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BE REALISTIC — DEMAND THE INCORRUPTIBLE!

have recounted the history and prehistory of crypto elsewhere — the path from PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) through e-gold to Bitcoin. Now I want to take a look at what happened next, what went wrong with the Ethereum vision of the future, and how we can turn things around to make the blockchain the powerhouse of the future that it was always meant to be. I need to talk about magic and rules. I’ve seen a fair bit of magic over the years, and I understand when it needs rules.

I’ve seen a fair bit of magic over the years, and I understand when it needs rules

Let’s start with a short recap; the first great crypto innovation was PGP, which tried to bring true privacy to online communications, then there was https that gave us the ecommerce revolution, Amazon and all that. Then, the third innovation came with the Bitcoin white paper that ushered in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was commonly believed to be a response to e-gold being shut down by the American government; if we want to ask “who is Satoshi?”, then the answer is that somewhere within two handshakes of the e-gold organisations is almost certainly where you find the origin of the Satoshi group — I have my theories, other people have theirs. Anyway, Bitcoin trundles along for a while as an interesting geek thing where a few Bitcoin can get you a pizza, if you know the right nerds, but it’s not much use for anything yet; until Wikileaks. When Wikileaks gets seriously effective at embarrassing governments, banks and various other payment routes shut them out so no one can donate funds to them. Suddenly, the only functional method that can get cash to Wikileaks and can’t be shut down is Bitcoin; people take notice, its value skyrockets to the level where one will buy you a very decent car instead of a fraction of a pizza, and people start to get politically interested in it.

Now though, we need to think about what was really going on with Bitcoin. What people wanted from the blockchain — and what a lot of them got — was magic, and new rules:

Magic: “internet money machine go brrrrrr” and folks that were futuristic and lucky got very rich. A real vanguard movement.

Rules: 1 BTC is always worth 1 BTC. Uncensorable. Free.

This idea that new rules can make you rich and the money isn’t really coming from anywhere is, unfortunately, the devil’s bargain. Here’s why: printing money makes the other money worth less.

Printing money makes the other money worth less

Bitcoin is converting fiat money into Bitcoin, and it’s just increasing the money supply. It’s exactly the same as a central bank printing money. It’s just that bitcoin is printed and handed out to the miners, instead of having a government write enormous bailout cheques to banks under a cover like “quantitative easing”. Bitcoin slowly makes the dollar worth less just as something like quantitative easing (QE) ultimately does. All that QE money invented and dumped onto the market in 2008 to stave off financial collapse eventually fed through to the increase in inflation and so on today — it made the dollar worth less because there was more money circulating. Same happens with Bitcoin. Bitcoin may not be the same as dollars, but it is doing the same thing; ultimately, it is used to buy things so it has the same effect — more money circulating. Now bitcoiners will tell you that’s fine. And, within the scope of human beings exercising their freedom to compute it certainly is. Bitcoin is arguably a free speech issue. I’m good with that, but the money is coming from the dollar getting slightly weaker every time BTC moons. I don’t like this way of making money. I don’t mind people doing it, but let’s call it what it is: crypto-fiat. Bitcoin is a “decentral bank” of the internet. It’s crazy that it works, but it’s another central bank printing money at the end of the day.

Let’s call it what it is: crypto-fiat. Bitcoin is a “decentral bank” of the internet

Something else was needed.

So, people start asking “Why doesn’t Bitcoin implement smart contracts?”, which would make it more than just crypto-fiat, and that question of “Why doesn’t Bitcoin implement smart contracts?” is, to me, the great religious issue of the day. Because if Bitcoin had said “yes” to smart contracts, then there would not be a need for a second system. All of the energy behind Bitcoin, all of the energy behind Ethereum, all of the energy behind everything else…It would be the single point of an enormous driven spear. We did not get that, because Bitcoin said “no” to progress, they said “no” to transformation, they said “no” to change. Bitcoin decided that they had evolved as far as they needed to, and that they were going to stay right there. As a result, we have an avant-garde that comes along to do the smart contracts thing, which is Ethereum and all of the things that came after Ethereum, while the old-school Bitcoiners stay with Bitcoin. Whether they turn out to be smart people that stuck to fundamentals, or Neanderthals who evolution ploughed under, is too soon to tell — give it another 20 years, maybe even another 50.

if Bitcoin had said “yes” to smart contracts…it would be the single point of an enormous driven spear.

The great hope from Ethereum is that Ethereum is more than a central bank. Ether is not money per se: Ether is a tokenized right to future transactions on the World Computer. Watch this 2015 video from the Ethereum Foundation to understand the story.

Does software create wealth? YES! What we do with spreadsheets can be done by accountants on paper but it takes weeks rather than seconds to run a new financial model. A payment instrument does not create wealth, it just moves wealth around. That’s why ETH > BTC for sure. What we’ve seen for the last 8 years, since Ethereum was launched, is a mad scramble to figure out what to do with the World Computer.

Generation after generation of cultish new ideas have been pitched as revolutions: ICOs, DeFi, NFTs were the largest waves. All of them, failed experiments. Folks will argue that these things have not failed but here’s a way to think about it: was more money put into these things than taken out? The answer is YES in all cases. Every penny made in DeFi was lost by somebody else, minus some friction which pays for creation of the tech. This is not wealth generating, any more than Bitcoin is wealth generating. Sophisticated mechanisms for moving money around do not CREATE wealth. The financial system does not create wealth other than by investing in the creation of goods and services that people actually need. And, right now, Ethereum is the financial system on bottom-up decentralised individually-superempowered turbo steroids. So, what happened?

Sophisticated mechanisms for moving money around do not CREATE wealth

Inside of Ethereum there developed three generations of political vision: these are what I would call the Nouveau Bitcoiners, the Radicalised Canadians, and the heartless Scammers. The Nouveau Bitcoiners are the people who think that Ether is going to be the global currency instead of Bitcoin, they think in terms of freedom to transact and are very much about the idea of a direct takeover from the nation state and a direct takeover from the dollar. It’s “Ethereum is just like Bitcoin, but with smart contracts”. Their vision is “The Ether price climbs and climbs and climbs, until every asset is denominated in Ether”. That is the generation-one political vision of Ethereum. Not many people think like that now, but there are a few of them.

Inside of Ethereum there developed… the Nouveau Bitcoiners, the Radicalised Canadians, and the heartless Scammers

The next generation are the Radicalised Canadians, and I would see Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as one of these. The vision here involves things like quadratic voting: you reduce the cost of building new social structures because you can use Ethereum smart contracts to do it. Those social structures control assets and the control of assets using these new social structures enables the transformation of the way society works. This means you can do much cheaper experiments in an evolving society because you use software to run the bureaucracy — you don’t need to build a new government department; you just need the right smart contract and you can do it now. This is expressed particularly well in a book called Radical Markets by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. This idea that we can incrementally improve the functioning of the world by putting more and more load on automated bureaucracy rather than attempting political transformation through the ballot box is the “build your way to your own utopia” model.

I would suggest that the apex of the “build your way to your own utopia” model is all the stuff on network states coming from Balaji Srinivasan. I went to the network states conference in Amsterdam, and there’s a huge amount of enthusiasm about building what I would call weakly state-like entities (WSLEs, or “Weasels”) on the blockchain, You have a cryptocurrency, you have a community, you buy a bunch of land, and you put all of that stuff together into a bundle, and it creates a sort of miniature state-like thing. Of course, there are major potential pitfalls inherent in all this; e.g. depending on where you have your land, your network state DIY utopia can look a lot like reinventing colonialism for the digital age — a bunch of Americans setting up a “utopia” in Honduras raises a lot more questions than, say, a bunch of Hondurans setting one up in the US. But a network state doesn’t necessarily need the land, it can have a completely virtual existence, there’s lots of enthusiasm about that, and I would say that is the final embodiment of the Radicalised Canadian vision: kind of libertarian, kind of utopian, but a lot more egalitarian than the hard line, currency-driven Bitcoin generation. The DAO people are a big part of that as well, lots of work on DAOs, lots of work on quadratic funding, Gitcoin… All of that is in this bucket that I would call the Radicalised Canadians.

Finally we have the third generation, the Scammers. A big problem in the space is that the Radicalised Canadians have been unable to fight off the Scammers. I remember when the Scammers arrived: our conferences went from being a bunch of nerds in various-kinds-of-band T-shirts, standing around in their big black boots and yapping to each other about consensus algorithms, to slick computer graphics and really impressive slide presentations fronted by people that had been trained to speak in the Tony Robbins school of sincerity. And when those folks arrived, what you wound up with was a problem; because when you had people coming to find out what Ethereum was, the slick, sincere-sounding guys were the ones they listened to because they knew how to capture attention. The people who understood what Ethereum was truly about, the Nouveau Bitcoiners and Radical Canaidans, were, generally speaking, poor presenters, and they were pushed aside by the people that understood how to sell scams. Those people didn’t really understand what it was they were selling, and they didn’t have to, they just needed to understand what people were buying. All they had to have was a plausible enough story to separate rubes from their money, and those people went through the space like dysentery through a refugee camp. I would suggest that they have destroyed 99% of the value in the Ethereum space over the last, say, 4–5 years.

Scammers went through Ethereum like dysentery through a refugee camp

I want to repeat that: I would suggest that scammers have destroyed 99% of the value in the Ethereum space… You wonder why the coin is floating around $2,000 rather than $20,000? You wonder why there are only $120bn of stablecoins rather than half the global financial system being on chain? The answer is Ethereum has become synonymous with fraud. If you hear that your cousin has gotten super into crypto, do you think “My god, that’s going to be amazing!” or do you think they’re going to lose their house and their car and you’re going to have to bail them out pretty soon? The fear that we have, that being involved in the blockchain is now a bad thing, that is fear of the grifters. It’s fear that people who don’t really understand the technology are going to be sucked in by slick marketing for a deal that should be illegal, and probably is. That they’re going to get ripped off for everything they own if the Scammers can manage it, and we’ve become so tolerant of this that the culture has terms like “rug pull”. Rug pull means fraud and people should go to jail — rug pull! We have smart contracts that are perfectly capable of making it technically impossible for people to rug-pull, but the general Ethereum user population are so ignorant about what the technology is and how it can protect them that they don’t even insist that the contracts are structured in a way that means they cannot get rug-pulled.

Ethereum has become synonymous with fraud

It’s finance minus all RULES and deprived of all MORALITY. In Ethereum right now you are literally seeing what Wall Street was like in 1929, rug pulls and all. Finance without RULES and MORALITY is net negative. It’s the fast being predatory and eating the life savings of the slow, over and over and over again.

It’s violent.

“No Force, No Fraud” says the Libertarian Golden Rule, the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP).

Does Ethereum live up to that today?

No. Remember I’m the former Release Coordinator for the 2015 launch. I also wrote the definitive blog post , Programmable Blockchains in Context, for the Ethereum launch. I’ve been around. I’ve done cryptographic applications development (against and then for multiple governments) since 1997. . I’m not pleased at how Ethereum is turning out.

We can do better. We can do a lot better.

So how did we wind up with epidemic fraud on Ethereum, a technology which was meant to produce an incorruptible global record of who owned what so that we could build a fairer, better global economy?

It’s your fault: you all got greedy and lazy and believed crappy NFTs had value. They are literally laughing at us.

Wilful ignorance of the law created the entire cycle of destruction around NFTs. If there had been a single decent intellectual property licence, commissioned by OpenSea and attached to everything by default then NFTs might not have hard crashed in value as they have. Proper use of law would have protected value which is, after all, the fundamental function of law.

Wilful ignorance of the law created the entire cycle of destruction around NFTs

Imagine how different it would have been if they could have said “here’s the OpenSea public licence and the Bored Ape licence, anything which is going to get done on the blockchain with images or art, you have that built in copyright licence by default. If you want a different licence, feel free to upload it, but you will have to have a licence…”

If they’d done that for intellectual property, then OpenSea would be the world hub for clearing intellectual property rights today, and it would probably still be doing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of transactions a month, and it would have created enormously powerful global liquid markets for IP. You would be able to literally licence a Bored Ape to Disney to do a TV show, rather than the situation right now where nobody can really pin down what you buy when you buy an NFT. That is the result of a lackadaisical attitude towards the deal; because if you don’t clearly define the terms, then what the hell is somebody buying?

We went out to build an incorruptible global economy, and what we got was overrun by scammers that subverted that vital global vision and delivered a wasteland of Ponzi schemes and delusional fake assets. The Eloi had a wonderful world full of sunlight and flowers, but the Morlocks still ate them. Ethereum needs a moral upgrade. Maybe instead of moral I should say political. “No force, no fraud” only works if we have a mechanism for punishing those who attempt or commit fraud. Financial products sold by Anonymous Aardvark twitter accounts do not have any meaningful ability to punish fraud. So we get fraud. A lot of really hardcore criminal shit is getting done in the financial markets running on Ethereum.

Ethereum needs a moral upgrade

It’s a massive market failure: in a Libertarian society in theory the “Free Market” is meant to self-regulate and create free market justice systems to make trade possible. What we have learned in this near-perfect experiment is that Libertarianism is bullshit.

Let me say that again: Libertarianism is bullshit, and we’ve proven it.

What we got on Ethereum was violent, destructive anarchy not a self-regulating borderless global economy.

It’s bad. To fix this we need to build governance structures on the blockchain which have the ability to impose rules and force good conduct on people. The violent anarchy we have created is so dangerous that ordinary people are getting mugged for everything they own

Is that acceptable?

Well, if it is acceptable, we wind up with Ethereum as a “Player-Versus-Player (PVP) part of the Great Global Massive Multiplayer Online game (MMO) in which we all participate. All the serious players will only interact with Ethereum when they’re heavily armed, and it’ll be filled with predators feeding on each-other. This is a bad scene; “PVP Ethereum” — the violent, destructive anarchy that we have now — is not fit for running the global economy. It would be a disaster if we took a system this amoral and tried to run the world on it.

It would be a disaster if we took a system this amoral and tried to run the world on it.

Well, if you don’t believe me, look at what happened when someone did try to run the world on it. It is indicative of the age of most blockchain people — they are young — that Russia in the ’90s is ancient history to them, they don’t remember it; but we are old, and some of us used to be Russian; we remember. There, then, communism collapsed, and while the state struggled to catch up, a new kind of money, dollars, flooded in, and Russia became the poster boy for the kind of unfettered free market capitalism that gave Ayn Rand libertarians spontaneous orgasms. No state interference, just money and business. What happened? Oligarchs happened; without effective law to enforce contracts, you only paid the people who would kill you if you didn’t, and killed your creditors if the opportunity arose. As a result the most ruthless, the hardest, and those with access to serious muscle and hardware (basically ex-KGB) cleaned up while everyone else got thoroughly rinsed and ended up near destitute. This only ended basically when the biggest, most ruthless bastard of all, Putin, got the upper hand, ran the oligarchs out of town and co-opted their methods for himself, resulting in a gangster capitalist mafia dictatorship, which is not the outcome anyone else wanted. Libertarianism in practice turns out to be essentially property without rights, it boils down to “it’s mine because I’ve got the biggest gun”, and that’s it. For 90s Russia, read Ethereum; for the oligarchs read the Scammers. Fraud is a form of force, at the end of the day. When scammers deceive people they remove that person’s will and replace it with the scammer’s own will.

So we have a choice to make: does Ethereum have a productive real future, or does it end up as a nasty, destructive “PVP” wasteland in which predators feed on predators and scammers scam scammers driving out all the perfectly ordinary and legitimate users until there’s nobody but criminals left on the chain. This could become a cultural race to the bottom that transfers all of the public good value of the blockchain directly into the private good pockets of the thieves.

This could become a cultural race to the bottom

You think I’m joking. I’m not joking. The future of finance, and the future of the internet, cannot be to create a more dangerous, less fair, more predator-dominated version of the world and then tell people that it’s good for them. It’s not good for them. We’re creating a hell and calling it a heaven.

Now I did not come into this thing to facilitate the creation of a destructive hell realm and to super-empower predators and thieves. I came into this looking for an international aid transparency technology to help me build my climate refugee projects.

I did not come into this thing to facilitate the creation of a destructive hell realm

We need to turn this thing around. We need to do it now because this Bull Run (if it materialises) looks like it will be the Real World Assets (RWA) bull run. If people try the same games with RWA that they did with NFTs, if we get runaway fraud, people will start going to jail. The authorities will start prosecuting. If you sell somebody an NFT and tell them it’s “blue chip” and will hold its value you’re probably not committing fraud, it’s what the art world does all the time after all. But when it’s real estate? Cops understand it. If we get any significant amount of actual fraud in the RWA industry, people who have been sold bogus tokens will go and talk to the police. “I was sold this car online and they defrauded me” is a message a cop can understand. It’s not about magic internet $. And it’s not financial regulators looking at mis-sold financial instruments. It’s not the SEC pointing the finger and trying to grab turf from CFTC etc. No, it’s the fucking FBI investigating wire fraud. It’s local police forces dealing with straight up thefts. It’s simple criminal enforcement in many or most cases. Primitive, primal law. “You took my money. You sold me garbage.” We have examples of that dispute going back 4000 years. Believe me, the police know how to act on it by now.

We need to turn this thing around. We need to do it now

Real World Asset scams are going to face criminal prosecution very fast.

Wow, that’s going to hurt the rest of us. Are we going to have Ethereum be a “PVP” corner of the internet in which scam artists con the general public, and the authorities keep throwing people in jail for blockchain scams? Is THAT the future that we’ve co-created together?

We have to get our shit together to avoid it

I want to propose an idea: I think we really screwed up horribly when we decided that decentralisation is what the blockchain was about.

I think that was a fundamental error of judgement, and I think it is not too late to fix it.

What we wanted was systems that were incorruptible, and we thought decentralised meant incorruptible.

We were wrong: incorruptible trade is the goal, and decentralisation is just one tool.

We believed and still believe that if you gave the power to the people, then the power would be used wisely. But in fact, what we have discovered is that if you give the power to the people, then the small number of people who are really good at being predators take advantage of the goodwill or ignorance of the rest to cut in and take the power: the scammers, the grifters, they take the power… We worked hard to give the power to the people, and then the scammers and the grifters took it right back off them again.

It all goes back to the idea of utopias — the internet has always been a utopian idea, a cool, free space, away from regulation and government where people can be excellent to each other and make a new world of equality and self-fulfilment for nerds. Every ten years, another generation tries to create the latest iteration of that, then get burned. Unfortunately something that works purely on mutual trust falls foul of (at least) two fundamental problems. Firstly, assumptions; if the two people in a deal come to it with different unspoken assumptions, grief results. Secondly, the Scammers, if one of the people in the deal isn’t playing fair, more grief results. There needs to be some basic capability that allows for formal agreements that makes the terms of a deal absolutely clear, and will punish scams. Smart contracts only provide one part of what is necessary to make this work in reality: FTX was not a technology problem. Failure to provide scam proofing is what has caused trust to collapse and allowed scams to proliferate, allowed the system to be corrupted. The lack of effective law is what screwed Russia in the 90s, and it will screw Ethereum now. Violent anarchy serves nobody. The locusts move on eventually.

Every ten years, another generation tries to create utopia, then get burned

I think that we need to start thinking in terms of the blockchain being about creating incorruptible systems: you get exactly what you pay for, nobody gets in the way, and if they do, the crypto economics or the legals squash them like bugs. That was the original vision of Ethereum, that was what we promised to ourselves that we were going to create back in 2015. If you look at the early Ethereum Foundation communications, incorruptibility is the core theme. That video I embedded earlier, Ethereum: the World Computer, really expresses this notion of an incorruptible system. An Ethereum where the scammers get crushed like bugs, that is the future, one where you know that if it happened on Ethereum it’s a square and you will get paid.

We need an Ethereum where the scammers get crushed like bugs

That is what I’m working towards creating with my company Mattereum. We have spent years and a ton of money creating a way to build legals into smart contracts in a way that is enforceable in 172 jurisdictions. The Mattereum system makes it possible to buy something on the blockchain and prove you own it in a court of law almost anywhere in the world. It removes misunderstandings and, yes, squashes scammers like bugs. We are mainly using it to ensure someone buying a real world asset like gold or real estate on the blockchain has an enforceable claim to the physical asset in the real world, but it can be used for IP licences for NFTs, almost anything sold on the blockchain. It’s a way of baking incorruptibility into the system to ensure every transaction is safe.

The Mattereum system removes misunderstandings and squashes scammers like bugs

So, Mattereum is doing magic with real estate, gold bars, and so on. The NFTs that people buy linked to their RWAs come with legal machinery that behaves properly, so they get what they paid for or get appropriate compensation. Magic. But that magic comes from rules. The Mattereum Asset Passport is a legally binding documentation stack which parcels out the risk associated with an RWA purchase and places the load on knowledgeable, solvent, deal-protecting underwriters. The magic is the rules. And we did not do this alone. The English judiciary (the judges) are very fond of the blockchain as a mechanism for storing legal evidence which can be used in court cases. They see the blockchain as an economic opportunity for the British economy in fact.

Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year — just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.

– Sir Geoffry Vos, Master of the Rolls

Now, you say, “but Vinay, centralisation is the devil”. Well, turns out decentralisation is the devil too.

If everybody is responsible, then nobody is. Value is bleeding through decentralised systems like coffee through a paper filter. It’s the Tragedy of the Commons basically.

Think about that. We could have Ethereum be the world’s most trusted trade environment instead of the destructive shitshow that we have these days. I want this thing to work. The world needs this thing to work.

We have a limited number of chances to make this thing work because — eventually — the world will simply give up on Ethereum as a fraud-ridden wasteland. That perception is already becoming a problem.

Every fraud on Ethereum profits the scammers and harms/damages the rest of the ecosystem. It’s the scammers or us: and that’s the real zero sum game here.

We have an absolute imperative to get the scammers out of the Ethereum ecosystem, we have to do this or the ecosystem is eventually going to die.

To do this the focus has to be on incorruptibility, not decentralisation because incorruptible systems can be used to identify the scammers and kick them off. “Is this thing that you’re doing incorruptible or not?” — “Well, no. It’s really decentralised, but…” — “We don’t care: bam, get off the blockchain, we’re not going to do this!”. It’s that simple — raise the bar. Demand incorruptibility.

If you’re going to put any money behind any project, then demand incorruptibility; if you’re working on a project, then demand incorruptibility. Take the power away from the administrators so it’s impossible to rug, use smart contracts to lock up all of the value, nail them to the legals — there are excellent law firms that are fully functional now to actually get you what you need for that quickly and at a reasonable price. We can make the blockchain live up to its potential, but if we fail to do it, then it’s going to wind up as another dead end.

Take the power away from the administrators so it’s impossible to rug

I’ve seen two waves of crypto innovation wind up in dead ends. The only thing that survived from crypto in the 1990s, even though we had fully functional digital currencies, was e-commerce, and e-commerce did not fundamentally make the world a better place — it made it more convenient, but it did not improve it. The first big wave of crypto innovation is all of the stuff that happened with secure communications — PGP and all that, secure email. Does anybody feel like their communications are genuinely secure? Nope. You don’t trust the software you’re using, you don’t trust the hardware. Most of that innovation was also lost. So if we’re going to make this round of crypto innovation stick, if we are going to make the blockchain work, if we’re going to get power of “These are my keys, nobody else can pretend to be me and nobody else can read my comms…” then we have to change our values. We have to go back to the original vision of Ethereum, we have to focus on the incorruptibility more than the decentralisation, and we have to absolutely stop tolerating the scams. If you see somebody on stage pitching something that you think is a scam, then you call it out, you do what you can to stop it. We need to be Judge Dredd bringing law to the Cursed Earth.

If we’re going to make this round of crypto innovation stick… then we have to change our values

Tolerating the scams means giving up on the blockchain because while scams are allowed to thrive unopposed they metastasise and consume all the available space. One reason people largely gave up on email is that for every email from family, there were 10 from Nigerian princes, alleged friends needing you to urgently send money (and possibly lawyers and guns) to get them out of a jam, cute strangers wanting to be your girlfriend, and so on. The same with “The Artist Formerly Known as Twitter”, people are leaving in droves because of Nazis, dropshippers and people shilling blockchain scams. No one is going to find it worthwhile to stay in a space where 90% of the activity is scammers eating people alive, even if it does have the potential to revolutionise the world.

Tolerating the scams means giving up on the blockchain

We should be revolutionising the world, we should be operating the world’s most honest trade environment — that’s the ETH brand promise. If we can deliver on the Brand Promise of Ethereum: “incorruptible transactions” we have friends all over the world. Everybody that wants to do honest business, to buy and sell in a transparent, honest and fair way, is our friend. You can’t get incorruptible trade with VISA cards and bank wires, so Mattereum is out here building the bridges necessary for incorruptible trade and our objectives are:

* Save Ethereum

* Use Ethereum to save the world

An incorruptible system is a safe system, and the fundamental thing people need is to be safe, on the blockchain, just as much as anywhere else.

We’re going to need your support to make this happen. I’m hoping to rapidly scale our operations fast in 2024 and bring near-incorruptible systems for real world asset transactions to all of you.

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    On May 17th, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino announced that 1 billion USDT had been issued on the Tron Network early this morning Beijing time, but not yet released. This means that the amount will be used as inventory for the next issuance request and chain exchange.

  • On-chain indexing service Subsquid completes financing of US$17.5 million, with participation from DFG and others

    Subsquid, a chain indexing service, announced the completion of a $6.3 million financing through the CoinList community. As of now, its total financing amount has reached $17.5 million, with participation from DFG, Hypersphere, Zee Prime, Blockchange, and Lattice. It is reported that its native token, SQD, is scheduled to be listed this Friday. The Subsquid SDK has been integrated with Google BigQuery, allowing developers to use Google's technology to analyze blockchain data and reduce the data costs of large-scale deployment in the blockchain and developer communities.

  • Optimism 2024 Q1 Report: The implementation of EIP-4844 reduces L1 submission costs by 99%

    Optimism has released its Q1 2024 report, which shows that the number of daily active addresses has reached 89,000 (a 23% increase compared to the previous period), and the daily transaction volume has increased to 470,000 (a 39% increase compared to the previous period). These indicators are slightly lower than the historical high point in Q3 2023.

  • Cointime May 12 News Express

    1.The number of Bittensor subnets for the AI ​​project will increase to 64, and 1024 subnets will be achieved this year2.Trader predicts Bitcoin price will reach $350,0003.vladilena.eth redeemed 1930 weETH from Zircult, suspected of selling4.Solana’s on-chain DEX transaction volume yesterday exceeded the sum of five chains including Ethereum, BSC, and Arbitrum5.RSS3 VSL locked-in amount surged in the past two days and is close to 200 million US dollars 6.The transaction volume of Club Key on friend.tech platform exceeded 1 million7.Lido has paid out more than 516,000 ETH in staking rewards, equivalent to approximately $1.51 billion8.1,000 BTC transferred from TronDAO to an unknown new wallet9.Report: Justin Sun deposited 120,000 eETH into Swell L2, worth $376 million10.1707.36 BTC have flowed out of Binance in the past 7 days

  • Bitcoin opens $63K futures gap as thin liquidity threatens BTC price

    Bitcoin market participants are doubting the staying power of the ongoing BTC price relief bounce.

  • The 133rd Ethereum ACDC meeting: The goal is to complete the devnet within 7-10 days

    The Ethereum developers held their 133rd ACDC conference call. First, they outlined the latest research on Ethereum protocol confirmation rules. Then, they discussed Pectra updates related to EIP-7547 and CFI states, and decided to put them on hold temporarily. They also updated the v1.5.0-alpha.1 specification. Regarding the implementation updates for devnet-0, most teams are making progress, but there are also some unexpected complexities. The goal is to complete devnet within 7-10 days.