yale has seen a return of almost 12 percent annually – over the past 20 years. In total, more than $500 billion dollars are invested in the funds of US colleges.[16]

Two important players have recently underlined their interest in the crypto market but have adjusted their schedule to the new pricing conditions. Bakkt, the crypto platform of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), has postponed the launch of its own Bitcoin futures until the end of January. “As is often true with product launches, there are new processes, risks and mitigates to test and re-test, and in the case of crypto, a new asset class to which these resources are being applied”, said Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler. The partnerships between ICE, mother of the New York Stock Exchange, and Starbucks as well as Microsoft are still up to date – but there are no new details.[17] Nasdaq also intends to stick to its plan to enter the market with futures contracts. Starting date is the first quarter of 2019, but talks are still underway with the US regulatory authority CFTC. Nothing is set in stone.[18]

M&As and Europe

Another way to enter crypto is to become active in business yourself or to buy up other companies. We have already mentioned several times that the market crash of the past months can be good for Bitcoin – because dubious projects become unprofitable as a result and perhaps even disappear. At the same time, the sector is being consolidated and the financially strong companies are going on a shopping spree. By October, the number of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the crypto sector had already risen by more than 200 percent – compared to the previous year. At least 30 deals are still open.[19]

The crypto industry is global and so far, appropriately, without a real financial center. One of the biggest and most interesting deals, therefore, did not take place in the USA, but in Europe. The Belgian investment company NXMH has just bought the Bitstamp stock exchange – and paid cash for it. The purchase price was not stated. Two years ago, Bitstamp, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the European Union, was valued at around $60 million. It can be assumed that the valuation for the sale was significantly higher after the 2017 boom. Bitstamp has more than three million registered users and a daily trading volume of $100 million dollars. For the two founders, Nejc Kodrič and Damian Merlak, the deal was definitely successful. They founded Bitstamp in Slovenia in August 2011 – in a garage. Their starting capital: A server, a few laptops and a thousand euros in cash. Today, Bitstamp is registered in Luxembourg. It is supposed to stay that way after the deal.[20]

Two more anecdotes from Europe, this time from the German-speaking area, which is very close to us. We know from past reports that Switzerland is actively trying to attract Blockchain and Bitcoin companies. As we reported in detail in our October issue, the government of Liechtenstein is planning its own law, which is already being praised by many as exemplary. But even the giant Germany is by no means inactive. The hipster capital Berlin has a lively crypto scene. Now there is an advance from the party of chancellor Angela Merkel. The CDU wants to make Germany the number one ICO country and a “blockchain financial centre”.[21]

Austria has another way of doing things. In Austria, ICOs are supposed to be carried out with legal certainty soon. A working group is to present results by the end of the year – then there will be a new law. But a lot is already happening on a small scale. The Graz-based company Coinfinity and the privately-owned Austrian state printing company have developed a solution for physical, offline storage of Bitcoin private keys. This is called “Chainlock” – and is the solution to the custodian problem, so to speak, but more for private individuals than for institutional investors.[22]

And the Viennese law firm Stadler & Völkel has succeeded in getting a capital market prospectus for a Security Token Offering (STO) approved by the supervisory authority for the first time. An STO can be understood as a further development of the ICO. Like share owners, holders of security tokens also have securitized rights and are not solely dependent on the price development of a purchased token – as was the case with ICOs. In return, the security tokens are subject to the same rules as other securities. For this reason, Austria requires approval from the Financial Market Authority (FMA) before such a token can be sold. The security token of Hydrominer, whose prospectus has just been approved, is expected to be available to investors in February 2019.[23]

Central Banks and Stablecoins

After just learning a new abbreviation (STO) we now present another one: CBDC. Central Bank Digital Currency. The subject is getting hotter every day. Although to this day it’s not even clear what we’re actually talking about. The media likes to pretend that the central banks experimenting with digital money are developing their own “cryptocurrencies” like Bitcoin. But it’s not that simple. For them, the blockchain is a vehicle to create a digital equivalent for cash. Nouriel Roubini, the notorious Bitcoin hater, is firmly convinced that the CBDC of the future will kill Bitcoin. Because no one would accept anarchy-money if they could have state money, he reasons. However, Roubini overlooks the fact that Bitcoin has something that digital central bank currencies can never have: its deflationary character as discussed in depth in the interview with Saifedean Ammous contained in this edition of the report.[24]

It is extremely unlikely for a central bank to ever issue a currency that tends to appreciate. In the event of over-indebtedness, the expansion of the money supply is often used as a form of concealed state financing. What can no longer be completely ruled out today is the “denationalization of money” as demanded and predicted by Friedrich August Hayek. He envisioned that commercial banks will come into the market as money producers. That is still possible. As far as private money is concerned, we are at the very beginning, but the most important steps have been taken.

Christine Lagarde, the influential head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has become aware of the issue. Central banks around the world need to be more open to new technologies, she said recently in Singapore. “I think we should consider issuing a digital currency. There must be a role for the state to provide the digital economy with money.”[25] She speaks of a “counterweight” for private currencies and thus shows that even the high priests of money now consider the existence of Bitcoin to be a given. Lagarde, like Hayek, also wants to involve the banks. But them printing their own money is not part of the plan. Lagarde sees CBDC primarily as a substitute for cash: “A digital currency could bring advantages as a last resort for payments. And it could drive competition forward because it offers an efficient alternative at a low price – just like its grandfather, the old, reliable paper money.” But the complete anonymity of cash would then be gone.

Instead, Madame Lagarde proposes to record transactions and pass on the details to the state only in case of suspicion. A delicate idea – but not completely crazy, at least in constitutional countries where there is a separation between the state and the central bank. However, Lagarde’s own experts from the IMF are quite skeptical about the subject. A recent IMF paper on the subject states:

“All in all, it is still too early to assess the benefits of CBDC. Central banks should take into account the specific circumstances in their respective countries, pay cautious attention to risks and the benefits of other solutions. It needs further analysis and studies of technical feasibility and costs.”

It should be noted at this point that central banks are notoriously slow when it comes to technical innovations. The plans for CBDC are by no means mature. One thing is certain: we are not talking about digital money as we already know it. An account balance is ultimately a claim to the bank. CBDCs must be currencies with no counterparty risk – as with Bitcoin or gold. Even if the true motivation of central banks and the IMF is the preservation of the money monopoly, the efforts to obtain their own digital money ultimately indirectly legitimize private alternatives such as Bitcoin conceptually.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Sweden is the country where plans for a CBDC are the most advanced. Sweden is regarded as the test tube of a cashless society and is now reaching the limits of what is feasible. There have long been protests by citizens against the abolition of cash, which has been pushed mainly by banks. This is one of the reasons why the central bank launched the E-Krona project and is currently investigating the various technical possibilities for introducing an electronic Krona. The Riksbank, the Swedish central bank, has now called on the government to create the necessary legal framework for a possible introduction of an E-Krona. “If the marginalisation of cash continues, a digital krona, an e‐krona, could ensure that the general public still has access to a state-guaranteed means of payment”, the Riksbank said.[26]

2019 will see the rise and expansion of private stablecoins. Joining Tether is also the Gemini Dollar, TrueUSD and Paxos. And of course, USDCoin, which is backed by no one other than Circle, in which Goldman Sachs is also invested. USDCoin is now even used and offered by the Bitcoin giant Coinbase.[27][28] Currently there are more than 50 such stablecoins. Some of them are not even tied to an existing national currency – but most of them are. During falling Bitcoin prices, investors can save their digital money in a USD stablecoin and wait until the market calms down. Of course, the controversies surrounding the original stablecoin Tether are not over. Even the US authorities are now investigating accusations that the backers of Tether and the Bitfinex stock exchange manipulated the Bitcoin price.[29]

ICO-Bust and Outlook

The SEC has dozens of investigations into crypto matters under way.[32] Two providers of ICOs (Airfox and Paragon Coin) had to pay fines of $250,000 each and compensate investors. They conducted their ICOs after the SEC issued an explicit warning last summer that ICOs were illegal sales of securities.[33] The penalties imposed by the SEC on two celebrities who had advertised dubious crypto currencies are likely to be much more effective. The boxer Floyd Mayweather and the hip-hop star DJ Khaled accepted fines of $300,000 and $100,000 dollars, respectively, as part of a settlement. The celebrities also had to relinquish the proceeds from their promotional activities – amounting to a further $300,000 and $50,000 respectively. According to the SEC, they had advertised ICOs on social media without disclosing that they were being paid. Both celebrities had advertised Centra, a project that has been in the SEC’s sights for quite some time. “Investors should be sceptical about investment advice posted on social media platforms and not make decisions based on recommendations from celebrities”, warned Steven Peikin of the SEC. “Social media influencers are often paid promoters.”[34]

While we consider it positive that the authorities have intervened here, it must be said that it is a drop in the ocean. Investors should be extremely careful with any form of information they obtain from the crypto-media and crypto-influencer environment. Three independent studies have shown that the media, so-called rating agencies, and individuals on social media and on YouTube are highly corrupt. The “Breaker” magazine wrote to 22 different crypto media companies from a fake address of an alleged Russian PR man. The result: more than half of the websites would have taken money for articles without marking them as “ads” or “sponsored”. Some were even willing to simply adopt ready-made PR texts and pass them off as their own. The smallest websites took less than $300. The largest more than $3000. In any case, this study explains why there are so many miserably written texts on the Internet about relatively obscure coins. Advertising is subtle. Among the websites that take money for reports are some of the best-known names in the cryptosector. But to be fair: Around 10 of the websites contacted immediately rejected the offer.[35]

But news sites are just the tip of the iceberg. The covert advertising campaigns are often managed by so-called ICO agencies, which have price lists for various channels at hand. These agencies do not only take care of the marketing of a coin on the relevant websites, but also provide comments and traffic in the Telegram groups and other social networks. Many people who discuss cryptocoins or ICOs on YouTube are also paid for their service. Research by Breaker, Techcrunch and Reuters paints a picture of a deeply corrupt industry at the heart of which is the hunt for money by ICOs.[36][37]

If the drop in prices and the SEC’s crackdown leads to this swamp being drained, then this should be welcomed. This is part of the development of the sector towards more professionalism. As far as mainstream acceptance is concerned, we no longer need to worry. Years after Bitcoin’s first appearance on “The Good Wife”, a feature film with Kurt Russel is soon to come. The title is simply “Crypto”.[38] And shortly before this report went to press, this news came in: Electronics giant Samsung is supposedly working on a cryptowallet for their smartphones. If there is any truth to this, it would be another big step into the mainstream. And a confirmation of the old thesis: While prices are falling, true innovations are taking place.[39]

[1] https://breakermag.com/a-comprehensive-list-of-crypto-references-in-pop-culture/

[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-is-close-to-becoming-worthless-2018-12-03

[3] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bitcoin-by-design-wont-become-worthless-according-to-this-crypto-heavyweight-2018-12-05?mod=newsviewer_click

[4] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/12/04/the-bitcoin-mining-death-spiral-debate-explained/

[5] https://blog.bitmex.com/the-price-crash-the-impact-on-miners/

[6] http://unchained.forbes.libsynpro.com/ari-paul-on-why-bitcoin-is-a-good-value-buy-today-ep95

[7] https://www.globaldata.com/ten-years-bitcoin-now-no-relevance-payments-says-globaldata/

[8] https://www.coindesk.com/morgan-stanley-says-crypto-is-a-new-institutional-asset-class/

[9] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-15/novogratz-says-bitcoin-rally-likely-to-take-place-next-year

[10] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-18/goldman-wades-deeper-in-crypto-betting-on-bitgo-with-novogratz

[11] http://fortune.com/2018/10/15/fidelity-launches-company-help-hedge-funds-big-investors-trade-crypto/

[12] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/institutional-investors-are-using-back-door-for-crypto-purchases

[13] https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/breaking-bank-of-americas-merrill-lynch-to-launch-bitcoin-trading-product-to-rival-goldman-sachs-and-morgan-stanley/

[14] https://gazprombank.ch/news/gazprombank-switzerland-ltd-prepare

[15] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/harvard-stanford-mit-endowments-invest-in-crypto-funds

[16] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-05/yale-is-said-to-invest-in-crypto-fund-that-raised-400-million

[17] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/11/20/bakkt-has-pushed-back-its-bitcoin-futures-launch-to-2019-but-phase-two-is-still-on-track/

[18] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-27/nasdaq-is-said-to-pursue-bitcoin-futures-despite-plunging-prices

[19] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/18/crypto-deal-makers-see-opportunity-in-bitcoins-price-slump.html

[20] https://www.businessinsider.com/r-european-investment-firm-buys-digital-exchange-bitstamp-in-all-cash-deal-2018-10?IR=T

[21] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/digital-bezahlen/cdu-vorschlag-deutschland-soll-mekka-fuer-kryptogeld-werden-15887209.html?printPagedArticle=-%20sync:%C3%9F%C3%87%C3%88%C3%A2%C3%88%C3%A2

[22] https://www.trendingtopics.at/card-wallet-coinfinity-und-staatsdruckerei-bringen-neue-speicherloesung-fuer-bitcoin/

[23] https://diepresse.com/home/wirtschaft/recht/5541879/Depot-in-der-Hosentasche_FMA-approved-BlockchainEmission

[24] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/central-banks-take-over-digital-payments-no-cryptocurrencies-by-nouriel-roubini-2018-11

[25] http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/diginomics/iwf-chefin-fordert-digitale-waehrungen-15889788.html

[26]  http://fortune.com/2018/10/26/sweden-riksbank-e-krona/

[27] https://diepresse.com/home/wirtschaft/kolumnen/wertsachen/5391098/Der-Kampf-gegen-das-Bargeld-ist-klaeglich-gescheitert

[28] https://www.ccn.com/2-million-lightning-network-hits-major-milestone-despite-bitcoin-price-decline/

[29] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-29/stable-coin-backed-by-circle-coinbase-draws-most-early-demand

[30] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-23/crypto-exchange-coinbase-to-list-stable-coin-backed-by-circle?srnd=cryptocurrencies

[31] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-20/bitcoin-rigging-criminal-probe-is-said-to-focus-on-tie-to-tether

[32] http://fortune.com/2018/11/02/sec-ico-report-cryptocurrency-scams/

[33] http://fortune.com/2018/11/16/sec-airfox/

[34] https://diepresse.com/home/wirtschaft/5538851/KryptogeldWerbung_High penalties for Boxer Mayweather and DJ Khaled

[35] https://breakermag.com/we-asked-crypto-news-outlets-if-theyd-take-money-to-cover-a-project-more-than-half-said-yes/

[36] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-promoters-specialre/special-report-little-known-to-many-investors-cryptocurrency-reviews-are-for-sale-idUSKCN1NW17S

[37] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/18/inside-the-pay-for-post-ico-industry/

[38] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8563452/

[39] https://www.sammobile.com/2018/12/11/exclusive-samsung-bitcoin-app-cold-wallet-cryptocurrencies/

Quarterly Review Q3 2018: Cell Phone Theft Edition

By
Nikolaus Jilch
-
Cell Phone Theft Edition

Satoshi’s vision is very much alive. Nobody wants to miss out on the journey even though it is going to be one hell of a ride.

A Heist With Perfect Timing

Hindsight is an incredible thing. We now know that a Bitcoin investor could have easily sold back in January 2018 when the price was still above $15,000. We are also cognizant that a Bitcoin investor should have not bought at the high of the last mania in hopes of Bitcoin soaring to $25,000, $30,000 or even $50,000 per Bitcoin.

One thing we do know for sure: once you bought them, you have to be careful how you store digital currencies. Easier said than done – and nobody knows this better than Michael Terpin.

The American entrepreneur and investor has been part of the Bitcoin space for a long time. Since 2013, he has been a part of a group of Angel Investors that invest in young Bitcoin companies. Their name: BitAngels. Back in March 2014, this also led to one of the first digital currency funds. Terpin is now a consultant for Alphabit Fund, one of the biggest hedge funds in the crypto sector.

This is, however, all secondary. Today, Terpin is subject to headline news due to his immense misfortune – and his own legal creativity. In January of this year, he was the victim of a cryptocurrency theft that was the equivalent of $23 million.[1]

Your Phone Could Cost More Than You Think

Terpin became victim to a new type of scam where an attacker gains access to the SIM card of the cellphone of their victims. Many websites use the mobile number of their users as a further security measure for more online safety by sending a SMS if there is unusual activity on an account or if certain steps need verification. This is called two-factor authentication (2FA), which can also be achieved with Google Authenticator and Authy.

As with almost all security features, 2FA can be misused if hackers are able to gain control over the mobile device. This method of digital identity theft is also used to illegally gain access to popular social media accounts. Those are then sold via the Darkweb and traded in Bitcoin. But in Terpin’s case, it wasn’t his Instagram handle that was compromised. Instead, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were directly stolen from his account.[2]

How do we know this? From the victim himself. He argues that the fault lies with his mobile provider AT&T, and he wants to go to court. His lawyers have prepared a 69-page paper, which supposedly illustrates the culpability of the network operator. Terpin is suing AT&T for compensation of the stolen $23.8 million – based on the price at the time the digital currencies were stolen. The day the hack occurred was January 7th, 2018, when a single Bitcoin was worth just over $17,000.

This was also the day that the Bitcoin price spiked for the last time. During the following four weeks, the price plummeted by more than 60 %. It finally stopped at roughly $6,000. At the time of writing this report, the price is only merely above this mark. One could almost assume Bitcoin has reached some kind of support at this level. This is at least what investors hope, although a further sell-off could be on the cards. When a price floor is broken on the downside, it spells trouble for investors because this floor becomes a resistance level on the way back up. As we suggested in the technical analysis article featured in our March edition, there have been two price rallies since our last report but no new higher highs. The bear market is still in full swing.

Anyhow, Michael Terpin has bigger fish to fry. He is not only suing for the stolen money but also for damages of $200 million. Should Terpin’s lawsuit be successful, he will not only have found a way to balance out his portfolio against the ups and downs of this volatile market but also how to 10x his money during the bear market. It goes without saying that AT&T refutes any kind of responsibility.

What does this story teach us? Even investors that have been in the sector for years and have accumulated millions are none the wiser when it comes to securing their crypto stash. The details of the heist are not 100 % clear; however, the press coverage leads us to believe that Terpin kept most of his portfolio at an exchange and that one or more of Terpin’s trading accounts were simply wiped out by a hacker. A further possibility would be that he had saved his private keys insecurely, for example, in his email account or on one of the cloud service providers. Both insecure options that are not advisable. However, he is not the only one having trouble storing his stash.

How to Store Bitcoin

The question of how to securely store Bitcoin has been around since the emergence of cryptocurrencies. At first glance, it would seem ironic that cryptocurrency users often store their cryptocurrencies with intermediaries such as exchanges and banks because the public blockchain technology was designed to work without banks, registrations, or licenses. It is its own monetary system which insures reliable trade via the Internet.

This was reason enough for technically savvy early adopters to get into Bitcoin. And still we can observe that in extreme circumstances Bitcoin continuously plays its role as a safe haven currency. A look at Venezuela’s current situation of hyperinflation is enough to underline this theory.[3] In stark contrast, we can see that Bitcoin remains mainly a speculative asset in the West where price inflation is relatively stable and low, at least for now.

The question of access and storage of digital assets remains largely unanswered. The mainstream investor does not want to bother with private keys or hardware wallets. Cumbersome access and storage also deter institutional players from the sector. Mature solutions for Bitcoin custodianship are only slowly trickling onto the market. The investment bank Nomura founded a consortium with the companies Ledger and Global Advisors to come up with a veritable solution. The name: Komainu. Also, three big banks are working on their own solutions: Bank of New York, JP Morgan, and Northern Trust.[4]

A further player is – of course – Coinbase, the emerging Bitcoin giant. Kyle Samani, a partner with the crypto hedge fund Multicoin Capital, is currently testing their custodian service. Bloomberg has even gone as far as to call it a game changer. “There are a lot of investors where custodianship was the final barrier,” Samani said in a phone interview with the news agency. “Over the next year, the market will come to recognize that custodianship is a solved problem. This will unlock a big wave of capital.”

Coinbase charges a onetime fee of $100,000 and then a further 0.1 % fee once a month – for a minimum storage of $10 million. Coinbase calculates that assets of roughly $20 billion could flow into custodian services. The problem is definitely not new. Traditional assets, such as cash, gold bullion, or diamonds also need custodians, which have made a reputation for themselves over the centuries. Cryptocurrencies need to be protected against hackers and in many cases their legal status is not yet defined. Established traditional players such as JP Morgan and Northern Trust are understandably hesitant. They would like to enter the market, but are naturally “extremely cautious”, as a source has told Bloomberg.

We will of course follow the further development of custodian services for Bitcoin and other cryptos. Bear markets are the ideal time to improve on the actual infrastructure of the market. The tentative progress of the custodian sector is a very real reminder of how young this market still is as a whole – and a good indication as to how long it could still take to fully mature.

A further sign: The boom of 2017 drew in the attention of millionaires to Bitcoin. As the yearly Capgemini World Wealth Report shows, more than half of the world’s high net worth individuals (HNWIs) are at least superficially interested in Bitcoin. However only a third feel adequately supported and informed by their wealth managers. What does that tell us? That two thirds of the best wealth managers in the world don’t have a clue about Bitcoin. As their rich clients are starting to complain about this, we guess things will change quickly. That is one main reason Incrementum publishes the Crypto Research Report. We strive to inform investors and also offer cryptocurrency investment solutions such as an AIF-regulated cryptocurrency fund.

From China to Liechtenstein

Back to the question of custodianship: Fidelity, one of the largest US-American finance providers, would like to establish itself in this field. CEO Abigail Johnson can be considered one of the most famous pro-Bitcoin voices the mainstream has to offer. Johnson publicly supported Bitcoin as far back as May 2017. She also does not want to settle on the mere question of storage for Bitcoin. Her goal is easier access for all mainstream investors. A possible solution: Fidelity could be working on its own crypto exchange.[5]

The race for the next big crypto exchange is totally on. The Swiss stock exchange is working on a crypto trading platform. It supposedly will be one of a kind and is due to start running in early 2019. “This is the beginning of a new era for capital markets infrastructures. For us it is abundantly clear that much of what is going on in the digital space is here to stay and will define the future of our industry,” said SIX CEO Jos Dijsselhof.[6]

The stock exchange in Toronto, Canada has similar plans. As does the stock exchange in Stuttgart, Germany. In Canada, they are working on an app called Bison which allows investors to buy digital assets without paying a fee. A trading platform is also planned. However, the Germans want to take it yet a step further. They want to make ICOs possible on their platform, which would make trading new coins instantly possible.[7]

Currently, the market is dominated by Binance. The merely one-year-old exchange has now, after getting a foothold in China and Hong Kong, reached out and set up shop in Malta as well as in Liechtenstein. A cooperation between the crypto exchange LCX from Liechtenstein should open up a fiat gateway for investors to trade in euros and Swiss francs. Simultaneously, the government in Liechtenstein is in the processes of passing a law in order to attract crypto companies and ICOs.[8]

The goal is to create a valid alternative to the Crypto Valley in Switzerland. Blockchain companies are checking the legal situation in Malta, Gibraltar, Switzerland and Liechtenstein and in the end choosing to go to Vaduz, says Lawyer and Software Developer, Thomas Nägele. [9] The so-called Blockchain Act, which is supposedly going to be enforced by mid-2019, is the brainchild of Prime Minister Adrian Hasler.[10] Within this report, you will also find an extensive interview with the Prime Minister on the topic of Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

ETF or No ETF?

Which three letters are currently the most important within the Bitcoin sector? Surprisingly it is not FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) but rather ETF (Exchange Traded Funds). Nothing seems to be influencing the price development quite like the question regarding if and when the American SEC will license a Bitcoin ETF. The numerous proposals, which have apparently been put before the commission, have so far only been declined. In late August, a total of nine ETF applications were all denied. According to the SEC, the decision itself is not an overall decision regarding Bitcoin; it is, however, an attempt to guard consumers from the unsafe and manipulated crypto market. In plain English: Bitcoin markets are simply not mature enough for the SEC at the moment.[11]

So why all the hype about a potential Bitcoin ETF? It would most likely create a simple, comfortable, and safe Bitcoin investment opportunity for investors because it would eliminate the storage problem. Trading with gold lends itself as a good comparison at this stage. Anybody wanting to buy precious metals needs a dealer, a safe place to store it and a way to insure it.

Anybody wanting to resell his bullion, needs to physically take it out of the insured safe and find a buyer. This may seem like the most natural thing in the world for true believers who swear on physical investments and hold it long term as a hedge against monetary crisis. But in comparison to the handling of securities, physical storage is rather complicated. Stocks can after all be bought with a couple of clicks on your computer. An ETF takes out the complicated aspect of the process for the consumer (the physical buying and the storage), and in future an ETF could also provide this for Bitcoin. The ETF provider takes over the hard part and the consumer merely presses a button.

According to some professionals, the bull market in gold and the resulting price bubble following the finical crisis was due to the inauguration of the gold ETF in the year 2004. Many Bitcoin investors hope for the same effect. The problem is that this ETF is taking its time to get underway and with every decline and postponement of the decision by the US commission board, the price fluctuates severely.[12] To solely base your Bitcoin investment on this decision makes no sense at all in our view. In the long run, there will be one or even an entire array of such investment solutions and the introduction a Bitcoin ETF could only have an ephemeral impact on price.

At the end of 2017, Bitcoin futures were introduced to the market. This was an important step in the right direction. One of the futures providers, the CBOE, is also taking part in the race towards an ETF – and stands a good chance of being among the first to receive authorization. The SEC should treat Bitcoin much like gold or other raw materials, says the CBOE. When the first ETF will really be approved is yet to be seen and is not predictable at the time of writing. It could be weeks, months, or, worst case, even years. It all depends on how quickly the markets develop.

As a reaction to the SEC, a couple of young American exchanges have pooled their resources together and created the “Virtual Commodity Association” to work on rules and standards for this young sector. The association is spear-headed by Gemini founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.[13]

A Game Changer by the Name of BAKKT

Some providers do not want to wait on an ETF decision by the SEC. The goal to attract more investors to the sector can also be accomplished via other routes. The most important game changer could possibly come directly from the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) itself, owner of the New York Stock Exchange.

By November, ICE is planning to set up a futures contract with physical delivery. This means, “real” Bitcoins will be going over the counter. The infrastructure of the ICE will be the base of this operation and later a company called Bakkt will take over the crypto plans of the exchange. The Microsoft cloud will be the corner stone for a new crypto trading platform. But the plans do not stop there.[14]

“In bringing regulated, connected infrastructure together with institutional and consumer applications for digital assets, we aim to build confidence in the asset class on a global scale,” ICE Chief Executive Jeffrey Sprecher said. He goes on to elaborate on the future: “Bitcoin could greatly simplify the movement of global money. It has the potential to become the first worldwide currency.” At this point we are drawn to point out that gold already has this role as a global currency for a couple of centuries, but we greatly appreciate Sprecher’s enthusiasm towards the innovation of Bitcoin.[15]

Sprecher points out that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies desperately need a clear set of rules and a reliable infrastructure. We are clearly only at the beginning of this phase.

One of the first partners of Bakkt is supposedly going to be Starbucks. This in short means that customers will in the near future be able to pay for their double shot iced caramel soy-milk Frappucino with digital money.

“As the flagship retailer, Starbucks will play a pivotal role in developing practical, trusted and regulated applications for consumers to convert their digital assets into U.S. dollars for use at Starbucks,” Maria Smith, vice president, partnerships and payments for Starbucks, said in a statement.[16]

The Real World Discovers Bitcoin

As mentioned before, times of falling prices can be beneficial because they are an impetus for research and innovation to improve the technology. However, positive developments and news do not immediately translate into rising prices. FUD and ETF are not the only acronyms influencing the crypto market. Many paths lead to a wider acceptance of Bitcoin, and the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute and International Monetary Fund (IMF) joining the crypto team are likely to help score some points. As mentioned in the previous report with the “Goldman Effect”, we can once again observe the establishment of Bitcoin in “the real world”, or at least on Wall Street.

Thousands of people head to the CFA Institute to undergo excruciating tests in different financial topics in order to call themselves “certified experts”. They now have included questions on crypto markets and Bitcoin into their curriculum. “We saw the field advancing more quickly than other fields and we also saw it as more durable,” said Stephen Horan, managing director for general education and curriculum at CFA Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. “This is not a passing fad.” The CFA seems to be reacting to the rising demand from Asia, where most of crypto trading takes place.[17]

In need of more acronyms? How about IMF? The International Monetary Fund is the capital of the international mainstream monetary system. It goes without saying that the IMF originally regarded Bitcoin with a good portion of skepticism, to say the least. However, there has been a slight transition to this first wave of disapproval. Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, has even gone as far as to say that cryptocurrencies have the potential to make the financial system safer. However, she had to balance out her enthusiasm because after all, she is the boss of one of the institutions that Bitcoin is disrupting. As expected of her as a good IMF boss, she did go on to warn against the potentials of a “new vehicle for money laundering and terror financing”. Overall though, IMF is sending a positive signal for cryptocurrency investors. Recently, IMF experts went as far as describing a world in which traditional banks, private money and cryptocurrencies all peacefully co-exist.[18]

Central banks per se have not yet found a consensus on their stance towards Bitcoin. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the central bank of all central banks, has declared itself in opposition to the crypto world. In June, the economists of the BIS published a 26-page report against Bitcoin. Starting with the fact that it is already an environmental disaster and continuing on to state that the promise of the founders will never be met by the current system.[19]

The decentralized structure of cryptocurrencies should be seen as a weakness, not as a strength and it is at the end of the day just “too risky” to run a global economy without a center, says the BIS. “Trust can evaporate at any time because of the fragility of the decentralized consensus through which transactions are recorded,” the report concluded. “Not only does this call into question the finality of individual payments, it also means that a cryptocurrency can simply stop functioning, resulting in a complete loss of value.” On top of all this, the BIS claims that Bitcoin could bring the whole Internet to a standstill.

Jay Powell, the head of the US central bank, sees the matter slightly more relaxed. In mid-July he stated in a hearing that the crypto sector is not big enough yet to actually pose a serious threat to the financial system. At that time, the market capitalization was at roughly $300 billion. By mid-August, it fell by another $100 billion. The FED has no regulatory power over cryptocurrencies and is also not interested in such an extension of supervision, Powell said.[20]

The Final Showdown

The price of Bitcoin and all other altcoins are on a downwards trend since the beginning of the year. As we can observe, many of the serious contenders are using this time to expand and solidify a new infrastructure. Countries, such as Liechtenstein, are preparing for the next stage of the blockchain revolution. Traditional players such as the IMF, the FED, and the BIS have an eye on Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market as a whole.

The sector itself is, however, still battling with major maturing issues. A main hindrance is the ICO bubble, which we warned against in our very first report and is still floating around. Jihan Wu, CEO of the mining giant Bitmain, expects this to resolve itself. “I believe ICOs are kind of an unsustainable financial bubble. It will burst eventually. It’s just a matter of time. I believe it’s just one year or two. Either way, it will just disappear.”[21]

Wu believes that in the future, traditional assets in the shape of tokens will be traded freely but not in the form of crowdfunded ICOs. Naturally, he wants to start an IPO on an exchange with his company Bitmain, so he does have his own agenda in mind. In our opinion, he does however have a point. ICOs were the hype of 2017 and especially pushed the price of Ethereum. How far the prices could plummet when the bubble does decide to burst once and for all is too scary to imagine at this point in time. Wu deserves to be heard as he does sometimes know what he is taking about – not something you can say about everyone who is inclined to voice their opinions publicly about Bitcoin and the crypto market these days.

The famous economist Joseph Stiglitz is the source of the lowest price prognosis we could find this time. Back in July, he predicted that countries will fight Bitcoin with a “hammer” and will regulate cryptocurrencies to death. “People in power will move to regulate anonymous transactions. That you can be sure of. “Bitcoin could easily be worth just $100 in 10 years.”[22]

We can of course not contradict this statement as (sadly) nobody can look into the future. The specificity of the number does, however, strike us as odd. 10 years ago, there was no such thing as Bitcoin, some investors can even remember a time in which $100 seemed like an extremely high prognosis. Giving Stiglitz’s statement a positive spin, we would say that considering Bitcoin to still exist in 10 years and still have a monetary value is good enough for us at the moment. From an investors point of view, such forecasts, be it bullish or bearish, are always to be treated with caution.

Entry: Tim Draper. The Billionaire and founder of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson sees a very different, positive future for Bitcoin:

“I believe cryptocurrencies will overtake fiat currencies in the next five to seven years. I hold a lot of cryptocurrencies and mainly Bitcoin. I am buying more. I feel that crypto and Bitcoin are the future. Fiat is the past. I do still have to hold some fiat currency for everyday transactions today, but I suspect that that will change over the next few years.”[23]

That the crypto world is still prone to hacks and thefts, as just witnessed again with the Ethereum based network Bancor, does not seem to worry Draper in the slightest. Hacks are also part of the traditional banking world. He sees these attacks as an argument for Bitcoin versus altcoins. “The larger the network of wallet holders, miners or stakeholders, the more secure the cryptocurrency. So, Bitcoin is the most secure.”[24]

Draper has a fascinating vision of the future of the finance world. He envisions the following: “I expect that since cryptocurrencies will increase the velocity of money, the current $86 trillion global market for currency will grow to be about $140 trillion in the next 10 years, and that growth will be in crypto. In fact, I estimate that fiat currencies will actually decrease in use, and that crypto will become as much as $100 trillion of that market. I expect Bitcoin to be about 10 % of that market, or $10 trillion. There is a lot of room to grow there.”

And he is right. At the all-time high, when Bitcoin was worth $20,000 apiece, the whole market was not even worth a trillion. However, many analysts expect to see Bitcoin to land somewhere in the region of $5,000, $4,000, or maybe even $3,000 before we can say the bear market is over.

In the long run, it will be interesting to see if Stiglitz or Draper turn out to be right. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general have the potential to let Draper’s fantastical dreams come true. On that path, however, many, very powerful, traditional financial institutions must still adapt or even fall. We can therefore understand why Stiglitz anticipates strong resistance. To stop Bitcoin as a whole, it would however take a level of international cooperation on a never before seen scale. Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision is intact. Bitcoin has stepped into the ring with fiat. New against old. Online against offline. De-centralized against centralized. And no matter the outcome, it is going to be one hell of a ride.

[1] See “U.S. investor sues AT&T for $224 million over loss of cryptocurrency,” Gertrude Chavez-Dreifuβ, Reuters, August 15, 2018.

[2] See “The SIM Hijackers,” Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Motherboard, July 17, 2018.

[3] See “Bitcoin Trading in Venezuela is skyrocketing amid 14,000% inflation,” John Detrixhe, Quartz, June 8, 2018.

[4] See “Regulated Crypto Custody Is (Almost) Here. It’s a Game Changer,” Olga Kharif and Sonali Basak, Bloomberg, June 18, 2018.

[5] See “Fidelity, a household name in American investing, is plotting a big move into cryptocurrency trading,“ Frank Chaparro, Business Insider, June 6, 2018.

[6] See “A Traditional Stock Exchange Is Also Going to Trade Cryptocurrencies Like Bitcoin,“ David Meyer, Fortune, July 6, 2018.

[7] See “Boerse Stuttgart to develop ICO platform and MTF for cryptocurrency trading,” Finextra, August 2, 2018.

[8] See “Binance LCX Launches Fiat-toCrypto Exchange in Liechtenstein,” Ana Alexandre, Cointelegraph, August 16, 2018.

[9] See “Krypto-Start-ups entscheiden sich selten gegen Liechtenstein,” Pascal Züger, Cash, August 13, 2018.

[10] See “PwC’s Pierre-Edouard Wahl: Blockchain Can Bring Positive Competition to Swiss Banking Space,“ Molly Jane Zuckerman, Cointelegraph, August 8, 2018.

[11] See “Bitcoin ETFs Aren’t Coming Any Time Soon Thanks to the SEC,” Rachel Evans and Lily Katz, Bloomberg, August 23, 2018.

[12] See “Are Bitcoin ETFs Back on the Table Again?,” Crystal Kim, Barron’s, March 27, 2018.

[13] See “The Biggest Digital Exchanges Are Teaming Up To Police the Crypto Space,” Matthew Leising, Bloomberg, August 20, 2018.

[14] See “NYSE-owner ICE to form new company for digital assets,” John McCrank and Anna Irrera, Reuters, August 3, 2018.

[15] See “Breaking: World’s Biggest Stock Exchange Operator is Launching a Bitcoin Market,” CNN, August 3, 2018.

[16] See “New Starbucks partnership with Microsoft allows customers to pay for Frappuccinos with bitcoin,” Sarah Whitten and Kate Rooney, CNBC, August 3, 2018.

[17] See “’This Is Not a Passing Fad’: CFA Exam Adds Crypto, Blockchain Topics,” Michael Patterson and Andrea Tan, Bloomberg, July 16, 2018.

[18] See “Bitcoin tools could make finance system safer, says IMF boss,” Richard Partington, The Guardian, April 16, 2018.

[19] See “Bitcoin Could Break the Internet, Central Bank Overseer Says,” Edward Robinson, Bloomberg, June 18, 2018.

[20] See “Powell Says Cryptocurrencies Aren’t Big Enough to Pose a Threat,” Olga Kharif, Bloomberg, July 18, 2018.

[21] See “ICOs an ‚Unsustainable Financial Bubble’: Jihan Wu,” CCN, August 22, 2018.

[22] See “Bitcoin price warning: BTC will drop to ‘$100’ after being ‘regulated into oblivion’,” David Dawkins, Express, July 9, 2018.

[23] See “Billionaire Investor Bill Draper Explains Why Bitcoin Will Hit $250,000 in 2022,” Jordan French, The Street, July 25, 2018.

[24] See “Another Crypto Fail: Hackers Steal $23.5 Million from Token Service Bancor,” Jeff John Roberts, Fortune, July 9, 2018.

The Network Effect As a Valuation Methodology

By
Friederich Zapke
-
The Network Effect As a Valuation Methodology

“… ether itself will retain a strong and steady value as a cryptofuel, and as a store of value for Ethereum-based security deposits, simply because of the combination of the Ethereum blockchain’s network effect (which actually is a platform network effect, as all contracts on the Ethereum blockchain have a common interface and can trivially talk to each other).”

Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum

A hot topic at conferences in the US is how to value cryptocurrencies. There are two main models: absolute and relative. Absolute valuation allows investors to calculate a “fair” price for each asset. Then the investor can compare the theoretical “fair” price to the real price that the asset is selling for on the market. If the price on the market is higher than the “fair” price, then the investor receives a sell signal and vice versa. On the stock market, analysts calculate the net present value of future firm revenues or of dividends to arrive at what the stock should be priced at today. In contrast, relative valuation models allow investors to compare several assets. Relative valuation models are often ratios such as the Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio which compares the price of an asset to the earnings of a company.[1] Cryptocurrency analysts adapted this general valuation framework by computing each crypto asset’s Network Value to Metcalf (NVM) ratio, Network Value to Transactions (NVT) ratio, and a metric that combines the concepts used in the two prior ratios called Network Value/Transactions to Growth (NVTG) ratio. Higher ratios mean a cryptocurrency is overbought relative to other coins.

In this chapter we develop relative valuation models to help investors compare various cryptocurrencies. Our calculations suggest that the cryptocurrency market is still overvalued because the market capitalization is not justified by the number of active users or the daily on-chain transaction volume. We focus our analysis on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin and find that Bitcoin is a better investment than Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin. However, the caveat is that this is only one indicator out of several that one can use for making investment decisions.

The Network Effect

In the 1980s, Robert Metcalfe, an employee at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), devised a novel theory about the value of communication systems.[2] The theory later became known as Metcalfe’s Law. His original intent was to describe the purchases and connections of the Ethernet, which was a predecessor to the Internet.

Today, the theory is used to value a network and its users, such as Internet businesses like Facebook and eBay. Metcalfe’s model proposes a relationship between the value of a network and its size, typically measured in number of users.[3] More specifically, he argued that the value of a network is proportional to the square of network nodes (users). For example, assume the social media network Pinterest has n users, then the utility each user derives from the network is proportional to (n – 1), namely the number of potential connections in the network. This relationship between utility and users is the so-called network effect. If an additional user joins the network, it increases the utility of the others, and assuming that all connections are equally valuable, the total network value should result proportional to n*(n – 1), which in turn is asymptotically proportional to n².

Metcalfe’s Law Applied to Crypto Assets

Much like online networks, crypto assets are networks of users that are connected in digital space that can interact with other users. Metcalfe’s law means that as more people adopt cryptocurrencies, the more utility each user derives from the network. Ultimately, the result is a proportionately higher network value.

In an effort to define the role of network effects and understand their consequences in the cryptoeconomic context, Vitalik Buterin outlined the main reasons a large network increases the value of a cryptocurrency.[4]

1.) Security effect: systems that are more widely adopted derive their consensus from larger consensus groups, making them more difficult to attack.

2.) Payment system network effect: payment systems that are accepted by more merchants are more attractive to consumers, and payment systems used by more consumers are more attractive to merchants.

3.) Integration network effect: third party platforms will be more willing to integrate with a platform that is widely adopted, and the greater number of these tools will make the platform easier to use.

4.) Size stability effect: currencies with larger market cap tend to be more stable, and more established cryptocurrencies are seen as more likely (and therefore by self-fulfilling prophecy actually are more likely) to remain at non-zero value far into the future.

5.) Market depth effect: larger currencies have higher market depth on exchanges, allowing users to convert larger quantities of funds in and out of that currency without taking a hit on the market price.

6.) Interpersonal single-currency preference effect: users prefer to use the same currency that others are using to avoid interchange fees when making ordinary transactions.

 7.) Intrapersonal single-currency preference effect: users that already use a currency for one purpose prefer to use it for other purposes both due to lower cognitive costs and because they can maintain a lower total liquid balance among all cryptocurrencies without paying interchange fees.

Different types of crypto assets may exhibit different types of network effects as well: a payment token like Bitcoin will probably exhibit a stronger Interpersonal single-currency preference effect than a utility token like Ethereum.

Network Value to Metcalfe Ratio

After having gained an understanding of the role of network effects in crypto assets, we can now look at the concrete metrics used to assess their fundamental value suggested by network effects. The first one is applying Metcalfe’s Law directly to crypto assets and is called the Network Value to Metcalfe ratio. Its main purpose is to give a sense of how over or undervalued an asset is at the moment.

The more inflated the price is in relation to the utility that network users derive from it, as proxied by the network effect theory, the higher the expected correction towards the theoretical fundamental value implied by the model will be. That said, the model implies that the price of a crypto asset stands in a direct relation with a fundamental value measured by user utility in the long run and that some form of reversion to the mean takes place.[5]

The Network Value to Metcalfe ratio puts the respective law for describing the network effect in its denominator, while using market capitalization as a proxy for network value in its numerator. The number of network users (n) is approximated by the number of unique addresses that are active on a given day, meaning they are participating in sending or receiving transactions.[6] Unique addresses in the Bitcoin ecosystem are payment addresses that have a non-zero balance. While the number of unique addresses is not a perfect measure of the actual number of users on a given day, it generally holds that the more unique addresses are in use the more users the network has and vice versa. Since we are trying to arrive at a long-term fundamental metric, we additionally smooth the daily active user number to a 30-day moving average in order to get rid of stark daily fluctuations related to noise.

The first candidate for our analysis is Bitcoin: Plotting the Network Value of Bitcoin against its seemingly mean-reverting NVM ratio reveals a staggering relationship.

Large spikes in Bitcoins NVM ratio indicate that the network is being priced excessively high in relation to the number of active users and have historically almost always led to subsequent corrections in its market value. We can see this quite evidently during the periods of early 2011, mid-2012, early 2013 and late 2017. Remember that the orange trace corresponding to the market value of Bitcoin is depicted on a log scale. We transform all the subsequent historical network values to a logarithmic scale for purposes of a more convenient visualization. The y-axis on the chart above represents the log scale on the left and the current value of the NVM multiple on the right.

What we can see is that once NVM moves significantly above its long-term mean (0.21), there are reasons to be concerned about the future near-to middle-term evolution of Bitcoin’s market value. Conversely, an NVM well below its mean has typically meant a good buying opportunity. The current levels, however, indicate a worrying picture for the state of Bitcoin and strongly suggest a further downwards correction.


Similar patterns, although with less predictive power, arise in the case of Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The quality of the latter is further diminished by its short history of data.

For Litecoin, spikes in NVM were mostly followed by corrections in its market value in subsequent periods. However, the most recent “bubble” in late 2017 has in no way been preceded by such a spike. This might be associated with the limitations we pointed out for NVM or with concerns inherent to the Litecoin network, such as the fact that Litecoin development has almost completely stalled, as evident from their Github activity, and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has sold 100 % of his LTC stake. Overall, the multiples of BTC & LTC seem to be trading more or less in the same range of 0.01–2, while BCH has inherently exhibited a way more inflated scale, ranging from .90–11. The current ratios can be found in the following table below. According to relative valuation, BTC and LTC are overvalued equally compared to their user base, while BCH appears to be grossly overvalued.

Network Value to Transaction Ratio

Another valuable relative valuation metric that is related to the Network Value to Metcalfe ratio is the Network Value to Transaction ratio. If we think back to the P/E ratio found in traditional finance, earnings serve as a proxy for the value created for shareholders. If we try to apply this reasoning to crypto assets, we will find that most of them do not have earnings in the traditional sense. However, one can argue that there might be a positive relationship between the utility and consequently fundamental value of a network and the total value of transactions flowing through it. This idea is in line with the interpersonal and intrapersonal network effects discussed in the previous section by Vitalik Buterin.

The most crucial part about the NVT ratio is defining the denominator, namely total transaction value, such that it truly proxies the utility conveyed to users. When looking at transaction volumes in the crypto space, there are currently two main venues where transactions take place: on-chain and off-chain. On-chain transactions refer to activity that occurs directly on the blockchain, while off-chain transactions typically refer to interactions on remote venues like cryptocurrency exchanges which are not directly documented on the blockchain.

Distinguishing volumes that proxy utility from those that do not is a true challenge in the crypto world and a lot of brainpower is going into that topic.[7] It is reasonable to assume that on-chain transaction volume is the closest we can get to measuring true economic output on the blockchain, which directly translates to user utility. We proxy the denominator in the NVT ratio with on-chain transaction volume as calculated by the Coinmetrics Team, which publishes their dataset under the name of “adjusted transaction volume estimates”.

Similarly, to NVM, we smooth the daily (on-chain & adjusted) transaction volume figures to a 30-day moving average to ensure that we solely capture a long-term fundamental trend. Using the total market capitalization as a proxy for network value as above, we obtain the following results presented in the figures below:

For Bitcoin, NVT shows high multiples (between 50–100) indicating a potential overvaluation and low multiples (between 0–30) signaling undervaluation. It is noteworthy that the current trend of NVT seems to be moving towards levels seen at the peak of the most recent bubble. This is true not only for BTC  but also for LTC, while BCH’s valuation in relation to its transactions volume seems to have stabilized around its long-term mean.


Similar to the NVM ratio, the NVT ratio of BTC and LTC are trading in the same range most of the time (20–60), while BCHs multiple is typically above 50 and at some points of its short history touching or overshooting the 100 mark, which might be indicative of an inherent overvaluation of BCH. As already discussed in the case of the NVM ratio, the NVT of LTC does not seem to have followed its historically predictive pattern during the most recent bubble in late 2017. Please refer to our possible explanations for this trend in the previous section.[8]

Network Value/Transaction Value to Growth

The previous two subchapters dealt with the NVM and NVT ratios in great detail, but as we can see from our analyses, the ratios sometimes suggest contradicting findings as far as over or undervaluation of a crypto asset is concerned. Both ratios are without doubt the most useful relative valuation ratios at the moment, however, researchers have noted that a metric combining their insights into one single figure would be desirable. NVT does not factor in the value-added to the network through new users, whereas NVM does not consider the total amount of economic activity that users actually expend on the network as opposed to just owning an address. This is why researchers[9] are drawing the connection between traditional finance and the crypto world by looking at the second most common relative metric used, namely the Price/Earnings to Growth ratio.


The PEG ratio is particularly useful in valuing stocks with high growth potential but close to non-existent earnings which would result in a very high P/E ratio and thus an incomplete assessment. If we apply the PEG ratio to crypto, we obtain the Network Value/Transactions to Growth (NVTG) ratio, which aims at factoring in both the economic throughput on a network and the growth of its user base in one single metric. Applying this concept to real networks we obtain the following results shown in Figures 14, 15, and 16.

The NVTG metric summarizes the findings we obtained from analyzing NVM and NVT for the three assets separately. Altogether, the ratios indicate room for further downwards correction towards their respective fundamental value as suggested by user numbers and transaction volumes for Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. As introduced earlier, Litecoin seems to have lost touch with its fundamentals completely, which is why its NVTG ratio appears to be of little predictive value at this stage.

To wrap up, we have summarized the current state according to relative valuation in one table for the selected tokens. As evident, Bitcoin seems to have the healthiest valuation levels on a relative basis compared to its peers, albeit being quite elevated in an historical comparison. Bitcoin Cash has clearly the most exaggerated valuation multiples relative to its user base and transaction volume. We will continue to monitor these ratios very closely in the future and plan to provide regular updates on them.

[1] Fama and French, 1992

[2] See “Metcalfe’s Law after 40 Years of Ethernet,” Bob Metcalfe, Computer, Vol. 46, No. 12, 2013.

[3] Ibid.

[4] See “On Bitcoin Maximalism, and Currency and Platform Effects,” Vitalik Buterim, Ethereum Blog, November 19, 2014

[5] Here we are focusing on the relationship between the network value and an aggregate user metric, aiming at keeping the network effect as general as possible. It would require further research into discerning the individual effects at play to arrive at a complete fundamental measure.

[6] For internet companies with strong network effects, the analogous daily active usersDaily Active Users (DAU) indicator is one of the most important performance and valuation metrics.

[7] See “Introducing our adjusted transaction volume estimates,” Coinmetrics Team, Coin Metrics, June 27, 2018.

[8] See “Re-thinking Network Value to Transactions (NVT) Ratio,” Dmitry Kalichkin, February 4, 2018; “Debunking Market Narratives: Litecoin ($LTC) Edition,” Tushar Jain, Multicoin Capital, September 14, 2018.

[9] See “Improvements on the Network Value to Transactions (NVT) Ratio & Introducing Network Value/Transactions to Growth (NVTG) to Value Crypto,” Vikram Arun, Medium, March 29, 2018.

Liechtenstein’s Blockchain Strategy: Insights from the Financial Market Authority

By
Mark Valek
-
Liechtenstein’s Blockchain Strategy: Insights from the Financial Market Authority

“Payment tokens can only be issued to companies with an FMA license, e. g., an electronic money license or a bank license. However, there are certain exceptions that do not require a permit. With securities tokens, it depends on whether the company uses the token to create a financial instrument for investors or to raise debt or equity for the company itself. In the latter case, the enterprise does not require a license from the FMA but should have the so-called prospectus approved.”

Patrick Bont, FMA

Patrick Bont is a member of the executive board of the Financial Market Authority Liechtenstein, and he is the head of the banking division and the head of the FinTech team at the FMA. For the past three and half years, Mr. Bont has served as lecturer at the University of Liechtenstein’s Compliance-Officer Certificate Program. He completed his Master’s in Law at the University of St. Gallen. Mr. Bont has written and spoken on the subject of cryptocurrencies, and he is an active member of the Liechtenstein FinTech community.

Mark Valek: An essential aspect of cryptocurrencies and the tokenized economy is the process of so-called initial coin offering (ICOs), i. e. the first issue of crypto tokens. What are the main categories of tokens from a regulatory perspective?

Patrick Bont: There are numerous approaches to categorize tokens. Discussions are under way among regulators and supervisors as to which approach makes the most sense. The FMA currently assumes three categories: utility token, payment token and securities token. Roughly speaking, one can say that utility tokens entitle to purchase a product or service, payment tokens are to serve as means of payment and securities tokens are quasi-financial instruments. In practice, however, the limits are not quite so easy to draw and there are numerous hybrid forms. From a financial market perspective, payment tokens and securities tokens are particularly relevant.

Mark Valek: Who carries out the token classification of the ICO in each individual case? Is the classification focused on the legal or technical perspective?

Patrick Bont: Generally, the token issuer is responsible for clarifying whether its ICO or token falls under financial market law. It is advisable to consult a specialized lawyer. The FMA’s FinTech team can of course also be contacted in case of uncertainties. First and foremost, the legal classification is important to us. However, the technical functionalities of a token can give hints to the classification process.

Mark Valek: Let us assume that a company intends to have an ICO in this country. What does the process look like depending on the token class that is to be issued?

Patrick Bont: First, the company must decide what it wants to achieve with the ICO. This means that it must assess the ICO economically but also legally and technically. One also speaks of “ICO economics”. If the decision has been made to issue a “security token” or a “payment token”, the company should submit the corresponding applications to the FMA, preferably with the support of a specialist.

Mark Valek: Does the issuing company require a regulatory license, and if so, which?

Patrick Bont: This in turn depends on the token or the business model of the company and to whom the tokens are offered. “Payment tokens” can only be issued to companies with an FMA license, e. g., an electronic money license or a bank license. However, there are certain exceptions that do not require a permit. With “securities tokens”, it depends on whether the company uses the token to create a financial instrument for investors or to raise debt or equity for the company itself. In the latter case, the enterprise does not require a license from the FMA but should have the so-called prospectus approved.

Mark Valek: How much time should be scheduled for an ICO?

Patrick Bont: According to our experience, the planning, preparation, and implementation of an ICO takes between 12 and 18 months, depending on the complexity and the required permits.

Mark Valek: What effects will the planned Blockchain Act have on the ICO landscape in Liechtenstein and how will this national law affect international business?

Patrick Bont: It is important to understand that all ICOs currently covered by the financial market law will continue to do so in the future. As an EEA country, Liechtenstein takes over EU financial market regulation and implements and enforces it. The Blockchain Act therefore affects all ICOs that are not covered by the financial market law, i. e. above all utility tokens. The law has the advantage that these ICOs are also subject to certain rules and thus the buyers of the tokens enjoy better protection. However, ICO are only one aspect of the new law.

Mark Valek: How many ICOs have already been reviewed by the FMA or how many are currently under review?

Patrick Bont: Over the past three years, the FMA has received and processed more than 100 inquiries in connection with ICOs. However, only a fraction of them were implemented.

Mark Valek: How does the FMA Liechtenstein prepare itself in terms of resources for the new complexity and increasing requests from companies, particularly with regard to the verification and monitoring of these tokens?

Patrick Bont: In June of this year, the FMA set up its own FinTech team. The Regulatory Laboratory/Financial Innovations team deals with questions from companies and entrepreneurs in the field of financial innovation. These are not only start-ups but also banks or other financial intermediaries who want to implement projects. In addition, we at the FMA attach great importance to ensuring that our employees receive further training in these topics so that we can discuss with market participants on an equal footing.

Mark Valek: Where can a company find out more about any requirements?

Patrick Bont: I recommend visiting the FMA website regularly. Under the heading “FinTech in Liechtenstein” you will find information on the topic. The FinTech pages are regularly updated and supplemented.

Liechtenstein’s Blockchain Strategy: Prime Minister’s Outlook

By
Mark Valek
-
Liechtenstein’s Blockchain Strategy: Prime Minister’s Outlook

“All these measures we are talking about are meant to maintain Liechtenstein’s quality of life for the future and to preserve as well as creating new jobs. This is the main goal we are pursuing in the long run.”

Prime Minister of Liechtenstein Adrian Hasler

For the past two years, the government of Liechtenstein has been crafting a first of its kind law related to the blockchain technology. The law signals to entrepreneurs that Liechtenstein is open for business. Prime Minister Adrian Hasler and Dr. Thomas Dünser from the Ministry of Finance are spearheading the project. This is part of a larger project to “digitalize Liechtenstein” by improving all government services and encouraging innovation in the country.

Mark Valek: Many thanks Prime Minister Hasler and Dr. Dünser for taking time. We have some questions that we would like to go through so let’s begin! Liechtenstein has made a name for itself within the crypto industry as a very blockchain-friendly jurisdiction. This has become evident so far from the many ICOs carried out here, by the commitment of the University of Liechtenstein, from regulated crypto funds which were approved here, and now finally also in the imminent adoption of the Blockchain Act.[1] What long-term vision for the principality do you see with this blockchain-friendly strategy?

Prime Minister Hasler: All these measures we are talking about are meant to maintain Liechtenstein’s quality of life for the future and to preserve as well as create new jobs. This is the main goal we are pursuing in the long run. Especially with these new technologies, we have found that there is great potential, that it comes with great disruptive power, and that it brings opportunities for the small state of Liechtenstein. Our aim is simply to be very open to innovation. We already took up the subject of innovation in the last legislature meeting, and we have already implemented appropriate measures with the Liechtenstein impulse program and want to incentivize the financial sector to innovate, too. The blockchain approach fits perfectly into this strategy, as far as the early recognition of opportunities and taking advantage of them is concerned. Providing legal certainty, which is very important in the financial sector, is always at the top of our list. We have experienced this in recent years in the traditional financial sector as well, and especially with these new technologies, that legal certainty can be created here. These are the main directions.

Mark Valek: Last June, the Blockchain Act was presented with great interest for the first time at the University of Liechtenstein. This is one of the first comprehensive legislative frameworks worldwide to formulate an expanded set of legal rules for applications of the new blockchain technology. What are the main cornerstones of this law?

Prime Minister Hasler: Our aim with this law is to clarify the fundamental questions of the token economy. We have seen very specific areas such as ICOs or cryptocurrencies regulated in other countries. We have chosen to deliberately develop a comprehensive approach to clarify these fundamental questions. Controlling tokens embodies all kinds of rights on blockchain platforms. Customer protection is very important for us, so we clearly define all the roles that exist in the token economy and regulate them in order to create legal certainty. A major concern of ours is also the applicability of money laundering laws, due diligence and so on as elementary parts of this new decree that we are planning.

Mark Valek: Is it known when the blockchain law will come into force?

Prime Minister Hasler: We are now about to start the consultation process. This is the first phase, then the regulators will have the opportunity to make comments and give feedback. We will then incorporate these comments and submit the relevant legislative proposal to Parliament. If all goes well, we will probably be able to do this in December. It is the first time the country is dealing with this bill, and I expect that we could have the bill in place by summer 2019.

Mark Valek: Where can interested companies or citizens find out about the law and follow up with questions? Will the law also be available in English?

Prime Minister Hasler: For the time being, the consultation is published and can also be downloaded from the government’s homepage.[2] However, this will not be in English. When the law is passed, it will certainly also be translated into English. We have already translated many laws into English, which are also available on our portal, and I assume that when this law is passed, it will be available in English on the portal as well.

Mark Valek: What impact do you think the law will have on the domestic banking system?

Prime Minister Hasler: I expect the Blockchain Act to have a positive impact on our financial center. The law will make it easier for banks and other financial intermediaries to deal with the blockchain. We are already seeing that banks, trustees, and lawyers are very interested in our draft and see great potential for new business models. In the meantime, various companies from the FinTech sector have already settled in Liechtenstein. This radiates to the outside world and leads to other companies taking an interest in our location. We have noticed that a new ecosystem is emerging in Liechtenstein that will certainly continue to grow.

Mark Valek: You have touched on this somewhat: Are there already companies that have announced their plans to make use of the law?

Prime Minister Hasler: In recent weeks, we have repeatedly received feedback from companies, and this feedback has been very positive. In Dr. Thomas Dünser we also have a competent contact person in the ministry. He is in close contact with the scene and feels the pulse. This shows that some of these companies are waiting for the law to come into force.

Mark Valek: Is there something like an association, someone with whom you were in bilateral talks with or was there a central point of contact?

Dr. Dünser: In drafting the law, we involved a core group of experts from various fields who have already dealt intensively with the blockchain. In addition, I hold relatively frequent discussions with entrepreneurs from the field in order to know the current developments and to recognize the upcoming problems.

Prime Minister Hasler: It is also exciting in this context that there are already local companies such as law firms, trustees, and also banks that have been intensively involved in this topic for some time. Many of them are in close exchange with Dr. Thomas Dünser and can also bring in input. Thus, a certain scene with both external and Liechtenstein companies has already formed here, and it was a great advantage that one could rely on these resources as well as assessing the know-how in the preparation of such a proposal.

Mark Valek: Especially with these new technologies, it is important because everyone has to learn somewhere, which we also see as our mission with the Crypto Research Report. Are you in contact with legislators in neighboring countries on the blockchain issue?

Prime Minister Hasler: We follow very closely what is being done in other states and jurisdictions, which is very interesting for us. We also exchange ideas with international organizations on a regular basis.

Mark Valek: How do you assess Lichtenstein’s progress as a location for the blockchain industry compared to Switzerland or other international locations?

Prime Minister Hasler: What we can say for sure is that we have been dealing with the subject of innovation and subsequently also with the subject of the blockchain for several years now and are working hard to optimize the framework conditions in this area. The Blockchain Act is now part of this work, and I think we are very well positioned given our innovation-friendly government and our financial market supervision, which sees potential in this area. Further, our regulatory laboratory, which is very well equipped to take up the concerns of companies at an early stage, also provides advice and guidance which is quite unique. These factors coupled with the short distances we have make a great package of Liechtenstein with which we can of course also score accordingly. Last but not least, our honorary membership is also a great advantage since we also have the EU passport, i. e. market access to Europe.

Mark Valek: We want to consider the whole topic from another standpoint: The chairman of the SEC has stated that every ICO he has seen so far resembles a traditional IPO and would therefore be subject to its supervision in the case of the USA. Do you agree with his view?

Prime Minister Hasler: We take a different view on this subject. There are tokens that are similar to securities and of course they are subject to this legislation – that is clear. However, there are also tokens that often reflect rights of use and, in our view, in Liechtenstein and other European countries, these do not fall under the securities legislation of the financial market regulation.

Mark Valek: Is the Financial Market Authority in charge of classifying these tokens?

Prime Minister Hasler: Yes, it is the central authority that classifies them together with the regulatory laboratory and then advises the companies and shows whether it embodies a soft right of use from the point of view of the FMA or it is similar to securities and therefore also subject to financial market regulation.

Mark Valek: Allow me to bring in another question: I assume that the FMA will inevitably put resources into it. Is there already a specific department there or people who are specifically responsible for that?

Prime Minister Hasler: A few years ago, the FMA established the Regulatory Laboratory, a cross-divisional organization that dealt with this topic and supported companies. The next step has been taken, and this regulatory laboratory has been further professionalized with supervisory management and equipping it with appropriate human resources. Nevertheless, the original areas are still responsible for approvals. This means that, as far as a banking licenses, insurance, etc. is concerned, the relevant departments are responsible. But the first point of contact for such businesses is the regulatory laboratory. There they give feedback if the token falls under the securities law of the financial market regulation or not, and then it goes into the normal process.

Mark Valek: There’s probably a point of contact or a person in charge?

Dr. Dünser: Yes, there is the head of the Office for Innovation and Regulatory Laboratory for the Financial Centre, Dorotha Rohlfing.[3]

Prime Minister Hasler: The second position of contact is the Ministry of Finance led by Dr. Thomas Dünser, and this is also very important that both the ministry of the government and the FMA have respective contact points on both sides and so that businesses can orient themselves there. We are joining forces so that all the information can be passed on.

Mark Valek: Which of the local banks and companies are ready to enter the crypto world, or are there interesting projects you have been following?

Prime Minister Hasler: For obvious reasons, I do not want to mention any special names now, but you can see that the interest of the local banks, but also of lawyers and fiduciaries, is very big. I have noticed in recent months that a great deal of time is being invested there, that appropriate training is being acquired, and specialist skills are being obtained in order to be active in this area as well. It turns out that there are many interesting projects by companies approaching Liechtenstein from outside and are looking for local business partners to set up their businesses here in Liechtenstein.

Mark Valek: There are lawyers who specialize in these matters and they are probably the first reference for many foreigners.

Prime Minister Hasler: Exactly. Some lawyers specialized early on. Some lawyers specialized in these topics at an early stage and are in great demand today. By the way, we also took this expertise into account when drafting the Blockchain Act.

Mark Valek: Last but not least, are there any other blockchain-friendly measures that are in the pipeline?

Prime Minister Hasler: We are constantly working on improving the framework conditions and would like to implement this Blockchain Act as a next step. That means discussing it with parliament, adopting it, and then entering it into force. That certainly still needs appropriate resources. Nevertheless, we are constantly in discussions with the market to feel the needs of the community, and to see where further measures are necessary, and we are very much looking forward to implementing further improvements. But currently there is no concrete project.

Mark Valek: Wonderful, of course I don’t want to take away either of you the chance to make any further comments or suggestions.

Prime Minister Hasler: I think the questions you have asked were well picked and I think we have given a proper overview of the subject. There’s a lot going on right now. Above all, the debate in parliament will be quite exciting. Before that, I am already very curious about the consultation that will come out of the comments. Whether this approach which we have chosen will also meet with approval. I assume that, but I am curious about further potential for improvement. In addition, the discussion in parliament will be very exciting and then, in the end, the effects it will have once the law has come into force. We hope that we will get good feedback and that companies in Liechtenstein will find a good location and that many of them will settle here.

Mark Valek: Excellent, then I would like to thank Prime Minister Hasler and Dr. Dünser very much for their time and wish them all the best for the future.

Prime Minister Hasler: Thank you very much, Mr. Valek. Thank you also for your interest and interview.

[1] See “Vernehmungslassungsbericht Blockchain-Gesetz,” Ministerium für Präsidiales und Finanzen, August 29, 2018.

[2] See “Vernehmlassung zum Blockchain-Gesetz gestartet,” Regierung des Fürstentums Liechtenstein, August 29, 2018.

[3] See “Medienmitteilung: Regierungslabor wird verstärkt,” Finanzmarktaufsicht Liechtenstein, April 20, 2018.

Smart Contracts

By
Demelza Hays
-
Smart Contracts

“A smart contract is a computer program that directly controls some kind of digital asset… The smart contract approach says instead of a legal contract, immediately transfer the digital asset into a program, the program automatically will run code, validate a condition, and determine whether the asset should go to one person or back to the other person, or whether it should be immediately refunded to the person who sent it or some combination thereof.”

Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum

Smart contracts are dynamic, complex, and incredibly powerful. This technology has the potential to change how business is done because governments and companies can decrease costs, automate contract enforcement, and provide an auditable trail of control. While their long-term potential is unimaginable, they are already disrupting industries such as crowdfunding, law, and insurance. However, smart contracts are made by humans, and therefore, they are not perfect. Over $2.4 billion USD have already been lost due to faulty smart contracts. The future success of utility tokens depends on the ability of developers to build more secure applications that users can trust. 

Smart Contracts, Decentralized Applications, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

With the rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, smart contracts, Decentralized Applications (DApps), and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are becoming increasingly important technologies that investors should understand. This all began when Nick Szabo coined the term “smart contract” in 1994. To define the term, a smart contract is a piece of software that represents a set of rules that are automatically executed under pre-determined circumstances. In other words, a smart contract is an “if-then” statement that is executed on a distributed peer-to-peer network.

Since each contract is stored on several computers all around the world, smart contracts do not have a single point of failure. Similar to BitTorrent, not having a single point of failure means that if one computer fails, the whole network does not fail. Nobody has the power to change the smart contract – even the person who made the smart contract. That applies to hackers and governments too!

Smart contracts have the same privileges as cryptocurrency wallets, except they are not controlled by private keys or users. Instead, a smart contract is controlled by the code contained within the smart contract. They can send and receive cryptocurrency, and they can store a balance or have a balance of zero. They can interact with other smart contracts, but users have to pay a small fee to the blockchain network to interact with the contract because every change needs to be approved and recorded by every computer that maintains the network. This is similar to mining in Bitcoin.

A DApp is a collection of many smart contracts that are working together to create a product for users. To be a DApp, four criteria must be met. First, the application must be open-source, which means that anyone can download it and look at the underlying code. Second, the application must run on a blockchain or distributed ledger technology, such as a directed acyclic graph. Third, the application must have a token associated with it. This token can be native to the application, such as Augur, or the application can use another cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Finally, the application must use a cryptographic algorithm for confirming changes to the smart contracts that control the DApp.

A DAO is a type of DApp that allows owners to make business decisions by voting electronically and to automate management using smart contracts. DAOs use smart contracts to facilitate digital voting, and to facilitate the voting outcomes. The goal of a DAO is to reduce managerial overhead and to circumvent regulations particular to geographic regions.

 Essential, a DAO is a company structure for a globally dispersed group of owners. The cryptography and blockchain enables a group of strangers to invest capital together and make financial decisions. Smart contracts enable the company to be run autonomously because they hold the rules of the company and serve as a basis for operation decisions instead of a human. For example, a smart contract could be programmed to distribute dividends to investors once a certain condition is met. If profits are above a certain threshold, the smart contract could automatically send a transaction to shareholder wallets.

Smart Contract Theory Applied In Practice

The most popular cryptocurrency that incorporates smart contracts is Ethereum. The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, proposed Ethereum in 2013 as a blockchain specifically designed for smart contracts. Ethereum is a worldwide network of computers which enforce, execute, and validate smart contracts. As covered in the previous Crypto Research Report, validation is achieved by a decentralized network of thousands of Ethereum nodes around the world. The centralized nature of the network enables decentralized applications (DApps) to run without downtime, censorship, or third-party interference, which makes the applications immutable or tamper-proof.

In practice, Ethereum can be used to create a decentralized crowdfunding website without intermediaries, such as Kickstarter. Ethereum users can invest in a business idea by sending money to an Ethereum wallet address of a smart contract. If the entrepreneur is unable to raise a certain amount of funding within a certain timeframe, the smart contract can automatically send all of the investors their money back. Instead of paying 10 % to Kickstarter, they only have to pay a 5-cent fee to the Ethereum network to process the transaction to the smart contract. Middleman removed. If company raises $10 million with Ethereum instead of Kickstarter, they save $1 million in fees.

The decentralized nature of Ethereum also allows investors to circumvent regulations that limit how much investors can invest in crowdfunding projects. For example, in the US, non-accredited investors with an annual income or net worth less than $107,000, are limited to invest a maximum of 5 % of their assets. For those with an annual income or net worth greater than $107,000, he/she is limited to investing 10 % of the lesser of the two amounts. These rules do not apply to Ethereum and other smart contract platforms such as NEO and EOS.

Blockchains that facilitate smart contracts are often referred to as utility blockchains, and the assets that are associated with them are referred to as utility crypto assets or utility tokens. Table 1 compares the relative return of utility crypto assets to payment crypto assets such as Bitcoin, Monero, and Litecoin. Although a portfolio comprised entirely of payment crypto assets had a higher cumulative return of 227 %, the portfolios are highly correlated with a 0.81 correlation coefficient. Cryptocurrency investors that bought the top five payment cryptocurrencies in June and sold in January realized a six-month profit of over 1,200 %.

Crypto Asset Companies That Use Smart Contracts, DApps, and DAOs.

There are already many projects that seek to implement smart contracts via blockchains into the real world. Ethereum is one of the most prominent examples, but a variety of other companies are also harnessing the power of automatic digital contracts, including Cosmos, Dfinity, Etherisc, Polkadot, and ShareRing.

A controversial example is the decentralized prediction market named Augur. In late July, CNN reported on Augur users gambling on whether President Trump would be assassinated by the end of this year. Since Augur is a DApp, no one can stop users from gambling on the probability of criminal and unethical behavior. Even the creators of Augur are unable to stop Augur from existing because the project is open-source. Not only are the legality of prediction markets questionable, now lives of people will be directly attached to financial gains. If this prediction market does lead to heinous acts be committed, Augur’s price will most likely be volatile and downward.

Although Augur is enabling people to vote on the probability that Trump, John McCain, or Warren Buffett will survive past the end of this year, most of Augur’s prediction markets are based on sports. For example, during the FIFA World Cup, users could vote on the outcome of specific games and earn Ethereum if they voted correctly.

When Smart Contracts Are Dumb

Since 2011, a combined $2.4 billion has been destroyed, frozen, stolen or otherwise compromised in the crypto asset space due to attacks. The two biggest crypto assets in terms of market capitalized have seen losses of around 1.7 million BTC and 4.54 million ETH over the past seven years. The three biggest mistakes that have occurred in the Ethereum space include the DAO hack, the Parity wallet hack, and the Parity wallet suicides.

DAO Hack

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was one of crypto’s most highly anticipated projects of all time and a pioneer in the application of the revolutionary capabilities of smart contracts. Some of Ethereum’s developers created a spin-off company called Slock.it and created the first DAO using the Ethereum blockchain in April 2016.[1] The DAO application worked like an investment fund, although without the usual investment fund management. Investors could participate by transferring the Ethereum cryptocurrency, ether, to the fund, which entitled them to voting rights. The investment decisions were supposed to be taken through a joint effort, where every participant could vote on investment proposals. Anyone with a venture project could pitch their idea to the DAO community in hopes of potentially receiving funding from a pool of ether which was controlled by the DAO.[2] Once a project was chosen, token holders would receive rewards – much like dividends or interest payments – if the projects turned out to be profitable.

The DAO was launched as a smart contract on the Ethereum network in May 2016. At the time, it raised $162 million worth of ether, making it the biggest crowdfund ever.

Nevertheless, on June 17th, 2016, a hacker perpetrated the DAO network by exploiting a loophole in its software, allowing him to drain funds from the pool of Ethereum tokens owned by the DAO network. 3.6 million ETH tokens were stolen in the first couple of hours of the attack, amounting to an equivalent value of $70 million at the time ($1.2 billion in today’s terms). Strangely enough, the hacker stopped draining the DAO for unknown reasons, even though he could have continued to do so.

The team and community behind Ethereum were quick in noticing the breach and very soon responded to the situation by presenting multiple proposals on how to deal with the attack. Due to the architecture of the DAO, the drained funds in the form of ether were locked up in a child DAO, another smart contract, which required a 28-day holding period before the attacker could fully withdraw the funds and launder them into circulation. This gave the Ethereum team sufficient time to decide on their course of action.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, realized the severity of this breach and issued a statement soon afterwards assuring all investor that their funds were safe for the moment. The Ethereum community then decided to render any transaction originating from the attackers account with code hash:

0x7278d050619a624f84f51987149ddb439cdaadfba5966f7cfaea7ad44340a4ba

as invalid, thereby preventing the attacker from withdrawing funds even after the completion of the 28-day holding period.

The hacker later published an open letter to the Ethereum community claiming rightful ownership of the acquired funds. You can see the original letter here. Refunding the investors’ ether would have not been possible under the rules of the Ethereum network at that time, posing an existential threat to the network as a whole.

The solution that the Ethereum foundation came up with was highly controversial.[3] They implemented a “hard fork” by releasing a new version of the Ethereum software client that did not include the hacked transactions. They re-winded the Ethereum blockchain in order to remove the hacker’s transactions. The release also included a fix to the bug that the hacker exploited. Not all of the members of the network agreed with the decision of hard forking the chain. Some dissidents left Ethereum entirely and others just continued to use the original Ethereum blockchain, which included the hacker’s transaction. This chain became called Ethereum Classic with ticker symbol ETC.

As with all of the mishappenings described in this article, none of them has arisen due to the fundamental design of the Ethereum network. Instead, the hacks occurred because of design problems in applications that were built on top of Ethereum. The type of attack that destroyed the DAO is known as a reentrancy attack.[4] In this attack, the attacker first donated ether to the smart contract (DAO) and then was able to “ask” for the ether back multiple times before the smart contract could update its balance. When the contract fails to update its state (a user’s balance) prior to sending funds, the attacker can continuously call the withdraw function to drain that contract’s funds.[5] The code written for the DAO had multiple flaws including the recursive call exploit as well as the fact that the smart contracts sent ETH funds before updating the internal token balance.

Parity Wallet Hack

Parity Technologies builds platforms and applications, and it powers large parts of the infrastructure of the public Ethereum network.[6] On the July 19th, 2017, an unknown hacker attacked a critical vulnerability in the Parity multisignature wallet on the Ethereum network, looting three massive wallets containing a combined $31 million worth of ETH in a matter of minutes.[7] A group of heroic white-hat hackers from the Ethereum community responded by quickly alerting Ethereum users on social media and hacking the remaining wallets before the attacker could. This form of hacking is called white-hat hacking because they hacked for the good cause. If the white hackers had not responded so quickly, the hacker could have hacked over $180,000,000 worth of Ethereum from vulnerable wallets. Of course, the funds that were stolen by the white-hats were securely redistributed to their respective account holders in the end.

The hacker found a programmer-induced bug in the code that let him re-initialize the Parity multisignature wallet, almost like restoring your iPhone to factory settings. Once having done that, he was free to set himself as the new owner and walk out with everything.

Due to the programming model of Ethereum, there is an incentive for programmers to optimize code in order to minimize transaction costs. Every time code is executed on Ethereum, a smart contract, which constitutes a transaction on the network and thus comes with a computation fee, needs to be deployed. An efficient way to reduce costs from the computation fees is to use shared libraries which have already been deployed to the network.

The default settings for the multisignature wallet in Parity had a configuration which did exactly that. It referenced a shared external library, which contained a wallet initialization logic, namely initWallet(), which if called could reinitialize the contract the wallet was built upon. It effectively made whoever exploited this flaw the new owner of the wallet. From there, the hacker could simply transfer the funds to any address of his or her choice.

However, why did they not just roll back this hack, like they did with the DAO hack? Unfortunately, that was not even an option any more. When the attacker drained the DAO into a child DAO the hacked funds were frozen for a 28-day period before they could be released to the attacker. This prevented any of the stolen funds from going into circulation, which in turn gave the Ethereum community plenty of time to consult the community about how to deal with the attack. In the Parity wallet attack, however, the attacker directly withdrew the funds and could start spending them. Once the stolen ETH was in circulation, it was almost impossible to recover them, much like with a huge sum of counterfeit bills circulating in the economy.

Parity Wallet Suicides

On November 6th, 2017, the Parity multisignature wallet fell prey to yet another attack,[8] only this time to one of a much more severe magnitude. A Github user named devops199 wrote a post titled “anyone can kill your contract”. Devops199’s post seemed to have good intentions.[9] He wanted to make the Parity team aware of a vulnerability in the smart contract that powered its multisignature wallets. The security vulnerability allowed any hacker to make him- or herself the “owner” of that contract, thus giving him or her permission to do with the wallet as he or she pleases. Up to this point in time, it still remains unclear what his original intent was, but his following actions were largely met with skepticism: He “accidentally” triggered the “kill switch” of the contract, rendering all Parity multisignature wallets impossible to access. Just minutes after the library was wiped out, devops199 raised another issue following up his “anyone can kill your contract” post on Parity’s Github titled “I accidentally killed it.”

The scale of this Parity hack compromised a total of 514 k Ethereum tokens, which
at the time were valued roughly around $155 million or 1 % of Ethereum’s total
valuation. As a consequence of the hack, no funds can ever be moved out of all
Parity multisignature wallets that were deployed after July 20th, 2017 again.

A hard-fork could technically “bail-out” the multisignature wallets that are frozen
but that would compromise the foundation of Ethereum’s decentralized,
distributed, immutable, and tamper-proof ledger. Calls for a hard-fork have largely
remained ineffective.

Smart Contracts Represent a Distinctly Different Exposure for Investors Than Bitcoin

Smart contracts have the potential to disrupt industries by cutting out middlemen and bringing together the parties of the contracts directly. They can ensure trust and cut transaction costs. Despite the benefits, The Economist criticizes the concept of smart contracts by pointing out the immature state of the industry.[10] They further argue that smart contracts are not flexible enough for an economy that needs to respond to ever changing conditions.

At Incrementum, we think that smart contracts are here to stay. From a financial perspective, utility blockchains, such as Ethereum, NEO, and EOS, offer a distinctly different risk-return profile compared to payment blockchains, such as Bitcoin, Dash, and Monero. Due to the complex nature of smart contracts, utility blockchains are inherently more prone to technology risk. In contrast, since utility tokens do not threaten to disrupt the current monetary system, risk of being outlawed for competing with sovereign currencies is lower when compared to public payment blockchains. However, many regulators are saying that initial coin offerings and utility tokens are violating security law. Diversifying into both crypto asset classes is prudent for investors that are willing to make the extra effort.

[1] See “Decentralized Autonomous Organization to Automate Governance. Final Draft – Under Review” [white paper], Christoph Jentzsch, 2016.

[2] See “The Story of the DAO–Its History and Consequences,” Samuel Falkon, The Startup, December 24, 2017.

[3] See “To fork or not to fork,” Jeffrey Wilcke, Etherum Blog, July 15, 2016.

[4] See “Smart Contract Attacks [Part 1] – 3 Attacks We Should All Learn From The DAO,” Pete Humiston, Hackernoon, July 5, 2018.

[5] You can find a more technical walkthrough here.

[6] Learn more about Parity here

[7] See “A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened and what it means for Ethereum,” Haseeb Qureshi, Medium, July 20, 2017.

[8] See “Security Alert,” Parity, November 8, 2017.

[9] See “Yes, this kid really just deleted $300 MILLION by messing around with Ethereum’s smart contracts,” Thijs Maas, Hackernoon, November 8, 2017.

[10] See “Not-so-clever contracts,” Schumpeter, The Economist, July 28, 2016.

ETH, NEO, ADA, & EOS

By
Demelza Hays
-
ETH, NEO, ADA, & EOS

“2019’s Trillion Dollar Question: How to merge Blockchains?

Yanislav Malahov, Aeternity

Smart Contract Platforms: Who’s the
Smartest in Town?

Grandmother Bitcoin has birthed powerful ecosystems – first and foremost, the
Ethereum empire. From July to August in 2014, the Ethereum Foundation
launched an Initial Coin Offering to promote its concept to Bitcoin owners. As we
already mentioned in our Crypto Concept chapter, the masterminds behind
Ethereum were Vitalik Buterin and Mihai Alisie. They realized that a Turincomplete
blockchain could enable decentralized applications. Vitalik developed the
solidity scripting language to compliment a Turin-complete blockchain. With the
technology built, he founded a new crypto asset and after the code had been
programmed and $18 million worth of Bitcoin had been collected in an initial coin
offering to advance the project, the first Ethereum block was created on July 30th,
2015.

Wrong Dichotomy

Like Bitcoin, Ethereum attracted a network of users – especially a larger spectrum of software developers. Due to the increasing interest, the Ether price also shot through the ceiling and the rivalry between the two camps increased. Some Bitcoin supporters – perhaps a little unsettled by the upturn in Ether prices – saw this new crypto asset as a cheap copy of Bitcoin, which was hardly faithful to true crypto values. On the Ethereum side, some exponents were already saying that the programmable blockchain was far superior to Bitcoin and that the former would make the latter obsolete sooner rather than later. To this day, the two camps are fighting each other on internet forums, on Twitter, and at conferences. While Ethereum maximalists are called heretics, Bitcoin maximalists are seen as the fundamentalists of the crypto world.

This circus around the title “Only True Blockchain” is ultimately nothing but a clownish pseudo battle. Bitcoin and Ethereum are not direct opponents, since they pursue different goals after all. As an independent store of value, the Bitcoin blockchain must offer the greatest possible security. This implies that Bitcoin must necessarily be based on a more rudimentary scripting language that limits susceptibility to bugs. The purpose of Ethereum is to resolve this trade-off in exactly the opposite way. Because of the greater experimentation and flexibility in programming capability, greater susceptibility to errors is also accepted at the source code level. Events mentioned in the Crypto Concept chapter in this edition of the Crypto Research Report, such as the DAO hack and the parity bug are due to programming errors because of solidity’s complexity. Because the Ethereum approach allows much more in terms of programming, its use case appears much broader, which leads many Ethereum enthusiasts to conclude that Ethereum is the more lucrative project in the long run.

Today, Ethereum is held responsible for the ICO hype during the end of 2017. Quite often the tone is somewhat reproachful: Not only have investors lost a lot of money in this speculative boom, but they have also been led astray by a number of ICO fraudsters and crypto charlatans. But thanks to Ethereum, anyone can launch their token at low cost without having to worry about setting up a blockchain infrastructure. Ethereum has thus taken crowdfunding to a whole new, global level. Financing can suddenly be carried out efficiently, quickly and independently via the Internet.

So, while Bitcoin is disrupting the creation of money by central entities such as central banks and commercial banks, Ethereum’s revolutionary power lies in providing a real alternative to the centrally organized capital market. Investment banks have always acted as intermediaries between asset managers and companies or states wishing to issue bonds or shares through an IPO. Before Ethereum, there was no technical way around them. Today there is. The venture capitalist business is currently being turned upside down, which is why it is no longer unusual to find venture capital companies such as Andreessen Horowitz or Union Square Ventures on pre-ICO investor lists. The figureheads of venture capitalists have already had to react to the “Etherealization” of investing – a fate that is likely to hit Wall Street as well.

A Non-centralized World Computer

Like Bitcoin, Ethereum is also based on a public blockchain and is therefore ultimately nothing more than a network of tens of thousands of geographically distributed computers, all communicating via the Ethereum protocol. Since Ethereum, in contrast to Bitcoin, can be used to program applications on top of it, the analogy of a world computer applies even better. The Ethereum blockchain functions like a computer. Like a hard disk of a computer, the blockchain stores everything that happens on the Ethereum world computer.

On a programmable blockchain like Ethereum’s, developers can program anything they can program on a local computer. However, the Ethereum world computer differs from an ordinary computer in that it must run according to its programming code and, due to its non central structure, can only be manipulated at extreme costs. At the same time, such a world computer provides immensely high robustness. Since the Ethereum blockchain runs on tens of thousands of individual computers, there is redundancy. The Ethereum “hard disk” does not only exist once and in one place only but is distributed all over the world. The downtime risk is therefore diminishingly small.

Why a Programmable Blockchain?

In the context of Ethereum, the term smart contract is frequently used. It was the Ethereum blockchain that first recognized the potential of these “intelligent contracts” and thus popularized the idea. The Bitcoin blockchain already knows a primitive form of smart contracts. In the case of Bitcoin, these are limited to the simple transmission of Bitcoin units. Since Ethereum is a programmable blockchain, the smart contract functions can be extended almost arbitrarily in theory. In addition to the processing of transactions of digital value units, other assets or securities such as bonds, shares, and even physical assets can also be transferred by means of a smart contract. Ultimately, the most diverse contracts that make up our social life today can be converted into computer code, stored in the form of smart contracts on the blockchain and executed by the Ethereum network in a non-centralized manner. This is the vision that is becoming established more and more in the minds of people as Ethereum grows more popular.

The elegance of a smart contract lies in the fact that it is a digital contract that executes itself according to predefined parameters. In other words, if the contract conditions are fulfilled, the contract is executed according to its content. A comparison with a vending machine helps here. One feeds the vending machine with money and receives the selected goods in return. There is no need for a third party to deliver the goods. The theory behind a smart contract works in a similar way: When you pay a smart contract, you receive the corresponding goods, a transfer certificate, a driver’s license or something else. In addition, the smart contract not only defines the rules and sanctions relating to the agreement, it also enforces them itself.

Gas – an Essential Component Of Ethereum

Ethereum clients are the individual computers that make up the Ethereum network, and execute the programming code defined in a smart contract. Since Ethereum is Turing-complete – a term from computer science – the computers of the Ethereum network are capable of executing code of any complexity. At the same time, Turing-completeness also means that a smart contract or its programming code would be executed endlessly by the Ethereum clients. Such an endless loop would render the Ethereum blockchain non functional, since the execution of a single smart contract would consume the resources of all the computers participating in the Ethereum network.

As a solution, Vitalik Buterin integrated a mechanism into Ethereum that enables the Ethereum clients to determine the execution length of each smart contract in order to prevent endless loops. The keyword here: Gas. Each execution of a smart contract costs a certain amount of gas. But this is just a form of expression. Behind every gas price that has to be paid for the execution of a smart contract is a certain amount of ether, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain. How much ether it costs, or in other words, how high the respective gas price is, depends on the current utilization of the Ethereum network. Not all smart contracts cost the same gas price. Depending on the complexity, the amount of ether to be paid is smaller or larger.

In principle, the gas from Ethereum can be compared to the gasoline of a vehicle. Just as petrol makes a vehicle run, gas ensures that a smart contract is executed. Just as a car comes to a standstill when the fuel tank is empty, the Ethereum gas also defines an upper limit for the execution of smart contracts and thus prevents endless loops.

The recipients of ether paid via the gas price are the Ethereum clients who are responsible for the execution of smart contracts. Each smart contract costs a minimum execution price. However, if a higher price is offered, the chances of processing and execution are greater, as Ethereum clients are usually controlled by  miners who earn wages by chasing the most lucrative offers.

Can Ethereum Hold Steady?

Whoever buys Ether invests in the first decentralized world computer. As such, Ethereum aims to become the backbone of a future decentralized internet. Should the Ethereum network ever reach this important position, Ether will be the “crypto-fuel” to power the entire Ethereum machinery. Just as the oil age made the Rockefeller family and others rich, Ether owners could one day become the new “oil barons” due to the crypto revolution.

Ethereum is now (only) three years old. Since the first Ethereum block was created on July 30th, 2015, the blockchain has become the second largest crypto asset in terms of market capitalization and already has over 250,000 developers today. To date, approximately 1,800 DApps have been registered. Ethereum is also undoubtedly the most successful blockchain-based crowdfunding platform. Of the top 100 tokens by market capitalization, 94 % were originally built on Ethereum – $13 billion in capital was generated through Ethereum in this way. Of the top 700 tokens by market capitalization, 87 % are Ethereum tokens. This corresponds to $15 billion of the $19 billion collected through the Ethereum platform.

This growth and the resulting dominance have led to the emergence of other smart contract platform projects. Although Ethereum has experienced a meteoric rise, to handle decentralized services and applications on scale that make it a viable alternative to traditional centralized solutions, effective scalability is required. The Ethereum community has recognized this and is working on it – but it has not yet made a significant
breakthrough.

This is where many alternative smart-contract platforms see their chance to outsmart Ethereum. If they succeed in scaling sooner and better, not only the old world but also the new world should be able to build its applications on one of these alternative smart contract platforms.

Academia Goes Blockchain

Most smart contract projects try to outpace Ethereum with speed. Such as Cardano, a project that is also described as the “Japanese Ethereum” in the crypto community because it was launched in Japan and is said to have had around 95 % of all ICO investors coming from the land of the rising sun.

Cardano does not focus on speed. On the contrary, the focus is on accuracy and correctness. Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson, who worked for Ethereum and BitShares. The fact that Hoskinson is a mathematician clearly mirrors Cardano’s path forward. No other smart contract project is more academically influenced and geared towards mathematical correctness. For the developers behind Cardano, the technical evaluation of the code is the most important thing. It is their intention to subject Cardano protocols to a peer review system and, if possible, to validate any program code with formal verification. A program code can be seen as formally verified once it is mathematically proven that it is correct for all inputs. Although formal verification does not (yet) prove that a code does what it is supposed to do, it does prove that certain errors can be excluded for sure. This kind of formal verification is a new area, and although other projects are increasingly oriented towards it, Cardano wants to be the leader when it comes to formal verification.

Although Cardano already runs on its own main net, many of the features and characteristics of this smart contract platform are still under development. For an outsider, there is little secure information available at the moment. Already today it seems to be clear though: While with many other projects the accounting of value transactions and the execution of smart contract commands are one and the same, with Cardano, these processes are separated into two different “layers”. There is the “settlement layer” for value transfer and the “computational layer” for the application of smart contracts. Cardano hopes that this split will enable it to better reconcile key aspects such as scalability, privacy, regulatory issues, and compliance. The two different layers are also based on two different programming languages. One language is specific and limited but less prone to bugs and other unforeseen programming errors, while the other is more flexible. Depending on the application, one or the other programming language can be used, which is why Cardano offers a certain choice here.

Only time can tell whether this careful way of peer reviewing and formal verification will lead to success in the incredibly fast-moving crypto world. After all Cardano’s peer reviewing appraisal method also has its exquisite critics. Their argument: Academic peer review processes do not always provide certainty and are therefore often not worth the effort. Nevertheless, at Cardano, people just want to
do philosophically, mathematically, and technically clean work. Consequently,
their project could provide the crypto world with some interesting approaches
regarding smart contract platforms going forward.

China Takes on Ethereum

Another project, which wants to establish a platform for a future internet comes out of China. Formerly known as Antshares, the project changed its name to NEO in June 2017 and immediately caused a sensation among crypto investors. But soon the question arose among them: Can a blockchain project from China even be successful when the Chinese government took a firm stand against Bitcoin and ICOs in 2017?

With China and its iron measures, it is always complicated. If you look closely, you will see that China has not generally opposed blockchain technology; after all, in its five-year plan, China’s central bank has taken a stance for exploring the possibilities of blockchain technology. It is just that the Chinese government is solely interested in blockchain projects that are predictable and thus controllable. And this is exactly where NEO seems to be entering the picture, probably for good reason and quite intentionally.

It is the declared goal of those responsible behind NEO to focus on speed and regulatory compliance. With NEO, blockchain technology can be used to digitalize assets of all kinds and to automate administration and trade in order to create structures for a smart economy. A digital identity solution seems to be indispensable for this, which is why the NEO Council – the body for the promotion of the NEO ecosystem – already supports a GDPR-compliant digital identity solution with PikcioChain. If a blockchain platform is based on pseudo or even anonymity, it is of little interest for a government – especially one like China – as well as for companies, since regulatory requirements can hardly be fulfilled this way.

At the same time, NEO is also focusing on solutions for the development of privacy and data protection. Through its partnership with OnChain, a company that promotes blockchain projects, NEO wants to enable companies to protect personal data. Founded by Da HongFei and Erik Zhang, who have also created NEO, OnChain is working with governments and corporations to create public and private blockchains that will eventually connect to the NEO ecosystem through OnChain’s decentralized network architecture (DNA).

Like Ethereum and other smart contract projects, NEO already has an open source community for developers and programmers called City of Zion. NEO also has an ICO platform that will allow payment solutions, distributed trading exchanges, and more.

The consensus mechanism of NEO is called Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance or dBTF. Behind this term lies a governance model known to us from the traditional world: that of a representative democracy. The NEO token holders appoint delegates, so-called accountants, who ensure consensus and thus maintain the network. There are a total of seven accountants. Compared to Ethereum, the number of nodes validating the network is much smaller. In addition, the NEO accountants still have digital identities and real names – so they are visible to everyone, while the network nodes at Ethereum are anonymous. The fact that the accountants at NEO are known certainly makes sense with regard to the goals of this project. In order to meet the regulatory requirements, the blockchain project must have this degree of transparency.

The delegated accountant model can prevent transactions from having to be validated by all nodes in the network. This way, NEO can handle a higher number of transactions than Ethereum. In addition, NEO transactions are final. This means: Forks, i.e. splitting the blockchain into several chains, are impossible. If the accountants reach a consensus of
66 %, the transaction is not only included in the blockchain but is final and cannot be made obsolete by a fork. One more difference between Ethereum and NEO concerns the programming languages for the development of smart contracts. Ethereum requires Solidity – a programming language specially developed for Ethereum. NEO, on the other hand, supports many of the most popular programming languages. Therein, NEO sees the advantage of enabling traditional developers to program on the NEO blockchain without having to learn a new programming language.

Differences Are Evident

Of particular interest is the fact that NEO, like Ethereum, knows gas. While Ethereum also uses the ether token as gas, NEO has a separate gas token in addition to the NEO token.

The NEO token makes it possible to be a “shareholder” in the NEO platform. As already mentioned, NEO token holders are entitled to appoint the accountants. The share-character of the NEO token is strengthened by the fact that the token is not divisible.

The GAS token, on the other hand, is used to pay for all operations such as transactions in the NEO network and thus functions as a sort of crypto fuel. Payment in the form of GAS tokens is made to accountants, but also to all NEO token holders. A personal NEO wallet is required to collect the GAS tokens.

This decoupling of NEO and GAS is particularly interesting because accounts do have the tendency to keep transaction fees low. The reason is the following: High transaction fees, which only benefit accountants, prevent operations from being carried out on the NEO blockchain. The fewer operations, the less reward NEO token holders receive. This leads them to vote for accountants, who in turn keep transaction fees low.

These are the features that make NEO an interesting smart contract platform. From a macro point of view, however, this platform differs from Ethereum in one fundamental aspect: NEO has apparently placed itself in the service of the Chinese government. Consequently, NEO is by its very nature a planned and top-down orchestrated undertaking, which seems to have been driven primarily by the NEO Council in the interest of the Chinese officials. From NEO’s point of view, this strategy has an intact chance of success. Anyone who manages to get popular in China itself and serves a market of 1.4 billion people can already book his project as a success.

And even if one or more smart contract platforms were to establish themselves in the West, this would not mean the end of NEO. Tech giants from the USA such as Facebook or Amazon provide a good example: Although their dominance in the world outside of East Asia is growing, they have virtually no chance against the domestic platforms in China. Why should this be any different in the area of smart contract platforms?

Ethereum might also experience some influence by interest groups such as Consensys or the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, its ecosystem nevertheless tries to generally uphold the philosophy of organic growth. In this sense, Ethereum is more of a platform emerging out of a spontaneous order. Because of these different intentions, the two projects are difficult to compare. While NEO strives for an advanced future that is adapted to the existing actors and circumstances, Ethereum is working on a new future to which the current companies and states will have to orient themselves someday.

EOS – Ethereum’s Biggest Competitor?

In doing justice to the drama of the crypto world, some of these smart contract counterparty platforms bear the name “Ethereum-killer”. Probably the most prominent of these projects is EOS, also called “Ethereum on Steroids” by some. While Ethereum is an established blockchain project with a fully functional platform, EOS is still in its infancy. Following the largest ICO ever carried out on Ethereum, which raised a record $4 billion, EOS held its Mainnet launch in June this year, switching from an ERC-20 token based on Ethereum to its own blockchain, the EOS blockchain.

Although EOS ultimately also enables the programming of smart contracts, there are some important differences. For example, Ethereum smart contracts are developed using JavaScript/Solidity. Smart contracts on the EOS blockchain, on the other hand, must be written in C++. Since this programming language is not as common and user-friendly, some programmers see this as an entry threshold that could put EOS at a disadvantage compared with other smart contract platforms. At the same time, EOS is supposed to feature the implementation of C/C++ libraries in the future, which would considerably expand the possibilities for developers.

Unlike Ethereum, EOS’s consensus mechanism is based on the so-called Delegated Proof of Stake or DPoS for short. This type of consensus finding was invented by EOS founder Dan Larimer. As with NEO, DPoS entitles every EOS token holder to choose validators in a voting process. Analogous to the motto “one person, one vote” the voting process follows: one token, one vote.This also means that those who have more EOS tokens have a greater influence on the voting result.

The validators are called EOS block producers because they produce the EOS blocks in mutual agreement and check their correctness in order to maintain the functionality of the blockchain. In total, EOS token holders will have to elect 21 block producers who are effectively capable of managing the blockchain and keeping the network secure and functional. They are rewarded for their work with new EOS tokens. If a block producer does not do its job well and, for example, validates invalid transactions, his status as a block producer can be revoked. The reconciliations are carried out approximately every two minutes. In principle, it is therefore possible to change validators every few minutes. In addition to the 21 active block producers, there are about one hundred other block producers in standby mode. If a block producer is deselected for whatever reason, one is being elected out of the reserve.

The idea of the EOS founders behind this structure is as follows: Because the task of actually processing and validating the transactions is delegated to only 21 block producers, the basic protocol and, thus, the actual blockchain itself should be able to be scaled to enable millions of transactions per second. In reality, the EOS project has so far completed a maximum of 3,097 transactions per second successfully. In an objective comparison, EOS has performed significantly better than Ethereum, even though the actual goal of millions of transactions has hardly been achieved. But EOS is not only capable of processing a larger number of transactions per second – the transaction speed is also higher. After just one second, the blockchain reaches finality via a newly added block.

Inflation as a Reward

Interestingly, no transaction fees are envisaged to make EOS work as they are regarded to be more of an obstacle by the EOS founders. In this context, they often refer to an example concerning Facebook: Facebook servers process over 50,000 likes per second and ultimately each of these likes represents a transaction. If one had to pay a transaction fee each time on a blockchain-based social media platform, this would be detrimental to the customer experience. While at Ethereum, the miners who validate transactions and add them to the blockchain are paid for this service through transaction fees, the validators within the EOS system are not remunerated with transaction fees for their verification work. To be fair, it has to be said: Ethereum is also working on second- or third-layer scaling solutions to mitigate the problems described above.

But how are the EOS block producers remunerated instead? They receive newly created EOS tokens through the EOS protocol. Each year, five percent more EOS tokens are produced. In concrete terms, this means that the EOS token stock is inflated by five percent a year. Of these five percent, the block producers each receive one percent as a reward for validating the transactions. The remaining four percent will be placed in a separate pool, from which proposals for improving and further developing the EOS blockchain will be financed. EOS also aims to ensure that block producers cannot share their earnings with those from whom they receive their votes. This way, “buying of votes” should be prevented.

From a cryptoeconomic point of view, transaction fees not only serve to provide incentives but also prevent malicious players from spamming the blockchain network with an unnecessarily large number of transactions. EOS, on the other hand, prevents such spam attacks by making blockchain bandwidth usage dependent on the number of EOS tokens. Anyone who owns one percent of all tokens is entitled to one percent of the entire bandwidth of the network. In order to increase the chances of a targeted network overload, the attacker must increase his possession of EOS tokens, which causes ever-increasing costs. Spam attacks are therefore not ruled out, but they are economically expensive.

Anyone who wants to develop a DApp (decentralized application) on Ethereum will, as it were, make use of the computing power of the Ethereum miners and pay for it with ether gas. EOS, on the other hand, is based on an ownership model: If you hold one-thousandth of the EOS network, you also have one-thousandth of the computing power combined on EOS Blockchain. This ownership model enables DApp developers to realistically estimate their hosting costs at any time.

Attacking Ethereum

EOS is also committed to revolutionizing the concept of crowdfunding once again. Today, the Ethereum platform can be used to collect funds directly via an ICO – also known as a token sale. One issues a token and in return receives Ether, Bitcoin, or other cryptocurrencies. It is inevitable that fraudsters, swindlers, and charlatans will also receive financial resources this way. It is the hope of EOS sympathizers that crypto projects will migrate away from Ethereum in the longer term and switch to EOS for crowdfunding. This was the case, for example, with Everipedia, a for-profit competitor of Wikipedia.

The EOS ecosystem knows no ICOs or Token Sales, only the Airdrop. If a project wants to finance itself via the EOS blockchain, its EOS-based tokens are passed on to the EOS community free of charge via Airdrop. After the tokens of the project have been distributed via Airdrop, the market determines the value of the tokens according to the law of supply and demand. The team behind the project can then sell a percentage of its own tokens to raise money for the project. However, it seems somewhat unclear how a token distributed over an Airdrop without capital can gain value in the first place and thus be accepted by the market.

At best, the venture capital fund created within the EOS ecosystem should come into play here. Behind this fund is the company Block.one, which conducted the ICO for the EOS token in 2017. The venture capital fund is intended to make strategic investments in various projects based on the EOS Blockchain. It is only natural that this venture capital fund should be used to invest in promising projects that also want to carry out an Airdrop via the EOS blockchain. Of course, the question then arises as to how strongly Block.one influences crowdfunding on EOS. After all, a certain pre-selection takes place through the venture capital fund, which is not the case with Ethereum. The tradeoff is between allowing fraud on Ethereum or censoring innovation on EOS.

What About Decentralization?

The decisive question crypto investors are asking themselves today: Who will prevail in the long term? Ethereum or EOS? Are there any clues? Investors, for example, are focusing on the most prominent people behind the two projects: The battle between Ethereum and EOS has thus also turned into a battle between Vitalik Buterin and Dan Larimer. Some Ethereum supporters refer to Buterin’s allegedly astronomically high intelligence quotient, which would make him an even greater genius than Larimer. The opposite side meanwhile refers to the crypto projects BitShares and Steemit, which both originated from Larimer and would lead him to triumph. In the end, these comparisons are interesting, but they have little relevance for the future of the two smart contract projects.

More revealing are project-specific debates that were initiated by Vitalik Buterin and Dan Larimer, among others. In the theoretical debate, the question of decentralization ranks at the top of the list. In the case of the EOS blockchain, it is ultimately a comparatively small number of nodes that maintain the network. In a world like that of crypto, which is committed to the decentralization of social structures, a blockchain concept with only 21 block producers naturally arouses suspicion. Is EOS decentralized enough or do the 21 block producers not rather remind us of a cartel or an oligarchy? Many honest crypto experts still consider it technically impossible to escape the blockchain trilemma, according to which there are inherent trade-offs between security, scalability, and decentralization, at the level of the basic protocol.

On the EOS side, there are some exponents for whom decentralization is not an absolute value. Since decentralization is always associated with mathematical and economic costs, compromises must be made in this respect in order to achieve the goal of mass scaling DApps. In their view, EOS is just as decentralized as the scaling intention requires. The fact that there are just 21 block producers can be traced back to Larimer’s previous experience with his other DPoS systems BitShares and Steemit. This number is therefore not engraved in stone or better written in code. In the light of new findings, it could also be changed, according to their arguments.

Other advocates of EOS do not consider the EOS blockchain to be less decentralized than Ethereum at all. They point out, for example, that at Ethereum three parties account for more than 50 % of total hashing power. If these three actors were to play together, the Ethereum blockchain could be successfully attacked and transactions could be spent twice. They also argue that Larimer’s earlier projects BitShares and Steemit have shown that DPoS systems are more decentralized than than proof of work used by Ethereum and Bitcoin because proof of work has an inherent tendency towards centralization due to economies of scale. Interestingly, it seems as if the EOS community generally consists more of people who prefer a certain amount of leeway to exert influence instead of a total inability to supervise. One can read the argument again and again that it can be considered sensible for “democratically” elected block producers to be able to intervene in the interest of the EOS community during emergencies such as a hack or bug.

A Fight That Is None?

Ethereum, EOS or another smart contract platform? The discussions about who will win the race are likely to continue for some time. Ethereum has by far the most developers, has many influential companies thanks to the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and is still by far the most widely used crowdfunding platform. EOS has become accustomed to its own blockchain by now and unites three of the most renowned crypto investors behind it, Mike Novogratz, Peter Thiel and Jihan Wu.

However, this fight is based on the assumption that only one smart contract platform is optimal. Most likely there is enough room for more than one winner because different applications require different blockchain infrastructures. The battle for supremacy among these platforms is reminiscent of the tug-of-war between the various operating systems in the early years of the computer and internet age. Just as several operating systems exist today with Mac, Windows, and Linux, no single winner is likely to emerge this time either. DApps can even run on multiple smart contract platforms simultaneously. Bancor, a blockchain protocol for the creation of smart tokens, for example, has already announced that it will use EOS as a foundation alongside Ethereum.

Advisory Board Meeting Q4

By
Mark Valek
-

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Mark Valek:

Welcome to our Advisory Board Crypto Research Report of the fourth quarter. A lot has been going on and we are very happy to have all of you here again to talk about some of the developments. Pricewise, cryptocurrency markets are generally still on the weaker side, we have been experiencing a bear market basically throughout the year, correlations remain high and only very few tokens experienced an uptrend. Most of them are down since the peak which occurred at the beginning of the year. So we find a minus of 60, 70 or 80 percent pretty common across all kinds of different tokens.

We talked about that already last time, I think Max brought up the fact that during bear markets typically a lot of technical advancements happen which are in turn often overseen by the markets, so I would like to start with Max.

How do you see current developments, perhaps starting off with Bitcoin’s lightning network? We have been covering this, but I think it is worth to follow the latest developments, because it is a very important feature of Bitcoin once it actually starts being implemented and starts working well. Max what are your thoughts on the development?

Max Tertinegg: 

First of all, I read the statement “Bear markets are the perfect environment for true technical innovation” already in your last report, which I quite agree on and thus I´m very positively inclined towards our current situation. On the lightning side, there is still one big problem holding back the adoption process which is the consumer user interface. Since our last talk there are no decent lightning enabled wallets enabling anyone to use it on a daily basis, for example on a smartphone. I tried to install a lightning wallet myself on my iPhone and even though being a technical guy, I struggled doing so. I don´t think about going out to the street and telling someone to install a lightning wallet, because we are just not there yet. So that is the big problem holding us back at the moment, but the backend developments are looking good: node counts still going up, transaction volumes are going up, the total balance of Bitcoin locked up in the lightning network is going up, so this all looks very good to me.

Mark Valek:

Ok great. Do you have sources where one can look this up? This is certainly very interesting material to keep track of. 

Max Tertinegg: 

Sure, there are some websites, where you can just look out for these indicators here.

Mark Valek: 

Perfect, I am sure that will be of interest to many people. Thanks, I have another question for you Max on Ethereum. Ethereum is underperforming; utility coins are generally underperforming Bitcoin this year. I think this is in part because of ICO activity drastically going down. How do you see this playing out relative to Bitcoin?

Max Tertinegg: 

As you might have already found out, I am sort of a Bitcoin maximalist, I see Bitcoin currently as the only real valuable decentralized coin out there. I think that more and more people are starting to realize that many of these tokens and coins which are decentralized or digital assets won’t end up being that valuable in the future. This certainly is one aspect explaining underperformance. The other thing is of course the more or less implosion of the whole ICO business. One of the big reasons for Ethereum`s success last year was the explosion of the number in ICOS and this went down drastically this year, going hand in hand with a significant drop in the value of Ethereum. I am not saying that I oppose Ethereum’s value proposition, it is an interesting platform for many decentralized applications, but from an investor’s perspective who wants to store value over mid-to-long term, I think that Bitcoin will definitely be the winner and we see this by Bitcoin’s dominance index going up. I think we are currently around 55%, which is a very strong sign.

Mark Valek: 

Ok thanks, I share your view and think this consolidation made investors more and more aware of where to put their money into. That leads me to my next question, which will be directed to you, Oliver. What is your stance on current ICO projects, I think you are active in consulting ICOs as well, what is your experience on that side?

Oliver Völkel: 

I can confirm what Max said before, the market has sort of imploded. Although it is interesting to know that in absolute figures the market is still huge, yet somehow more concentrated. On the other hand, we see many people with brilliant ideas, which are by no means fraudulent, trying to raise funds through an ICO but not getting funded. That is how I see it from an economic perspective. From a legal perspective, I see that regulators have used the time wisely in the last couple of months. The Austrian regulator for example has issued new guidance a couple of days ago which was drafted in a very thorough manner and issued new guidance as to how to remain compliant with all local legislation. I think this was certainly a step in the right direction for Austria. If we look overseas to the US, we see that the SEC is going after token sales quite heavily now. Everything that has been done in 2016 and 2017 is being scrutinized a lot at the moment. I think this could also be the part of the reason why the ICO market is not performing so well, because of the scrutiny of regulators.

Demelza Hays: 

Ok, that is very helpful Oliver to discuss the latest updates in Austrian regulation. Another question that I have for you is have you seen any criminal court cases actually arise related to the blockchain technology yet?

Oliver Völkel:

I have indeed seen a couple of criminal investigations and some of them were concerning compliance with capital market regulations which is also a criminal offence in Europe and in most legislations around the world. The Austrian regulators seems to forward criminal charges to the prosecutor who is then taking over the cases and interestingly enough, as far as I know none of these cases have gone to trial yet. I think the reason for that is that also the prosecutor isn’t really confident what to do about these cases and has decided that even they cannot tell whether this is a criminal case or not so they can’t really press charges. This was one aspect. Another interesting development is in connection to how prosecutors try to get a hold of cryptocurrencies in the case of suspected money laundering with an ICO. I have talked to the guy responsible for that at the Austrian Bundeskriminalamt and it is quite a challenging but interesting question: How do you take Bitcoin from a money launderer into custody? What they have done in the past is simply take all the computers they could find and store their hard drives in the hope that nobody else has the private key over the cryptos. Another thing they are going to do is transferring crypto to wallets which only the government has the private keys to. This is also interesting in terms of criminal law.

Demelza Hays: 

So, no concrete court cases yet. The reasons why I am asking this is because I am curious to see a court case where a Coin promises to pay out dividends or some type of interest payment to investors and then fail to do so. I am wondering if an investor goes to court and says that this company engaged in fraudulent or negligent behavior. Will the courts actually take action, can investors even take companies to court, not for criminal, but for civil cases? Right now investors are circumventing the entire regulated financial market. My question is, are the courts still responsible for judicating this type of cases?

Oliver Völkel:

Sure they are. I can only speak for the European side; in the US it is a whole different issue. In Europe and Austria in particular, if a company were to issue coins with a fraudulent attempt then you could press criminal charges against it. In terms of civil liability, you would have to make a distinction: have you participated in a private token sale or just purchased coins on the secondary market. If you are somebody who has purchased coins on the secondary market, most likely if they are not labeled as securities (security tokens) you can’t really do much in terms of action against the company that has issued them in the first place. Perhaps you could file a claim against the person you have purchased the coins from if you know that person. But if it was a primary investment, if you have purchased coins or tokens from the issuing company directly, then you could under European law file a suit based on the consumer rights protection act. The most promising approach in terms of ICO that I have seen, is to argue, if that is the case, that you have not been informed properly about the risks associated with the purchase and that the sale of the coins has violated these information obligations. If you are lucky then you could have a right of withdrawal from your contract for 1 year and 14 days, which is a relatively long period of time to decide to withdraw from the investment. This is the most promising approach at the moment in my view.

Demelza Hays: 

Ok, so the bottom line is we all need to know a good lawyer. One last question from my side, do you know of any successful tokens that have received a license to be a security?

Oliver Völkel:

That is an interesting question. In Liechtenstein there was a capital market prospectus published for security tokens which is as far as I know the first in Europe. Unfortunately, it is not going to be us, but here in Austria I expect by the end of this month that we will also have the first registered security token offering to start or at least have the prospectus approved by the Austrian regulator. So this is also moving forward now.

Demelza Hays: 

Thanks, Oliver. To open it up to Stefan and Max about their general view points, do you see a future for tokens that are also securities?

 Max Tertinegg:

Yes, I see a future for this one, but the main development has to be on the regulatory side, not on the technical side, but definitely, I see a future. I think it will take a couple of years until they have this ready, so one or two year from my perspective.

Oliver Völkel:

If I may add something there, the thing is not only that you need issuers who use the blockchain to issue their securities, but you also need exchanges where you could trade these securities and I do not know of any crypto exchange that is licensed to trade real securities. The infrastructure for that is still a missing ingredient as well.

Mark Valek: 

Thank you, switching gears: Stefan, in terms of performance, gold obviously has outperformed crypto this year, not too much on the upside yet I would say but on a relative basis gold was a much better play this year. My question is, do you see gold investors opening up to cryptos, I guess the market climbing isn’t super in favor as I said, but what is your feeling in terms of gold and crypto overlap from the investor´s perspective, has anything changed in this aspect?

Stefan Wieler:

Sure, allow me to add to the securitization of crypto tokens first. There have been some interesting developments in the Swiss market over the past couple of months. There is one company called the Swiss Crypto Exchange and they are actively looking to be a fully licensed exchange and exactly servicing that market. There has been another interesting development also in Switzerland, called Siba Crypto AG and they raised 100 Million Swiss francs to build a bank that offers cryptocurrency services to companies and investors as well as banking the entire industry. People are actually unaware of this but behind these companies are kind of the usual suspects, pretty much all of them come from the banking industry. I mean obviously they have tech guys in it, but the driving force behind this development are typically bankers. I find it interesting and I totally agree with what was previously said, it is a regulatory issue and it will take time to do that.

So, going back to your question on the interplay of gold and crypto from the investor side. We see some of that, because we are offering both and that said we still haven’t gone live with BlockVault. I hope by the time the transcript of this call goes out, we will actually be live, but we do offer cold storage for some cryptocurrencies already. Most of our clients own gold and other precious metals and they also go into the crypto side. The turnover is relatively large; I would say there is a relatively limited amount of our customers that are actively engaging in the crypto market at this point. Obviously, it is hard to see this from the data, but we have long-term customers that are convinced in gold and they might not be interested in cryptocurrencies and it is rather recent customers which are generally younger that are more interested on the crypto side. We have not done a detailed analysis of these trends yet. You don’t see people that are selling all their gold and just going into cryptocurrency. Usually they have both, their common threat is more that they distrust the fiat currency system and they distrust the banking system and so that naturally opens them up to be receptive to the concept of cryptocurrencies and these people actually do like our services. We don’t have people that just come to us to buy cryptocurrencies in masses at the moment. Maybe once BlockVault is live, we are going to see that, but it is too early to tell.

Demelza Hays: 

Fascinating Stefan, to learn about what Gold Money and BlockVault are doing. One question I am curious about: Since Gold Money offers services to US clients, will BlockVault also offer custodian services to US clients? It seems like there is no company in the US or prime broker dealer that has been licensed by the SEC yet. That is really a bottleneck problem for large institutional investors in the US.

Stefan Wieler:

Yes, the plan is that this is open to everyone. The storage itself is not necessary in the US, so for instance, there will be a BlockVault AG which is a Swiss company and stores assets in Switzerland in one of our vaults which we already use for precious metal storage. What these companies are offering is simply storage of a physical object and that is open to everybody. I think the trick is that you are getting a trusted third-party auditor and a trusted third party insurance company to audit the insured goods. We already have a ton of US customers both from the public and institutional side in the US. It is a very large market of ours and we already do store all kind of stuff for them, mostly metals but we also hold money for them.

Mark Valek: 

Ok, Interesting. I just wanted to shortly introduce our team member Friederich who is also curiously listening in from NY and has got a question for you, Stefan, as well.

Friederich Zapke: 

Stefan interesting. I wanted to ask you one thing: I was wondering, as we see more and more systems moving  away from proof of work to proof of stake the following question arises for investors: You have tokens, you store them, but you can actually generate income within those proof of stake systems. I attended at a talk of Coinfund recently here in NY and they are saying that one of their major strategies right now is staking their coins, as opposed to merely sitting on them. They are looking for a solution of custodians that hold the coins, but also take those coins and stake them for transaction confirmation purposes and then actually generate income on these funds. Is GoldMoney looking into that direction as well?

Stefan Wieler:

The first thing when we will go live is simply going to be pure storage. That is going to be the offering. Our unique selling proposition is that we are insured and audited by KPMG. That enables a lot of institutional investors which simply so far had no way to invest for mostly legal reasons. Obviously, once the system is in place, the way it is set up, it is very flexible, so you could do a lot of things. Certainly, it should be able to at some point have the same functionality for cryptocurrencies that we have for precious metals. For example, GoldMoney owns a share of a company called LBT, lending borrowing trust, and LBT is a really cool company, that allows you to use your Gold as collateral to borrow fiat currencies. So let´s say you want to borrow $10 Million and you have $15 Million in gold, you can do that through Lending Borrowing Trust, by using the $15 Million dollars of gold as a collateral. It is basically a market place where you have lenders and borrowers, bringing them together and using the metal as collateral.
This generates extremely good conditions for the borrower and the lender has extremely liquid collateral. There is nothing holding us back from applying the same principle to the cryptocurrency side. Again, I cannot spill the secrets, what we are doing but once we are out, it will be quite clear, that it is a quite flexible system and you can do a lot with it. We do introduce something that has been taken away out of the cryptocurrencies, namely we are not decentralized, so you deal with one party which is us. Even though we centralize the risk for our customers, we actually don’t own anything, but there is an auditor and insurance company still going through us.

Stefan Wieler:

The way our partners are handling storage of cryptocurrencies is exactly the same way they handle metal. We can do anything you can do in the metal world. That said obviously given the volatility of cryptocurrencies, borrowing against any cryptocurrency becomes a little bit trickier than it is in metal world.

Mark Valek: 

Summing that up Stefan, GoldMoney has already branched out into quite a few areas of supply chain or value chain with regard to gold and crypto, right? So you got GoldMoney, BlockVault coming up, you have got Menē and LBT, are these all subsidiaries of GoldMoney?

Stefan Wieler:

With exception of LBT, which was founded by people that were closely affiliated with GoldMoney, among others James Turk the founder of the original GoldMoney, but it has always been a separate business. It was always meant to be a platform that serves GoldMoney’s clients. GoldMoney has over the past couple of months increased its share in the company several times, but we still hold the minority stake at this point. The other companies that you mentioned, BlockVault we own 100% and Menē we own I think at this point 40%.

Mark Valek: 

Great, thanks for that insight.

Demelza Hays: 

Fascinating! Just to open this backup to the whole group of advisors, one thing that I have seen lately is the emergence of stable coins or explosion of stable coins. Definitely some stable coins are being backed by gold. I actually think that the DAO project that imploded in 2016 is relaunching as a gold-backed coin and they are working with vaults in Asia from my understanding. In general Max, Oliver and Stefan do you see a future for stable coins? I mean because for example as a Bitcoin maximalist Max, I guess a stable coin would compete with Bitcoin wouldn’t it?

Max Tertinegg:

Sure, I have 2 answers: First one is, I don’t think that stable coins can function on the long run, because there is just too much risk. You have to hold assets to be represented by other assets, so I don’t think that it works from a technical perspective. The other thing I want to say is that we already have a stable coin and it is called Bitcoin, but the other currencies just do not know about this yet. I think that in 10 years everything will be referring to Bitcoin as the stable anchor of value. I think Bitcoin will be the stable coin. In the meantime, there might be some projects trying to stabilize their coin somehow, but I think most of them won’t work properly because of technical reasons.

Demelza Hays: 

Oliver any outlook from legal perspective or general opinion?

Oliver Völkel:

Actually, I would say that Max is correct. I see it the same way he does.

Demelza Hays: 

Wow that is a pretty strong opinion. This first security token that was approved by regulators in Liechtenstein, from my understanding will be a stable coin that is going to be offered by Union Bank, so it seems like there is a lot of investment in that area, but both of you are bearish on stable coins. Stefan do you have any thoughts?

Stefan Wieler:

Generally, I agree with my co-advisory board members. I am not sure why we need this; the whole idea of cryptocurrency independent from the blockchain was that you create something which has value on its own. So naturally, I am skeptical about this.

Demelza Hays: 

Max, what is Coinfinity doing, are there any new projects or any updates from your side?

Max Tertinegg:

We partnered up with the Austrian state printing company, which produces our ID cards and Passports, and we are doing a wallet (debit) card with them which we will launch in 2 or 3 weeks. It is a very secure way to store Bitcoin offline and, in the future, we expect to add further cryptocurrencies. Basically, it is a paper wallet, but a very sophisticated paper wallet, printed in the Austrian state printing house. They say they have the most secure room in Austria. I am not sure about this, but it is a highly secured room. State printing house guarantees that no one has ever seen the private key to a Bitcoin address; even them and they can approve it to the customer. The good thing is that you can take this Card Wallet and even use it for offline transactions of Bitcoin. So if you can trust that nobody else, than the owner of the card wallet has the private key, can you can put for example 1 BTC on the card and use it for offline payments, so you just hand over the card to another person and both of them know that there is no copy of the private key and the Bitcoin changed hands without having to touch the blockchain.

Stefan Wieler:

This is in a way similar to what we are going to do, too. You basically transact the wallet, the title of the wallet goes from one person to the other, but it actually never moves from one wallet to the other, unless you take physical possession in our case. So, if the customer comes to us and says he wants to have physical possession, obviously we don’t send him the piece of metal, there is a onetime transaction that goes into your wallet instead. It is the same thing, you are taking a little bit away of the idea of what a cryptocurrency is with decentralization but make it infinitely scalable on fast to trade with.

Max Tertinegg:

Exactly, in the best of worlds where everything is decentralized, you always have the problem of having to keep your private key secure. That is the basic problem and this is just one way to overcome this. I am not saying that it is a perfect way for every use case, but for many people who don’t know how to store their passwords or how to keep their computer secure it provides a great solution. Just just let the card wallet handle it for you, put it into your safe and 10 years later you pull it out again have the private key and that’s it.

Stefan Wieler:

How does the physical product get to the client?

Max Tertinegg:

That is the best part, it gets sent out directly by the Austrian state printing house.

Stefan Wieler:

So there is a robot that passes it?

Max Tertinegg:

Exactly and you get it in an envelope like you would get your ID or your driving license.

Stefan Wieler:

So what you are basically producing is an empty wallet and you are getting a physical thing that has a private key and a public key in it.

Max Tertinegg:

Exactly, the basis of the product is just empty wallets, just a credit card size card. First we are going to sell these without any Bitcoin, because then it is easy to sell it worldwide. If it would be preloaded with Bitcoin, we would have problems with different regulatory environments. Of course it would have been very interesting to do this, but we will sell preloaded cards only in Austria for the beginning.

Demelza Hays: 

That is just fascinating Max, and just to confirm, what did you call this card?

Max Tertinegg:

Card Wallets.

Demelza Hays: 

Is there a website where we could order this in 2 weeks from now?

Max Tertinegg:

Hopefully so, if you enter cardwallet.com, you would be redirected to our Coinfinity website and I hope we would have our preordering set up by then.

Demelza Hays: 

Ok that is terrific, thank you very much Max for the update. That is a product that I have been looking for a very long time. I think that is all that we have planned for today’s meeting and we want to thank all the advisors for coming on today. If there are any concluding statements, we open up the table for any remarks.

Demelza Hays: 

Ok, well going forward, we would like to invite all of you to join us for our very first blockchain breakfast, which is going to be a meeting specifically for professional investors in Liechtenstein, at our office is in Schaan and the meeting will be on November 21 from 8:30 am until 10:00 am and we are going to be discussing our fund and how we make investment decisions at Incrementum for cryptocurrency assets.


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Legal Aspects and Regulatory Issues of Cryptocurrencies – EU Perspective

By
Demelza Hays
-
Legal Aspects and Regulatory Issues of Cryptocurrencies – EU Perspective

In a presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Demelza Hays talked about the legal aspects and regulatory issues of cryptocurrencies in Europe.

Read the complete presentation here:


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Consensus Mechanisms

By
Demelza Hays
-
Consensus Mechanisms

In cryptography, there is a theory that states that anything that can be done with a central party, can also be done without a central party. This refers to voting, auctions, banking, etc. For example, OpenBazaar is a decentralized version of eBay, Bisq is a decentralized version of Coinbase, and Bitcoin itself is a decentralized version of fiat currency. In a decentral network there is no ruler to make sure that everyone follows the rules. Instead, decentral networks rely on consensus mechanisms.

A consensus mechanism is the way that a group of people make a decision. For example, Bitcoin users need to constantly update their history of transactions in order to reflect new transactions and wallet balances. Consensus mechanisms enable strangers to come to an agreement by giving financial rewards or financial punishments. A major goal of consensus mechanisms is to stop users from double-spending the same coin. If a user could send the same Bitcoin to two different wallets, then the supply of Bitcoin could be inflated infinitely, which would result in a decrease in the purchasing power of the currency. In order to stop double-spends, every computer that maintains the Bitcoin blockchain needs to have the same information about which wallets hold what amounts of value.

Table 1: Consensus Mechanisms of the Top 100 Cryptocurrencies

As shown in Table 1, around 17 different consensus mechanisms exist; however, none of them are perfect. So far, the most secure consensus mechanism is still the original one used by Bitcoin: proof of work. However, proof of work relies on miners, which can lead to centralization. Developers are constantly trying to beat proof of work because a coin that removes miners and their electricity consumption would splash big waves in the ICO market.

Figure 1: Consensus Mechanisms of the Top 100 Cryptocurrencies

Companies such as Visa and PayPal do not need to employ a consensus mechanism because they control the entire network. If someone uses their Visa credit card, the information is sent to a centralized database that is maintained by Visa. We trust these companies to protect our sensitive information and settle our transactions. Since Visa controls the network, they can reverse and censor transactions. In the 1970s, computer specialists began to explore other ways to solve this problem because they realized that even a central authority can be hacked by an adversary or corrupted from within. The two most popular methods for taking decentralized decisions in a cryptocurrency network are known as “proof of work” and “proof of stake”. However, dozens of consensus mechanisms exist including proof of authority, proof of space, proof of importance. All of these different methods are proposed solutions to the Byzantine Generals’ Problem.

Byzantine Generals’ Problem

Imagine there is a king in a castle defended by 300 soldiers. The castle is surrounded by five armies of 100 men each. Each army has its own camp in the surrounding hills and its own general. The generals need to communicate with each other in order to agree on an attack strategy. However, the generals cannot easily trust each other because they suspect that some of the generals are traitors. If they send a message on horseback from one camp to another with the time of the attack and strategy, then the disloyal generals could easily change this message and relay false information to the next camp. Sending a simple message is not secure because written text is easy to change. Misinformation could result in the traitors winning the battle because the different camps will attack at the wrong time or not attack at all.[1]

Nowadays, a conference call could replace the messenger on horseback, but the problem still persists. How can you be sure that the message is authentic and not tampered with? Authenticity refers to the problem that adversaries can fake phone calls or emails by pretending to be someone else. Tampering refers to the content of the message being changed, deleted, or read by an adversary.

To solve the Byzantine generals’ problem, consensus algorithms rely on two concepts. First, each of the generals would need to invest resources into the network, i.e. they need to have “skin in the game.” For example, imagine two businessmen decided to co-found a venture, and one refused to invest any time or capital into the venture. The invested partner would feel suspicious of his partner’s loyalty to the project. The same idea holds in a decentralized network. The second concept is that there must be a ledger of all previous communication that is “tamper-proof”. Tamper-proof refers to the ability of the computers to immediately detect when the history of communication has been changed or deleted. The digital version of the ledger is a blockchain that tracks each user’s transactions and links them using hash functions that ensure the data’s authenticity.[2]

To go back to the Byzantine Generals’ problem, one way they could ensure the loyalty of their comrades is to make each general invest a large sum of money in an escrow account that is impenetrable. Before a general sends a message, he must sign his name with a cryptographically secure signature that proves his identity. If any of the generals misbehave, the army will look at the message book and see the traitor’s signature. The traitor can still misbehave, but now he will suffer financially because the army will not give him back his deposit. This method of coming to a decentralized consensus is referred to as “proof of stake” because each general, or computer user in modern times, has a stake invested in the success of the network. Another option would be for the network to force each general to solve an extremely complex math problem before they can successfully sign and send a message. To solve the math problem quickly, the general would need to invest large sums of money in expensive mathematicians. This consensus method is called “proof of work” because the general proved that he invested scarce resources such as time and capital into solving the math problem.

Overview of Consensus Mechanisms

As shown in Figure 2, consensus mechanisms exist along two main axes, degree of centralization and degree of external anchor. The vertical axis ranges from centralized, where you need to trust a person or an organization to settle transactions correctly, to decentralized, where strangers settle transactions. For example, Bitcoin’s proof of work consensus mechanism is an example of a permissionless and public blockchain because an untrusted stranger can become a transaction validator and their identity does not need to be disclosed. Another example is Monero.

Figure 2: Centralization and Externality of Consensus Mechanisms

The horizontal axis refers to what kind of investment a user needs to pledge in order to gain power within the system. For example, Bitcoin requires users to pledge scarce resources in the real world in order to make decisions in the Bitcoin network. This is referred to as an external anchor. In contrast, consensus mechanisms that fall into the upper right quadrant, such as proof of stake, do not require external resources in order to make decisions within the network. This quadrant includes coins such as NXT and Peercoin. Ethereum is planning to switch from the upper left quadrant to the upper right quadrant over the next year.

On the other side of the spectrum in the bottom right quadrant are permissioned and private consensus mechanisms such as byzantine fault tolerance. IBM’s Hyperledger is an example of a data structure that allows the creator to specify who will settle transactions. A company that uses Hyperledger or Microsoft’s Blockchain as a service will know the identities of the people that they select to control the network, and the users of the network will need to trust these people. These systems are centralized, and they do not have external anchors. In the bottom left quadrant are coins like IOTA, Byteball, and Hashgraph. These coins have witnesses and coordinators that centralize the system; however, they still require the validators to pledge external resources in order to gain power within the network. The most common consensus mechanism is the directed acyclic graph structure combined with proof of work to prevent Sybil attacks.[3]

Proof of Work (PoW)

In the case of Bitcoin, you can think of the Byzantine Generals as different Bitcoin wallets. Computers that run the Bitcoin software use the proof of work consensus algorithm to come to an agreement on which payments are valid.

According to Hristian Hristov at the BlackSeaChain Conference, proof of work is

“a piece of data which is difficult (costly, time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify and which satisfies certain requirements. Producing a proof of work can be a random process with a low probability so that a lot of trial and error is required on average before a valid proof of work is generated.”

If Mark wants to send 5 Bitcoins to Demelza, the entire network must ensure that Mark has the 5 Bitcoins and that the transaction is being signed with Mark’s digital signature. Bitcoin nodes come to an agreement every ten minutes about which transactions are valid in a process known as “mining”. Before confirming a new block of transactions, the miners compute hashes until they find a desirable number that is less than a specific number set by the software protocol called the difficulty target. In the Bitcoin protocol for example, miners must find the right “nonce”, or arbitrary number, that produces a hash lower than the difficulty target set by the software. This is called a hash-puzzle because the miner must add the nonce to the hash of the previous block in the blockchain. The computational output is a number which basically falls into a target space which is comparatively small in relation to the large output space of the entire hash function.[4] This number becomes that block’s identification number, which is used as an input in the next block’s hash puzzle.

Figure 3: Proof of Work Computation

Proof of work uses two main types of financial rewards to incentivize users to maintain the network: rewards and transaction fees. The first miner to find a hash that is lower than the given difficulty target will be entitled to “print” new Bitcoins and receive the transaction fees that the senders paid to the network when they broadcasted their payments. The first transaction of every block is a “coin-creation transaction”. The coin-creation transaction allows the miner of the block to mint new Bitcoin and to send these new Bitcoin to his or her wallet. In 2016, the value of the block reward was about 25 Bitcoins.[5] However, this rate drops roughly every four years and is currently 12.5 Bitcoins. The block reward incentivizes honest behavior because the coin-creation transaction will only be valuable if it is accepted by the other users maintaining the network. The second reward is the transaction fee. When users send Bitcoin transaction they attach a fee. The higher the fee, the more likely a miner will include the transaction in their candidate block, which means the confirmation time of the transaction will be faster.

Figure 4: Bitcoin Minig and Transaction Revenues

However, Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm has disadvantages. First, there are several attack vectors that adversaries can exploit including:

Second, the network uses large quantities of energy and hardware equipment, which have been estimated to cost approximately $400 million per year. Since more and more entrepreneurs are joining the mining industry, the difficulty of finding a Bitcoin block continuously increases. Consequently, the electricity a miner must buy to find a block is constantly increasing. This is why mining has naturally become centralized in countries where electricity is cheap. Table 2 shows the cost of electricity in several counties.

Like gold, Bitcoin uses electricity and capital equipment to mine new coins. The probability of randomly being chosen to create a block and receive a reward is equal to each miner’s amount of mining power divided by the total amount of mining power on the network. The more power the mining hardware consumes, the higher the hash rate. This results in a higher profit from mining. The parameters used to calculate include: difficulty factor, hash rate (TH/s), BTC/USD Exchange rate, pool fees in %, hardware cost (USD), power (watts), power cost (USD/kWh).[1]

[1] See “Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable in 2018,” Ofir Beigel, 99Bitcoins, 2018.

Table 2: Cost of Electricity by Country in 2018

Proof of Stake (PoS)

Unlike Bitcoin or gold, proof of stake allows the users with the largest holdings to create coins out of thin air. In a proof-of-stake system, the probability of receiving a reward is equal to the fraction of coins held by the user divided by the total number of coins in circulation. Several varieties of proof of stake exist including leased proof of stake and delegated proof of stake.

Both systems achieve similar outcomes; however, proof of work incurs a negative externality on the environment. Then why are people still using proof of work? The highest market capitalization coins all rely on proof of work but proof of stake is gaining popularity: Ethereum, the second largest market capitalization coin, is expected to switch from proof of work to delegated proof of stake during the next year.

In addition to attack vectors, proof of stake has not been well tested on the market. Although many supporters of proof of stake claim that it is less centralized than proof of work, this is not necessarily true. Since investors receive interest on their long positions, proof of stake encourages hoarding more than proof of work. As Andreas Antonopoulos explained during the Wisma BeeOn Group in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, proof of stake allows the rich to get richer. This has a centralizing impact on the holders of the cryptocurrency. In contrast, proof of work miners are forced to release a certain number of coins to the market in order to invest in new mining hardware and to pay electricity bills. This allows a relatively constant amount of newly minted Bitcoins to hit the market every day.

Conclusion

The main trade-off that cryptocurrencies face is between centralization and efficiency. The more centralized the decision-making process is, the faster the decision can be taken and the more scalable the network is. On the other hand, the less centralized a network is, the longer it takes to come to a consensus. This is not unlike the dichotomy between dictatorships and direct democracies. When the hierarchy between shareholders is flat, unanimous decision making is difficult to achieve. Although the introduction of counterparties may not be a problem in every case, the original goal of the blockchain technology was to create consensus without intermediaries. Miners, oracles, witnesses, delegates, or stakers all centralize the system to some degree.

A consensus mechanism that could remove proof of work’s electricity use without introducing a directed acyclic graph coordinator would make huge headlines in the cryptospace. MIT cryptographer, Silvio Micali, reports that his consensus mechanism, Algorand, achieves decentralization and security simultaneously. We plan to keep this algorithm and coins that employ it on our radar. Also, coins such as Tezos and Dfinity promise to embed governance at the protocol level, which may enable decentralized shareholders to come to a consensus faster. While we are optimistic about the ability of developers to overcome the scaling problem in the long run, we recognize that proof of work’s proven track record of at least ten years makes it the undefeated champion of consensus mechanisms. However, governments may crack down on the use of electricity to mine cryptocurrencies, therefore, we recommend holding a range of cryptoassets with different consensus mechanisms.

[1] See “Bitcoin and the Byzantine Generals Problem“, Patricia Estevao, We Use Coins, July 13, 2015.

[2] IOTA and Byteball use a directed acyclic graph instead of a blockchain to record transactions.

[3] Witnesses & coordinators are meant as a temporary measure until the network reaches scale according to developers; however, the path to decentralization is not clearly defined.

[4] Narayanan, A., Bonneau, J., Felten, E., Miller, A., & Goldfeder, S. (2016). Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

[5] Ibid.

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