OKEx Token Delistings, Round 3 →

OKEx:

To create a robust trading environment and offer the best trading experience to our users, we will delist several TRADING PAIRS with weak liquidity and trading volume according to the OKEx Token Delisting/Hiding Guideline.

Delisted tokens, along with their respective market cap rankings include — 1ST (459), AMM (1109), ATL (820), AVT (698), BRD (137), CAG (659), CBT (719), CIT (1836), DAT (735), DENT (150), DNA (680), DNT (302), EVX (383), GNX (351), ICN (159), KEY (279), LA (428), LEV (740), MAG (1857), MTL (255), MVP (735), NGC (312), OAX (516), OST (236), QVT (1596), RDN (202), REN (218), REQ (150), RNT (199), SAN (174), SHOW (1823), SNGLS (285), SPF (1001), SUB (156), TRA (N/A), UKG (440), VEE (278), and WRC (927).

The majority of these tokens can be classified as s***coins, cryptos that have very little demand — these delistings don’t surprise me. The delistings that do surprise me are the coins that rank higher than 200 in terms of market cap — BRD, DENT, ICN, REQ, RNT, SAN, and SUB. Here’s a quick look at the market cap to 24-hour trading volume multiplier for these coins.

  • BRD: 20,713,812/60,379 = 343x
  • DENT: 18,500,492/770,031 = 24x
  • ICN: 17,492,584/8,383 = 2,086x
  • REQ: 18,360,543/2,444,093 = 7.5x
  • RNT: 12,423,939/243,014 = 51x
  • SAN: 15,475,269/86,063 = 180x
  • SUB: 17,859,556/161,965 = 110x

For comparison, here are the market cap to volume calculations for the top three cryptocurrencies  – BTC, XRP, and ETH.

  • BTC: 69,772,425,346/6,412,798,840 = 10x
  • XRP: 15,032,647,237/670,421,120 = 22x
  • ETH: 11,864,281,308/2,541,170,913  = 5x

I like to use this multiplier to gauge the value of a cryptocurrency against itself. In my experience, cryptocurrencies with an average multiplier that is less than 20-25x have adequate and reliable trading volume to support the price. In my opinion, cryptocurrencies that have multipliers higher than 50x are severely overvalued and do not have adequate volume and interest to support the price. In most cases, cryptocurrencies with high multipliers have extremely thin order books with less than 10 BTC sitting between the spot price and “zero”. With this in mind, the cryptocurrencies from OKEx’s delisting that resemble houses of cards are BRD, ICN, RNT, SAN, and SUB, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see these coins delisted on other exchanges in the near future.

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Substratum is the Answer to Everything (Not) →

David Petersson for Forbes:

Substratum has used this technique to penetrate China’s Great Firewall. The platform splits transmitted data into several parts and forwards them via nodes, using artificial intelligence to find the fastest routes. Combined with encryption, this creates a secure and uncensorable connection without using VPNs or Tor.

Substratum hasn’t “penetrated” anything except the net worth of their SUB token investors. Regarding China’s firewall, they’ve found a temporary loophole which anyone with an installation of OpenVPN or ShadowSocks on an unblocked IP address can take advantage of.

Combined with encryption, this creates a secure and uncensorable connection without using VPNs or Tor. “Our plan is to implement a term we call masquerading. We encrypt and wrap data into transactions that look similar to other patterns of web traffic,” explains Justin Tabb, the CEO of Substratum. “As we move further we will have more and more masqueraders in the hopes of never being identifiable.”

In the Substratum ecosystem, “masquerading” is just a fancy buzzword that doesn’t actually mean anything once you realize IP discovery can occur internally on the network. VPN and Tor traffic can be identified externally through data packet analysis. If Substratum’s masquerading works, data packets won’t be identifiable externally. However, the IP of the next-hop node can be easily extracted and blocked via a firewall. Presumably, the node would then ping the network to connect to another node on the network. Rinse and repeat until all the IP addresses on the Substratum network are blocked.

Putting this system on the blockchain actually plays a crucial role. Eventually, VPN hosts are limited and costly. Tor is free of charge but the only incentive for anyone to use it would be anonymity. Blockchain, on the other hand, flips the entire equation. Here, the nodes can actually earn income by sharing their network. For instance, Substratum implements a model where you pay for content based on “clicks.” This decentralized version of the web empowers the nodes instead of the centralized players and has the potential to bring net neutrality back.

Substratum’s faux-censorship resistance properties aren’t derived from blockchain. Instead, Substratum will only use the Ethereum network to process payments through its utility token, SUB. In general, I think processing micropayments is a valid use case for cryptocurrency, but it’s unclear to me how the economics of Substratum’s network will play out when considering the Ethereum network’s variable gas fees and lack of scalability. Lastly, Substratum doesn’t “bring net neutrality back”. As I said earlier, the IP addresses of every node on the network could potentially be extracted and blocked, which effectively kills the product’s use case.

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Bastiaan007 shows a website hosted on Substratum →

Bastiaan007:

Just succeeded in Hosting my own Website through The Substratum Network! @SubstratumNet #NetNeutrality #Cryptocurrency #substratum

Bastiaan007 is an official Substratum ambassador who’s created a number or videos showing SubstratumNode “bypassing” state-level firewalls around the world. In this latest screenshot, Bastiaan007 shows a website, substratum.sub, being hosted on the Substratum network. This moment is truly magical because the Substratum network isn’t even live yet.

Jokes aside, I suspect what Bastiaan007 actually demonstrated is a DNS exploit to mirror Substratum’s official website on a different domain. This is completely different from “hosting” a website. The Substratum team should probably clarify this lie from Bastiaan007, but I suspect they won’t since it can be classified as “price-positive” shilling. Last I checked, SUB was approaching $0.04, so they definitely need all the shilling they can get.

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Pomp discusses Bitcoin on CNN →

Anthony Pompliano on CNN:

We have very deep conviction on a long-term basis. And if you look at the fundamentals, the 24-hour transaction volume on the Bitcoin network is about $4.6 billion as of lately, and the market cap is $74 billion. So that’s about a 16-times multiple of transaction volume for market cap. That’s very similar to Mastercard which does about $11 billion worth of transactions and is valued at about $180 billion. So from a value perspective, it’s right there on par with Mastercard.

I’m generally bullish on Bitcoin, but I just don’t understand the “fundamentals” behind this market cap multiplier comparison between Bitcoin and MasterCard. Bitcoin’s market cap is calculated by multiplying its circulating supply by its last traded price on off-chain exchanges — a completely speculative figure that can be easily distorted or manipulated. MasterCard’s market cap is based on real revenue statistics. After tweeting at Pomp asking about this comparison, he responded saying “they are both transaction networks.” To me, this seems like a nonanswer, but then again, I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist.

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Producing “Duality” with TVK →

I can’t believe this happened just two months ago. Long story short, ThatViolaKid showed up in Tokyo and decided he wanted to become a rapper in addition to being a world-class violist. Two weeks later, we released this video — shot on a Panasonic GH5. Good times.

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Bokehlicious

TVK was here in Tokyo a few months ago, and we spent a lot of time shooting around the city. I love how the XF 56mm f/1.2 renders bokeh. Beautiful.

The Relationship Between ICON and ICONLOOP

ICON Foundation:

ICONLOOP private networks with strong use cases on the public chain have been carefully selected with the eventual goal of connecting with the ICON network via the ICON Nexus and every transaction will require ICX for transaction fees.

This should clear up any doubt over ICON’s plans, both in the short-term and the long-term. Like I’ve said many times before, an interoperability-focused platform is useless without third party entities to connect. It makes sense that ICON is focused on carefully selecting private blockchain clients that have legitimate reasons to connect to each other via the public ICON network.

Currently, most, if not all of ICON’s development resources are dedicated to building out ICON’s public chain, and as ICONLOOP is built on the same blockchain engine, just a few additional developers are required for customization of private blockchain implementations.

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Exploring Shirakawa-go

Shirakawa-go (白川郷) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gifu Prefecture. I’d love to come back in the winter someday.