Nearly the end of 2019, which means we’re out there chatting with interesting people doing cool things in crypto and DLT. This time, I caught up with Alex Batlin, CEO and Founder of Trustology.

Colin Platt (CP): Hello, great to speak with you again, it has been awhile. Thank you for taking the time to join us.

Alex Batlin (AB): Hello, thank you, it has been.

CP: Alex, let’s dive straight in, can you tell us a bit about who you are, and what you do?

AB: Yes, sure. I’m the Founder and CEO of Trustology. I’ve had a number of roles before, primarily technology in banking (JP Morgan, Nomura and UBS). I ran the innovation lab for UBS at Level 39 in London, where we did a lot of different projects. Ultimately we focussed heavily on blockchains, our team was responsible for smart bonds, the EEA, Hyperledger and R3. Early on, I connected with Joe Lubin (founder of ConsenSys), and helped launch the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). I was also involved in helping R3 in the early days, as well as Hyperledger. I moved to BNY Mellon and worked on blockchain and digital custody.

After my experience in banking, I decided to try the entrepreneurship route and setup Trustology as I had a vision of mass adoption of crypto and believed that secure management of private keys would be a crucial step towards making that future a reality. We started out as a ConsenSys spoke, and then spun out as a separate company. We closed seed funding with ConsenSys and Two Sigma Ventures. The company has now been around for about two years, of which one as an independent company.

CP: So, custodial wallets. Who are they for? and why are they important?

AB: We started out looking to sell key transaction management to banks as a technical product that they could offer to their clients, high-net worth individuals and investment funds. We also spoke directly to funds about how this could function as a custody service. We had vision for enterprise grade, scalable resilient and secure digital asset wallets. They needed to be cheap to operate, which meant that we needed to design our model around low OPEX. At the end of the day, though we all hate to admit it, custody is a race to the bottom. We understand that there is a need to deliver quality service but still have to be cheap to operate, which means low unit costs. We also understood that it had to be institutional-grade, which is more about functionals, with high levels of controls, such as white-lists and blacklists, multiple layers of controls. We’ve spent a lot of time working on how to implement procedures for these types of clients.

In addition, we are also focused on mass adoption as I mentioned earlier. Our vision is that in the future, everyone will interact with blockchains, ideally through tech offered by us.

CP: And what has been the feedback so far?

AB: Our clients have been very positive. We have been told that we have good tech, that is easy to audit, programmable, secure and can be managed at scale.

We’re a bit different as we don’t do cold storage, so we sought to strengthen our solution with insurance. Insurance companies told us that they couldn’t insure the technology, only the service, so we setup a “minimum viable service”. That led us to build a service that anyone can use, all you need to do is download an app from your iPhone, that sets up instruction keys on your mobile device’s secure enclave that you use to securely work with us. This service was enough for us to get insurance. We’ve managed to get Aon, and now have an insurance syndicate, which was a first for real- time wallets.

We’ve also now introduced business accounts, so employers can setup employee accounts with multi-signature capabilities and white-listing of addresses. This has gotten a lot of traction with crypto funds. We’ve also started to get more business directly from HNWI and individuals, as well as with funds and asset issuers.

CP: What other types of projects are you focused on?

AB: We also work with DeFi, DeFi is both a passion and focus for me, and I’m pleased to say we are the first real-time custodial wallet to integrate with MetaMask. This makes it possible to lend, borrow and swap through DeFi apps using Trustology. We’ve seen lots of traction there. Our view is that the world needs more decentralisation in the future, and we are big believers in decentralised finance.

To enable mass adoption, we need to build an ecosystem that is safer, faster, and easier, until then, the industry can only address enthusiasts. We believe that the best way to offer this is through a custodial wallet. We see wallets somewhat like the internet browser for the blockchain.

CP: Talk to me about your experience selling to banks

AB: We’re working on banks and direct sales. We’re always in conversations with banks about the best approach, whether that is to deploy on premise, or to have a hybrid approach. We want to address this client base, and we understand that it will take time for everyone. We believe that working with banks must be on a partnership and relationship basis, which is a major focus for us. This also means understanding that not everyone is ready to buy today, but we want to make sure that we are the partners of choice when they are ready. We believe that our strategy of going directly to clients is a strong proof point that will help them in the future. It gives us a track record, improves the technology and the solution through user input, and improves security as a result. Ultimately it means that we have a better offering for banks when they are ready.

CP: You talked about getting excited about blockchains and decentralisation. What is it about decentralisation?

AB: Resiliency and access. Resiliency and independence of issuer of an asset is important, as we’ve seen with Quantitative Easing (QE), where a single centralised entity has inflated the asset supply. Due to globalisation this can lead to negative impacts on other countries, which may not receive the positive impact that the country doing the QE might receive. Lots of countries rely heavily on foreign currencies and are facing issues.

More nations are also worried about access to SWIFT. We’ve seen a weaponization of access to financial infrastructure. Institutions are increasingly looking for more fair access to infrastructure that cannot be blocked. We hear about this in other areas outside of finance as well, with companies building on platforms then having their access cut off when they become too big, like Uber and Google Maps.

There is also an important benefit around operational resiliency, as centralised services can go down, and in a world of electronic payments this is doubly important. Decentralised systems are better, and offer exponential improvement. More and more decentralisation means more resiliency.  For example, when things go down for electronic transactions you cannot pay for things, and this could lead to people not being able to buy food and necessities. This wouldn’t be possible in a decentralised ecosystem.

CP: What do you think about crypto assets?

AB: Some businesses cannot work without decentralisation. If things are national, then a central bank can act as trust arbitrator. However, as things became more international, thanks to the internet, communications have now also become more international but payments sadly have stayed national. Right now, there is no global central bank to help arbitrate international transactions. The de facto method of trust in value transfer is via the US Dollar, with the Fed acting as the central bank of trust. This was okay when people could trust the Fed, but now that is coming into question. The Euro is one avenue that is being pushed in Europe, but this is simply a zero sum game, shifting global trade from USD to EUR without solving the core issue.

Bitcoin was the first asset to not have a central bank, a truly decentralised value transfer mechanism. I see Bitcoin as a natural evolution of the internet, borne out of need, rather than a protest movement. It solves the problem of international value transfer without a single point of trust. I don’t believe that it will kill fiat transactions, as they are still useful and faster for national transactions. But it could become extremely helpful for international transactions, and could become a backbone for international settlement as networks become faster and  move beyond fiat to decentralised currencies. ETH 2.0, for example, could start to get to the point that performance is good enough for mass transactions done on a lower level of volume.

CP: What about Decentralised Finance (DeFi)?

AB: DeFi itself becomes interesting for global liquidity. The Euro was trying to do pan Europe, but today it still doesn’t work, and is still very national and regional. With DeFi, for the first time, they are genuinely global, and international from the outset. When people gain confidence in the new products, and see that they don’t fail, there will be a slow ramp up. After this we can have more liquidity and things become interesting because global liquidity could be much larger than traditional liquidity pools. As it goes global and becomes trustworthy, more liquidity will flow there, and attract more liquidity. All of this will be enabled by decentralisation, because it is more safe.

CP: Thank you very much, that was incredibly interesting. Always great to hear what you have to say, I wish you and Trustology the best of luck.

AB: This was fun, thanks for having me.

As always, nothing here should be construed as financial advice, recommendation or endorsement of any project or cryptocurrency.

Colin Platt here again, time for another blog, exploring some of the topics that Zeth, Shaun and I found interesting.

It has been a year since we focused on the SEC’s settlements with Paragon Coin, DJ Khaled and Floyd Maywhether. How time flies.

Although it’s not something we’ve spent too much time on here, regulators haven’t lost interest in cryptocurrencies. Regulators around the globe have announced actions and settlements on a number of projects, large and small. Beyond these, after having been awakened from their slumber by Facebook and Libra, lawmakers have tasked regulatory bodies with getting to the bottom of what is happening with stablecoins. Investigations into risks, and rules of these projects have been hotly debated by the G7, Bank for International Settlements, IMF and more.

Perhaps the loudest story was that of Canadian texting application, Kik, which raised $100 in a SAFT offering. In June, the SEC announced that it was suing Kik for selling unregistered securities to US investors. Amongst the allegations were that Kin tokens traded at half of the value that they were sold to investors at, that they had been marketed as an investment opportunity, and had no functionality. The complaint included details about how Kik had developed basic “minimum viable products” which could be purchased for Kin tokens, including their famous “Let’s Jam” honey badger:

Immediately prior to the news of the lawsuit being made public, Kik announced plans to sponsor a “Defend Crypto” fund which sought to raise funds to support crypto projects from regulatory actions. Upon the news of the SEC lawsuit many early supporters quietly withdrew support for the initiative.

Kik has denied wrongdoing and is challenging the SEC’s complaint. In the meantime, Kik let their Tel Aviv based team go in September. Kik CEO, Ted Livingston was accused, in what was later found out to be a hoax, of having drunkenly texted a journalist with doubts about the project.

The autumn crypto legal action season kicked off with a bang on 30 September, as Block.one (the founders of EOS) announced a settlement with the SEC related to their $4bn, year-long ICO that ended in June 2018. The SEC’s complaint claimed that the EOS tokens, originally launched as ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum network and sold to the general public, were unregistered securities. This is perhaps the main regulatory concern that projects conducting token sales have when raising capital from the public, so the news of SEC action was widely followed. Not only were onlookers surprised that the SEC was finally coming after larger ICOs, but the amount of the fine, $24 million, surprised many. While a significant number in absolute terms, this settlement, which did not require that Block.one admit guilt to the claims made by the SEC, was less than 1% of the total amount raised by the EOS token pre-sales. Many commented that this was a very light fine, while several legal professionals suggested that circumstances including cooperating with the investigation and relative values raised from Americans could have contributed to calculating the amount of the fine.

While the Block.one managed to snatch the headlines, just one day later, the SEC announced another settlement, this time with Boston-based Nebulous, the company behind the 2014 launch of Siacoin. The settlement, which also did not admit fault, resulted in disgorgement and penalties amounting to $225k. Though this number is significantly smaller, the 2014 raise amounted to approximately $120k (all of which was subject to disgorgement). Nebulous went on to raise a further $1.5 from investor in 2018 under a Reg D sale.

As September ended on a note of, “well it could have been worse”, October saw a much larger, more notable action. On 11 October, the SEC filed a complaint against Telegram’s TON token sale, requesting the court grant an Emergency action, preventing TON from converting SAFTs (Simple Agreements for Future Tokens) to Gram tokens available for resale to the general public. This action was particularly notable for a few reasons, first is that it was one of the largest, well known projects in the space, having raised $1.7 billion from sophisticated investors.

Many projects issuing SAFTs had hoped that by raising money from qualified investors, developing their project and only then releasing tokens for a functional project, they could avoid having their tokens classified as securities.

In early September of this year, Telegram released a basic testnet and blockchain explorer for TON. While this clearly demonstrated that progress had been made, this network is not currently at a state that the tokens could be considered to have any actual utility.

Perhaps sparked by the TON testnet announcement, and subsequent realisation that the SAFTs would be converted by the end of October, and potentially released to the general public –without appropriate filing for registration of such issuance of securities– the SEC sought to halt the conversion process.

Following this announcement and the granting of the restraining order by the court, Telegram asked SAFT holders to grant an extension of its 31 October 2019 deadline, which was accepted by SAFT holders. In addition, Telegram formally responded to the SEC allegations, in which it claimed to have been in regular communication with the SEC and to have been caught in the 11th hour by this emergency action. Additionally, they argued that Grams should not be considered as securities, comparing them with currencies or commodities, and asked the court to deny a preliminary injunction which would have the effect of halting their plans.

The Telegram news showed that regulators were not going to go lenient on all token sellers, and that the rule of law still applied.

Outside of token sales, Facebook and Libra have been in the headlines, not just the crypto ones but everywhere. The US Congress, central banks, the G7 and even the BIS have called them in to testify, speak, and make the case why they should be allowed to proceed with their plans. We won’t go into too much depth on these well publicised proceedings, except to note that one side-effect of this focus has been that regulators are looking at if and how rules and regulations should be adapted for stablecoins generally. Regulators have noted a number of risks from these products, and some have called for stablecoins to be regulated as securities.

As is often the case, this space continues to look incredibly exciting and innovative. Increased regulatory focus doesn’t change this, but does reinforce the importance of understanding the rules of operating in financial services, even if things are dramatically different from what came before.

As always, nothing here should be construed as financial advice, recommendation or endorsement of any project or cryptocurrency.

Interview with Bob Summerwill, Executive Director, ETC Cooperative

Colin Platt, here, and I managed to line-up an amazing conversation with an amazing individual, Bob Summerwill, the Executive Director of the ETC Cooperative. The ETC Cooperative is a non-profit dedicated to supporting the Ethereum Classic (ETC) protocol. Bob also serves as the CTO of Varro Technologies, and as Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks. Bob has a history of being at the centre of things in this space, at the right time, having been involved in the Ethereum Foundation in 2016, moving over to ConsenSys to launch the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance in 2016. He’s also held technical and developer roles at EA, Sony and Sweetbridge. In short, Bob is a great person to speak to if you want to know where we’re going.

CP: Hi Bob, great to catch up again, it’s been a busy year for you. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, and for sharing your insight. Could you share a bit about who you are and what you do?

BS: For sure! So the majority of my career was as a software engineer in the videogames industry, with over 15 years at Electronic Arts, mainly working on EA Sports titles, with roles on game teams, in central technology and on collaboration projects across the company, “peaking” when I was appointed the first Architect for EA Sports as a whole.

I went down the blockchain rabbit hole in 2014, including meeting Vitalik for the first time, and from 2015 onwards I plunged full-time into the Ethereum ecosystem and have never come up for air since!

CP: Let’s start with a big topic that you and I have discussed. Communities and cooperation across projects in this space. Why is this important?

BS: When the Ethereum Foundation was being rebooted, following the departure of the previous Executive Director, I contacted Vitalik and offered to help with the transition. I had been a part of the Foundation before my time at ConsenSys and worked with the C++ team. Vitalik suggested to me that I try to identify what “good would look like” for the Foundation. As I dug into the possibilities of what the Foundation could do, I also started to stumble across some of what led to the previous bumps in the Foundation. At the outset, before the Foundation launched, there were two camps, one seeing a path for what would become the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, and another that saw a for-profit company sitting in the middle of Ethereum as the best approach. Unfortunately, these two ideals led to a significant level of distrust amongst the two camps, with those championing the idea of a for-profit being demonised by those who supported the non-profit approach. This led to the former seeing the latter somewhat as an “attack on Ethereum”. As sometimes happens, this led to something akin to people supporting a sports team, where logic became less important than backing your side.

CP: The relationship between the Ethereum (ETH) and the Ethereum Classic (ETC) communities have been tense historically. Why do you think that these relations were complicated?

BS: My view has always been that Ethereum is a technology stack, and that’s what originally attracted me. Currently we use the Ethereum technology in the mainnet (ETH) as well as several testnets. There are also people working on Enterprise Ethereum projects. Do people necessarily see those as an attack on Ethereum? Most would say “no”. Coming back to our history, in 2016 when the DAO hard fork occurred, some members of the community decided to keep the original, non-forked, chain alive and it became known as Ethereum Classic, or ETC. Unfortunately, as some of the supporters of ETC had already been blacklisted by the community that followed the hard-fork [ETH], it was seen by some as an “attack” on the fundamentals of the [ETH] project.

CP: You talk a lot about the importance of the human ingredients to the Ethereum story. What do you think that this can explain as to how it has developed?

BS: I think to get started, it’s worth noting that while we have some differences of opinions, crypto is still an extremely small niche, and isn’t load bearing for society, if crypto got wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow it’s not like the world would even notice. My second point is that most people in crypto objectively probably all agree on most things, even if we have differing opinions on some topics, and very importantly there aren’t bad people in crypto, just a bunch of flawed human beings trying to build a dream. We’re all altruists, dreamers and technologists.

Let’s put some colour to this, at the end of the day, cryptocurrency is an incentive mechanism for a world without trust. It naturally follows that the people originally attracted to this, and actively building this, are people with trust issues themselves. Many of them fear control by the elites, and experiment with the tools that they have to attempt to break from this relationship. Sometimes this also led to “cargo-culting”. Coming back to my earlier note, this also has the side effect that “non-believers” in this vision can be seen as an attack on the early adopters.

Amongst those experimenting with this, many ended up with the “decentralisation disease” trying to remove all semblances of hierarchy and control. We had lots of people making mistakes on basic things, because they had a “phobia of professionalism”, and those coming in with basic tools for things like project management and product delivery were seen as trying to take over. Unfortunately, we’ve also seen a lot of “cultural tourism” with people who aren’t really interested in the underlying technology showing up with an opinion.

CP: Aside from the obvious catalyst of the hard fork, what are your senses of what’s similar and what’s different between these communities and the aims of the ETH and ETC projects?

BS: One of the things that is important to me is learning from the lessons of what works generically and not trying to always rebuild from scratch. Certainly, there are new things that we don’t have a tried-and-true path for, but many things already have the tools and we shouldn’t reject them out-of-hand.

With ETC our approach ultimately started from a philosophical issue with the DAO hard fork, but the underlying message is deeper and more important. If you have a technocracy, that may be worse than the current system because those in control were never elected and have no accountability. ETH currently views that the DAO hard fork was ok, and there is a social consensus around future hard forks, but you also have a mob democracy, without a voting system, and no constitution. While I wouldn’t say that outside of the powerful early adopters the rest are serfs, but it still isn’t great.

There have also been those reciting an anti-ETC “purity pledge”, reading Vitalik’s comment following the hard fork, that –even if ETC outpaced ETH– he would concentrate 100% of his effort on ETH. I don’t think that was a negative comment on ETC per se, but a reflection of where he spent his time. It’s a nuance, but it’s important nonetheless.

The view in ETC is that there are some basic hardlines that we don’t cross, and that the base layer should be fixed with minimal changes. While it could be debated whether to allow the DAO HF or not because many viewed it as theft of funds that would have gone to developing the ecosystem, interventionism was a dangerous and slippery slope. In ETC this type of thing was strongly rejected. This also extended to issuance, ETC opted for a fixed upper limit of tokens to be created over time, like Bitcoin, because people were upset with the continuous changes they saw in ETH. The hope is that this will give people looking to build on ETC the certainty that things will remain stable for decades.

Some people have called this sociopathic, I don’t think that is fair, there is a strong social layer, and people respect the adherence to principles.

CP: You took the ED role at ETC Cooperative earlier this year, can you tell me about a few things that you are most proud of so far?

BS: There have been some big technology priorities that ETC has been taking on, and we’ve done a lot as a community to catch-up with the technology in the ETH stack. At the same time these changes are done in a way that minimises the impact on the protocol and reduces backward compatibility issues. Some examples of this have been rejecting gas price changes that were accepted by ETH, rejecting ProgPOW –which I believe has corporate profit motives and lacks strong technical justifications. We hope to catch up with the latest EIP (Ethereum Improvement Protocols) by mid-2020, and even implement some features, like EVM versioning before Ethereum, which we believe will prove extremely important.

After that we expect ETC to be objectively better as a technology stack than ETH, and with that show the Ethereum Foundation what good looks like. Unfortunately, due to the Ethereum Foundation shifting their focus to ETH 2.0, they haven’t properly focused on, or funded ETH 1.0 development, which gives us an opportunity to show people that a lot of the promises are still possible. Of course, this will also force projects to move up to layer-2 solutions, which we believe is positive. In addition, ETC benefits from not having the ICO bloat that beset ETH, which even if things pick up on layer-1 won’t necessarily suffer with a greater number of transactions.

In addition, as a community, I am proud that we have teams that are properly funding ideas and projects. It really feels like 2015 in Ethereum, but with better technology.

CP: Looking forward, we’re having a conversation this time next year. What are the milestones that you look at to say that we’ve have a good last 12 months?

BS: As our technology matures at a faster rate than ETH 1.x, and we properly fund development and projects and learn from the lessons of Ethereum and from other parts of industry, I look forward to new projects deciding that ETC is the right place to build.

CP: Bob, thank you very much for coming to speak with me and sharing your wealth of knowledge, I feel like there is a lot more that we need to talk about and hope that you’ll come back again soon.

BS: Thank you, this has been great, and I’d be happy to come back anytime.

As always, worth mentioning that nothing in this should be construed as an endorsement, or enticement to invest in any of the instruments or projects mentioned. We are big fans of crypto but cannot be relied on for financial advice. Please make sure to do your own research and consult a professional before making any investment decisions.

Colin Platt here again, time for another blog, exploring some of the topics that Zeth, Shaun and I found interesting.

On the 30 September, several of the largest and most prominent US-based companies in the cryptocurrency space, including Coinbase, Kraken, Circle and Genesis, came together to announce the launch of their latest initiative, the Crypto Ratings Council.

The members of the Crypto Ratings Council believe that they found an opportunity to offer further clarity to companies working with digital assets, with regard to their treatment under US laws. To this end they developed the Asset Rating Framework (the “Framework”) which specifically focused on the likelihood that a US Federal court may find specific digital assets to be classed as securities under the benchmark “Howey Test”.

This test comes from a landmark 1946 court case, whereby it was decided that an instrument could fall under rules that would require that they, amongst other things, need to register as a security. This test is comprised of four factors: “(i) whether crypto purchasers invested money, (ii) in a “common enterprise”, (iii) with a reasonable expectation of profit, (iv) based on the efforts of others.”

Looking at the four components of the Howey Test, the Framework is used to assign a ranking of 1 (least likely to be a security) to 5 (most likely to be a security). The Crypto Ratings Council does not rate all tokens and does not release the names of tokens which it determined to have a 5 ranking.

The Block investigated the initially released ratings, which showed that Maker, Polymath and XRP were all rated as more likely to be considered securities:

Bitcoin, stablecoin DAI, Litecoin and Monero, however were seen as the least likely to satisfy the Howey Test.

It is worth noting that on the day that the ratings were released, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (which governs securities registration in the US) announced a settlement with EOS issuer Block.one, which alleged that the EOS ICO had been an unregistered securities sale. The Crypto Ratings Council had rated EOS a 3.75, on par with Augur, Decentraland, FOAM, Hedera Hashgraph, Loom Network, Stellar and Tezos, and less than Maker, Polymath and XRP.

Ether, the native token of Ethereum, was rated a 2, suggesting that it was more likely to be considered a security than Bitcoin, but still relatively low. Details for this were not made public, but some have speculated that ETH 2.0 and a move to PoS may have prompted an increased score.

Legal experts have commented that the release of these ratings, while a positive sign that such companies are conducting due diligence, could have negative repercussions, including attracting unwanted attention. It’s hard to say if, or how a court might use the Crypto Ratings Council Framework if one of the rated projects was challenged.

Given the SEC action it is unclear whether the Crypto Ratings Council will amend their Framework.

What we can draw from this, is an appetite from many involved in the cryptocurrency space to have clear cut guidance on challenges facing them, including regulatory treatment. This is perhaps not a surprise, given their desires to build new things which may not always neatly fall into an existing bucket. However, for that same reason, it may also be difficult to offer such guidance in a useful manner.

As always, nothing here should be construed as financial advice, recommendation or endorsement of any project or cryptocurrency.

Colin Platt here again, time for another blog, exploring some of the topics that Zeth, Shaun and I found interesting. It has been a while since we did a deep dive, happy to be back to it.

Scaling has always been the elephant in the room for all blockchains. From debating block sizes, to layered approaches, the issue has consumed a lot of bandwidth.

Amongst the more audacious approaches is that of Ethereum. A full rewrite of the Ethereum specification, aiming to bring a lot of new functionality designed to help it scale to handle more transactions/data, confirm faster, and not rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW). The practical, but non-exhaustive, list of changes between Ethereum now and the future are:

– Proof-of-Stake (PoS) – Replacing PoW (and thus its carbon footprint) to ‘stake’ ETH as a means to impose financial skin-in-the-game for transaction validators in a permissionless blockchain,

– Sharding – Removing the requirement to have every transaction stored by every node and allowing for some transactions to be processed in parallel to other transactions,

– EWASM – Rewriting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in WebAssembly. Developers claim that it will make it faster, more secure and more interoperable.

Together, the plan is called ETH 2.0, let’s have a look at how it will be rolled out. In short, the roadmap is comprised of 7 phases:

0) Proof-of-Stake Beacon chain, without sharding – Beacon chain will act as a chain-of-chains that eventually coordinates the actual transactions on sharded blockchains; this is when Casper gets trialled

1) Basic sharding, without EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) – Allows for testing the interaction between the Beacon chain and each sharded chain, with limited functionality

2) EVM state transition function – Starts EWASM, and the long depreciation process for EVM; Storage rent (paying to keep static data, e.g., balances)

3) Light client state protocol – Allows clients to not hold all of the shards + Beacon chain

4) Cross-shard transactions – Different sharded chains can talk to each other, this is a very important thing to get right

5) Tight coupling with main chain security – Makes each shard more secure

6) Super-quadratic or exponential sharding – Shards within shards

The implementers expect that phases 0-2 should be online at some point in 2020.

Phases 0 & 1 will be interesting to watch, but are very technically heavy and don’t actually allow anyone building applications to glean any real indication of what will change for them.

Phases 2-4 are where things become more concrete and I suspect that these are the areas where we will start to see if they’ve really been successful from a technical point of view for the average dApp developer. EWASM is of course one of the main areas where applications need to potentially be changed and migrated, but the cross-sharding functionality could arguably be a bigger headache for the current crop of Ethereum developers. Let’s quickly look at this.

When Ethereum introduces shards (smaller bits of the distributed ledger which ultimately tie back to the main Beacon chain), the idea is that some dApps will do lots of transactions with their local shard, and occasionally need to relay to a foreign shard (another local shard). A few keys areas to know are:

1) How usable this is,

2) Whether transactions actually remain as local as this model presupposes, and

3) How you will manage “gas” across shards.

Point 3 is currently being discussed, as without significant improvements you may need to pre-fund transactions for a dApp in chains that you use only occasionally, which could get expensive. Personally, I would not be surprised if entire areas of economics research are dedicated to optimising this.

Phases 5 & 6 seek to massively productionise the features brought in with previous phases. Many of these areas still have kinks to work out, but these are the areas that should allow the hard yards gained, particularly in Phases 2-4, to really pay-off.

Even with the massive potential uplifts in scaling introduced under the ETH 2.0 improvements, it probably should be little surprise that there have already been discussions about ETH 3.0. One to watch.

As always, nothing here should be construed as financial advice, recommendation or endorsement of any project or cryptocurrency.

Fancy reading more of our blogs around blockchain click here. 

It’s always impressive to meet the talented people building in the blockchain ecosystem. This week I got to chat with two of the co-founders at Tenderly, Andrej (CTO) and Bogdan (Distributed Systems Engineer) following their win at the ETHBerlin Zwei hackathon last week for their entry, sol.tty. It was a great chat, and an awesome project, hope that you enjoy learning about it as much as I did. 

Colin Platt (CP): Hey guys, hope that you had a good trip back from Berlin, and were able to rest-up after the week. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.

Andrej Bencic (AB): Hi, good to talk to you. Yes it was an intense trip, it was a very packed agenda and we were super busy the whole time. It was a really good and was good to meet people you know from the internet in real life.

Bogdan Habic (BH): Yeah, we met a lot of people and I don’t think that I’ve ever shaken so many hands. A great event.

CP: So tell me a bit about yourselves. How did you get into this space?

AB: We’ve worked together for about six years now. We met in high school in Serbia and have been working together ever since. We started doing software development together back then and done several hackathons together.

BH: You could say that the hackathons have become a benchmark of our friendship. If we don’t win our friendship is over.

AB: We’ve started two companies together, while working together at four altogether, doing software engineering.

BH: Guess that because we’ve been working together, sometimes it’s hard to add in the intro. I’m a distributed systems engineer and have always enjoyed working with scaling issues. Previously I’ve been in “traditional” software engineering, with a focus on cloud. I became a fan of cloud because of the ability to leverage it to build huge systems with a small team and make a large impact. The Ethereum ecosystem is interesting because it is very young, and are still working to bring scaling. I became interested with the challenge of how to bring better visibility into the blockchain. Before launching Tenderly we worked together as part of a startup called ManageWP, a WordPress management platform, which got acquired by GoDaddy in 2016.

AB: About a year ago, we entered an Ethereum hackathon. We wanted to build a trustless, public tender project for governments to get bids for projects. That’s where the name “Tenderly” came from. We continued to build the project out after the hackathon, and talked to the people at GovTech Pioneers in Vienna for potential projects, but then discovered two things. First it was hard to talk to governments, and secondly there was a lack of tooling in Ethereum. We really enjoyed building dev tooling more than talking to government procurement teams. We liked the name though, so kept that and open sourced our internal dev tooling.

CP: So tell me about Tenderly.

BH: Tenderly is a smart contract monitoring platform focused on bringing visibility to the development and deployed phases of Ethereum smart contracts. We bring dev tools to help successfully manage deployed smart contracts, as well as help developers deploy faster. Debugging smart contracts is time intensive so we built human readable stack traces for solidity which can cut 30-60 minutes of debugging time. In addition to helping fix errors, which are just a part of the smart contract lifecycle, we also have a platform for monitoring the load on deployed smart contracts, and VMs for extracting data. We can help visualise the full execution cycle of all transactions on smart contracts, which can help developers see unexpected and strange behaviour on a method-by-method basis. This can help understand what is actually happening, and let the developer tell whether the contract is doing what it is “supposed to be doing”, or what it is “meant to be doing”.

AB: There are also tools for monitoring how smart contracts are behaving, who is using them, how money is being spent and how the contract is being used. This helps respond to unexpected behaviour, and identify entities trying to use it in ways that weren’t intended. We don’t just offer templates, the tool is highly configurable because the developer is in a better position to know what needs to be monitored.

CP: Beyond Ethereum, do you work with other blockchain networks currently?

AB: Currently we’re focusing on Ethereum as the ecosystem is the largest, but we’re building a platform to expand with Ethereum and eventually scale out to other platforms. In our view, in a future on ETH 2.0, it will be particularly important to monitor what is going on with smart contracts inside of Ethereum. We’re also believers in sidechains and permissioned chains networks. Projects like Polkadot and Cosmos also interesting for us.

CP: You were just in Berlin for the ETHBerlin Zwei conference, where you were one of the hackathon winners with your entry “sol.tty”. Can you tell us a) how to pronounce sol.tty and b) give us a brief explanation of what it does, and what inspired you to build it?

AB: Haha, I think that we’re going with “solty”, like salty, but with an “o”. We knew we wanted to do something with solidity and thinking of a name I thought of a TTY which is a term from the Unix world. Once we heard how sol.tty sounds, we couldn’t pass on the opportunity for a pun.

BH: Coming from the Web2.0 world we have experience with other tools for other platforms, and one of the things that we saw as missing in Ethereum was a REPL. Right now if you want to test a contract you need to write the contract, deploy it, call it, then destroy it. This can use a lot of gas and cost a lot.

AB: Our work on Tenderly has given us quite a bit of low-level operating knowledge of the EVM, so we decided to try to implement an EVM in the EVM. We spent about 40 hours during the hackathon with a table of the EVM opcodes trying to implement them in solidity. When you run a code it checks against the table and executes the method. You can then use a wallet like Metamask to run sol.tty and spin up your own local version of an EVM to check code before deploying it to the network.

CP: Let’s talk about how it can be used and the problems that sol.tty could solve.

BH: An example of where this might be useful is when you want to write a smart contract to arbitrage across multiple decentralised exchanges. Right now you’d need to query the DEXs, pulling from web3 and then implement the strategy to call the DEXs. But this means that you need to wait for transactions to be mined and the prices may have moved when you go to run your smart contract. With sol.tty you write the strategy in your wallet, ensure it works and execute it directly. In a way this now gives us some of the functionality that exists in Libra’s Move, where there are transactions and mini scripting programs that act as transactions. It allows you to orchestrate multiple smart contracts, and gives you more flexibility.

AB: We also implemented it as an identity contract, so that the functions can be called from a single contract acting on your behalf and allows you to control the originator of the call. This makes it cleaner to write code and add functionality later. It also allows your contract to do arbitrary things where the owner is an onchain entity.

BH: It is really flexibility to the extreme. It allows you to do anything that the EVM can do. We hope that it should open new functionality and allow people to experiment. We’ve looked at how it could be helpful for rapid prototyping without the need to deploy. You just run trials hammer at the end point. This might even be helpful for penetration testing on other contracts. Send a lot of tries at once and see what happens.

CP: So an EVM in an EVM is cool. Could you also do something similar for other VMs?

AB: In theory, and I stress in theory, we could do eWASM in the EVM but it is more complicated, or really go extreme and do a JVM in EVM but there would be lots of issues there and extra functions that wouldn’t really work or be necessary. For the eWASM in the EVM it might be useful for checking new eWASM opcodes to check support on contracts as well as the usefulness of implementing them.

CP: Could you talk to me about some of the challenges of developing sol.tty, and what you learnt?

BH: You can think of the EVM as composed of a few parts, stack, memory, storage and loop logic. Implementing the loop was easy, for-loops with switches. Biggest challenge was working in an environment that already had a stack without blowing up something. In theory it was possible to do it in one stack, but it was easier and more flexible to re-implement everything in memory.

AB: Our second issue was whether we would have corrupted memory. Initially we thought, “nah”, that’s not going to happen, but in the end, of course, we ran into corruption issues. Sectioning memory was something we constantly had to keep in mind.

BH: While implementing opcodes, a tricky problem to get right was positioning all data correctly on our stack. The EVM needs everything to have fixed widths, but sometimes appends values on the left, sometimes on the right. We had to go back to the GETH code to see how it was done. There isn’t a ton of documentation on it, outside of the Yellow paper which was a bit harder to decipher and would have taken too much time, so having a reference implementation was good.

CP: What’s next? Do you plan on further evolving sol.tty?

AB: It would be cool to continue to work on it, doing more optimisation on gas costs and adding more opcodes. It was cool when we arrived back in Serbia to see that we already got PRs for new opcodes. We’re just back so we’ve not given it too much thought but maybe we’ll look for grant funding to keep going.

BH: I’m interested to try having other languages for more defined use cases optimised for exactly what you’d wanted. This could make it easier for someone that doesn’t want to deal with all of solidity and could act as a bridge for what is executed onchain. Right now, without optimisation it isn’t really suited for using frequently because of the additional gas costs, but maybe this is something that could be brought down to say 5% more gas than going directly and might be worth using. It could also be useful for simplifying complex operations like swaps. Lots of transactions are straight-forward but others are a pain.

CP: Any other cool projects that we should know about?

AB: Check out Tenderly! We’re pretty heads-down focused there. Personally, I’m also interested in Uniswap because of its simplicity and flexibility.

BH: Decentralised identifiers are something that interests me personally. I also like the work around onchain wallets like Argent. The Gas Station Network (GSN) Alliance is also quite interesting because you can imagine how it brings adoption to the next level. Combine it with the iOS Shortcuts app to write code that is sent to GSN, and sol.tty. It would allow you to do walletless, gasless transactions from Siri.

CP: Alright, now you’re getting into sci-fi. Thank you so much guys, it was a pleasure talking with you. I wish you the best of luck, hopefully we’ll be hearing a lot more from you soon.

AB: Thank you, it was good chatting with you.

BH: Thanks for reaching out.

Colin Platt here again, time for another blog, exploring some of the topics that Zeth, Shaun and I found interesting and noteworthy. It has been a while since we did a deep dive, happy to be back to it. As always, nothing here should be construed as financial advice, recommendation or endorsement of any project or cryptocurrency.

Just when you thought that crypto had exhausted every possible permutation of three letter acronyms they surprise you once again.

Today we look at one of the latest trends in using tokens to fundraise, IEOs.

Let’s start with a quick explanation of what these things are. Most readers will know what ICOs, or Initial Coin Offers, are: teams selling crypto tokens to investors to finance the development of a project. Generally ICOs have worked somewhat like crowdfunding, where the ICO seller announces the amount of tokens to be sold, a price (in USD or crypto), and a start date for the sale. Some projects opt for more complex processes where the price increases over time, or after a certain amount is sold, still others go through a more complex auction process. One of the main selling points of ICOs as an investment was that they commonly offered investors liquidity shortly after the completion of the token sale. However, things were not always so simple.

Though ICO teams usually had exchange listings as part of their token sale roadmaps, would enter into partnerships during and after the sale it was always a risk that they would have no, or only minor -exchanges willing to list them. Listing on the more prestigious, larger exchanges, usually meant higher returns for early investors and greater liquidity when it came time to sell. Many exchanges understood this and sought fees from ICOs looking to list after a sale, which could often measure in the hundreds of thousands of Dollars.

While exchanges initially found listing fees profitable, they quickly understood that by accepting them, clients would no longer see the fact that listing on a large exchange was a mark of distinguishment, thus degrading the overall perception of the exchange itself. In addition, while generous, these fees could also end up leaving the exchange with large potential legal liabilities should regulators decide to clamp down. In an effort to maintain this source of revenue, their brand perception and try to take the heat off themselves, exchanges pivoted to become involved significantly earlier in the fundraising cycle.

Enter the IEO.

The IEO process looks somewhat similar to the ICO, however with one critical difference. Teams looking to fundraise with a token work with a potential exchange in the early stages, going through due diligence on their idea, team and plan, and structure the details of the fundraise with dedicated teams at the exchanges. During the token sale itself the token uses tools provided by the exchange and accepts funds, which have gone through the normal KYC processes of the exchange. Having provided these services, exchanges can charge a fee in good conscience. And although simply running a token sale through an exchange doesn’t guarantee listing on that exchange, there are reassurances for the exchange that the team would have passed the basic levels as part of that process. More reputable exchanges will generally segregate the IEO team from the teams which decide which tokens get listed, though this is not a universal process.

In addition to third parties raising funds via IEO, the exchanges themselves have used the tools and customers they already have to raise funding. Some examples are Binance Coin (BNB), Bitfinex’s Unus Sed Leo (LEO) -which raised more than $1bn, Huobi Token (HT), as well as more recent FTX token (FTT).

Despite their success, having effectively replaced ICOs, IEOs have not been without their controversies. Investors have complained that many IEOs have given preference to insiders, selling out millions in seconds, or otherwise employed unequal terms that favoured some groups. Teams have reported paying money for the IEO process only to be hit with unanticipated fees, and receiving less than they had expected. As with ICOS, questions around the legality of IEOs still abound. Still others question how real the raises are, pointing to the fact that with ICOs you can at least see the sales via the transactions on the blockchain themselves.

Post launch IEOs have also had questionable returns, despite common jumps on day one, returns have not always fared well. This continues to pose the question about the suitably of IEOs as investments for the retail investing public, which may not have the time to properly research the prospects of the investment, or be able to withstand the risk of capital loss.

Despite this, IEOs present an interesting evolution in the token-based fundraising space, and help answer some of the basic questions, as well as giving some level of assurance about projects. The current incarnation may be ephemeral, ultimately giving way to the next iteration of this trend. It is clear though that fundraising leveraging crypto assets is a trend that is not likely to disappear in the short term.

One thing that I absolutely love about this industry is meeting new people, meeting Charlie Hayter, CEO and Co-founder of CryptoCompare, was doubly great because we got to chat about crypto over tapas in sunny Barcelona.

Colin Platt (CP): Hi Charlie, good to finally meet you after months of trading emails.

Charlie Hayter (CH): Hi Colin, glad we could connect.

CP: Charlie, I’m a huge fan of data around cryptocurrencies and blockchains, so naturally am interested in your product. Can you tell me a bit about how you got into cryptocurrencies and what got you to launch CryptoCompare?

CH: I think that I originally saw it in 2012 but was dubious about the idea of a currency that wasn’t backed by anything. Truth be told, I didn’t really know much about money at the time, so did not really see the value in something like Bitcoin. It was about a year later when the price crossed $1000 that a friend got me to look back into it, and quickly thereafter I started dreaming up the idea behind CryptoCompare. A year later, along with my co-founder Vlad, we launched CryptoCompare. I come from a financial services background, so financial data was something that I saw value in having. The idea behind CryptoCompare was to set up a unified data platform, somewhat like a live research report, much like Bloomberg for crypto to give a more holistic view. I also have a background in digital marketing and knew how to get ad revenue to grow the business, and saw the long term value of the data that we would be collecting.

CP: So you launched in 2014, what’s the journey been like?

CH: This is a fast moving industry, and we as a company have been evolving as well. When we first set up in 2014 we were a very thin team, classic startup, I wasn’t taking a salary and we focussed on getting the right elements in place. Later in the year we raised our first funding round from angels and officially launched. The next year we were able to get a version two off the ground which greatly improved our offer. From the beginning I knew that we liked the name CryptoCompare but didn’t have the URL, we negotiated and finally were able to buy it in 2015. In 2016 we had grown a lot and were able to get our second round of funding, the following year we managed to be cash flow positive which was a great achievement. In 2017 we were able to grow the team to set up the business, and 2018 was about making everything work. This year we have really been concentrating on growing up as a company and becoming more efficient. We never did a token sale, so our journey may look different from some others.

CP: It seems very disciplined and more sustainable. Tell me a bit about your product offerings today.

CH: We have three main activities. First is our data business, where our APIs sit. Our APIs receive 20 million calls per hour on average, having peaked at 180 million calls from 14 million unique IP addresses, Our second line of business is our data products, this includes our cryptocurrency indices business, which provides to companies like VanEck, Reuters, Yahoo! Finance, and underpins the Nasdaq Cryptocurrency Futures. Our third line of business is media, we run the CryptoCompare Digital Asset Summit, which took place last June in London. We also do affiliate marketing, the CryptoGlobe news site and research. Within research we do our taxonomy work, as well as exchange rankings.

CP: I saw those exchange rankings, those are extremely useful. I do want to talk about indices, in crypto we don’t have closing rates or official “fixings”, how do you construct indices?

CH: Absolutely right, a lot of the design in indices is making sure that we have robust methods which reduce the risk of manipulation. This is particularly important for tracker funds and futures. We spend a lot of time on methodology and benchmarking. Our indices are based on VWAP (Volume-weighted average price) and include fade-outs, if exchanges haven’t had trades in a certain amount of time we reduce their contribution to the price. We also do a lot of work to evaluate how robust exchanges are, and if the prices are reliable. The statistics from the VanEck report to the SEC are well known for their work on this, we’ve found that when you look at other pairs things become more complex. Looking at exchanges for good management practices and generally trying to do the right thing is highly important, and helps us ascertain our weightings. Less liquid currencies can add more complication as we often need to go to the extra step of passing their prices by BTC or ETH then back into fiat.

CP: That’s great insight, surely regulators and investors must be interested in your findings.

CH: Yes, we are founding members in GDF (Global Digital Finance) and share a lot of our findings via their working groups to help inform global regulators about best practices. We’re also members of the CryptoUK self-regulatory organisation and do advocacy work in the industry on these aspects as well.

CP: You brought up a point earlier about originally not having seen the value of Bitcoin. Popular topic nowadays is Libra. Where do you see that fitting in?

CH: I look at money as coming in three forms, the first is issued by nation-states, like the Dollar or Sterling. The second is natural money and algorithms that we collectively agree to treat as money, things like gold on the one hand and bitcoin on the other. The third type is issued by companies, this is where Libra fits in. It’s money more or less because a company, or group of companies, have put it out there and will accept it. These types of money have existed for a while, and are popular in video games. Libra is a new form of that. There are pros and cons, but this is how I see it fitting in.

CP: My favourite question, but the one that interviewees always hate. If you could go back five years and give yourself advice, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself?

CH: That is a tough one. I think that I would tell five year younger me to not create such a scramble in the early days, and hire and raise more earlier on. I would also have wanted to focus more on the leverage and derivatives aspects of the industry sooner, as that is clearly a large trend which we would have liked to be involved in earlier. I probably would have also started our conference in November 2017. I still don’t think that I would have done a token.

CP: Charlie, thank you very much, it has been a pleasure speaking with you.

CH: Thank you, great to meet you.

Coinscrum, the UK’s largest & longest running Bitcoin & Blockchain networking group is proud to have partnered with Blockchain.com to launch the first of the regular Coinscrum_markets seminars where they’ll be introducing the key influencers & innovators who are driving the future of the digital asset market ecosystem.

Whether a crypto veteran or traditional market pro looking to expand your knowledge of this fast-evolving sector, Coinscrum_markets will provide an opportunity for you to learn from, and converse with, the people at the coal-face of the industry.

To kick things off, they will welcome three seasoned professionals who carry a wealth of experience drawn from Investment Banking, Venture Capital, Technology and the crypto-assets markets.

:: Charles McGarraugh : Head of Institutional Markets at Blockchain.com
:: Iqbal Gandham : MD at eToro
:: Simon Cowell : Head of Corporate Development at Bitstamp

They’ll each be sharing their experiences in terms of how they’ve seen the crypto markets evolve in comparison with others; their view on where they’re at now and; their thoughts on where they need to go during their next stage of maturity.

Register now at coinscrum.com/register and follow the link in the confirmation email to register for this event.

Follow  @coinscrum

This week I had the good fortune of catching up with John Salmon technology lawyer at Hogan Lovells, we had an interesting and wide ranging talk on what’s going on in crypto-land, new forms of raising money, and the laws and regulations that affect them.

Colin Platt (CP): Hi John, it’s been a little while since we last spoke, great to finally be able to catch up again. Thank you for taking the time.

John Salmon (JS): Hello Colin, yes it has been, and great to be involved.

CP: John, before we get too in-depth, would you mind sharing a bit about your background?

JS: Sure, I’m a London-based partner at the law-firm Hogan Lovells, and have worked as a technology lawyer, advising on digital and online legal issues for more than 20 years. For the last 15 years, I’ve focused on financial institutions and technology companies working in innovative areas, which we now call FinTech. As you can imagine, I have spent quite a bit of time looking at cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.

CP: Great place to start actually. I’m really curious about your take on this raft of acronyms that have been flying around, ICOs, STOs, IEOs. Projects are using tokens and cryptocurrencies to raise money, what are some of the challenges that you see?

JS: You’re right, they have been popular and we have had a number of discussions with clients on what is, and isn’t allowed, and the implications of what they are looking to do. There are still several areas which need further clarity from policy makers and regulatory bodies. This is an important distinction to make, while people like to group policy makers and regulators together, they have very different roles, and levels of understanding. By and large, policy makers have historically seen cryptocurrencies and using these assets to raise funds as a way for people to get around the rules. Regulators focus more on AML, terrorism funding prevention, investor protections, and increasingly cyber privacy issues like hacks. In addition to working with clients, my role has also been to educate policy makers, and regulatory bodies about these markets.

CP: I often hear people in this space say that the rules are unclear, or the existing rules unfit for crypto. What is your take?

JS: This is a complex area. To some extent there are teams that simply don’t like what the rules say, or don’t want to hear the truth, others are confused about how they apply. The fact is that while many of the existing rules do work, 10-20% don’t really work at all or were designed for an analogue, centralised world. We see wording in the rules where it was assumed that a single regulated entity could sit in the middle and act as gatekeepers. Ultimately rules, like those around money laundering, put the job of policing at the banks. In cryptocurrencies, this may not always work. We can very much look to the roots of bitcoin, which grew up in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and found supporters who were disillusioned with the existing system and often used bitcoin as a way to get around failures.

CP: So this is an interesting point. Today we’re talking about tokens and rules, but as you point out, the early roots of cryptocurrencies, in many instances, could be seen as rejecting the rules. How does this square up?

JS: Really good point, ICOs are generally looking for clear rules rather than breaking the rules. Clients that come to us generally want to follow the law, they often just don’t know how. We talk a lot about the Howey test in the United States, but in Europe things are different, and what’s quite interesting is that European regulators have opened up the possibility of utility tokens. They have gone one step further and stated that utility tokens may completely fall outside of regulated parameters, these things are very unclear and it is currently very easy to get pulled back into a regulated area in one way or another. This can be because of the way that it was issued, or the lack of actual utility, or the way that it is marketed or promoted. It’s also important to note within EU regulations, that while EU countries are adopting more complex sets of rules for cryptocurrencies, they still also need to respect EU regulations like MIFID II, which can be complex for those working in this area.

CP: I am always fascinated by the notion of utility tokens, and personally feel like a lot of the project purporting to be utility tokens are just trying to hide what is actually a security. What are some of the things that you might look at to determine if it is actually a utility token?

JS: As I said, doing it right is really hard, and there aren’t clear tests yet, but areas like marketing, issuance and utility are important. The Swiss regulator, Finma, have expressly talked about utility at the point of issuance. Take for example a “blog token”, you sell a token that gives you access to read this blog, that’s useful today. Maybe you use that money to pay yourself and expand the blog, so in time that token could become more useful, even more valuable than the money you paid today. It’s pretty clear in this example that anyone that bought the token did so for the purpose of the underlying utility and not on the basis of trading a security.

CP: I like it, I should start charging everyone to read this blog. You did mention something important, the potential value going up over time. What about secondary markets, are those important factors?

JS: There are varying views on this. Having a secondary market for a utility token isn’t a non-starter, but some regulators may look at this as an indicator of whether the token is an investment or not. Intentions are very important, and the things that issuers do and say will have an impact. For instance, paying listing fees to cryptocurrency exchange venues could, in some circumstances be seen as a negative. Simply having a secondary market however, isn’t necessarily definitely negative, Wimbledon sold debentures to fund the development of its stadium and these are tradeable on a secondary market. Stamps are another excellent case, all postage stamps have a defined utility, but some have collector value and trade on platforms, this doesn’t detract for their utility. It is similar if we look at investors buying houses off plan and then reselling them.

CP: John, thank you very much this has been fascinating. I think that we’re going to need you to come back again soon to discuss more of these areas and look into how things evolve.

JS: It would be my pleasure to come back. Thank you.