Sunday, July 03, 2022

3: Polygon, Fred Wilson



Polygon’s Value Grows as Its Apps Grow in Usefulness and Popularity Recently Polygon (CCC:MATIC-USD) reached a peak on Dec. 26 at $2.8988. Unlike other cryptos, it has been rising at the end of 2021 when others were dropping like flies. However, since then, it has backed off very hard from that price. As of Jan. 17 MATIC crypto was at $2.22 per token. .......... Polygon’s general usefulness as a popular cryptocurrency. ........ It was up 144 times during 2021 ....... Polygon has also become a favorite of developers for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other digital collectibles. ....... Polygon was originally designed as an Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD)-killer, with faster transaction times and lower fees. ...... recently the Associated Press said it would launch its own NFT marketplace on Polygon to support journalism. .......... To build up its capabilities, Polygon recently announced the acquisition of the Mir protocol. This will allow it to use “zero-knowledge proofs” for building decentralized applications away from the Ethereum network. It paid for the protocol using its own MATIC-USD tokens.

Polygon Spends $400M to Scale Ethereum–With ETH2 Around the Corner Polygon has a war chest of MATIC tokens it's using to acquire Mir, a startup working on zero-knowledge proofs. ........ At its ZK Day event today, the scaling platform announced the acquisition of Mir protocol, a platform that uses "zero-knowledge proofs" for building decentralized applications away from the Ethereum network. According to Polygon, the deal will be worth as much as $400 million in MATIC tokens. ......... In August, Polygon merged with ZK-rollup project Hermez in a $250 million deal. .......... Polygon, formerly known as the Matic Network, is a protocol that sits atop Ethereum and is designed to take pressure off of it. As NFTs, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and blockchain games grow more popular, there is more competition for Ethereum transactions to be pushed through, resulting in high congestion and fees. ......... Polygon's basic strategy has been to use sidechains—blockchains that snake out from another chain so they can accommodate more transactions. It's kind of like adding another leg to run faster or putting a charging pack on your phone to increase the battery's lifespan. ........... "We have made a strategic decision to explore and encourage all meaningful scaling approaches and technologies at this stage," said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal in a press release. "We believe this is the way to establish Polygon as the leading force and contributor in the ZK field and onboard the first billion users to Ethereum.” ............ ZK rollups use zero-knowledge proofs to "roll up" multiple transactions into one big transaction. Instead of the Ethereum blockchain being bombarded with a bunch of small requests to send funds, bid on NFTs, or make trades, it can let those be handled off-chain and sign off on them in one go. All privately. ........... "We are introducing a recursive proof system that is orders of magnitude faster than anything else and is practical to verify on Ethereum," said Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic about the acquisition. "This is a huge win for the entire industry.”

Associated Press to Launch NFT Marketplace on Polygon to Support Journalism The AP is launching its own photo NFT marketplace, which will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning shots. ......... “For 175 years, AP’s photographers have recorded the world’s biggest stories through gripping and poignant images that continue to resonate today,” said Dwayne Desaulniers, AP’s director of blockchain and data licensing, in a release. “With Xooa’s technology, we are proud to offer these tokenized pieces to a fast-growing global audience of photography NFT collectors.”

How NFT Photo Sensation Twin Flames Landed at Christie's Justin Aversano’s Ethereum NFT photos are coveted by big collectors like Snoop Dogg. Now he’s building a platform for other photographers. ......... NFTs have brought blockchain-backed proof of scarcity to artwork, social media avatars, video files, and more, creating value for digital items that have traditionally been freely shared and downloaded. Now photography NFTs are on the rise too, and there’s no bigger—or arguably, more powerful—project in the space than Justin Aversano’s Twin Flames. ........ Minted as Ethereum-based NFTs in February, Twin Flames are now coveted by collectors. Snoop Dogg and Gary Vaynerchuk both own Twin Flames NFTs, and the portrait collection has yielded nearly $13 million worth of trading volume to date, per OpenSea. One NFT in the collection was sold in August for 506 ETH, or nearly $1.9 million at the time. ....... The buyer of the Twin Flames NFT will also get 100 physical prints of the full Twin Flames set, and Christie’s estimates a $100,000 to $150,000 sale price for the combined lot ......... With their help, Aversano launched Twin Flames at 0.55 ETH (about $1,000 at the time) per photo, quickly raising around $100,000 to pay off the immense credit card debt he generated during the Twin Flames’ creation and earlier exhibitions. ....... The cheapest available Twin Flames NFT is listed at 140 ETH ($484,000) on the OpenSea marketplace, with the average sale price over the last 30 days at 110 ETH ($375,000).

Where My Vans Go

How to Launch a DAO Here's a beginner's guide to the tools and apps you need to start a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. ....... It's not difficult to spin up a new DAO; the hard part is getting people to join, and retaining them. ........ DAOs continue to grow as a community organizing model, a means of quickly raising and distributing money for social causes ....... The first DAO, called "The DAO," launched on Ethereum in 2016. While it is possible to establish a DAO on any blockchain that supports smart contracts, most of them run on Ethereum. ......... Love it or hate it, Twitter is the public square. DAOs use Twitter to announce their plans to the broader world. ......... If any Web2 app has stuck around in Web3, it's Discord, which built its base with gamers but has now also become the home of DAOs. DAO leaders like Discord for its ability to organize thousands of people into different roles and working groups.

What Are Ethereum Rollups? A Scaling Solution to Cut Transaction Costs Rollups cut down on blockchain transaction costs by "rolling up" batches of transactions into a single one. Here’s how they work. ......... the Ethereum blockchain is slow and has maxed out its capacity. Now you must pay through the nose for every additional byte of block space if you are to buy the next "must-have" NFT. ......... Scaling solutions differ, but generally settle part of the transaction on another network—one faster and cheaper than Ethereum—before providing the main Ethereum chain with information about the transactions it plans to submit. ...... Zero-knowledge rollups (also referred to as zk-rollups) work very differently. They rely on a piece of cryptography called a zero-knowledge proof, which allows someone to mathematically prove that a statement is true (that someone is, say, Greek) without disclosing additional information about that statement (like a passport). In crypto, these are called zk-SNARKs, in reference to an additional piece of cryptography called "succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge." This method bypasses the dispute-resolution system inherent to optimistic rollups because the "SNARK" bit only permits valid transactions to be uploaded to the rollup. ........ Some claim that zero-knowledge proofs are superior because they do not require a dispute-resolution mechanism. ........ Ethereum could one day become so fast that rollups would look like an unnecessary speed boost to a lightning-fast blockchain. Conversely, rival L1 blockchains, like Solana and Avalanche, could become so popular that they usurp Ethereum entirely. Should the majority of DeFi’s traffic take place on blockchains other than Ethereum, rollups would become redundant. .......... Alternatively, rollups could continue to rise should Ethereum become more powerful. They could integrate with the upcoming upgrades to make Ethereum easier and cheaper to use for the masses.

Pussy Riot Founder, Trippy Labs, PleasrDAO Members Launch Ukraine DAO Crypto Twitter is mobilizing to raise money for Ukraine—using Ethereum NFTs. ........ "Our goal is to raise funds to donate to Ukrainian civilian organizations who help those suffering from the war that Putin started in Ukraine," Pussy Riot tweeted. "We'll be buying an NFT of the Ukrainian flag." ......... "This is exactly what DAOs are for, making change offline in the real world harnessing the power of blockchain." ....... Founded in 2011, Pussy Riot is a feminist punk rock group from Moscow. The group is known for staging pop-up or guerrilla-style performances supporting LGBT rights and opposing Putin. ....... "Activism is the only reason I joined Web3," Tolokonnikova says. "Now, when I'm so deeply ashamed of my government, I simply have to try to help Ukrainians."



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Education for the Real World



Atheism is inconsistent with science, says Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser Is it saying too much to say something doesn't exist when you have no evidence either way? ......... Dr. Gleiser reminds us that we are on an “island of knowledge” in the middle of an “ocean of the unknown.” As knowledge advances, we become more aware of what we don’t know. ....... Lord Kelvin, a brilliant British scientist of the 19th century, claimed that flight was impossible and that X-rays were a hoax. Albert Abraham Michelson, an American physicist also working just before the relativistic and quantum revolutions in physics, suggested that the laws of physics had all been worked out and that the only task left was to improve accuracy in measurement. .........



Polygon Blog
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Saturday, July 02, 2022

2: Tom Cruise



We just closed our first Fund as a VC firm— here are the lessons we learned while fundraising

Airbnb: The party's over

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