The Breakdown

The full week's episodes in one (plus a bonus TL;DR on ZeroHedge's deplatforming. 

• Tuesday | Narrative Watch: The Future of Fud
• Wednesday | Exclusive Interview with Binance US CEO Catherine Coley announcing staking 
• Thursday | The Unsolved Mystery of How To Fund Public Protocols
• Friday | The Founders of Chainlink and Synthetix on DeFi, Derivatives and 25 New Decentralized Price Feeds

Yesterday Chainlink released price reference data for 25 of its decentralized oracle networks which, together, power more than $100m in DeFi. 

On this special interview episode, @nlw talks with Sergey Nazarov and Kain Warwick, the founders of Chainlink and Synthetix respectively about: 

1. The evolution and goals of Synthetix, a novel type of derivatives exchange where users can interact with any asset with a price feed. 
2. The challenge Synthetix faced around spinning up their own oracles around price feeds
3. The history of their collaboration and how Synthetix came to work with Chainlink
4. Chainlink approach to building decentralized oracles for data such as price feeds
5. Chainlink’s announcement yesterday about the new published price reference data for 25 oracle networks
6. The state of the idea of decentralization, and how what was previously a concept is becoming operationalized
7. One thing that gives them pause or scares them about DeFi and crypto and one thing that makes them excited for the future 

The best way to fund open source projects remains a question, and one that - in the context of crypto protocols - has never had higher stakes. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen live action experiments in a number of different approaches. 

Gitcoin grants used a quadratic funding program to match grants to technology builders and media creators in Ethereum 

After months and months of concerted community debate and conversation, Zcash will implement a new Dev Fund of 20% of the block rewards after the Founders Reward runs out in November, splitting it between the Electric Coin Co (7%), Zcash Foundation (5%) and 3rd party developers (8%)

A consortium (cartel?) of the 4 largest BCH mining pools tried to insist upon a 12.5% block reward diversion to a new dev fund, with a threat to orphan blocks that didn’t comply. The plan ran into a barrier when Roger Ver’s bitcoin.com backed away. 

Also in this episode, @nlw looks at the latest in CBDCs - including Japan’s continued hedging that they’re preparing for the possibility of needing to move quickly and Cambodia’s announcement that they will be implementing a CBDC this quarter. 

Finally, Andrew Yang took a few minutes yesterday to talk about cryptocurrencies and why regulation with the intent to stop them would be doomed to fail.

In a Breakdown exclusive, Binance US CEO announces that the exchange will begin supporting staking, starting with ALGO and ATOMs. 

On this episode, Catherine and I discuss:

1. How the company prioritizes both new features and which audiences to build for
2. Why staking is important both for allowing people to do more with their crypto assets as well as help build and secure the networks those assets run on 
3. How staking is part of a much larger mission around education, financial literacy and lowering the barriers to entry for participation in crypto.

We’re over $9,000! That means a lot of good things, of course. But any price increase brings with it increased scrutiny and, yes, increased FUD. The question for this time around is whether the FUD is the same old same old or something new. 

In this episode, @nlw looks at three emergent (and continued) areas of FUD, including: 1) accusations that the bitcoin community is rooting for calamity as the safe haven narrative takes hold; 2) an updated “crypto is for criminals” narrative with more emphasis on state-level enemies; 3) a new, more economically vindictive green/energy waste narrative. 

Importantly, the question isn’t so much whether these new categories of FUD will come to fruition, but what can be done about them.