Smart contracts (origins in 80s, 90s vs. 2013 ETH and 2020s Cardano)
We had a pretty interesting product update. We laughed, we cried, we all learned a little bit. Two and a half hours lots of stuff and I hope this gives you guys a good window into all the things that are happening. There's an enormous amount of complexity in Cardano and Goguen is no different. In fact that one slide showing all the interlocking dependencies and the moving pieces for it and just the sheer volume of things that are going on is, is an indication of not only the quality of the team but also the commercial reality of being a smart contract platform. In 2020 when I co-founded Ethereum our reference material was paper. We looked at things that Nick Szabo and people from the 1990s and 1980s wrote about and whether you were a Ricardian contract fan or you had programmed in Eiffel or you understood things like FpML basically it was an open field which gave us kind of a freedom to just do whatever we wanted to do but it also didn't give us a commercial reality of who's going to buy it? Who's going to use it? What do you need to do? The expectations in 2020 are vastly different from the expectations in 2013 and the reality is that there are massive deficits with Ethereum as designed today which is why Tezos exists and Algorand exists and why ETH2 is being constructed . It's why there are so many different players from Polkadot and others on down who have deep and detailed opinions about the things we need to do. If the ICO revolution hadn't happened, there was no notion of an ERC20 token and we were in a just different world.
We didn't have DeFi, any of these things and now in 2020 if you are to be competitive and build great things and actually invite real use and utility at a scale of millions and billions of people or government or Fortune 500 you need to have real good answers about a lot of different threats and things. For example, Marlowe, what it does is it leverages 20 years of history from domain experts like Willi Brammertz and over 30 years of history in domain-specific language (DSL) design from professor Simon Thompson and his team and it puts them together. It says for the first time ever we're going to have semantical clarity between the entrepreneur, the developer, the writer and the financial services infrastructure whether that be the banker, the insurance agent, the exchange, whoever that might be. Up until the totality of human history till today we have never had that semantical clarity. All four of those actors speak different languages and what we're doing with Marlowe as a DSL is an example of how you can unify and create a common language and experience between all of them today.
Marlowe, DSL, Glow, Plutus, IELE
Right now, you guys can go to the Marlowe playground and you can start using it and start building things and start having that semantical clarity and work with us and over a period of six months or so that will continue to evolve. Templates will evolve, applications will be constructed and those applications will work their way into Cardano applications and eventually they'll become cross-platform and work on things like (Hyperledger) fabric and other such things as we see industry and commercial adoption but it requires a starting point and Marlowe has evolved over a four year period through the hard labors of so many people to actually give us a great starting point. You can visually look at contracts and talk about their design. You can write them in JavaScript, you can write them in the Marlowe programming language. There's a Haskell side to things and you can see the power of this approach because of its design. You can prove things are correct, you can use theory that has existed for over 40 years like SAT solvers and reachability to actually show that you're not going to have a parity bug and that's just one example of one DSL of which many more will come. The point of DSLs is to give clarity to people in the industry. For example if we get into the health business and we start talking about medical records that will become a DSL to broker their movement and that same clarity and semantical unification will occur between doctors and hospitals, patients, governments, regulators and business professionals and they will now have a common language. So, Marlowe is an entry point and it's an example of how to build a DSL and evolve a DSL and bring the right people to the table.
When we look to things like Glow, from MuKn, this is an example of a team that's highly motivated and intrinsically across blockchain. When we look to the future and we say what happens when Bitcoin gets smart contracts? What happens when ETH2 comes out? What happens when people want to build cross-blockchain applications? Wouldn't it be nice to have a unification language and that's what Glow is basically all about. By strategic investments in that ecosystem, what Glow does for us is it ensures that we won't be left behind that Cardano has that and all Cardano infrastructure can benefit from that and Glow in turn will benefit from its embedding in our ecosystem. More users, more technology and ultimately because Cardano's the best. If you deploy in that direction it's the best experience. When you look to Plutus, Plutus is the unification language, it's the conductor of the orchestra and it pulls all of these things together and there were a lot of design requirements with Plutus that were quite hard from a theory viewpoint. We really cared a lot about resource determinism. We wanted to make sure that it was always predictable or at least as predictable as it can be to know how much it costs to do things because at the end of the day this is not a science experiment. These are not toys back in 2013. We had the luxury with Ethereum of just seeing what happened and the market makes strategic investments and they have to know how much their operating cost is going to be for their business model. We designed Plutus so that it would be one of the best programming languages on a long arc agenda of being a very practical on and off chain language to unify all the Cardano ecosystem. There are many objects in the ecosystem to operate, manipulate, instruments of value like native assets, identity, smart contracts onto themselves, DAOs, off chain infrastructure and you need a conductor that's capable of living in between all of these things and you need certainty that the code you're writing is going to work.
This is why we based it on an ecosystem that has 35 years of history and we as a company have invested millions of dollars in that ecosystem to modernize it and bring it into the 21st century especially for things like Windows support and working with partners like Tweag WebAssembly support, working on projects like compilation to JavaScript so that we can share that's there and our commitment is going to continue beyond that we are a founding member of the Haskell foundation working with Simon Peyton Jones and we're going to ensure that Haskell has compilation to ARM and that all of the technology that's required to keep that language competitive and actually make the language even more competitive will happen. It's very nice that Plutus is deeply ingrained in that ecosystem and that makes it a perfect conductor language. In the coming months we're going to talk a lot more about our relationship decay in IELE. If you live in the imperative object-oriented world and you want to do things a bit differently than the way things are done in the Haskell functional world then it makes sense to have an option that has the same principles as us which is why we reached out to Grigore years ago and established a commercial relationship with him. It's been the privilege of my career finding a way to resurrect that relationship so in the coming months we're going to talk a lot about how IELE fits into the Cardano ecosystem and the value it's going to bring in addition to the value of Marlowe, Glow, and Plutus.
Native assets
One of the single most important things about all of this is the native asset standard. One of the things we did not anticipate when we created Ethereum is just how pervasive the user's ability to issue an asset would be. We figured this would be an important thing, it's why we put it on a T-shirt back in the Miami conference in January of 2014 and we realized that from the color coin's project in the master coin project and one of the most important things is that we have the ability to issue not just a utility token but non-functional assets, security tokens and a litany of other instruments that hold value. Some ephemeral, some permanent, some with flexible monetary policies, some with fixed monetary policies, some from a central issuer, some from a decentralized issuer, some managed by a foundation, some managed by the community, some managed by fixed code that's immutable and the point of the native asset standard in the ERC20 converter is to establish a co-evolution of the technology and the commercialization of the technology. What we've been doing with ERC20 converter is using that as a way to create a conversation with those who want to migrate or build on Cardano and thinking through how are we going to create practical standards with our native assets. We already have enormous advantages with this standard over Ethereum. In particular the fact that your assets you issue on Cardano are treated the way that ADA is treated whereas in Ethereum you're a second-class citizen or ETH is treated differently from smart contracts. This first class citizen approach means that your assets will have the same governance access layer, to portfolio access and infrastructure that ADA itself has. Easier listing experiences, easier time with hardware wallets, easier time with wallet software. In general better user experience, faster transactions, lower transaction costs and then eventually for higher value tokens even the possibility of paying transaction fees over the long term in the native asset itself as if you were your own cryptocurrency.
Goguen rollout
You just simply cannot do this with the design of Ethereum and Ethereum 2. It's a huge advantage we have in our ecosystem and it's one that will become more pervasive over time now Goguen has already started. As a launch agenda the very first update to enable some Goguen era functionality was the metadata standard which meant that you could go from just moving ADA around to actually a whole litany of applications in the identity space and in the metadata space some of which we're aggressively negotiating on in commercial deals which we'll announce at a later date. The rollout of Goguen in terms of the system as we mentioned in the presentation will be principally done for the first iteration over a series of three hard fork combinator (HFC) events. The first of which is beginning this year in November December time frame and that's going to lay a lot of the foundations that will enable us to get to the second hard fork combinator event which will occur in Q1 of next year and we'll announce that specific date likely at the next product update and then the third one will happen shortly thereafter. They have to be spaced this way because it's just simply too cumbersome on our developers and also our partners such as wallet infrastructure and exchanges to try to do too much too quickly and furthermore there's an enormous amount of work as you've noticed on that slide to roll out Goguen. You have to do two things at once, you have to deploy the infrastructure but then you also have to populate the infrastructure and what's nice about the way that we've done things as you now see with the Marlowe playground the population of that infrastructure is occurring now today and with the ERC20 converter and the mint test net that's coming.
That's going to occur in November which means that that gives people time to start building and playing on our ecosystem in a safe sandbox so that when they deploy it to the mainnet they do it right the first time and they don't make an existential failure as we have seen with the DeFi space because at the end of the day once you go live you have a huge adversarial surface and everybody in the world is going to try to break the things you've done. It's very important that you do it right which means that you need time as a commercial partner and an application deployer to do it correctly. Parts of Goguen are indeed shipping this year, some have already shipped and we'll have another HFC event at the end of next month or early in December and throughout the first quarter of next year and likely the second quarter will complete the other two HFC events which will roll out full support for native assets, extended UTxO, the Plutus infrastructure and the Marlowe infrastructure. In the meantime we're also working on strategies about how we can ensure best integration of Glow and IELE into the Cardano ecosystem and as you've noticed there are three parallel teams that are working very hard. The Shelley team continues to upgrade the Shelley experience. Just today we've received a lot of concerns over for example the state pool ranking in Daedalus. Let me be very clear about something. There's no problem with the ranking software, the problem is the k parameter. It needs to be increased and the fact that things are getting grayed out is an indication that the ranking parameter is actually working right for the first time. So, k needs to go up but there are consequences of that and we need to improve the software to reflect those consequences but it is my goal to get k to 1000 before ideally d hits 0 because we really do want to have over a 1000 well-functioning stake pools but by no means is that the end of the story.
Improvements + project Catalyst
We need partial delegation and delegation portfolios. We need means for stake pool operators to communicate effectively and efficiently with those who delegate to them. We need improvements in SMASH. We need an identity center, we need a litany of improvements to Daedalus itself. Right now, today, there are more than four companies working full-time at doing just these things in addition to the Goguen updates that are occurring right now. That research thread and that development thread will continue. We've already seen seven CIPs including CIPs related to the reward function. We take them very seriously, we review them and there's enormous amount of discussion about how to create a fair and balanced system and we appreciate this feedback. It's a process and we ask for patience and we also remind people that we launched Shelley just at the end of July and despite that the ecosystem has more than doubled in size and it's been growing at an incredible pace and it's only going to continue and we're only going to see our best days ahead of us. Good things are coming down the pipe and it's becoming a much more holistic ecosystem from in performance improvements, to usability improvements, to better overall software for everyone.
There's no greater example of that than what we've been able to accomplish in the last three months for the exchanges in general. We're really proud of what we've done with the Adrestia stack and we're really proud of working with great partners like Binance and Bittrex throughout the last few months and we've had some certain challenges there but as a result of overcoming those challenges we have left behind an incredible enterprise grade listening experience that continues to get faster, continues to get higher quality and is secure and reliable 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we'll continue investing heavily to ensure that that only gets better for all of those partners whether they be an external wallet or their infrastructure like an exchange operator. We've had a lot of wins also on the governance side with the Voltaire Catalyst project. We have seen huge wins in participation going from small focus groups to now over 3500 people every single day coming into cardano.ideascale.com competing for 2250000 worth of ADA with fund2. That's just the beginning and every six to eight weeks that's going to increase in scale, in terms of the money and people, the quality... When we ask what is our developer acquisition strategy that's a major part of it because people know that there's money to be made in building on Cardano and that you have the right incentives to go realize your dreams and add value so just as these frameworks like the Marlowe playground and the Plutus playground and other such things like Glow come online and IELE come online the ability to build will be matched by the ability to discuss what to build and fund? What to build through a community driven process that includes greater and greater inclusivity. For example the next fund will include a voting center built right into Daedalus in addition to the cell phone application that we've already launched to vote and we will continue refining that experience relentlessly that's one of our fastest moving teams and I will remind you we are doing this in parallel to the Shelley workstream and the Goguen workstream that we showed you guys today. Finally there's Basho, not the next hard fork combinator event but HFC#3 which we anticipate in Q1 2021.
Sidechains, Hydra
I would like to include a sidechain protocol that allows the movement of value between independent systems through some form of blocking mechanism. We are currently examining and designing a protocol that we think fits very nicely into the way that our system works with mild modifications to the ledger rules. If that and should this be successful then that helps with one of the pillars of Basho interoperability and then the other pillar is scalability. Rob is hard at work working with technical architects and scaling up a team to start de-risking the Hydra protocol and others are hard at work evolving the science behind the Hydra protocol. We have seen great progress on all fronts to de-risk Hydra's roll-out and what's so beautiful about Hydra is it is our belief that the majority if not all of Hydra can be implemented in Plutus. As Plutus rolls out we have a natural constituency to run this infrastructure. The stake pool operators and we have a natural way without an HFC event or special accommodation of rolling out Hydra.
It's not really needed at this level of scaling capacity. We have an enormous throughput already 10 times greater than Ethereum as it is today and room to make it a hundred times greater than what Ethereum is today without Hydra. However as we de-risk this infrastructure solidify the protocols and get out all the kinks. What's so beautiful about it is that we will be able to when the time comes the community can roll out multiple implementations of Hydra so that there is diversity and there will be a natural group of actors to run those channels as we have seen for example with the Bolt spec and the Lightning ecosystem on Bitcoin. The contrasting difference between Lightning and Bitcoin and Hydra and extended UTxO and Cardano is we designed Cardano for Hydra.
Bitcoin was not designed for Lightning and as a consequence it's always more difficult for them to try to make meaningful progress whereas us there's no friction in that relationship. It just fits very nicely through so the roadmap is coming together and Cardano 2020 has definitely started to evolve into quite a mature ecosystem and what's really exciting is we're going from an ecosystem of potential to one of reality and instead of asking what could we do we're showing people what has been done and people are actually doing things every day.
Our commercial team is inundated with requests for coordination and cooperation and deployment. I get numerous emails every single day, well intended to very serious about people wanting to build on the platform and we're really excited about that. We're going to keep this steady systematic relentless march as you saw with the enormity of the news today. It's business as usual and it'll be exactly the same in November only there'll be more and every month. The velocity increases, we burn down the remaining story points to get these things done and things are happening very quickly and we just keep releasing and releasing and releasing and it's a very different time than it was even six months ago.
Community rules
What's so reassuring is we continue to have the best community in all the cryptocurrency space. It's the final point but it's one that I'm most proud of. You see people get to decide where they want to live, what infrastructure they want to deploy, on who they want to work with and when you have a welcoming warm and friendly community that is constructive and productive and their job is to help you get to where you need to go you want to work with those people. When you have a destructive or toxic community that's exclusive hierarchical and not invented here in their mentality people don't want to work with that community. Money can't buy that. I don't care if you have a bank account with four billion dollars or you're a central bank. You can't buy character and you can't buy culture, you have to make it and you have to earn it and if we've accomplished anything over these last five years from the 90 papers now and the million plus lines of code and the incredible releases that have happened and continue to happen we accomplished the greatest thing of all: we built a community to rival that of bitcoin's. I believe with that community we can realize the dream in the coming years of Cardano becoming the financial operating system.
For those who don't have one and giving open prayer and free economic identity to those who need it I am astounded by just how easy it is to roll these things out. They're super hard and complex under the hood but they just feel right and fit right and all the pieces are starting to come together in just the right way and I'm astounded by the fact that when we roll them out community members are there to receive them and take them to the next level.
Thank you all for attending the product update at the end of the month. This was a real good one, just as good as the Shelley one and we are now in the Goguen era with the first HFC event coming in the end of November and we're going to keep pushing them out. Every single one of them will add more capabilities and I encourage everyone to check out the Marlowe playground start building with it. Today things are happening really fast when the mint comes online at the end of November. Start playing around with that, start talking about the multi-token standard. If you're interested in a project our commercial division divisions always' open and you're going to see more and more progress from all entities in this ecosystem and some potentially major announcements before you can think it. Thanks guys it was a good day and thanks to the entire team that made all this happen I'm real proud of all of you.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5wADba8kCw

I have been here for many previous altcoin seasons (2013,2017 etc) and wanted to share knowedle. It's a LOOONG article.
The evaluation of altcoins (i.e not Bitcoin) is one of the most difficult and profitable exercises. Here I will outline my methodology and thinking but we have to take some things as a given. The first is that the whole market is going up or down with forces that we can't predict or control. Bitcoin is correlated with economic environments, money supply increases, safe havens such as Gold, hype and country regulations. This is an impossible mix to analyze and almost everyone fails at it. That's why you see people valuing Bitcoin from $100 to $500k frequently. Although I am bullish on the prospects of Bitcoin and decentralization and smart contract platforms, this is not the game I will be describing. I am talking about a game where you try to maximize your BTC holdings by investing in altcoins. We win this game even if we are at a loss in fiat currency value. To put it another way:

If you are not bullish in general on cryptocurrencies you have no place in investing or trading cryptocurrencies since it's always a losing proposition to trade in bubbles, a scientifically proven fact. If on the other hand you are then your goal is to grow your portfolio more than you would if holding BTC/ETH for example.

Bitcoin is the big boy

How the market works is not easily identifiable if you haven't graduated from the 2017 crypto university. When there is a bull market everything seems amazingly profitable and things keep going up outgrowing Bitcoin by orders of magnitude and you are a genius. The problem with this is that it only works while Bitcoin is going up a little bit or trades sideways. When it decides to move big then altcoins lose value both on the way up and on the way down. The second part is obvious and proven since all altcoins from 2017 are at a fraction of their BTC value (usually in the range of 80% or more down). Also, when BTC is making a big move upwards everyone exits altcoins to ride the wave. It is possible that the altcoin market behaves as an inversed leveraged ETF with leakage where in a certain period while Bitcoin starts at 10k and ends at 10k for example, altcoins have lost a lot of value because of the above things happening.

We are doing it anyway champ!

OK so we understand the risks and just wanna gambol with our money right? I get it. Why do that? Because finding the ideal scenario and period can be extremely profitable. In 2017 several altcoins went up 40x more than BTC. But again, if you don't chose wisely many of them have gone back to zero (the author has first hand experience in this!), they have been delisted and nobody remembers them. The actual mentality to have is very important and resembles poker and other speculative games:
A certain altcoin can go up in value indefinitely but can only lose it's starting investment. Think about it. You either lose 1 metric or gain many many more. Now that sounds amazing but firstly as we said we have the goal to outperform our benchmark (BTC) and secondly that going up in value a lot means that the probability is quite low. There is this notion of Expected Value (EV) that poker players apply in these kind of situations and it goes like that. If you think that a certain coin has a probability let's say 10% to go up 10X and 90% probability it goes to zero it's an even bet. If you think that probability is 11% then it's a good bet, a profitable bet and you should take it. You get the point right? It's not that it can only go 10X or 0X, there is a whole range of probability outcomes that are too mathematical to explain here and it doesn't help so much because nobody can do such analysis with altcoins. See below on how we can approximate it.

How to evaluate altcoins

A range of different things to take into account outlined below will form our decision making. Not a single one of them should dictate 100% of our strategy.

Basics

It's all about market cap. Repeat after me. The price of a coin doesn't mean anything. Say it 10 times until you believe it. I can't remember how many times I had conversations with people that were comparing coins using their coin price instead of their market cap. To make this easy to get.

If I decide because the sky is blue to make my coin supply 100 Trillion FoolCoins with a price of $0.001 and there is another WiseCoin with a supply of 100 Million and price of $1 then FoolCoins are more expensive. - Alex Fin's Cap Law

Fundamental analysis

This is done usually in the stock world and it means that each company has some fundamental value that includes it's assets, customers, growth prospects, sector prospects and leadership competence but mostly centered in financial measures such as P/E ratios etc. Valuation is a proper economic discipline by itself taught in universities. OK, now throw everything out of the window!.
This kind of analysis is impossible in vague concepts and innovations that are currently cryptocurrencies. Ethereum was frequently priced at the fictional price of gas when all financial systems on earth run on the platform after decades (a bit of exaggeration here). No project is currently profitable enough to justify a valuation multiple that is usually equal to P/E in the thousands or more. As such we need to take other things into account. What I do is included in the list below:

• Check Github. You need to make sure there is active development for the platform and it's a very bad sign if the project is either keeping the code closed source or even worse there is simply no development. No projects are "complete".
• Check Website. If the website is written in bad English the Chinese google translate type it means that they are not serious enough to produce an unbreakable decentralized project. If you can't write English you can't change the world, period. That's a deal breaker.
• Check Team's Linkedin. Numerous projects have either fake Linkedin accounts or the team is comprised mainly by unexperienced employees that are even shown to be working in other companies currently.
• Check backers. Projects that have Binance, Coinbase or Silicon Valley VC funds backing them are way more legit but way more overpriced too!

Relative valuation

One of my favorite ways to value altcoins that is based on the same principle in the stock market is to look at peers and decide what is the maximum cap it can grow to. As an example you take a second layer Ethereum solution that has an ICO and you want to decide if you will enter or not. You can take a look at other coins that are in the same business and compare their market caps. Thinking that your coin will outperform by a lot the top coins currently is overly optimistic so I usually take a lower valuation as a target price. If the initial offering is directly implying a valuation that is more than that then there is no room to grow according to my analysis and I skip it. Many times this has proven me wrong because it's a game theory problem where if many people think irrationally in a market it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But since there is opportunity cost involved, in the long run, getting in initial offerings that have a lot of room to grow will pay off as a strategy.

Sector prospects

In 2017 the sexiest sector was platforms and then coins including privacy ones. Platforms are obviously still a highly rated sector because everything is being built on them, but privacy is not as hot as it used to be. In 2018 DEXes were all they hype but still people are massively using centralized exchanges. In 2020 Defi is the hottest sector and it includes platforms, oracles and Defi projects. What I am saying is that a project gets extra points if it's a Defi one in 2020 and minus points if it's a payment system that will conquer the world as it was in 2017 because that's old news. This is closely related to the next section.

Hype

Needless to say that the crypto market is a worse FOMO type of inexperienced trigger happy yolo investors , much worse than the Robinhood crowd that drove a bankrupt company's stock 1200% after they declared bankruptcy. The result is that there are numerous projects that are basically either vaporware or just so overhyped that their valuation has no connection to reality. Should we avoid those kind of projects? No and I will explain why. There are many very good technically projects that had zero hype potential due to incompetent marketing departments that made them tank. An example (without shilling because I sold out a while back) is Quantum Resistant Ledger. This project has amazing quantum resistant blockchain, the only one running now, has a platform that people can build tokens and messaging systems and other magnificent stuff. Just check how they fared up to now and you will get the point. A project *needs* to have a hype factor because you cannot judge it as normal stocks that you can do value investing like Warren Buffet does where a company will inevitable post sales and profitability numbers and investors will get dividends. Actually the last sentence is the most important: No dividends. Even projects that give you tokens or coins as dividends are not real dividends because if the coin tanks the value of the dividend tanks. This is NOT the case with company stocks where you get dollars even if the company stock tanks. All that being said, I would advice against betting on projects that have a lot of hype but little substance (but that should be obvious!).

How to construct your portfolio

My strategy and philosophy in investing is that risk should be proportional to investment capital. That means that if you are investing 100K in the crypto market your portfolio should be very different than someone investing 1K because 10% annual gains are nothing in the latter while they are very significant in the former. Starting from this principle each individual needs to construct a portfolio according to how much risk he wants to take. I will emphasize two important concepts that play well with what I said. In the first instance of a big portfolio you should concentrate on this mantra: "Diversification is the only free meal in finance". In the case of a small portfolio then this mantra is more important: "Concentrate to create wealth, diversify to maintain wealth". Usually in a big portfolio you would want to hold some big coins such as BTC and ETH to weather the ups and downs explained in previous paragraphs while generating profits and keep progressively smaller parts of your portfolio for riskier investments. Maybe 50% of this portfolio could be big caps and 10% very risky initial offerings. Adapting risk progressively to smaller portfolios makes sense but I think it would be irrational to keep more than 30% of a portfolio no matter what tied to one coin due to the very high risk of bankruptcy.

Conclusion

The altseason is supposedly coming every 3 months. Truth is that nobody can predict it but altcoins can be profitable no matter what. Forget about maximalists who are stuck in their dogmas. Altcoins deliver different value propositions and it makes sense because we are very far from a situation where some project offers everything like Amazon and we wouldn't even want that in the first place since we are talking about decentralization and not a winner takes all and becomes a monster kind of scenario! Some last minute advice:

• Stay out of paid telegram/discord pump groups. They are deadly for your wallet.
• Avoid jumping on overhyped coins that have pumped massively during the last days without any very important news.
• Don't keep coins in obscure exchanges for too long or you will get burned with certainty.
• Stop thinking that your coin will 1000x and overtake Bitcoin!

P.S If you find value in reading this and want more weekly consider subscribing to my newsletter here

Binance Support Number 🎧 【+𝐼 】 𝟪𝟦𝟦-𝟫𝟢𝟩-𝒪𝟧𝟪𝟥☎️ Customer Service Number

Binance support number 1844-907-0583 CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao really doesn't want to tell you where his firm's headquarters is located.
Binance support number 1844-907-0583 has loads of offices, he continued, with staff in 50 countries. It was a new type of organization that doesn't need registered bank accounts and postal addresses.
To kick off ConsenSys' Ethereal Summit on Thursday, Unchained Podcast host Laura Shin held a cozy fireside chat with Zhao who, to mark the occasion, was wearing a personalized football shirt emblazoned with the Binance support number 1844-907-0583 brand.
Scheduled for 45 minutes, Zhao spent most of it explaining how libra and China's digital yuan were unlikely to be competitors to existing stablecoin providers; how Binance support number 1844-907-0583's smart chain wouldn't tread on Ethereum's toes – "that depends on the definition of competing," he said – and how Binance support number 1844-907-0583 had an incentive to keep its newly acquired CoinMarketCap independent from the exchange.
There were only five minutes left on the clock. Zhao was looking confident; he had just batted away a thorny question about an ongoing lawsuit. It was looking like the home stretch.
Then it hit. Shin asked the one question Zhao really didn't want to have to answer, but many want to know: Where is Binance support number 1844-907-0583's headquarters?
This seemingly simple question is actually more complex. Until February, Binance support number 1844-907-0583 was considered to be based in Malta. That changed when the island European nation announced that, no, Binance support number 1844-907-0583 is not under its jurisdiction. Since then Binance support number 1844-907-0583 has not said just where, exactly, it is now headquartered.
Little wonder that when asked Zhao reddened; he stammered. He looked off-camera, possibly to an aide. "Well, I think what this is is the beauty of the blockchain, right, so you don't have to ... like where's the Bitcoin office, because Bitcoin doesn't have an office," he said.
The line trailed off, then inspiration hit. "What kind of horse is a car?" Zhao asked. "Wherever I sit, is going to be the Binance support number 1844-907-0583 office. Wherever I need somebody, is going to be the Binance support number 1844-907-0583 office," he said.
Zhao may have been hoping the host would move onto something easier. But Shin wasn't finished: "But even to do things like to handle, you know, taxes for your employees, like, I think you need a registered business entity, so like why are you obfuscating it, why not just be open about it like, you know, the headquarters is registered in this place, why not just say that?"
Zhao glanced away again, possibly at the person behind the camera. Their program had less than two minutes remaining. "It's not that we don't want to admit it, it's not that we want to obfuscate it or we want to kind of hide it. We're not hiding, we're in the open," he said.
Shin interjected: "What are you saying that you're already some kind of DAO [decentralized autonomous organization]? I mean what are you saying? Because it's not the old way [having a headquarters], it's actually the current way ... I actually don't know what you are or what you're claiming to be."
Zhao said Binance support number 1844-907-0583 isn't a traditional company, more a large team of people "that works together for a common goal." He added: "To be honest, if we classified as a DAO, then there's going to be a lot of debate about why we're not a DAO. So I don't want to go there, either."
"I mean nobody would call you guys a DAO," Shin said, likely disappointed that this wasn't the interview where Zhao made his big reveal.
Time was up. For an easy question to close, Shin asked where Zhao was working from during the coronavirus pandemic.
"I'm in Asia," Zhao said. The blank white wall behind him didn't provide any clues about where in Asia he might be. Shin asked if he could say which country – after all, it's the Earth's largest continent.
"I prefer not to disclose that. I think that's my own privacy," he cut in, ending the interview.
It was a provocative way to start the biggest cryptocurrency and blockchain event of the year.
In the opening session of Consensus: Distributed this week, Lawrence Summers was asked by my co-host Naomi Brockwell about protecting people’s privacy once currencies go digital. His answer: “I think the problems we have now with money involve too much privacy.”
President Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, now President Emeritus at Harvard, referenced the 500-euro note, which bore the nickname “The Bin Laden,” to argue the un-traceability of cash empowers wealthy criminals to finance themselves. “Of all the important freedoms,” he continued, “the ability to possess, transfer and do business with multi-million dollar sums of money anonymously seems to me to be one of the least important.” Summers ended the segment by saying that “if I have provoked others, I will have served my purpose.”
You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.
That he did. Among the more than 20,000 registered for the weeklong virtual experience was a large contingent of libertarian-minded folks who see state-backed monitoring of their money as an affront to their property rights.
But with due respect to a man who has had prodigious influence on international economic policymaking, it’s not wealthy bitcoiners for whom privacy matters. It matters for all humanity and, most importantly, for the poor.
Now, as the world grapples with how to collect and disseminate public health information in a way that both saves lives and preserves civil liberties, the principle of privacy deserves to be elevated in importance.
Just this week, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the 9/11-era Patriot Act and failed to pass a proposed amendment to prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from monitoring our online browsing without a warrant. Meanwhile, our heightened dependence on online social connections during COVID-19 isolation has further empowered a handful of internet platforms that are incorporating troves of our personal data into sophisticated predictive behavior models. This process of hidden control is happening right now, not in some future "Westworld"-like existence.
Digital currencies will only worsen this situation. If they are added to this comprehensive surveillance infrastructure, it could well spell the end of the civil liberties that underpin Western civilization.
Yes, freedom matters
Please don’t read this, Secretary Summers, as some privileged anti-taxation take or a self-interested what’s-mine-is-mine demand that “the government stay away from my money.”
Money is just the instrument here. What matters is whether our transactions, our exchanges of goods and services and the source of our economic and social value, should be monitored and manipulated by government and corporate owners of centralized databases. It’s why critics of China’s digital currency plans rightly worry about a “panopticon” and why, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was an initial backlash against Facebook launching its libra currency.
Writers such as Shoshana Zuboff and Jared Lanier have passionately argued that our subservience to the hidden algorithms of what I like to call “GoogAzonBook” is diminishing our free will. Resisting that is important, not just to preserve the ideal of “the self” but also to protect the very functioning of society.
Markets, for one, are pointless without free will. In optimizing resource allocation, they presume autonomy among those who make up the market. Free will, which I’ll define as the ability to lawfully transact on my own terms without knowingly or unknowingly acting in someone else’s interests to my detriment, is a bedrock of market democracies. Without a sufficient right to privacy, it disintegrates – and in the digital age, that can happen very rapidly.
Also, as I’ve argued elsewhere, losing privacy undermines the fungibility of money. Each digital dollar should be substitutable for another. If our transactions carry a history and authorities can target specific notes or tokens for seizure because of their past involvement in illicit activity, then some dollars become less valuable than other dollars.
The excluded
But to fully comprehend the harm done by encroachments into financial privacy, look to the world’s poor.
An estimated 1.7 billion adults are denied a bank account because they can’t furnish the information that banks’ anti-money laundering (AML) officers need, either because their government’s identity infrastructure is untrusted or because of the danger to them of furnishing such information to kleptocratic regimes. Unable to let banks monitor them, they’re excluded from the global economy’s dominant payment and savings system – victims of a system that prioritizes surveillance over privacy.
Misplaced priorities also contribute to the “derisking” problem faced by Caribbean and Latin American countries, where investment inflows have slowed and financial costs have risen in the past decade. America’s gatekeeping correspondent banks, fearful of heavy fines like the one imposed on HSBC for its involvement in a money laundering scandal, have raised the bar on the kind of personal information that regional banks must obtain from their local clients.
And where’s the payoff? Despite this surveillance system, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that between $800 billion and $2 trillion, or 2%-5% of global gross domestic product, is laundered annually worldwide. The Panama Papers case shows how the rich and powerful easily use lawyers, shell companies, tax havens and transaction obfuscation to get around surveillance. The poor are just excluded from the system.
Caring about privacy
Solutions are coming that wouldn’t require abandoning law enforcement efforts. Self-sovereign identity models and zero-knowledge proofs, for example, grant control over data to the individuals who generate it, allowing them to provide sufficient proof of a clean record without revealing sensitive personal information. But such innovations aren’t getting nearly enough attention.
Few officials inside developed country regulatory agencies seem to acknowledge the cost of cutting off 1.7 billion poor from the financial system. Yet, their actions foster poverty and create fertile conditions for terrorism and drug-running, the very crimes they seek to contain. The reaction to evidence of persistent money laundering is nearly always to make bank secrecy laws even more demanding. Exhibit A: Europe’s new AML 5 directive.
To be sure, in the Consensus discussion that followed the Summers interview, it was pleasing to hear another former U.S. official take a more accommodative view of privacy. Former Commodities and Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo said that “getting the privacy balance right” is a “design imperative” for the digital dollar concept he is actively promoting.
But to hold both governments and corporations to account on that design, we need an aware, informed public that recognizes the risks of ceding their civil liberties to governments or to GoogAzonBook.
Let’s talk about this, people.
A missing asterisk
Control for all variables. At the end of the day, the dollar’s standing as the world’s reserve currency ultimately comes down to how much the rest of the world trusts the United States to continue its de facto leadership of the world economy. In the past, that assessment was based on how well the U.S. militarily or otherwise dealt with human- and state-led threats to international commerce such as Soviet expansionism or terrorism. But in the COVID-19 era only one thing matters: how well it is leading the fight against the pandemic.
So if you’ve already seen the charts below and you’re wondering what they’re doing in a newsletter about the battle for the future of money, that’s why. They were inspired by a staged White House lawn photo-op Tuesday, where President Trump was flanked by a huge banner that dealt quite literally with a question of American leadership. It read, “America Leads the World in Testing.” That’s a claim that’s technically correct, but one that surely demands a big red asterisk. When you’re the third-largest country by population – not to mention the richest – having the highest number of tests is not itself much of an achievement. The claim demands a per capita adjustment. Here’s how things look, first in absolute terms, then adjusted for tests per million inhabitants.
Binance support number 1844-907-0583 has frozen funds linked to Upbit’s prior $50 million data breach after the hackers tried to liquidate a part of the gains. In a recent tweet, Whale Alert warned Binance support number 1844-907-0583 that a transaction of 137 ETH (about $28,000) had moved from an address linked to the Upbit hacker group to its wallets.
Less than an hour after the transaction was flagged, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance support number 1844-907-0583, announced that the exchange had frozen the funds. He also added that Binance support number 1844-907-0583 is getting in touch with Upbit to investigate the transaction. In November 2019, Upbit suffered an attack in which hackers stole 342,000 ETH, accounting for approximately $50 million. The hackers managed to take the funds by transferring the ETH from Upbit’s hot wallet to an anonymous crypto address.

Binance Customer Care Number +(𝟣) 𝟪𝟦𝟦-𝟫𝟣𝟪-𝟢𝟧𝟪𝟣

Binance support number 1844-918-0581 CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao really doesn't want to tell you where his firm's headquarters is located.
To kick off ConsenSys' Ethereal Summit on Thursday, Unchained Podcast host Laura Shin held a cozy fireside chat with Zhao who, to mark the occasion, was wearing a personalized football shirt emblazoned with the Binance support number 1844-918-0581 brand.
Scheduled for 45 minutes, Zhao spent most of it explaining how libra and China's digital yuan were unlikely to be competitors to existing stablecoin providers; how Binance support number 1844-918-0581's smart chain wouldn't tread on Ethereum's toes – "that depends on the definition of competing," he said – and how Binance support number 1844-918-0581 had an incentive to keep its newly acquired CoinMarketCap independent from the exchange.
There were only five minutes left on the clock. Zhao was looking confident; he had just batted away a thorny question about an ongoing lawsuit. It was looking like the home stretch.
Then it hit. Shin asked the one question Zhao really didn't want to have to answer, but many want to know: Where is Binance support number 1844-918-0581's headquarters?
This seemingly simple question is actually more complex. Until February, Binance support number 1844-918-0581 was considered to be based in Malta. That changed when the island European nation announced that, no, Binance support number 1844-918-0581 is not under its jurisdiction. Since then Binance support number 1844-918-0581 has not said just where, exactly, it is now headquartered.
Little wonder that when asked Zhao reddened; he stammered. He looked off-camera, possibly to an aide. "Well, I think what this is is the beauty of the blockchain, right, so you don't have to ... like where's the Bitcoin office, because Bitcoin doesn't have an office," he said.
The line trailed off, then inspiration hit. "What kind of horse is a car?" Zhao asked. Binance support number 1844-918-0581 has loads of offices, he continued, with staff in 50 countries. It was a new type of organization that doesn't need registered bank accounts and postal addresses.
"Wherever I sit, is going to be the Binance support number 1844-918-0581 office. Wherever I need somebody, is going to be the Binance support number 1844-918-0581 office," he said.
Zhao may have been hoping the host would move onto something easier. But Shin wasn't finished: "But even to do things like to handle, you know, taxes for your employees, like, I think you need a registered business entity, so like why are you obfuscating it, why not just be open about it like, you know, the headquarters is registered in this place, why not just say that?"
Zhao glanced away again, possibly at the person behind the camera. Their program had less than two minutes remaining. "It's not that we don't want to admit it, it's not that we want to obfuscate it or we want to kind of hide it. We're not hiding, we're in the open," he said.
Shin interjected: "What are you saying that you're already some kind of DAO [decentralized autonomous organization]? I mean what are you saying? Because it's not the old way [having a headquarters], it's actually the current way ... I actually don't know what you are or what you're claiming to be."
Zhao said Binance support number 1844-918-0581 isn't a traditional company, more a large team of people "that works together for a common goal." He added: "To be honest, if we classified as a DAO, then there's going to be a lot of debate about why we're not a DAO. So I don't want to go there, either."
"I mean nobody would call you guys a DAO," Shin said, likely disappointed that this wasn't the interview where Zhao made his big reveal.
Time was up. For an easy question to close, Shin asked where Zhao was working from during the coronavirus pandemic.
"I'm in Asia," Zhao said. The blank white wall behind him didn't provide any clues about where in Asia he might be. Shin asked if he could say which country – after all, it's the Earth's largest continent.
"I prefer not to disclose that. I think that's my own privacy," he cut in, ending the interview.
It was a provocative way to start the biggest cryptocurrency and blockchain event of the year.
In the opening session of Consensus: Distributed this week, Lawrence Summers was asked by my co-host Naomi Brockwell about protecting people’s privacy once currencies go digital. His answer: “I think the problems we have now with money involve too much privacy.”
President Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, now President Emeritus at Harvard, referenced the 500-euro note, which bore the nickname “The Bin Laden,” to argue the un-traceability of cash empowers wealthy criminals to finance themselves. “Of all the important freedoms,” he continued, “the ability to possess, transfer and do business with multi-million dollar sums of money anonymously seems to me to be one of the least important.” Summers ended the segment by saying that “if I have provoked others, I will have served my purpose.”
You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.
That he did. Among the more than 20,000 registered for the weeklong virtual experience was a large contingent of libertarian-minded folks who see state-backed monitoring of their money as an affront to their property rights.
But with due respect to a man who has had prodigious influence on international economic policymaking, it’s not wealthy bitcoiners for whom privacy matters. It matters for all humanity and, most importantly, for the poor.
Now, as the world grapples with how to collect and disseminate public health information in a way that both saves lives and preserves civil liberties, the principle of privacy deserves to be elevated in importance.
Just this week, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the 9/11-era Patriot Act and failed to pass a proposed amendment to prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from monitoring our online browsing without a warrant. Meanwhile, our heightened dependence on online social connections during COVID-19 isolation has further empowered a handful of internet platforms that are incorporating troves of our personal data into sophisticated predictive behavior models. This process of hidden control is happening right now, not in some future "Westworld"-like existence.
Digital currencies will only worsen this situation. If they are added to this comprehensive surveillance infrastructure, it could well spell the end of the civil liberties that underpin Western civilization.
Yes, freedom matters
Please don’t read this, Secretary Summers, as some privileged anti-taxation take or a self-interested what’s-mine-is-mine demand that “the government stay away from my money.”
Money is just the instrument here. What matters is whether our transactions, our exchanges of goods and services and the source of our economic and social value, should be monitored and manipulated by government and corporate owners of centralized databases. It’s why critics of China’s digital currency plans rightly worry about a “panopticon” and why, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was an initial backlash against Facebook launching its libra currency.
Writers such as Shoshana Zuboff and Jared Lanier have passionately argued that our subservience to the hidden algorithms of what I like to call “GoogAzonBook” is diminishing our free will. Resisting that is important, not just to preserve the ideal of “the self” but also to protect the very functioning of society.
Markets, for one, are pointless without free will. In optimizing resource allocation, they presume autonomy among those who make up the market. Free will, which I’ll define as the ability to lawfully transact on my own terms without knowingly or unknowingly acting in someone else’s interests to my detriment, is a bedrock of market democracies. Without a sufficient right to privacy, it disintegrates – and in the digital age, that can happen very rapidly.
Also, as I’ve argued elsewhere, losing privacy undermines the fungibility of money. Each digital dollar should be substitutable for another. If our transactions carry a history and authorities can target specific notes or tokens for seizure because of their past involvement in illicit activity, then some dollars become less valuable than other dollars.
The excluded
But to fully comprehend the harm done by encroachments into financial privacy, look to the world’s poor.
An estimated 1.7 billion adults are denied a bank account because they can’t furnish the information that banks’ anti-money laundering (AML) officers need, either because their government’s identity infrastructure is untrusted or because of the danger to them of furnishing such information to kleptocratic regimes. Unable to let banks monitor them, they’re excluded from the global economy’s dominant payment and savings system – victims of a system that prioritizes surveillance over privacy.
Misplaced priorities also contribute to the “derisking” problem faced by Caribbean and Latin American countries, where investment inflows have slowed and financial costs have risen in the past decade. America’s gatekeeping correspondent banks, fearful of heavy fines like the one imposed on HSBC for its involvement in a money laundering scandal, have raised the bar on the kind of personal information that regional banks must obtain from their local clients.
And where’s the payoff? Despite this surveillance system, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that between $800 billion and $2 trillion, or 2%-5% of global gross domestic product, is laundered annually worldwide. The Panama Papers case shows how the rich and powerful easily use lawyers, shell companies, tax havens and transaction obfuscation to get around surveillance. The poor are just excluded from the system.
Caring about privacy
Solutions are coming that wouldn’t require abandoning law enforcement efforts. Self-sovereign identity models and zero-knowledge proofs, for example, grant control over data to the individuals who generate it, allowing them to provide sufficient proof of a clean record without revealing sensitive personal information. But such innovations aren’t getting nearly enough attention.
Few officials inside developed country regulatory agencies seem to acknowledge the cost of cutting off 1.7 billion poor from the financial system. Yet, their actions foster poverty and create fertile conditions for terrorism and drug-running, the very crimes they seek to contain. The reaction to evidence of persistent money laundering is nearly always to make bank secrecy laws even more demanding. Exhibit A: Europe’s new AML 5 directive.
To be sure, in the Consensus discussion that followed the Summers interview, it was pleasing to hear another former U.S. official take a more accommodative view of privacy. Former Commodities and Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo said that “getting the privacy balance right” is a “design imperative” for the digital dollar concept he is actively promoting.
But to hold both governments and corporations to account on that design, we need an aware, informed public that recognizes the risks of ceding their civil liberties to governments or to GoogAzonBook.
Let’s talk about this, people.
A missing asterisk
Control for all variables. At the end of the day, the dollar’s standing as the world’s reserve currency ultimately comes down to how much the rest of the world trusts the United States to continue its de facto leadership of the world economy. In the past, that assessment was based on how well the U.S. militarily or otherwise dealt with human- and state-led threats to international commerce such as Soviet expansionism or terrorism. But in the COVID-19 era only one thing matters: how well it is leading the fight against the pandemic.
So if you’ve already seen the charts below and you’re wondering what they’re doing in a newsletter about the battle for the future of money, that’s why. They were inspired by a staged White House lawn photo-op Tuesday, where President Trump was flanked by a huge banner that dealt quite literally with a question of American leadership. It read, “America Leads the World in Testing.” That’s a claim that’s technically correct, but one that surely demands a big red asterisk. When you’re the third-largest country by population – not to mention the richest – having the highest number of tests is not itself much of an achievement. The claim demands a per capita adjustment. Here’s how things look, first in absolute terms, then adjusted for tests per million inhabitants.
Binance support number 1844-918-0581 has frozen funds linked to Upbit’s prior $50 million data breach after the hackers tried to liquidate a part of the gains. In a recent tweet, Whale Alert warned Binance support number 1844-918-0581 that a transaction of 137 ETH (about $28,000) had moved from an address linked to the Upbit hacker group to its wallets.
Less than an hour after the transaction was flagged, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance support number 1844-918-0581, announced that the exchange had frozen the funds. He also added that Binance support number 1844-918-0581 is getting in touch with Upbit to investigate the transaction. In November 2019, Upbit suffered an attack in which hackers stole 342,000 ETH, accounting for approximately $50 million. The hackers managed to take the funds by transferring the ETH from Upbit’s hot wallet to an anonymous crypto address.

ATTN: These AMA questions are from Autumn 2019 - before the official launch of the Kava Mainnet, and it's fungible Kava Token.
These questions may no longer be relevant to the current Kava landscape, however, they do provide important historical background on the early origins of Kava Labs.
Please note, that there are several repeat questions/answers.

Q51:

How do you think about France in Kava market development plan?

What is your next plan to raise awareness among French about Kava?

• Answer: It is important to reach many top markets. For countries like France we need to find 1st regulator partners such as Binance that can help provide access to KAVA for users. When our CDP platform launches, we will work through local validator partners to help translate content and work with local users.
  
• We have some great community efforts where people create content for us.
  

Q52:

Why did you choose Cosmos instead of Aion, which comes with AVM built on JAVA, which can be accepted by many developers?

Will there be a possibility that one day we will be able to collateralize a privacy coin, such as Monero, on KAVA?

• Answer: We like programming in GO, interfaces are OK for Java. Cosmos will also feature a WASM module and EVM later. The Cosmos-SDK is very flexible and it allowed us to choose our own security model. That was unique compared to other frameworks where we had to adopt the underlying blockchains. In Cosmos-SDK we can create our own blockchain.
  
• Re: privacy - you can do some fun things in payment channels to make transactions more private. Such as onion routing clearing and settlement across different nodes. This can be possible in the future, but not our priority now.
  

Q53:

The biggest advantage of finance is the efficient allocation of resource allocation. If KAVA connects assets of multiple platforms through the interchain technology, the efficiency across the market will be improved.

But in terms of connectivity, Facebook's Libra, with its centralized giant platform, could be a big threat for the future. Of course, regulatory uncertainty still exists. KAVA wonders what big platform companies think about entering the blockchain field and how they can cope with their competition.

• Answer: We think of Kava as a DeFi service that can integrate with wallets, exchanges, and other platforms when users want loans or stable coins for payments. We don't see competition with Libra, but we see lots of users potentially getting into crypto which will be good for the market, good for BTC, and good for Kava.

Q54:

What will you do with the money after IEO?

What is the most important markets that Kava is focusing?

What is your marketing strategy to approach those markets?

• Answer: What will we do with the IEO money? Put it in a bank and keep building. We keep our funds safe in secure accounts that are insured. We always maintain at least 2 years runway in pure fiat to ensure we can survive in any bear market conditions and come out on top in the end.

Q55:

On mainnet, which function/feature can we expect to see on Kava since i only saw informations about its testnet?

• Answer: mainnet will feature KAVA, staking, delegating, validator software, voting and governance / parameter changes. Following mainnet, the validators will vote to enable transactions and the CDP platform. We expect this to be towards the end of the yeaQ1 2020

Q56:

How does Kava maintain the stability of its stablecoin? Are there any opportunties for outsiders to arbitrage or any other mechanisms to maintain price stabilization?

• Answer: Kava users deposit crypto assets as collateral and can withdraw a loan based on the amount they deposited. They must always provide more collateral than the loan is worth. When the value of the collateral drops due to market conditions, before it reaches the value of the loaned amount, the platform will auction off the crypto assets for USDX that is on the market at a discount. Holders of USDX can buy these assets at a profit. This removes USDX from the market and makes sure that the global USDX to collateral in the system remains balanced. Similar to MakerDao, 3rd parties can run "keepers" - very simple implementations which continuously monitors the Kava/USDX credit system for unsafe CDPs, and execute the liquidation function the moment they become unsafe. Keepers can also perform arbitrage on DEX/Exchanges executing trades across the Kava platform and the markets.

Q57:

Alright! So KAVA is doing DeFi right, could you explain DeFi in layman term to us.

• Answer: Decentralized Finance. Finance is really ensuring everything about past, present, and future value of money. You need safe custody and a store of value to keep money you earned in the past safe to be used later when you need it. You need something liquid and easily tradable to be used in the present. And the trickier one is the future - people need to get loans on the assets they have or hedge against the assets they have in order to ensure they can build for a better future. That’s finance.
  
• DeFi is taking all those things and making them open access and unregulated so that regardless if you were born with out an ID, if your credit score is bad, or if the government is trying to censor your actions and limit your spending - DeFi promises to give you a way to get access to the financial products you need.
  

Q58:

Could you please briefly explain your projects, and why you choose DeFi as a problem to solve?

• Answer: Kava is a cross-chain DeFi platform for cryptocurrencies. Kava offers decentralized loans and stable coins for any other crypto asset such as BTC, XRP, BNB, and ATOM.
  
• DeFi is the killer use case of crypto today. I think most people see this clearly now. We believe providing the basic DeFi services is the very first step that is required before blockchain technology can really become wide spread - so we started here.
  

Q59:

Why the name of the project KAVA?

• Answer: We started in crypto thinking we would build banking products and we wanted a more relaxed cool name to stand out from other solutions. Turns out Kava means many things.
  
• Kava = Hippopotamus in Japanese
  
• Kava = crow in hindi
  
• Cava = wine region in spain
  
• Kava = a medicinal root you add to Tea
  
• Kava = now a cross-chain DeFi platform
  
• But TLDR - we liked the name and thought it sounded short and sweet.
  

Q60:

What do you think of the future of DeFi in this space? Will DeFi one day take over the traditional financial systems? -- any wild guess on when it might happen?

• Answer: I think centralized solutions will always have certain advantages and DeFi will also have certain advantages.
  
• But truthfully, KYC is a problem from a user experience point of view. One of the big things with DeFi is there is no need to make people go through a KYC process anymore.
  
• If we imagine a world where USD Is king, or Renminbi is king, or BTC is king. DeFi has a place in all of them because open access to financial services is a basic human necessity.
  

Q61:

As we have known, Lending is not the only problem to solve in the whole financial areas, are you planning on going beyond lending? What other financial products are in your pipeline?

• Answer: Thats a good #Q .
  
• While we have a lot to solve to offer lending to other crypto assets - we can expand our support to non-crypto assets, to NFT tokens, and other assets.
  
• We also have plans to offer derivatives and other synthetics other than USDX - such as synthetic bitcoin and Yuan. What is exciting about Kava and the oracle system run by validators is that we can leverage this infrastructure around the world to do all sort of things.
  
• One of the more interesting products is creating under-collateralized loans using payment channel (layer-2 tech) of our USDX coin. Two parties can lock funds in payment channels and place bets on the price feeds from the oracles. When the funds reach a maximum threshold, the bet closes. Since a price feed is just a data set, we can have the settlement rules be multiples of the real data. In simple terms we can create 100x leverage products for the craziest of traders 😉
  

Q62:

Btw KAVA is a bit unique because it use Cosmos/Tendermint. While other DeFi use Ethereum , why you guys choose Cosmos?

• Answer: Cosmos is the future. Even facebook’s Libra consensus design was just a copy of Tendermint. Kava, Binance, the Cosmos Hub and many other blockchains are built on the same Cosmos-SDK framework.
  
• It’s very flexible and soon interoperable. This is a huge advantage over Ethereum. Where system’s like MakerDAO will be forced to develop in a slowly evolving chain like Ethereum and only touching Erc20 assets, Kava will be able to rapidly evolve, program in GO rather than solidity, and interoperate with chains like Binance directly.
  
• We’re very excited to get BNB and BTCB onto Kava’s CDPs and to put KAVA and USDX onto the Binance DEX. This is fairly easy on Cosmos.
  

Q63:

I saw in KAVA deck that you guys will use USDX, is it a stable coin? How is it going to work and its relationship with KAVA token itself?

• Answer: USDX is an algorithmically stable token pegged to the USD. USDX is the token users recieve when they get a loan from the Kava platform. USDX is collateralized or backed by crypto assets so the Kava platform should always hold more crypto value than the USDX it loans making USDX a very safe store of value even if the market crashes 10x overnight. That is what a stable coin should do.
  
• USDX is special though. Natively, users can spend or trade USDX freely like other stable coins, but the important difference is that 1) USDX is free of censorship and does not require a bank or anything else. 2) USDX can be “bonded” or “staked” providing an interest bearing yield between 2-10% APR. This is substantially more than what I can even get from my bank account.
  

Q64:

From your point of view as KAVA team, what would be most anticipated feature in KAVA ?

• Answer: Our CDP platform launch later this year. The first USDX will be minted then.
  
• Support of BTC in the CDP smart contracts. No blockchain has supported a real decentralized custody and use of BTC with smart contracts before.
  

Q65:

Indonesia is one of the “developing” countries, how is DeFi can help in making a difference in those “developing” countries?

• Answer: I can’t speak for developing countries as it’s not my expertise, but DeFi in general is trying to offer the exact same services to EVERYONE. Whether you are in San Francisco or Indonesia, the financial services you should have should be similar. The rates and fees you pay should be the same. DeFi is fair treatment and open access for everyone. That is what’s nice about having things run on a protocol.

Q66:

Last but no least, since we are doing AMA in Indonesian group, I believed our members wants to know if you are interested in going to Indonesia to expand your community and reach?

• Answer: As I said, I have not been before! I am traveling throughout South East Asia for a lot of the year. It is one of my destinations. I hope to meet many of you while I am out there.

Q67:

Defi companies are growing at a rapid pace, but they're actually smaller than traditional financial institutions. In order for Defy to become a global trend, it must eventually acquire consumers within the traditional financial industry.

Traditional financial consumers, however, have poor technical understanding and want psychological stability through government guarantees such as deposit insurance. After all, what does KAVA think about long-term competitors as traditional financial institutions, and what long-term strategies do they have to embrace traditional financial consumers?

• Answer: We think of financial institutions as big honey pots of potential DeFi users. For example, if Kava can offer margin lending at better rates than a bank because there is no middle men or compliance costs, users should want to use that service.
  
• As crypto grows, I believe more FIs will integrate crypto assets and DeFi services. For example, in the US you cannot currently margin trade crypto as a retail user. But it could be possible for a regulated FI to integrate a lending service like KAVA without causing issues with regulators due to Kava having no counter party risk other than the user itself.
  

Q68:

MakerDAO is only for ethereum but Kava support multiple assets, is this only difference?

What are Kava main advantages compared to MakerDAO?

• Answer: Kava supports multiple assets THAT are on different blockchains. Maker can only support ETH. This is a huge difference. In addtion, the role of Maker is quite likely a security token. It represents fees paid by others. Where in Kava, the token is used in security of the blockchain protocol itself. The holders of Kava have a lot at stake and need it to govern the system. Maker holders have nothing at stake.
  
• I think a huge difference is that with our model being POS and based on validators with slashing if they don't participate our governance participation and management will be much more effective than MakerDao.
  

Q69:

Ticket claim for KAVA Launchpad is comming around the corner. This maybe last IEO ticket claim of this year. With this hype and expectation of investors/traders, do you think KAVA will be a big boom to end this year with happy tears?

If someone wants to manipulate Governance function of KAVA by changing voting result by possessing many Validators Node through buying over 51% KAVA of market, what will KAVA team do? Do you think Emergency Shutdown(Maker has this) can be considerd as a solution?

How will USDX be minted and backed on KAVA platform? If its based on uses crypto collateral, how will KAVA team make it stable since the inflation of crypto price?

• Answer: I believe Kava to be underpriced currently, especially compared to maker which is 10x the value and serving ETH which is much smaller market than ours.
  
• But I cannot tell you with certain if Kava will boom or bust - only the market can decide that. As with all speculative assets, do your homework and trade at your own risk. We here at kava are very LONG Kava, but we are biased 😉
  

Q70:

Stablecoin is the word that I heard everyday, so do you have any plans to release wallet for stablecoin?

• Answer: There are already wallets created for Kava that can hold our tokens 😉

Q71:

My first question is: Why do traders choose to use KAVA instead of margin on exchanges?

My second #Q is: What happens whenKAVA doesn't have enough cash to loan out?

• Answer: Traders who cannot get passed KYC can use Kava. Traders who want better rates than exchanges can use Kava. If regulators like in the US prevent margin trading, Kava is a great solution.
  
• Kava creates USDX out of thin air when users withdraw loans. It will only create Kava is the user locks a great value of crypto in the system to back it. When the USDX loan is repaid, it is destroyed. In this way, Kava can scale however big it wants - it will never run out of cash.
  

Q72:

i heard as you said before in San Fransisco, Silicon Valley. what is the relationship about Silicon Valley and KAVA? and what will KAVA done in this Q1 ?

• Answer: I am born and raised in Silicon Valley. I am blessed to have grown up in this area where lots of tech innovation is. However, I am the only one at Kava that lives here full time. The others on my team are in the Cayman Islands and Cambridge.
  
• San Francisco is a hub for the largest crypto projects - Ripple, Coinbase, Stellar, etc. It's a great place to network with founders and feel inspired to do big things. It is not the best weather here, but the people are focused and extremely helpful if they can be if you aim to do big things.
  

Q73:

With regard to minting new USDX, is there any potential chance to against Global financial law? Likewise USDT, issuing money should guarantee deposit of real collateral as I have known.

• Answer: USDX is debt. It is not a guarantee, but the protocol's rules state it must have more crypto assets behind it than the # of USDX issued. In this way, rules are better than guarantees. Tether guaranteed 1:1 USD, it turned out not to be true because their funds were seized by regulators. That is impossible in the case of Kava.

Q74:

What is the uniqueness of KAVA project that cannot be found in other project that´s been released before?

• Answer: Cross-chain is unique for us. But most unique is our partners and validator group that is launching our blockchain. We have incredible partners that support our work including Ripple, Cosmos, Arrington, Hashkey, SNZ, Lemniscap, etc.

Q75:

KAVA was initially planned to launch on Ripple network but later switched to Cosmos Tindermint Core. What is that something you see in Tindermint Core that is not available anywhere.

• Answer: We did not plan to launch on ripple and did not launch on "Tinder"-mint. I have a fiance - she would be quite mad.
  
• We did however use the Cosmos SDK - a tool set, to build our blockchain that features tendermint consensus.
  
• Tendermint is just the consensus so I assume you mean the SDK. The SDK is very much "choose your own adventure" you can build anything and design all the spec of your blockchain easily. In this way you choose the tradeoffs that make the most sense for your special application/network
  

Q76:

How much portion of USDX is backed from crypto/fiat money ...& please mention why any trader, hodler will prefer USDX over other stable coins?

What are the biggest challenges you expect to face and how do you plan to overcome these challenges?

• Answer: 150% of USDX or more is backed by crypto. Traders will use USDX because it offers a savings rate. This rate allows traders heding bitcoin or other assets to not only store value, but earn a return.

Q77:

What do you think about creating liquidity for the Kava project?

• Answer: It's the biggest challenge. My hope is the savings rate USDX offers will give it natural organic demand over existing stable coins. It will definitely be a large BD process to get USDX listed and used worldwide.
  
• We work with some of the worlds best market makers to seed liquidity today. But we will need organic demand in the long-term
  

Q78:

So many IEO projects consistently drop in price after listing. Whats different with KAVA, what are some special highlights?

• Answer: Why is Kava based on Cosmos? Based on what considerations?

Q79:

How do you see the chinese language community? How do you view the opportunities for growth in the chinese community?

• Answer: You will be soon listing on Binance, what are your plans on the business side after listing? In one years time, what are your thoughts on where Kava's development will be?

Q80:

If we take a look at all the different types of DeFi products/apps out there, including decentralized exchanges, stablecoins, atomic swaps, insurance products, lending platforms, trade financing platforms, custodial platforms, crowd investment platforms, etc, nearly cover all the important areas of traditional finance.

In this age of all these different platforms taking hold, where does Kava see itself appealing to its app developers, users, investors?

• Answer: What does Kava do? What can a normal user (of crypto) achieve by using KAVA?

Q81:

How does Kava maintain the stability of its stablecoin? Are there any opportunities for outsiders to arbitrage or any other mechanisms to maintain price stabilization

• Answer: What is the reason for the IEO price reaching 6x the first round private sale price? How did you come about to reaching this valuation?

Q82:

What would you be able to do more for Russian-speaking communities and regions?

• Answer: one thing to keep in mind is that yes, we do have limitations and regulations to follow when it comes to certain countries and we will adhere to those regulations in hopes of proving ourselves to be a thoughtful and long-term solution. while we may not directly work with some countries, we hope that communities there can understand that we're here focused on being sustainable rather than another project around shorter-term gains.
  
• for myself, I'm actually belarusian myself so I absolutely see the value of working in the CIS/Russian-speaking regions. we'll continue to do AMAs, interviews, and always engage with Russian-speaking communities to better understand what the #Q s, concerns, and thoughts.
  
• If there's anything else we can do in this region and with the @gagarin_ico communities, please let us know!
  

Q83:

What are your major goals to archive in the next 3-4 years? Where can we KAVA ecosystem in this period? What are your plans to expand and gain more adoption?

Do you guys feel satisfied by seeing your progresses and achievements till now, when you look back to the day when you have started this project?

• Answer: We want to really build out great DeFi products for the masses. I really believe that DeFi will be a major force to allow much more mass adoption for crypto over the coming years. In the sorter term, we want to push out our blockchain and build on top of that our CDP platform, which allows users to trustlessly put collateral onto the Kava blockchain, and receive a loan in USDX that will be also trustlessly administered.
  
• We will then build out more complex products and financial derivatives for crypto users and traders. We have barely scratched the surface in what we can do with DeFi so I can't predict the future, but we want to build products that are pegged to BTC values so that traders have more leverage purely in crypto.
  

Q84:

Which one of your milestone do you think was difficult and which was the encouragement that courages you to achieve it?

What were the Minimum and Maximum limit of KAVA tokens that one can be able to STAKE after the Mainnet launch ? And What will be the percentage of reward one gets and will it in future ?

• Answer: Good #Q ! Well we've been working on open source cross-chain technologies for a number of years and honestly it can be a pain. I think the Cosmos SDK made it significantly easier to implement the features that we wanted into the software.
  
• I think the largest challenges for Kava are not software based but in market adoption. Makerdao is a great project and they have spearheaded a lot of the work in the lending field. Hopefully Kava can be a very meaningful contributor as well
  

Q85:

What if someone fails to repay the debt? Is that KAVA is taking collateral system to enterprise level & if so, what's the plan? How secure KAVA is to safely handle the collateral tokens?

• Answer: These CDPs or "collateral debt positions" are always over-collateralized, which means you have to have more asset locked up in the bucket than you can draw from the bucket. The system leaves a margin when the collateral is 'called' to be able to sell off. If the asset cannot be fully redeemed KAVA is minted to cover the balance. Hence KAVA is a 'lender of last resort". This is why its important that we select good initially assets to support 👍

Q86:

I am very impressed with your voting method, how does it work? Whether users can vote to change things in the platform, are you a programmer with filters to decide what can be voted on and what is not possible?

• Answer: Thanks. A lot of this was pioneered with the Tendermint team. Basically voting is entirely open and asynchronous, meaning anyone can submit a proposal to be voted on. All the project in the Cosmos ecosystem are working diligently to expand the space of variable or features that can be modified via this governance method in protocol. For example, we were the first to enable transactions directly via governance in our Testnet-2000!

Q87:

Where does the interest rate come from for holding USDX specifically & technically?

• Answer: Great #Q ! Just like in MakerDAO, lenders of collateral (e.g. BTC, BNB) pay an annual interest rate to borrow USDX. A portion of that interest rate accretes to holders of KAVA, the rest we can apply a 'carrot' for users to adopt USDX. In short, Savings rate is loan interest rate less 'rents' collected from KAVA holders

Q88:

As far as I understand it KaVa is used both as a staking token and as collateral for Kava stablecoins (UsDX) .Can you talk a bit about the stability mechanism? Can other forms of collateral be used to create Kava stablecoins (a la Multi-Collateral Dai)?

• Answer: KAVA will not be used as a collateral type in the CDPs. Collateral types will be assets exogenous to the system, like BTC and BNB. Of course BTC and BNB's value fluctuates. To make USDX not fluctate we ensure there is always more BTC or BNB in the CDP bucket than 'stable' USDX. Therefore BTC could increase or decrease a lot, as long as its less than the 'stable' debt of USDX that you have drawn, the system is healthy and functional 👌

Q89:

As far as I know, KAVA had 150 Validators in the test. Why do you have so much. Which conditions are your team based on to choose / invite them to stay decentralized, important for a Defi platform like KAVA?

• Answer: KAVA mainnet will launch with a cap of 100 validators. We want as many validators as possible. The reason? What if KAVA was run by just you and me. Well that works if people trust us, but its pretty for us to collude and act maliciously. Its harder for 100 people to collude -- its still possible, but harder. And so we put a lot of effort in to promoting a healthy and large validator community, and empowering them to grow their stake in the system

Q90:

As a developer, which program languages can i use in kava core smart contracts?

2How secure your fully on-chain liquidity protocol & What's is a core Smart Contract ?can you briefly explain.

• Answer: Yay developers! 🤓 The Cosmos SDK is currently written in Golang. So thats a good start. What other language would you like to work in?

Q91:

What do you think of DEFI in the Blockchain space?

DeFi brings many benefits to users, but conflicts of interests with the Bank. What is the solution of kava?

• Answer: Defi to me is offering financial primates, the supplies of which are spreadout amongst many participants, as opposed to few. People offer loans on BTC today. Kava's goal is to maximize the amount of counterparties to any loan, thereby 'socializing' the returns on any activiely used financial product

Q92:

What is the crucial thing, in your opinion,that would increase adoption of KAVA and possibly the rest of crypto. What’s the KAVA economic model and how will it is architecture ensure scarcity of the token and help to growth token price?

Can you tell me more about the new technology that combines the benefits and interactive functions of Cosmos with the DeFi applications you have built?

• Answer: Principly what I believe is 'new' about the KAVA tech stack is that we are building a standalone piece of software that treats other network techologies as 'first class citizens'. This means from the ground up our design is mean to easily incorporate and work with other software. A lot of blockchain is a story of "everyone will use my software, because its the best". Kava Labs worked for years against this view while bringing open Interledger to market.

Q93:

As Per Kava website ! $KAVA was done many partnerships with Big project like Ripple, Cosmos, TenderMint, Hashkey, etc ! So, whats the major reason and benefits of these partnerships to kava project?

Kava Project have their own Mainnet Blockchain So, whats the main work of Cosmos Blockchain in Kava ? Is Kava projects is on Both mainnet and Cosmos OR Kava is just using the Cosmos Blockchain services?

• Answer: Working together. Pooling resources and talent to make something bigger! Crypto is still a little fish in a huge ocean of financial services. Kava Labs has always had an eye for inclusivity. Grow the pie!

Q94:

I have been too involved in KAVA's AMA, I think I know all about your technology.I want to ask a successful person like you why come with cryptocurrencies and blockchain, with talent. There are many other areas for you to choose, so why are you targeting such a risky market?

• Answer: Successful ay? hehe. Depends how you define success and what your goals are. I love delivering products to users. Crypto has some fantastic users, and there is still sooo much to be built. I think KAVA has a lot of promise, but there is still so much work to be done and I hope users like you all become producers some day as well

Q95:

What's the most critical and innovative point of KAVA to ensure users that it is the best under DeFi niche?

How can you compete MakerDAO which has done good number of business with recent market! If I hold KAVA tokens how KAVA leverage the tokens value and make it moon for me? 🙈

• Answer: "IF" you hold KAVA tokens now? 😂 Again I think this a markets concern. To the extend that users on other chains begin to trust KAVA brand for loan issuance, and we get some solid adoption of USDX I think we're in a good spot. I would say a benefit of KAVA is that we are FOCUSED. We're not trying to be everything for everyone. This is lending, quite simply, for the large market cap coins -- and that's hard enough

Q96:

Why KAVA needs to create it's own stable coin, whereas there are are many other options available in the market? Is that crypto tokens can be stable!!?

• Answer: Yeah there are a lot of USD backed stable coins that is true. Indeed we have looked around with working together with a number of them. The difference with USDX (and DAI) is that its crypto-collateral backed. Doesnt mean we won't work with others in the future 😉

Q97:

Processing fees on loans we need to pay in kava or usdx?

Which types of success you've been seen in testnet? Why on Nov 5th you've planned to launch mainnet? How many testnet was processed in the past?

• Answer: Three major testnets with some minor iterations therein. Testnet-3000's software was pinned to KAVA mainnet software. That testnet is looking good which is a good indicator for smooth sailing on mainnet launch, we'll see 🤞

Q98:

DeFi is a hot niche when it comes to crypto/blockchain project! Most of the projects are developing aiming DeFi, How KAVA is looking to contribute in DeFi ecosystem? What will be the approach of KAVA to systemize & increase adoptability?

• Answer: DeFi is big. Mostly on Ethereum, which is great! KAVA is for non-ethereum networks 😇

Q99:

What is the main reason that you think that Cosmos-based Kava zone will present a new validator opportunity :- a complex and multi-faceted governance system that allows differentiation?

• Answer: Validator #Q , nice. I believe its important for validators to be able to distiguish there service in multiple ways, not just on security (otherwise they will be treated as a commodity). KAVA present an opportunity for validators to distiguish themselves on the basis of proper governance of system parameters on behalf of their delegating constituents. KAVA is a "lender of last resort", so delegating to a sophisticated validator could lead to better results beyond security.

Q100:

How is kavas tendermint better than other defi consensus especially with the introduction of etheruem 2.0 which many believe will be better than all others - considering kavas association with ripple, is it possible to foresee defi loans from crypto to fiat ?

Maybe kava partnership with centralised banks?

• Answer: IDK about that. But we will be working closely with the great folks over at Ripple, thats for sure!

Q101:

Adoption is one of the important factor that all sustainable blockchain projects should focus to be more attractive in the invertors' eyes.

Can you tell me what KAVA has done and plan to do to achieve Adoption in the reality, real use cases, our real society?

• Answer: Bitcoin is real!? I'm continuously impressed by the demand and size of that network. Help us capture that demand! Really, if we can I think the future looks bright for KAVA!

Right now, the top 20 has 2 forks of Bitcoin, Tether, an exchange's token, Ethereum Classic, and a few other projects that make this space look far less serious than it really is. On the other hand, you have many great projects out of the top 20 with huge potential going forward. The purpose of this post is to discuss the cryptocurrencies that I believe are exciting, different, and already have (or are extremely close to having) a working project. These are the projects that actually keep my faith alive in crypto among all the other BS out there. I'm hoping to outline a few projects you know, as well as some smaller ones. I will exclude Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP from this list, as everyone knows them already and what they do. This is NOT MEANT TO BE AN ALL-INCLUSIVE LIST - that means I'm definitely missing some projects. However, these are some of the projects I believe will make seriously large contributions to the space going forward.
1 - Nano. Reddit already shills the hell out of this coin, and it's for good reason. Nano is the single fastest and cheapest (100% free) P2P digital currency in the space, period. There's something to be said about sending somebody 50 Nano and them receiving EXACTLY 50 Nano, not 49.999 or something similar. Nano is an actual innovation in the space, with a very different codebase than other coins. It uses a block lattice (instead of using a blockchain), which is an incredible invention, and is reminiscent of the kind of innovation that ETH first offered for blockchain applications in 2015 - but for digital cash. Nano feels like what Bitcoin should have been from Day 1. Download the mobile app/create a web wallet and send some back and forth between the two - you'll understand why people are so bullish on this coin once you've tried it out for yourself.
2 - Monero. If any coin most clearly resembles the fungibility and privacy of using physical cash, it's Monero. It's the only major coin that is fully private by default, 100% of the time. The recent updates over the past few months have made Monero extremely cheap and fast to use, and if you haven't tried it out, I'd highly recommend it (MyMonero's web wallet is excellent https://wallet.mymonero.com). There's no denying this coin's potential to shape the space in the future as the top privacy coin. Monero has also proven to be highly resistant to bear trends, holding its price better than nearly every other top 40 coin in the last bear market. Lastly, the team is extremely competent and makes real innovations to this coin - between making transactions fully private, cost reduction/speed upgrades, and forking away from ASIC mining, this team has proven that they are little talk, ALL action, and committed to constantly improving this cryptocurrency.

1. Augur - This decentralized betting platform was one of the first Ethereum dapps ever planned, and took nearly 3 years to come to fruition. It is one of the most well-made, useful dapps running on Ethereum right now and has real users making markets every single day. You can bet on pretty much anything using Augur, and it's actually completely decentralized - meaning no third parties or governments who are unhappy with the content or types of bets being placed - can shut this dapp down. It does have a few issues for sure, but I am confident that they are minor and will be resolved in time as this market continues to mature.
   
2. Lisk - Though the project has seen many delays in its time, the Alpha SDK - their biggest innovation - is just about to launch. Lisk will be the first project to really bring sidechains for dapps into the cryptocurrency space, and this is a big deal. It's not just another dapp platform - these sidechains allow for much more customization than simply running a dapp on Ethereum, Tron, or EOS. Dapps can be written in pure Javascript, a language that every software developer knows, and the dapps themselves won't be held back by many of the issues that Ethereum has (average-slow network speed/congestion issues, etc). Not to mention, their team is massive (30+), they have plenty of funding and the price is very low right now ($2, with an ATH of over $35).
   
3. IOTA - No matter what you think of this coin, IOTA's tangle is undeniably different. It's DAG-like technology is refreshing to see in a space where 98% of coins are just clones/forks of other coins - even if it doesn't work the way it should yet. It's possible that the removal of blocks and instead creating a tangle of transactions where every node in the network helps to power future transactions could allow for scaling beyond what current blockchains offer.
   
4. BitTorrent - I really hesitated to list this one. Do I agree with the way Justin Sun markets and overhypes every small meeting or minor project development? Of course not. However, there is no denying that this token will expose a TON of new users to cryptocurrency for the first time - arguably more than any other dapp token. BitTorrent, the application, is already being used by millions of users, and there's no denying that. This is a rare situation and no other cryptocurrency dapp has anywhere near the user count that this BitTorrent has. While I don't love Tron in general... it is largely an Ethereum clone with few advantages other than added hype...BTT is guaranteed to at least see some real-world usage and it might be good to own a few tokens.
   
5. Upfiring - If you like the idea that BitTorrent is putting forth (rewarding seeders), Upfiring is that exact idea - but their dapp is literally already out and nobody knows about it yet. I hesitated to list this project due to the low market cap, but it just might be one of the most useful dapps out there and one of the best uses of smart contracts. The dapp is awesome - super sleek and easy to use. In terms of high potential projects, this one is huge with around a 2 million USD market cap and really could explode at any time imo. You can download their dapp right now and share files on the blockchain, set a price in UFR for your files and earn crypto when others download them. Torrenting is one of the areas that I believe crypto will make a big impact in, since rewarding seeders is an excellent use-case to incentivize file-sharing. With an ATH of 40 million, it has reached 20x the current market cap before, so the price and hype level is currently low.
   

Major projects to watch out for due to being overvalued or other significant red flags (please don't downvote this post if you disagree with these - instead, let us know why you disagree in the comments):
1 - Litecoin. I'd certainly agree it should be in the Top 50 due to its fame status, but the #4 position is ridiculously high for a coin like this. Put simply, there is simply no major use case for this coin. If you wanted to use something as cash, Nano and even Bitcoin Cash are arguably both better options. At least Bitcoin serves as the standard for markets on exchanges. Remember that the creator of this coin has literally sold all of it as well - while arguably a smart move on his part, it's something to keep in mind.
2 - Binance Coin. Regardless of the fact that it is Binance, and Binance is great, this coin's entire value is based on a 100% CENTRALIZED business. That's a big deal. This means if something ever happens to Binance, for whatever reason, BNB's value will directly be affected as a result. In addition, a 4.5 BILLION dollar market cap for an exchange token is just a ridiculous market cap in general, even if it is Binance. Props to Binance for making this token so successful, though.
3 - Stellar. This is a big one, and I know I'm going to take some heat for listing this, so let me clarify. I really like what Stellar is doing with payments, for sure, but one thing that makes that all null and void from an investment standpoint - Stellar's team owns over 80% of the entire Stellar coin supply. Let that sink in for a second. 19,331,690,041 XLM is circulating among every single Stellar holder, while the team themselves holds 85,710,809,041 XLM. People tend to ignore this fact for some reason, but it's unfortunately a huge deal and requires that you put a ton of trust in Stellar's team not to casually sell millions of dollars worth of their XLM whenever they want more money. How would you feel if Vitalik owned 400,000,000 ETH? That's the same ratio to what the Stellar team owns. There's also been a ton of sketchy things that have happened with the team selling off millions of dollars worth of coins in 2017/early 2018 - you can search those in the search bar to read up on those incidents where users here tracked those transactions. Lastly, Stellar is a fork of Ripple. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily, but it's something to keep note of.
4 - Bitcoin SV. Yeah, it's pumping right now. Who cares, so are lots of coins. Ignore it, and maybe it will go away. This coin once again serves no real purpose and has no place being the #8 cryptocurrency with how many great projects are sitting below it.
5 - Ethereum Classic. This coin has already been 51% attacked SUCCESSFULLY, and it's value has gone up since then. In addition, no changes have been made to the coin to prevent such an attack in the future, and none are planned. No hard forks will happen to improve this coin, ever...that's because Ethereum Classic's main value proposition is immutable and irreversible transactions, Ironic - because the 51% attack showed that transactions on this chain are actually the exact opposite of this. Obviously, this coin should be avoided.
And before you ask, why did I leave out... -Cardano: Interesting project but too far away from releasing their smart contracts to mention in this post. In addition, market cap is extremely high for not having a working product out yet
-Tron: A hyped-version of Ethereum with few differences. Not necessarily bad, but not innovative enough to mention from a technological standpoint. I won't comment on their marketing tactics...
-Vechain: It remains to be seen whether this use-case will ever play out using a public blockchain like this with real businesses. Certainly one to keep an eye on, but as of right now it's not being used on any sort of large scale
-Qtum: Still has yet to find a real niche over projects like Ethereum, Tron, and EOS
-EOS: Raised billions of dollars in their ICO but their platform still has many issues. There are some decent developments like Everipedia on it, but overall I decided to leave it out due to once again, not offering anything THAT innovative to the space, and the lack of decentralization (EOS team can freeze transactions)
I'll update the top list as well if anyone provides me with good projects that I may have missed out on here!