EXPERIMENT - Tracking Top 10 Cryptos of 2019 - Month Twenty-Two - UP +66%
Like crypto and numbers? Or want to detox from the first meme weekend? Welcome!
\Note - price snapshots are always taken on the 1st of each month, so numbers below are before crypto spiked in early Nov.**
See the full blog post with all the tables here.
tl;dr

Moons to first one to find the three hidden cultural references in this post.
What's this all about? I purchased $100 of each of Top Ten Cryptos in Jan. 2019, haven't sold or traded. Did the same in 2018 and 2020. Learn more about the history and rules of the Experiments here.
October - BTC had a great month, followed by Litecoin and BCH. Crypto diverged from traditional markets this month, a welcome change.
Overall since Jan. 2019 - Bitcoin (+262%) still far ahead, followed by ETH (+191%).
2019 Top Ten performing best out of the three experiments.
Combining all three three years, Top Ten cryptos are tied with the S&P if I'd taken a similar approach.

Month Twenty Two – UP 66%

2019 Top Ten Snapshot for October
The 2019 Portfolio had a solid month, and was the best performer of the Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiments. Most of the cryptos ended October in positive or neutral territory, while the losses of the worst performers were no biggie (at least for crypto).

Question of the month:

In early October, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charged this crypto exchange with illegally operating an unregistered trading platform.

A) Bittrex
B) Binance
C) Bitmex
D) That other crypto exchange that starts with the letter “B”
Scroll down for the answer.

Ranking and October Winners and Losers

2019 Top Ten Ranking - 40% dropout rate
After losing quite a bit of ground in the rankings in September, the 2019 Top Ten rebounded a bit in October. Only BSV finished down on the month, down two places (from #9 to #11) and dropping out of the Top Ten. The rest either held or climbed: EOS, Tron and Stellar each advanced one position each and Litecoin picked up four places and was able to rejoin the Top Ten.
It’s good to have LTC back in the familiar confines of the Top Ten, as last month it found itself on the outside looking in, for the first time since the Experiments started back in January 2018.
40% of the crypotos that were in the Top Ten on January 1st, 2019 have dropped out: Tron, Stellar, BSV, and EOS have been replaced by BNB, DOT, ADA, and LINK.
October Winners – Big Poppa BTC had a great month, finishing up +25%. Second place goes to LTC, up +17% in October, followed by BCH, up +14%.
October Losers – The losses were moderate this month, but the L for October goes to BSV, which lost -7% and fell out of the Top Ten. EOS was second worst performing, down -5%.
For overly competitive nerds, here is a tally of which coins have the most monthly wins and losses during the first 22 months of the 2019 Top Ten Experiment:
2019 Ws/Ls
Because it's the default winner in down months, Tether is still far ahead in terms of monthly victories (7). That’s more than twice as much as second place BSV, BTC, and ETH. And although BSV is up 74% since January 2019, it dominates the monthly loss count: it has now finished last in nine out of twenty-two months (paying attention, swing traders?). And XRP is still the only crypto that has yet to notch a monthly win.

Overall update – BTC’s lead increases, XRP back to the basement, 2019 Top Ten pulls ahead of other Experiments.

BTC extended the lead it carved out last month over second place ETH in October. The top two are up +262% and +191% respectively, followed distantly by Litecoin, which is up +79% since January 2019. The initial $100 investment in BTC is currently worth $369.
For the first time since April 2019, BSV has dropped out of the Top Ten.
Twenty-two months into the 2019 Top Ten Index Fund Experiment, 70% of the 2019 Top Ten cryptos are either flat or in the green. After barely escaping the basement last month, XRP has once again sunk to the bottom of the pack, down -33% since January 2019.
At +66%, the 2019 Top Ten Portfolio has pulled ahead of the 2020 Top Ten Portfolio’s +61% gain and both are far, far ahead of the 2018 group , which is down -74% (more on that below).

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

Total market cap since Jan 2019 is +215%
Since January 2019, the total market cap for crypto is up +215%. The overall market gained about $50B in October, ending the month just over the psychologically important $400B mark. This is now the highest month-end level since the 2019 Top Ten Experiment began 22 months ago.

Bitcoin dominance:

Are you into BitDom?
After spending much of the year locked in the 65% range, BitDom took a short break in the summer to dip it low, but then has picked it up slow, and has now popped back up to 63%. As always, a high Bitcoin dominance signals less of an appetite for altcoins. Zooming out, the BitDom range since the beginning of the experiment in January 2019 has been between 50%-70%.

Overall return on investment since January 1st, 2019:

The 2019 Group gained $122 in October, so after the initial $1000 investment, the 2019 Top Ten Crypto Portfolio is worth $1,660.
2019 Top Ten Index Fund Experiment ROI
For some context, here’s a look at the ROI over the life of the first 22 months of the 2019 Top Ten Index Fund experiment, month by month:
2019 Top Ten ROI summary
Unlike the completely red table you’ll see in the 2018 Top Ten Experiment, the 2019 crypto table is almost all green. The first month was the lowest point (-9%), and the highest point (+114%) was May 2019.
At +66%, the 2019 Top Ten Portfolio is now the best performing out of the three Experiments but not by much: the 2020 Top Ten Portfolio is up +61%.
Speaking of the other Experiments, let’s take a look at how the 2019 Top Ten Index Fund Portfolio compare to the parallel projects:

2018 Top Ten Experiment: down -74% (total value $264)
2020 Top Ten Experiment: up +61% (total value $1,613)

Taking the three portfolios together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line:
After a $3000 investment in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, my combined portfolios are worth $‭3,537‬ ($264+ $1,660 +$1,613).
That’s up about +18% for the three combined portfolios, compared to +11% last month.
Here’s a table to help visualize the progress of the combined portfolios:
2018, 2019, 2020 Top Tens combined ROI
To sum up: +18% gain by dropping $1k once a year on whichever cryptos happened to be in the Top Ten on January 1st, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
But what if I’d gone all in on only one Top Ten crypto for the past three years? While many have come and gone over the life of the experiment, only five cryptos have started in Top Ten for all three years: BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC. Let’s take a look at those five:

A tie: BTC catches up to ETH this month for leader of the Three Year Club
Up until this month, Ethereum would have been your best bet. As of the end of October, it’s basically a tie between BTC and ETH. Both are up +121%, (although BTC is technically $21 ahead of ETH).
On the other hand, if I had followed this world’s slowest dollar cost averaging approach with XRP, I’d be down -32%.
With BCH I would have just about broken even.
Alright, that’s crypto. How does crypto compare to the stock market?

Comparison to S&P 500:

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of the experiments to have a comparison point with traditional markets. The S&P continued to fall from an all time high in the summer, and is now up +30% since January 2019.
S&P since Jan 2019? +30%
The initial $1k investment I put into crypto 22 months ago would be worth $1,300 had it been redirected to the S&P 500 in January 2019. +30% is not a bad return at all. But the 2019 Top Ten Portfolio is up more than double (+66)% over the same time period.
That’s 2019. But what if I took the same world’s-slowest-dollar-cost-averaging $1,000-per-year-on-January-1st crypto approach with the S&P 500? It would yield the following:

$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018 = $1220 today
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019 = $1300 today
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020 = $1010 today

Taken together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line for a similar approach with the S&P:
After three $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, and 2020, my portfolio would be worth $3,530.
That is up +17.6% since January 2018. Compared to a +17.9% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios. You can also compare against five individual coins (BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC) by using the table above if you want.
It’s small, but that tiny 0.3% difference in favor of crypto. That’s now seven monthly victories for the S&P vs. three monthly victories for crypto, all clustered in the second half of the year.

Crypto re-takes the lead in October....barely

Conclusion:

Thanks mainly to Bitcoin, October was a good month for crypto and a good month for the 2019 Top Ten Portfolio. As traditional markets have struggled over the last few months, crypto seems to be headed in the opposite direction. I’m looking forward to seeing if those trends hold in the last few months of a crazy year.
Take care of each other out there, stay safe.
Thanks for reading and for supporting the experiment. I hope you’ve found it helpful. I continue to be committed to seeing this process through and reporting along the way. Feel free to reach out with any questions and stay tuned for progress reports. Keep an eye out for the original 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment and the 2020 Top Ten Experiment.

And the Answer is…

C) Bitmex
In October, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed money-laundering and other charges against BitMEX for illegally operating in the US.

EXPERIMENT - Tracking Top 10 Cryptos of 2018 - Month Thirty-Four - Down -74%
See the full blog post with all the tables here.
tl;dr

I'll give the first one to find the four hidden cultural references some moons.
What's this all about? I purchased $100 of each of Top Ten Cryptos in Jan. 2018, haven't sold or traded. Did the same in 2019 and 2020. Learn more about the history and rules of the Experiments here.
October - BTC and Litecoin had a very good month and crypto as a whole did much better than traditional markets.
Overall since Jan. 2018 - Bitcoin still far ahead. And, for the first time since I started this experiment back in Jan. 2018, I'm happy to report: BITCOIN HAS BROKEN EVEN!!!
Combining all three three years, Top Ten cryptos is tied with the S&P if I'd taken a similar approach.

Month Thirty Four – Down 74%

2018 Top Ten Summary for October
After an all-red September, it’s nice to see a bit of green this month. Thanks mainly to Bitcoin, the 2018 Top Ten Portfolio finished October with modest gains overall.
But, STOP THE PRESS, what is that!??! Green in the “Total % Change” column!?!? Yes indeed: for the first time in 34 monthly updates, I’m happy to announce that BTC ended October worth more than the price I paid for it on the 31st of December, 2017. Although only up +4% overall, it’s been a long road: this small 2018 Top Ten victory is to be celebrated.

Question of the month:

In October, this global payment service announced it will support cryptocurrency buying, selling, and shopping through its platform.

A) Paypal
B) Square
C) Stripe
D) Alipay
Scroll down for the answer.

Ranking and October Winners and Losers

Rank of 2018 Portfolio - 40% of cryptos are drop outs
Not much movement this month, a bit strange for the 2018 Top Ten Portfolio. Only three cryptos shifted positions in October: NEM’s Top Twenty hopes seem to be fading fast (it dropped from #22 to #24); XLM picked up one spot (#18 to #17); and, much to the relief of long time crypto-ers with a soft spot for the silver to BTC’s gold, Litecoin was able to stop its freefall, rebounding back into the Top Ten nicely, picking up four spots (#12 to #8). Welcome back LTC.
Drop outs: After thirty-four months of this experiment 40% of the cryptos that started 2018 in the Top Ten have dropped out. NEM, Dash, IOTA, and Stellar have been replaced by Binance Coin, Tether, LINK, and most recently, DOT.
October Winners – For the second month in a row, this month’s W goes to Bitcoin, up +25% for the month. Litecoin finishes the month in second place, up 17% and climbing back into the Top Ten.
October Losers – For the second month in a row, this month’s L goes to NEM, down -16%. IOTA finished down -11%, the second worst performer of the month.
For the overly competitive nerds, below is a tally of the winners of the first 34 months of the 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment. Bitcoin still has the most monthly wins (9) and Cardano in second place with 6 monthly wins. With another poor performance in October, NEM now has 8 monthly losses.
Every crypto has at least one monthly win and Bitcoin is unique as the only cryptocurrency that hasn’t lost a month yet since January 2018.
Ws and Ls - One coin to rule them all

Overall update – BTC far ahead and breaks even, ETH in distant second place. Dash in last place.

So here we are: point break even. On the 31st of December, 2017, I bought $100 worth of BTC (0.008) at $13,170. Nearly three years later that same 0.008 is worth $13,665. Although only 4%, it’s a symbolic victory and one that’s been a long time coming. The initial investment of $100 thirty-three months ago is now worth about $83. A distant second place, Ethereum is down -45% since January 2018.
At this point in the 2018 Top Ten Experiment, Dash is at the bottom. It has lost -93%. The initial $100 invested in Dash 34 months ago is now worth $6.52.
The 2018 Portfolio welcomed LTC back Top Ten in October. September 2020 was the first time since I started the experiment back in January 2018 that Litecoin had fallen out of the Top Ten.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

Total market cap - back over the $400B mark for the first time in over 2.5 years
The crypto market gained about $50B in finished October over the psychologically important $400B mark, a level we haven’t seen since the end of April 2018.

Bitcoin dominance:

BitDom - growing
After a few months of dipping, BitDom shot back up to 63.1% in October. A big move, but for context, it was up over 68% earlier in 2020.
For even more context: since the beginning of the experiment, the range of Bitcoin dominance has been quite wide: we saw a high of 70% BitDom in September 2019 and a low of 33% BitDom in February 2018.

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2018:

2018 Top Ten ROI
The 2018 Top Ten Portfolio gained about $25 bucks in October. Despite BTC breaking even, the portfolio overall is still struggling: if I cashed out today, the $1000 initial investment would return about $264, down -74% from January 2018.
Down -74% sounds bad (and it is), but the overall direction lately has been encouraging and a nice break from the negative eighties. Here’s a look at the ROI over the life of the experiment, month by month, for some context:

2018 Top Ten Monthly ROI - Red, red, red
The absolute bottom was -88% back in January 2019.
So the Top Ten Cryptos of 2018 are down -76%. What about the 2019 and 2020 Top Tens? Let’s take a look:

2019 Top Ten Experiment: up +66% (total value $1,660)
2020 Top Ten Experiment: up +61% (total value $1,613)

So overall? Taking the three portfolios together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line:
After a $3000 investment in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, my combined portfolios are worth $‭3,537‬ ($264+ $1,660 +$1,613).
That’s up about +18% for the three combined portfolios, compared to +11% last month.
Here’s a table to help visualize:
Combined 2018, 2019, 2020 ROI
That’s a +18% (actually +17.9%) gain by investing $1k on whichever cryptos happened to be in the Top Ten on January 1st for three straight years.
But surely you’d do better if you went all in on one crypto, right?
Depends on your choice. Let’s take a look:
Three year club: BTC and ETH tied
Only five cryptos have started in the Top Ten for all three years: BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC. Knowing what we know now, which one would have been best to go all in on?
As of this month, it’s basically a tie between BTC and ETH. Both are up +121%, (although BTC is technically $21 ahead of ETH).
So: with $3,000 USD, dropped in $1k chunks on January 1st three times in a row since New Year’s Day 2018, you would be up +121%, by going all in on either BTC or ETH.
The worst choice? At this point in the experiment, that would be XRP, down -32%.

Comparison to S&P 500:

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of the experiment to have a comparison point with other popular investments options. The S&P 500 Index continued its fall from an all time high in August. It ended October up +22% since January 2018.

Monthly S&P since January 2018
The initial $1k investment into crypto on January 1st, 2018 would have been worth about $1220 had it been redirected to the S&P.
But what if I took the same invest-$1,000-on-January-1st-of-each-year approach with the S&P 500 that I’ve been documenting through the Top Ten Crypto Experiments? Here are the numbers:

$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018 = $1220 today
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019 = $1300 today
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020 = $1010 today

Taken together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line for a similar approach with the S&P:
After three $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, and 2020, my portfolio would be worth $3,530.
That is up +17.6% since January 2018. Compared to a +17.9% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios. You can compare against five individual coins (BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC) by using the table above if you want.
Gentlemen and lady (hello lady, I see you back there) we have a tie.
Well, not quite a tie, crypto is up .3% so crypto gets the win:
Three year S&P vs. Top Ten Crypto Experiments Combined ROI
That’s seven monthly victories for the S&P vs. three monthly victories for crypto. The largest gap so far was a 22% difference in favor of the S&P in June.

Conclusion:

October saw a bit of divergence between crypto and the S&P: crypto up, S&P down. That separation is nice to see when it often seems that crypto moves in tandem with traditional markets. Two more months left in the year. What more will 2020 throw at us? And how will crypto and traditional markets respond?
Thanks for reading and for supporting the experiment. I hope you’ve found it helpful. I continue to be committed to seeing this process through and reporting along the way. Feel free to reach out with any questions and stay tuned for progress reports. Keep an eye out for my parallel projects where I repeat the experiment twice, purchasing another $1000 ($100 each) of two new sets of Top Ten cryptos as of January 1st, 2019 then again on January 1st, 2020.

And the Answer is…

A) Paypal
Paypal announced in October that it will allow customers to buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Customers will also be able to pay with crypto at 26 million merchants on its network starting in early 2021.

EXPERIMENT - Tracking Top 10 Cryptos of 2018 - Month 33 - Down -76%
See the full blog post with all the tables here.
tl;dr

First one to find the three hidden cultural references gets some moons.
What's this all about? I purchased $100 of each of Top Ten Cryptos in Jan. 2018, haven't sold or traded. Did the same in 2019 and 2020. Learn more about the history and rules of the Experiments here.
September - BTC, although -8%, outperforms the field this month.
Overall since Jan. 2018 - Bitcoin miles ahead of the pack, and only one close-ish to break even point.
Combining all three three years, Top Ten cryptos underperforming S&P if I'd taken a similar approach.

Month Thirty Three – Down 76%

2018 Top Ten Summary for September
After a rough start to September, crypto spent the month trying in vain to claw back ground. While a few coins rebounded quite a bit from the monthly lows, most ended up finishing the month significantly down. Out of the 2018 Top Ten group, Bitcoin lost the least, down -8% in September. NEM followed it’s winning August (yes, you read that right) with the poorest performance, down -26%.

Question of the month:

Which cryptocurrency exchange won approval to create America’s first crypto bank in September?

A) Binance B) Binance.us C) Kraken D) Coinbase
Scroll down for the answer.

Ranking and September Winners and Losers

Rank of 2018 Portfolio - 50% no longer in Top Ten
A lot of shuffling in September. On the upside, Bitcoin Cash and Cardano gained one place each landing at #5 and #10 respectively. Cardano gets special mention for re-entering the Top Ten.
Heading the wrong direction were IOTA, NEM, Dash, and Stellar each falling two or three spots.
The big story though, for long time crypto watchers, was the ejection of Litecoin from the Top Ten, down five places from #7 to #12 in just one month. For some context, Litecoin’s absence from the Top Ten is a Top Ten Experiment first. It is also the first time since CoinMarketCap has tracked crypto rankings that Litecoin has not been in the Top Ten.
Drop outs: After thirty-three months of this experiment 50% of the cryptos that started 2018 in the Top Ten have dropped out. NEM, Litecoin, Dash, IOTA, and Stellar have been replaced by Binance Coin, Tether, BSV, LINK, and most recently, DOT.
September Winners – Although it lost -8% of its value, this month’s W goes to Bitcoin. ADA gets second place, down -15% and climbing back into the Top Ten.
September Losers – As most probably expected after an extremely out of character victory last month, NEM came back down to earth in September, bigly, down -26%. Litecoin finished right behind, down -24% and dropping out of the Top Ten.
For the overly competitive, below is a tally of the winners of the first 33 months of the 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment. Bitcoin still has the most monthly wins (8) and Cardano in second place with 6 monthly wins. With its poor September performance, NEM now has 7 monthly losses.
Ws and Ls - One clear winner
Every crypto has at least one monthly win and Bitcoin is unique as the only cryptocurrency that hasn’t lost a month yet since January 2018.

Overall update – BTC solidly in the lead, followed by ETH. Dash in the basement, LTC drops out of the Top Ten.

Even though BTC took a bit of a detour on its way back to break-even point, it is still far ahead of the field, down -17% since January 2018. The initial investment of $100 thirty-three months ago is now worth about $83. Second place Ethereum is down -49% over the same time period.
At this point in the 2018 Top Ten Experiment, Dash is at the bottom. It is currently worth $70.49, down from a January 1st, 2018 starting price of over $1,000. That’s a loss of -93%. The initial $100 invested in Dash 33 months ago is now worth $6.77.
The big story this month is LTC’s departure from the Top Ten, the first time since I started the experiment back in January 2018. Whether or not it will eventually fend off the new generation of coins remains to be seen, but it certainly is noteworthy to have one of the most well known and long standing cryptos drop out of the Top Ten. Consider pouring one out for Litecoin.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

The crypto market lost over $35B in September and is down -39% since January 2018. The value of the overall crypto market is near where it was in August of this year, just a few months back. As painful as the beginning of the month was, looking at a table like this helps with perspective, especially if you’re panic prone.

Bitcoin dominance:

After steadily dipping for months, BitDom increased a bit in September, up to 57.5%.
For some context: since the beginning of the experiment, the range of Bitcoin dominance has been quite wide: we saw a high of 70% BitDom in September 2019 and a low of 33% BitDom in February 2018.

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2018:

The 2018 Top Ten Portfolio lost -$50 this month. If I cashed out today, the $1000 initial investment would return about $238, down -76% from January 2018.
September broke an encouraging upward trend, but at least the portfolio is taking a break from the -80% range. Here’s a look at the ROI over the life of the experiment, month by month, for some context:
33 Monthly ROIs on Top Ten since Jan 2018
The absolute bottom was -88% back in January 2019.
So the Top Ten Cryptos of 2018 are down -76%. What about the 2019 and 2020 Top Tens? Let’s take a look:

2019 Top Ten Experiment: up +54% (total value $1,538)
2020 Top Ten Experiment: up +56% (total value $1,564)

So overall? Taking the three portfolios together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line:
After a $3000 investment in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, my combined portfolios are worth $‭3,340‬ ($238+ $1,538 +$1,564).
That’s up about +11% for the three combined portfolios, compared to +31% last month.
Here’s a table to help visualize:
Combined ROI on $3k over 3 years - UP +11%
That’s a +11% gain by investing $1k on whichever cryptos happened to be in the Top Ten on January 1st for three straight years.
But surely you’d do better if you went all in on one crypto, right?
Depends on your choice. Let’s take a look:

ETH for the win
Only five cryptos have started in the Top Ten for all three years: BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC (unless Litecoin can make a comeback by the 1st of Jan. 2021, it’s not going to make the four year club!). Knowing what we know now, which one would have been best to go all in on?
Ethereum, by a pretty good margin: the initial $3k would be up +104%, worth $6,118 today. The worst choice of a basket to put all your eggs in at this point in the experiment is XRP, down by almost one third.

Comparison to S&P 500:

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of the experiment to have a comparison point with other popular investments options. The S&P 500 Index fell from an all time high in August, but is currently up +26% since January 2018.
S&P since Jan. 2018
The initial $1k investment into crypto on January 1st, 2018 would have been worth about $1260 had it been redirected to the S&P.
But what if I took the same invest-$1,000-on-January-1st-of-each-year approach with the S&P 500 that I’ve been documenting through the Top Ten Crypto Experiments? Here are the numbers:

$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018 = $1260 today
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019 = $1350 today
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020 = $1050 today

Taken together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line for a similar approach with the S&P:
After three $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, and 2020, my portfolio would be worth $3,660.
That is up +22% since January 2018, compared to a +11% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios.
That’s an 11% swing in favor of the S&P 500 and breaks a two month mini-streak of wins from the Top Ten crypto portfolios.
S&P vs. Top Ten Crypto Experiments
That’s seven monthly victories for the S&P vs. two monthly victories for crypto. The largest gap so far was a 22% difference in favor of the S&P in June.

Conclusion:

September was a tough month for both traditional and crypto markets. What’s next for the rest of 2020? More volatility is no doubt to come as we enter the last quarter of a truly unpredictable and exhausting year. Buckle up.
Thanks for reading and for supporting the experiment. I hope you’ve found it helpful. I continue to be committed to seeing this process through and reporting along the way. Feel free to reach out with any questions and stay tuned for progress reports. Keep an eye out for my parallel projects where I repeat the experiment twice, purchasing another $1000 ($100 each) of two new sets of Top Ten cryptos as of January 1st, 2019 then again on January 1st, 2020.

And the Answer is…

C) Kraken
According to an official announcement in September, Kraken is “the first digital asset company in U.S. history to receive a bank charter recognized under federal and state law.”

EXPERIMENT - Tracking Top 10 Cryptos of 2018 - Month 32 (-71%)
See the full blog post with all the tables here.
tl;dr:

purchased $100 of each of Top Ten Cryptos in Jan. 2018, haven't sold or traded, repeated in 2019 and 2020, update y'all monthly. Learn more about the history and rules of the Experiments here.
August - solid month for the 2018 Top Ten, led by, ladies and gentlemen (or lady singular, there in the back row, I see you) NEM!!!!! Up over +200% in August.
Overall - BTC still way ahead and approaching break-even point, ETH gaining ground, alone in the middle. NEM(!!!) finally escapes last place replaced by DASH.
Over three years, cryptos outperforming S&P if I'd taken a similar approach.

Month Thirty Two – Down 71%

2018 Top Ten Summary
August was not quite as strong as all-green July, but still a solid month for the 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment. The gains were led by (I hope you’re sitting down for this one) (drum roll please) (you’re not going to believe this): NEM(!) which finished the month up over +200%. Really!

Question of the month:

The US Justice Department announced in August that it had seized cryptocurrency from terror groups in the Middle East. How much did they confiscate?

A) $2 million B) $4 million C) $8 million D) $32 million
Scroll down for the answer.

Ranking and August Winners and Losers

Rank since January 2018
Lots of movement this month: all but three cryptos moved positions in August and all but one (NEM!) in the wrong direction. Despite gaining in value, Dash had the biggest slide, down four in the rankings from #24 to #28. ADA fell three and has dropped back out of the Top Ten. XRP, Bitcoin Cash, IOTA, and Stellar each lost one place in the rankings. The lone exception is a big one: XEM(!) climbed an unprecedented 9 spots in August. The last time NEM was in the Top Twenty was May 2019.
After thirty-two months, 50% of the cryptos that started 2018 in the Top Ten have dropped out. NEM, ADA, Dash, IOTA, and Stellar have been replaced by Binance Coin, Tether, BSV, CRO, and most recently, LINK.
August Winners – Don’t call it a comeback, NEM‘s been here for years. Up over +200% in August, NEM crushed the rest of the field. A distant second place was ETH, up +32% on the month.
August Losers – Down -13%, ADA was the worst performing crypto of the month, followed by Bitcoin Cash, down -9%.
For the overly competitive, below is a tally of the winners of the first 32 months of the 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment. Bitcoin still has the most monthly wins (7). Cardano is a close second with 6 monthly wins. Despite its blockbuster August, NEM has the most monthly losses with 6. Every crypto has at least one monthly win and Bitcoin is unique as the only cryptocurrency that hasn’t lost a month in the 2.5+ years of the Experiment.
Ws and Ls

Overall update – BTC in the lead and inching towards break-even point, followed by second place ETH. NEM escapes last place, replaced by Dash.

Although BTC didn’t make any major moves this month, it continued to slowly but surely approach its break-even point. It is down about -10% since my purchase in January 2018. The initial investment of $100 thirty-two months ago is now worth about $90.
Ethereum is all alone in second place. It had a strong August, it picked up a lot of ground, but is still down -35% since January 2018.
The big story this month is at the bottom: NEM(!) gained +200% in August, crushing its counterparts and leaping out of last place, where it was so comfortable for so, so long. Although still down -83% over the life of the experiment, it moved from 10th place to 6th place in just one month. The new king of the basement is Dash, down -91%. The initial $100 invested in Dash 32 months ago is now worth $8.50.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

The crypto market added nearly $43B in August. The last time we saw a similar level in terms of overall crypto market cap was way back in the fifth month of the 2018 Top Ten Experiment: May 2018.

Bitcoin dominance:

After being stuck in the mid-60s for most of 2020, BitDom dropped significantly this month, down to 57%. For context, the last time BitDom was this low was back in June 2019.
For some more context: since the beginning of the experiment, the range of Bitcoin dominance has been quite wide: we saw a high of 70% BitDom in September 2019 and a low of 33% BitDom in February 2018.

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2018:

The 2018 Top Ten Portfolio gained about $17 this month. If I cashed out today, the $1000 initial investment would return about $287, down -71% from January 2018.
While -71% isn’t something to brag about, the monthly trend is encouraging. Here, take a look at the ROI over the life of the experiment, month by month, for some context:
2018 Top Ten Monthly ROI Summary
So, -71% from a bottom of -88% is moving in the right direction.
Or that’s what I tell myself as I cry myself to sleep nightly.
Hopefully the next stop will be in the -60% range, a level this experiment hasn’t seen in years.
So the Top Ten Cryptos of 2018 are down -71%. What about the 2019 and 2020 Top Tens? Let’s take a look:

2019 Top Ten Experiment: up +82.51% ($1,825)
2020 Top Ten Experiment: up +82.52% ($1,825)

So overall? Taking the three portfolios together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line:
After a $3000 investment in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, my combined portfolios are worth $‭3,937‬ ($287+ $1,825 +$1,825).
That’s up about +31% for the three combined portfolios, compared to +23% last month. This marks the highest ROI of the three combined portfolios since I added the metric this year.
Here’s a table to help visualize:
Combined ROI on $3k over three years
A +31% gain by investing $1k on whichever cryptos happened to be in the Top Ten on January 1st for three straight years, not bad. But surely you’d do better if you invested only in one crypto, right? Depends on your choice. Let’s take a look:

Three year club: shoulda gone with ETH
Only five cryptos have remained in the Top Ten for all three years: BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC. Knowing what we know now, which one would have been best to go all in on, at least at this point in the Experiment? Ethereum, easily: the initial $3k would be up +160%, worth over $7800 today. The worst performing at this point is XRP, down -17%.

Comparison to S&P 500:

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of the experiment to have a comparison point with other popular investments options. Defying global gloom, the S&P 500 reached an all time high in August and is up +31% since the beginning of the Experiment. The initial $1k investment into crypto on January 1st, 2018 would have been worth about $1310 had it been redirected to the S&P.
But what if I took the same invest-$1,000-on-January-1st-of-each-year approach with the S&P 500 that I’ve been documenting through the Top Ten Crypto Experiments? Here are the numbers:

$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018: +$310
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019: +$400
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020: +$90

Taken together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line for a similar approach with the S&P:
After three $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, and 2020, my portfolio would be worth $3,800.
That is up over+27% since January 2018, compared to a +31% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios.
That’s a 4% swing in favor of the Top Ten Crypto Portfolios! As you’ll see in the table below, this is only the second time since I started recording this metric that crypto has outperformed the S&P had I taken a similar investment approach:

3 x $1k crypto vs. S&P
This is a big turnaround from the 22% difference in favor of the S&P just two months ago.
Although it’s fun to see crypto is in the lead, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the heart condition you may develop by being in the cryptosphere is worth that +4% edge…

Conclusion:

August was a bit mixed compared to July, but still a very solid month for the 2018 Top Ten. Some interesting developments this month: Bitcoin is now within 10% of the price I paid on January 1st, 2018. ETH had solid gains and NEM(!) had a crazy month, tripling in value and finally climbing out of the basement. At the same time, traditional markets are doing well too: the S&P reached an all time high in August. It will be interesting to see how both markets perform during the final third of a very crazy year.
Thanks for reading and for supporting the experiment. I hope you’ve found it helpful. I continue to be committed to seeing this process through and reporting along the way. Feel free to reach out with any questions and stay tuned for progress reports. Keep an eye out for my parallel projects where I repeat the experiment twice, purchasing another $1000 ($100 each) of two new sets of Top Ten cryptos as of January 1st, 2019 then again on January 1st, 2020.

And the Answer is…

A) $2 million
According to federal prosecutors, the US Justice Department seized $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from terror groups in the Middle East including ISIS, al Qaeda, and the al Qassam Brigades.

ETH updates ATHs while Bitmex loses its position. Metamask will allow coin exchange, and much more! Get in, we are waiting!

Today in 1896, the Dow Jones index was first launched. Dow became the primary U.S. stock exchange indicator. And although it has grown more than 1000-fold in about a hundred years, an old-school cypherpunk won't be amazed by such a childish price rise. We are certainly here for the technology, but who's met a bitcoiner complaining about a 12 million percent rise? In general, the point is that this is just the beginning, and all you have to do is keep an eye out. So it's time to check out the digest!
ETH to the moon!
Let's fly 🚀
https://preview.redd.it/fs7z1sm6axr51.jpg?width=1100&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=93e616df2d3765817b8d3411bf503957826e2f8e
The computational power of the Ethereum network (hashrate) has exceeded its historical maximum, having passed the 250 TH/s mark.
The growth of the hashrate occurs in parallel with the stable growth of network activity - since the beginning of 2020, the volume of transactions in the Ethereum blockchain has increased by more than 10-fold. And in Bitcoin, this figure has increased by 44% over the same period. This is due to the popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi). At the same time, the ETH price is still 76% lower than its January 2018 record highs.
So what?
ETH is among the stars. Even Bitcoin, being on everyones' lips and capturing the newspapers' titles, is getting a bit overshadowed by the fame of Ethereum.
We are waiting for the tales from friends like "I wanted to buy ETH, but 'this and that' went wrong ...".

BitMex VS Binance Futures
FIGHT! 🥊
https://preview.redd.it/s60rlmp7axr51.jpg?width=1100&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=305bc065e30bb94e42346ea473b1f8084df0e070
Futures and swaps currently account for the lion's share of the market for crypto derivatives.
We are watching BitMex lose ground, while Binance Futures, on the contrary, is taking the lead.
According to Cryptorank, the situation has changed since January 30:
BTC Futures
– The share of BitMex by daily volume decreased by 64%;
– For Binance Futures, it increased by 75%.
Open interest on BTC Futures
– For BitMex reduced by 50.5%;
– The share of Binance Futures increased by 187.4%.
So what?
Sign up using our link to get 20% off on commissions.
P.S. While we were typing this text, BitMex changed its head management. Hm…

MetaMask. New. Update!
Exchange, MOFO!
https://preview.redd.it/gvh397j9axr51.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c45df22f6c2a6d06aaf156ada280def9224a9fb
The MetaMask wallet team will launch an interface that combines several decentralized exchanges and aggregators to exchange tokens directly through the wallet.
MetaMask integration with DEX and aggregators such as 1inch, Airswap, Kyber, 0x API, Uniswap, dex ag, and Paraswap will give users access to all the liquidity of decentralized finance (DeFi) in one place.
Also, yesterday, the team said that the MetaMask wallet had passed the mark of 1 million active users per month.
So what?
MetaMask has all chances to take most of the exchange market.
The project is extremely ambitious, targeting the ranks of giants. Explore it now, if you haven't yet.

Meme of the day

https://preview.redd.it/tkzrupccaxr51.jpg?width=612&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a4446c7ce21c32c0d95d576491e65d767c2a9964

Guys! Join our crazy project here battles.getmoni.io and let's rock!

*(Featuring Bitcoin Cash as a portfolio trading option)
TLDR : Canadian entrepreneur, Javis Lockhart developed a dual momentum based trading system for cryptocurrency but struggled at times executing trades manually. So he created a Binance trading bot that would do it for him. Then opened Trendbot free to the public in late 2019. Q & A (Products discussed).
https://tradeium.io/referrals/Trendbot86/
Tradeium Q & A with Javis Lockhart:
Why did you develop Tradeium?
Tradeium originally was just Trendbot and was just for personal use. While being talented in statistics, math and developing systems. Discretionary (manual) trading wasn't my strong suit. The main issue with manual trading is its inconvenient and inconsistent. It can be emotionally hard and stressful to stick with it even when you have a great strategy.
So I created a Binance trading bot that would do it for me. After offering my trading systems to friends and family. I opened Trendbot free to the public in late 2019 through Tradeium.io
What does the strategy do?
Trendbot (Free) Aims to outperform the market with lower risk by catching the largest price trends in cryptocurrency. Tradeium allows you to select a custom portfolio of your favorite coins (+BCH), or a pre-selected one. TrendBot then trades between the coins in your portfolio using a dual-momentum trading system every 6 hours.
Marginbot is a trend trading bot offered by Tradeium (Coming soon). It builds upon Trendbot by using the power of margin trading. It utilizes an advanced strategy to apply margin when Trendbot significantly generally outperforms.
HODL (Free) was designed for those who want to passively average the returns of a selection of coins. HODL will rebalance every 6 hours.

Trendbot My Portfolio
https://tradeium.io/referrals/Trendbot86/
What’s the minimum amount I need to have in Binance?
There is currently no minimum balance required to use Trendbot. However $50 is recommended.
How much does it cost?
Tradeium takes advantage of the Binance Broker Program and currently receives 40% of the trading fees our users generate on Binance. Allowing us to provide Trendbot and HODL free to the user!
We are working on a TRM token payment model for Marginbot which is not available to the public at the time of this interview.
How many users are currently using Tradeium?
We have over 90 active users. We also have a growing support and discussion community that can be found on Telegram (at time of post 85 members).
https://tradeium.io/referrals/Trendbot86/
More Info:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb5VsidqzNI&t=2s Advanced Trend Trading Bot for Binance | Tradeium Overview

Telegram- https://t.me/tradeium_community (85 members at time of post)

Telegram- https://t.me/Bots_vs_BTC (128 members at time of post) (*See BOT TRACKER)

https://cryptocanary.app/review/Tools-Utilities/Tradeium Five star user reviews

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/javis-lockhart-792509134

Javis Lockhart - Founder - https://tradeium.io/referrals/Trendbot86/

Dash showing some life today on the 24 hour. We briefly spiked to $75.48 before dropping back to our normal $72’ish. It would appear that Binance spun up 135 new Masternodes and this may have spiked the price. Interesting. https://twitter.com/binance/status/1275726367087382531/photo/1
Of course, the 7 day data still looks terrible. The 24 hour data looked pretty good, but we need consistency.

Dash outperformed 5 of the 21 cryptos listed above us on CoinPaprika (24% win rate). The 30 day SMA* is 35%
Dash outperformed 6 of the 10 cryptos ranked below us (60% win rate). The 30 day SMA* is 31%.
In total, Dash outperformed 11 of the top 31 cryptos (36% win rate) on the 7 day time frame. The 30 day SMA* is 34%.
Bitcoin dominance dropped 2/10ths to 64.0%.
16 of the top 31 cryptos beat Bitcoin (52%) on the 7 day data.
On the 7 day time frame, 11 of the top 32 cryptos (34%) were in the green.
On the 24 hour time frame, 8 of the top 32 (25%) cryptos were in the green.
On the 24 hour time frame, Dash beat 20 of the top 31 cryptos (65%).

* The 30 day SMA is the Simple Moving Average for the last 30 days. It is represented with the red line. The blue line is the daily Dash performance based on the price change over a one week period compared to the price change of other coins. Don’t invest more in crypto than you can afford to lose.

^ Dash vs the top 31 cryptos in the world. This looks a lot like a pennant formation. This usually signals an upcoming big price change up or down. With the splashy new announcement of Dash/Binance Customizable Locked Savings, I'm thinking up. But who can say really?

The red line is the percentage of the top 32 Alt Coins that were in the green (price went up) on the 24 hour time frame.
The blue line is the percentage of the top 32 Alt Coins that were in the green (price went up) on the 7 day time frame.
Today was a big down spike. Tomorrow should be up again. Tune in tomorrow!

Red line is the percentage of the top 31 cryptos that Dash beat on the 24 hour time frame.
Blue line is the percentage of the top 31 that Dash beat on the 7 day time frame.
Ok, Dash went up on both time frames. This is interesting because the Alt sector had a big spike down today. The Alt sector has that peculiarly predictable volatility. Better than 50/50 chance it bounces up tomorrow. If Dash rides that, AND people get excited about the new locking/savings options for Dash on Binance, Dash could have a real nice day tomorrow. Tune in tomorrow!

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

Q1:

Kava is a decentralized DEFI project, why did you implement the countries restrictions to run the node? Will there be such restrictions by the time of the mainnet?

Answer: There are not country restrictions for nodes. But there are country restrictions for who Kava the company can sell tokens to and remain compliant based on laws and regulations. Anyone can hold Kava, anyone can run a Node. We just can't sell directly to some people which is unfortunate. While we have issues selling directly to Russia, partners like Binance do not. In addition, we have partners like P2P.org that run validators for the Russian communities. (I highly recommend them btw!)

Q2:

According to the project description it has been indicated that staking reward (in KAVA tokens) varies from 3 to 20% per annum. But how will you fight with inflation?

We all know how altcoins prices are falling, and their bottom is not visible. And in fact, we can get an increase in the number of tokens for staking, but not an increase in the price of the token itself and become a long-term investor.

Answer: Kava is both inflationary with block rewards, but deflationary when we burn CDP fees. Only stakers who bond their Kava receive inflationary rewards - users and traders on exchanges do not get this. In this way, rewards are inflated, but given to stakers and removed value from the traders who are speculating like a tax. The Deflationary structure of fees should help counterbalance the price drops from inflation if any. In the long-term as more CDPs are used, Kava should be a deflationary asset by design if all things go well

Q3:

In your allocation it is indicated that 28.48% of the tokens are in the "Token treasury" - where will these tokens be directed?

Answer: Investors in financing rounds prior to the IEO have entered into long-term lock-up agreements in-line with their belief in Kava’s exciting long-term growth potential and to allow the projects token price to find stability. Following the IEO, the only tokens in circulation will be those sold through the IEO on Binance and the initial Treasury tokens released.
No private sale investor tokens are in circulation until the initial release at the end of Q1 2020 and then gradually over the [36] months The initial Treasury tokens in circulation will be used for a mixture of ecosystem grants, the expenses associated with the IEO as well as initial market making requirements as is typical with a listing of this size. Kava remains well financed to execute our roadmap following the IEO and do not envisage any need for any material financings or token sales for the foreseeable future.

Q4:

Such a platform (with loans and stable coins) is just the beginning since these aspects are a small part of many Defi components. Will your team have a plan to implement other functions, such as derivatives, the dex platform once the platform is successfully launched?

Answer: We believe Kava is the foundation for many future defi products. We need stable coins, oracles, and other infrastructure first that Kava provides. Once we have that, we can apply these to derivatives and other synthetics more easily. For example, we can use the price feeds and USDX to enable users to place 100x leverage bets with each other. If they both lock funds into payment channels, then they can use a smart contract based on the price feed to do the 100x trade/bet automatically without counter party risk. In this way, Kava can expand its financial product offerings far beyond loans and stable coins in the future.

Q5:

There are several options for using USDX on the KAVA platform, one of which is Margin Trading / Leverage. Is this a selection function or a compulsory function? Wondering since there are some investors who don`t like margin. What is the level of leverage and how does a CDP auction work?

Answer: This is a good #Q . Kava simply provides loans to users in USDX stable coins. What the users do is completely up to them. They can use the loans for everyday payments if they like. Leverage and hedging are just the main use cases we foresee - there are many ways people can use the CDP platform and USDX.

Q6:

Most credit platforms do not work well in the current market. What will you do to attract more people to use your platform and the services you provide? Thank you

Answer: Most credit platforms do not work well in the current market? I think that isn't correct at least for DeFi. Even in the bear market, MakerDao and Compound saw good user growth. Regardless, our efforts at Kava to build the market are fairly product and BD focused. 1) we build more integrations of assets and expand financial services to attract new communities and users. 2) we focus on building partnerships with high quality teams to promote and build Kava's core user base. Kava is just the developer. Our great partners like Ripple, Stakewith.Us, P2P, Binance - they have the real users that demand Kava. They are like our system integrators that package Kava up nicely and present it to their users. In order to grow, we need to deepen our partnerships and bring in new ones around the world.

Q7:

KAVA functions as a reserve currency in situations where the system is undercollateralized. In such cases new KAVA is minted and used to buy USDX off the market until USDX becomes safely overcollateralized.

Meaning, there will be no max supply of KAVA?

Answer: Yes, there is no max supply of Kava.

Q8:

Why Kava?

Answer: ...because people are long BTC and the best way to go long BTC without giving up custody is Kava's platform. Because it is MakerDao for bitcoin. Bitcoin has a 10x market cap of ETH and Maker is 10x the size of Kava. I think we're pretty undervalued right now.

Q9:

How do you plan to make liquidity in Kava?

Answer: Working with Binance for the IEO and as the first exchange for KAVA to trade on will be a huge boost in increasing the liquidity of trading KAVA.

Q10:

Most crypto investors or crypto users prefer easy transaction and low fees, what can we expect from KAVA about this?

Answer: Transaction fees are very low and confirm if seconds. The user experience is quite good on Tendermint-based blockchains.

Q11:

How do I become a note validator on KavA?

Answer: The basic requirement for a node is nothing really. But in order to earn block rewards you must be a node with the top 100 KAVA by weighted stake at a given time. If you are looking for technical specs, I suggest you check out the Cosmos FAQ for a guide. https://cosmos.network/docs/cosmos-hub/validators/validator-faq.html

Q12:

It is great to know that KAVA is the first DEFI-supported project sponsored by Binance Launchpad, do you think this is the meaning that CZ brings: Opening the DEFI era, as a leader, you feel like how ?

Answer: We are the first DeFi platform that Launchpad has supported. We are a very strategic blockchain for major crypto like BNB. Kava's platform will bring more utility to the users of BNB and the Binance DEX. It feels good of course to have validation from the biggest players in the space like Cosmos, Ripple, CZ/Binance, etc.

Q13:

Since decentralized finance applications is already dominating, how do you intend to surpass those leading in the market?

Answer: The leaders are only addressing ethereum. BTC, XRP, BNB, ATOM is a much larger set to go after that current players cannot.

Q14:

What does Ripple play in the Kava's ecosystem, since Ripple is like a top tier company and it’s impressive that you are partnered with them?

Answer: Ripple is an equity investor in Kava and a big supporter of our work in cross-chain settlement research and implementations. Ripple's XRP is a great asset in terms of users and liquidity that the Kava platform can use. In addition, Ripple's money service business customers are asking for a stable coin for remittances to avoid the currency heading risk that XRP presents. Ripple will not use USDC or other stable coins, but they are open to using USDX as it can be XRP-backed.

Q15:

Considering the connectivity, Libra could be the biggest competitor if KAVA leverages interchain for efficiency.

Answer: With regard to USDX, it is important to understand the users interacting with the Kava blockchain have no counterparty that people could go after for legal actions. A user getting a USDX loan has no counterparty. The software holds the collateral and creates the loan. The only laws that would apply are to the very users that are using the system.

Q16:

Wonder how KAVA will compete with the tech giants

Answer: Libra is running into extreme issues with the US Senate and regulators. Even the G7-G20 groups are worried. Its important to understand that Libra is effectively a permissioned system. Only big companies that law makers can go after are able to run nodes. In Kava, nodes can be run by anyway and our nodes are based all over the world. It's incredibly hard for a law maker to take down Kava because they would need to find and legally enforce hundreds of business in different jurisdictions to comply. We have an advantage in this way over the larger projects like Libra or Clayton.

Q17:

In long-term, what's the strategy that KAVA has for covering the traditional finance users as well? Especially regarding the "stability"

Answer: Technical risk is unavoidable for DeFi. Only time will tell if a system is trustworthy and its never 100% that it will not fail or be hacked. This is true with banks and other financial systems as well. I think for DeFi, the technical risk needs to be priced in to the expected returns to compensate the market. DeFi does have a better user experience - requiring no credit score, identity, or KYC over centralized solutions.
With our multi-collateral CDP system, even with it overcollateralized, people can get up to 3x leverage on assets. Take 100 USD in BTC, get a USDX loan for 66 USDX, then buy $66 BTC and do another loan - you can do this with a program to get 3x leverage with the same risk profile. This is enough for most people.
However, it will be possible once we have Kava's CDP platform to extend it into products that offer undercollateralized financial products. For example, if USER 1 + USER 2 use payment channels to lock up their USDX, they can use Kava's price feeds to place bets between each other using their locked assets. They can bet that for every $1 BTC/USD moves, the other party owes 3x. In this way we can even do 100x leverage or 1000x leverage and create very fun products for people to trade with. Importantly, even in places where margin trading is regulated and forbidden, Kava's platform will remain open access and available.

Q18:

In long-term, what's the strategy that KAVA has for covering the traditional finance users as well? Especially regarding the "stability"

Answer: Kava believes that stable coins should be backed not just by crypto or fiat, but any widely used, highly liquid asset. We think in the future the best stablecoin would be backed by a basket of very stable currencies that include crypto and fiat or whatever the market demands.

Q19:

Compound, maker they're trying to increase their size via the competitive interests rates. THough it shows good return in terms of growth rate, still it's for short-term. Wonder other than financial advantage, KAVA has more for the users' needs?

Answer: Robert, the CEO of Compound is an investor and advisor to Kava. We think what Compound does with money markets is amazing and hope to integrate when they support more than just Ethereum assets. Kava's advantage vs others is to provide basic DeFi services like returns on crypto and stable coins today when no other platform offers that. Many platforms support ETH, but no platform can support BTC, XRP, BNB, and ATOM in a decentralized way without requiring centralized custody of these assets.

Q20:

The vast majority of the cryptocurrency community's priorities is symbolic pricing. When prices rise, the community rejoices and grows. When they fall, many people begin to cast in a negative way. How will KAVA solve the negative problem when the price goes down? What is your plan to strengthen and develop the community to persuade more people to look at the product than the price?

Answer: We believe price is an important factor for faith in the market. One of Kava's key initiatives was selecting only long-term partners that are willing to work with kava for 2 years. That is why even after 6 months, 0 private investor or kava team tokens will be liquid on the market.
We believe not in fast pumps and then dumps that destroy faith, but rather we try and operate the best we can for long-term sustainable growth over time. It's always hard to control factors in the market, and some factors are out of our control such as BTC price correlations, etc - however, we treat this like a public company stock - we want long-term growth of Kava and try to make sure our whole community of Kava holders is aligned with that the best we can.

Q21:

Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to Kava and how? What are the measures to increase awareness of kava in non-crypto space?

Answer: We are 100% focused on crypto, not the general market. We solve the problems of crypto traders and investors - not the average grandma who needs a payment solution. Kava is geared for decentralized leverage and hedging.

Q22:

Adoption is crucial for all projects and crypto companies, what strategy are you gonna use/follow or u are now following to get Kava adopted and used by many people all over the world?

Revenue is an important aspect for all projects in order to survive and keep the project/company up and running for long term, what are the ways that Kava generates profits/revenue and what is its revenue model?

Answer: We have already partnered with several large exchanges, long-term VCs, and large projects like Ripple and Cosmos. These are key ways for us to grow our community. As we build support for more assets, we plan to promote Kava's services to those new communities of traders.
Kava generates revenue as more people use the platform. As the platform is used, KAVA tokens are burned when users pay stability fees. This deflates the total supply of Kava and should in most cases give rise to the value of KAVA like a stock-buyback in the public markets.

Q23:

In order to be success in Loan project of Cryptocurrency, I think marketing is very important to make people using this service without any registration. What is main strategy for marketing?

Answer: Our main strategy is to build a great experience and offer products that are not available to communities with demand. Currently no DeFi products can serve BTC users for example. Centralized exchanges can, but nothing truly trustless. Kava's platform can finally give the vast audiences of BTC, BNB, and ATOM holders access to core DeFi services they cannot get on their own due to the smart contract limitations of those platforms.

Q24:

Currently, some project have policies for their ambassadors to create a contribution and attract recognition for the project! So the KAVA team plans to implement policies and incentives for KAVA ambassadors?

Answer: Yes, we will be creating a KAVA ambassador program and releasing that soon. Please follow our social media channels to learn about it in the coming weeks.

Q25:

Currently there are so many KAVA tokens sold on exchanges, why is this happening while KAVA is going to IEO on Binance? Are those KAVA codes fake or not?

Answer: For everyone's safety, please understand Kava tokens do not exist yet and they will only exist starting with the Binance IEO. Any other token listings or offerings of Kava are not supported by Kava Labs and I highly discourage you all from trying to get them there. It is most likely a big scam. Please only trust Binance for this.

Q26:

KAVA have two tokens, the first is called Kava - a governance and staking token; the second is called USDX - an algorithmically managed crypto-backed stable coin. What are the advantages of USDX compared to other stablecoins such as: USDT, USDC, TUSD, GUSD, ...?

Answer: USDX is one of the few stablecoins to be fully backed by crypto-assets. This means that we do not deal with fiat to back the value, and thus we don't have some of the issues when it comes to storing fiat funds with banks and custodians. This also makes our product fully digital and built for the future of crypto growth.

Q27:

As a CEO, does your background in Esports and Gaming industry help anything to your management and development of KAVA Labs?

Answer: Esports no. But having been a multi-time venture-backed foundeCEO and have gone through the start-up phase before has made creating and running a 2nd company easier. Right now Kava is still small, Fnatic had over 80 employees. It was at a larger scale. I would say developing software is much more than doing the hardware at fnaticgear.com

Q28:

Why did Kava choose to launch IEO on Binance and not other exchanges like: Kucoin, Houbi, Gate, ....?

Answer: Kava had a lot of interest from exchanges to partner with for IEO. We decided based on a lot of factors such as userbase, diverse exposure across multiple regions and countries, and an amazing team that provides so much insight into so many communities such as this one. Binance has been a tremendous partner and we also look forward to continuing our partnership far into the future.

Q29:

Currently if Search on coinmarketcap has 3 types of stablecoins bearing the USDX symbol (but these 3 stablecoins are no information). So, what will KAVA do to let users know that Kava's USDX is another stablecoin?

Answer: All these USDX have no volume or listings. We will be on Binance. I am not worried.

Q30:

In addition to the Token Allocation for Binance Launchpad, what is the Token Treasury in the Initial Circulating Supply?

Answer: This is controlled by Kava Labs, but with the big cash we have saved from fundraising, we see no reason why these tokens would be sold on the market. The treasury tokens are for use in grants, ecosystem growth initiatives, development, and other incentive programs to drive adoption of the platform.

Q31:

How you will compete with your competitors? Currently i don't see much but for future how you will maintain this consistency ? No doubt it is Great and Unique project, what is the main problem that #KAVA is currently facing?

Answer: Because our industry is just starting out, I don't like to think of them as our direct competitors. We are all working to grow the size of the pie rather than get a larger slice from a small pie. The one thing that we believe will allow us to stand apart is the community we are building. Being able to utilize our own community along with Cosmos and our other partners like Binance for the IEO, we have a strong footing to get a lot of early users onto our platform. Also, we are also focusing on growing Kava internationally particularly Asia. We hope to build our platform for an even larger userbase than just the west.

Q32:

How do you explain your project to a random person who has never heard of your project?

Answer: non-crypto = Kava is a lending platform for users of cryptocurrencies.
crypto = Kava is a cross-chain DeFi platform for loans and stablecoins backed by BTC, BNB, XRP, ATOM and other major cryptocurrencies.

Q33:

Will KAVA team have a plan on implementing DAO module on your platform since its efficiency on autonomy, decentralization and transparency?

Answer: All voting is already transparent on the Kava blockchain. We approved a number of proposals on our test net.

Q34:

how to use usdx token :only for your platform or you have plan to use usdx for payment ?

Answer: Payments is a nice use case, but demand for crypto payments is still small. We may choose to focus here later if demand for crypto payments increases. Currently it is quite small with the bulk of use remaining in trading and speculative use cases.

Q35:

Do you have plans to spread KAVA ecosystem across other continents. if yes, what are the strategies and how can I as a community member contribute to making it possible?

Answer: We are already across many continents - I don't think we are in antarctica yet. Africa might be light on nodes as well. I think as we grow on major exchanges like Binance, new node operators will get interested and help decentralize Kava further.

Q36:

Maker's CDP lending system is on top in this market and its Dominance is currently sitting on 64.90 % , how kava will compete will maker and compound?

Answer: adding assets like bitcoin which have more value and more users than ETH. It's a bigger market that Maker cannot compete with Kava in.

Q37:

Currently, the community is too concerned about the price. As prices rise, the community rejoice and grow, when falling, many people start throwing negatively. So what is KAVA's solution to getting people to focus on the project rather than the price of the token?

What is your plan to strengthen and grow the community to persuade more individuals to look at the product than the price?

Answer: We also share similar concerns as price and price direction is always a huge factor in the crypto industry. A lot of people of course are very short-term focused on flipping for bigger profits. One of the solutions, and what Kava has done, is to make sure that everything structured is for the long-term. So that makes sure that our investors and employees are all focused on long-term gains and growth. Locking vesting periods are part of that alignment. Another thing is that we at Kava are very transparent in our progress and development. We will be regularly posting updates within our own communities to allow our users and followers to keep up with everything we're up to. Please follow us or look at our github if you're interested!

Q38:

How did Kava get on Piexgo?

Answer: We did not work with Piexgo. We have not distributed tokens to any exchange other than Binance. I cannot speak to what is going on there, but I would be very wary of what is happening there.

Q39:

Why was the 1st round price so much lower than the current price

Answer: It is natural to worry that early investors got better pricing and could dump on the market. I can assure you that our investors are in this for the long-term. All private sale rounds signed 2 year contracts to run validators - and if they don't they forfeit their tokens. You can compare our release schedule to any other project. We have one of the most restricted circulating supply schedules of any project EVER and its because all our investors are commiting to the long-term success of the project and believe in Kava.
About the pricing itself - it is always a function of traction like for any start-up. When we made our public announcement about the project in June, we were only a 4 man team with just some github code. We could basically run a network with a single node, our own. Which is relatively worthless. I think our pricing of Kava at this time was justified. We were effectively a seed-stage company without a product or working network.
By July we made severe progress on the development side and the business side. We successful launched our first test net with the help of over 70 validator business partners around the world. We had a world-wide network of hundreds of people supporting us with people and resources at this point and the risk we would fail in launching a working product was much lower. At this point, the Kava project was valued at $25M. At this point, we had many VCs and investors asking for Kava tokens that we turned away. We only accepted validators that would help us launch the network. It was our one and only goal.
Fast forward to today, the IEO price simply reflects the traction and market demand for Kava. Our ecosystem is much larger than it was even a month ago. We have support from Ripple, Cosmos, and Binance amongst other large crypto projects. We have 100+ validators securing our network with very sophisticated high-availability set-ups. In addition, our ecosystem partners have built products for Kava - such as block explorers and others are working on native integrations to wallets and exchanges. Launchpad will be very big for us. Kava is a system designed to cater to crypto traders and investors and in a matter of days we distributed via Binance Launchpad and put in the hands of 130+ countries and tens of thousands of users overnight. It doesn't get more DeFi than that.

Q40:

What is the treasury used for?

Answer: Kava's treasury is for ecosystem growth activities.
Investors in financing rounds prior to the IEO have entered into long-term lock-up agreements in-line with their belief in Kava’s exciting long-term growth potential and to allow the projects token price to find stability. Following the IEO, the only tokens in circulation will be those sold through the IEO on Binance and the initial Treasury tokens released. No private sale investor tokens are in circulation until the initial release at the end of Q1 2020 and then gradually over the [36] months The initial Treasury tokens in circulation will be used for a mixture of ecosystem grants, the expenses associated with the IEO as well as initial market making requirements as is typical with a listing of this size. Kava remains well financed to execute our roadmap following the IEO and do not envisage any need for any material financings or token sales for the foreseeable future.

Q41:

Everyone have heard about the KAVA token, and read about it. But it would be great to hear your explanation about it. What is the Kava token, what is it's utility? :)

Answer: The Kava token plays many roles. KAVA is the native staking token of the Kava blockchain and is used for securing the network. KAVA is delegated to validators, basically professional node operators that run highly-available servers to secure the Kava blockchain. The top 100 validators by weight of staked KAVA earn block rewards that range from 3-20% APR based on the total amount staked in the network. These rewards are split between the validators and the KAVA holders.
When users of the platform repay their loans, they must a stability fee (a percentage of the loan) in KAVA tokens. These tokens are burned by the system, effectively deflating the total supply overtime as more users use the CDP system.
KAVA is also the primary token used in governance of the platform. KAVA token holders can vote on key system parameter changes and upgrades such as what assets to support, how much USDX in total can be loaned by the system, what the debt-to-collateral ratio needs to be, the stability fees, etc. KAVA holders have a very important responsibility to govern the system well.
Lastly, Kava functions as a "Lender of Last Resort" meaning if USDX ever gets undercollateralized because the underlying asset prices drop suddenly and the system manages it poorly, KAVA is inflated in these emergency situations and used to purchase USDX off the market until USDX reaches a state of being over collateralized again. KAVA holders have incentive to only support the good high quality assets so risk of the system is managed responsibly.

Q42:

No matter how perfect and technically thought-out a DeFi protocol is, it cannot be completely protected from any unplanned situations (such as extreme market fluctuations, some legal issues, etc.)

Ecosystem members, in particular the validators on whom KAVA relies on fundamental decision-making rights, should be prepared in advance for any "critical" scenario. Considering that, unlike the same single-collateral MakerDAO, KAVA will be a multi-collateral CDP system, this point is probably even more relevant here.

In this regard, please answer the following question: Does KAVA have a clear risk management model or strategy and how decentralized is / will it be?

Answer: Simialar to other CDP systems and MakerDAO we do have a system freeze function where in cases of extreme issues, we can stop the auction mechanisms and return all collateral.

Q43:

Did you know that "Kava" is translated into Ukrainian like "Coffee"? I personally do love drinking coffee. I plunge into the fantasy world. Why did you name your project "Kava" What is the story behind it? What idea / fantasy did your project originate from, which inspired you to create it?

Answer: Kava is coffee to you.
Kava is Hippopotamus to Japanese.
Cava is a region in Spain
Kava is also a root that is used in tea which makes your mouth numb.
Kava is also crow in Hindi.
Kava last but not least is a DeFi platform launching on Binance :)
We liked the sound of Kava it was as simple as that. It doesn't have much meaning in the USA where I am from. But it's short sweet and when we were just starting, Kava.io was available for a reasonable price

Q44:

What incentives does a lender get if a person chooses to pay with KAVA? Is there a discount on interest rates on the loan amount if you pay with KAVA? Do I have to pass the KYC procedure to apply for a small loan?

Answer: There is no KYC for Kava. Its an open blockchain software platform where anyone with a computer can connect to it and use it.

Q45:

Let's say, I decided to bond my cryptocurrency and got USDX stable coins. For now, it`s an unknown stable coin (let's be honest). Do you plan to add USDX to other famous exchanges? Also, you have spoken about the USDX staking and that the percentage would be higher than for other stable coins. Please be so kind to tell us what is the average annual interest rate and what are the conditions of staking?

Answer: Yes we have several large exchanges willing to support USDX from the start. Binance/Binance-DEX is one you should all know ;)
The average annual rates for USDX will depend on market conditions. The rate is actually provided by the CDP fees users pay. The system reallocates a portion of those fees to USDX users. In times when USDX use needs to grow, the rates will be higher to incentivize use. When demand is strong, we can reduce the rates.

Q46:

Why should i use and choose Kava's loan if i can use the similar margin trade on Binance?

Answer: If margin is available to you and you trust the exchange then you should do whatever is cheaper. For a US citizen and others, margin is often not available and if it is, only for a few asset types as collateral. Kava aims to address this and offer this to everyone.

Q47:

The IEO price is $ 0.46 while the price of the first private sale is $ 0.075. Don't you think that such price gap can negatively affect the liquidity of the token and take away the desire to buy a token on the exchange?

Answer: It is natural to worry that early investors got better pricing and could dump on the market. I can assure you that our investors are in this for the long-term. All private sale rounds signed 2 year contracts to run validators - and if they don't they forfeit their tokens. You can compare our release schedule to any other project. We have one of the most restricted circulating supply schedules of any project EVER and its because all our investors are commiting to the long-term success of the project and believe in Kava.
About the pricing itself - it is always a function of traction like for any start-up. When we made our public announcement about the project in June, we were only a 4 man team with just some github code. We could basically run a network with a single node, our own. Which is relatively worthless. I think our pricing of Kava at this time was justified. We were effectively a seed-stage company without a product or working network.
By July we made severe progress on the development side and the business side. We successful launched our first test net with the help of over 70 validator business partners around the world. We had a world-wide network of hundreds of people supporting us with people and resources at this point and the risk we would fail in launching a working product was much lower. At this point, the Kava project was valued at $25M. At this point, we had many VCs and investors asking for Kava tokens that we turned away. We only accepted validators that would help us launch the network. It was our one and only goal.
Fast forward to today, the IEO price simply reflects the traction and market demand for Kava. Our ecosystem is much larger than it was even a month ago. We have support from Ripple, Cosmos, and Binance amongst other large crypto projects. We have 100+ validators securing our network with very sophisticated high-availability set-ups. In addition, our ecosystem partners have built products for Kava - such as block explorers and others are working on native integrations to wallets and exchanges. Launchpad will be very big for us. Kava is a system designed to cater to crypto traders and investors and in a matter of days we distributed via Binance Launchpad and put in the hands of 130+ countries and tens of thousands of users overnight. It doesn't get more DeFi than that.
TLDR - I think KAVA is undervalued and the liquid supply of tokens is primarily from the IEO so its a safer bet than other IEOs. If the price drops, it will be from the overall market conditions or fellow IEO users not due private sale investors or team sell-offs.

Q48:

Can you introduce some information abouts KAVA Deflationary Fee Structure? With the burning mechanism, does it mean KAVA will never reach its max supply?

Answer: When loans are repaid, users pay a fee in Kava. This is burned. However, Kava does not have a max supply. It has a starting supply of 100M. It inflates for block rewards 3-20% APR AND it inflates when the system is at risk of under collateralization. At this time, more Kava is minted and used to purchase USDX off the market until it reaches full collateralization again.
TLDR: If things go well, and governance is good, Kava deflates and hopefully appreciates in value. If things go wrong, Kava holders get inflated.

Q49:

In your opinion what are advantage of decentralized finance over centralized?

Answer: One of the main advantages is not needing to pay the costs of regulation and compliance. Open financial software that is usable by anyone removes middle men fees and reduces the barrier for new entrants to enter and make new products. Also DeFI has an edge in terms of onboarding - to get a bank account or an exchange account you need to do lots of KYC and give private info. That takes time and is troublesome. With DeFi you just load up your funds and transact. Very fast user flows.

Q50:

Plan, KAVA how to raise capital? Kava is being supported by more than 100 business entities around the world, including major cryptocurrency investment funds like Ripple and Cosmos, so what did kava do to convince investors to join the project?

Answer: We have been doing crypto research and development for years. Ripple and Cosmos were partners before we even started this blockchain with Kava Labs. When we announced Kava the DeFi platform they knew us already to do good work and they liked the idea so they support us.

Who cares about political tweets from some random country's president when payment channels are a much more interesting and are actually capable of carrying value?
So let's have a short history of various payment channel techs!

Generation 0: Satoshi's Broken nSequence Channels

Because Satoshi's Vision included payment channels, except his implementation sucked so hard we had to go fix it and added RBF as a by-product.
Originally, the plan for nSequence was that mempools would replace any transaction spending certain inputs with another transaction spending the same inputs, but only if the nSequence field of the replacement was larger.
Since 0xFFFFFFFF was the highest value that nSequence could get, this would mark a transaction as "final" and not replaceable on the mempool anymore.
In fact, this "nSequence channel" I will describe is the reason why we have this weird rule about nLockTime and nSequence. nLockTime actually only works if nSequence is not 0xFFFFFFFF i.e. final. If nSequence is 0xFFFFFFFF then nLockTime is ignored, because this if the "final" version of the transaction.
So what you'd do would be something like this:

You go to a bar and promise the bartender to pay by the time the bar closes. Because this is the Bitcoin universe, time is measured in blockheight, so the closing time of the bar is indicated as some future blockheight.
For your first drink, you'd make a transaction paying to the bartender for that drink, paying from some coins you have. The transaction has an nLockTime equal to the closing time of the bar, and a starting nSequence of 0. You hand over the transaction and the bartender hands you your drink.
For your succeeding drink, you'd remake the same transaction, adding the payment for that drink to the transaction output that goes to the bartender (so that output keeps getting larger, by the amount of payment), and having an nSequence that is one higher than the previous one.
Eventually you have to stop drinking. It comes down to one of two possibilities:
- You drink until the bar closes. Since it is now the nLockTime indicated in the transaction, the bartender is able to broadcast the latest transaction and tells the bouncers to kick you out of the bar.
- You wisely consider the state of your liver. So you re-sign the last transaction with a "final" nSequence of 0xFFFFFFFF i.e. the maximum possible value it can have. This allows the bartender to get his or her funds immediately (nLockTime is ignored if nSequence is 0xFFFFFFFF), so he or she tells the bouncers to let you out of the bar.

Now that of course is a payment channel. Individual payments (purchases of alcohol, so I guess buying coffee is not in scope for payment channels). Closing is done by creating a "final" transaction that is the sum of the individual payments. Sure there's no routing and channels are unidirectional and channels have a maximum lifetime but give Satoshi a break, he was also busy inventing Bitcoin at the time.
Now if you noticed I called this kind of payment channel "broken". This is because the mempool rules are not consensus rules, and cannot be validated (nothing about the mempool can be validated onchain: I sigh every time somebody proposes "let's make block size dependent on mempool size", mempool state cannot be validated by onchain data). Fullnodes can't see all of the transactions you signed, and then validate that the final one with the maximum nSequence is the one that actually is used onchain. So you can do the below:

Become friends with Jihan Wu, because he owns >51% of the mining hashrate (he totally reorged Bitcoin to reverse the Binance hack right?).
Slip Jihan Wu some of the more interesting drinks you're ordering as an incentive to cooperate with you. So say you end up ordering 100 drinks, you split it with Jihan Wu and give him 50 of the drinks.
When the bar closes, Jihan Wu quickly calls his mining rig and tells them to mine the version of your transaction with nSequence 0. You know, that first one where you pay for only one drink.
Because fullnodes cannot validate nSequence, they'll accept even the nSequence=0 version and confirm it, immutably adding you paying for a single alcoholic drink to the blockchain.
The bartender, pissed at being cheated, takes out a shotgun from under the bar and shoots at you and Jihan Wu.
Jihan Wu uses his mystical chi powers (actually the combined exhaust from all of his mining rigs) to slow down the shotgun pellets, making them hit you as softly as petals drifting in the wind.
The bartender mutters some words, clothes ripping apart as he or she (hard to believe it could be a she but hey) turns into a bear, ready to maul you for cheating him or her of the payment for all the 100 drinks you ordered from him or her.
Steely-eyed, you stand in front of the bartender-turned-bear, daring him to touch you. You've watched Revenant, you know Leonardo di Caprio could survive a bear mauling, and if some posh actor can survive that, you know you can too. You make a pose. "Drunken troll logic attack!"
I think I got sidetracked here.

Lessons learned?

Bears are bad news.
You can't reasonably invoke "Satoshi's Vision" and simultaneously reject the Lightning Network because it's not onchain. Satoshi's Vision included a half-assed implementation of payment channels with nSequence, where the onchain transaction represented multiple logical payments, exactly what modern offchain techniques do (except modern offchain techniques actually work). nSequence (the field, but not its modern meaning) has been in Bitcoin since BitCoin For Windows Alpha 0.1.0. And its original intent was payment channels. You can't get nearer to Satoshi's Vision than being a field that Satoshi personally added to transactions on the very first public release of the BitCoin software, like srsly.
Miners can totally bypass mempool rules. In fact, the reason why nSequence has been repurposed to indicate "optional" replace-by-fee is because miners are already incentivized by the nSequence system to always follow replace-by-fee anyway. I mean, what do you think those drinks you passed to Jihan Wu are, other than the fee you pay him to mine a specific version of your transaction?
Satoshi made mistakes. The original design for nSequence is one of them. Today, we no longer use nSequence in this way. So diverging from Satoshi's original design is part and parcel of Bitcoin development, because over time, we learn new lessons that Satoshi never knew about. Satoshi was an important landmark in this technology. He will not be the last, or most important, that we will remember in the future: he will only be the first.

Spilman Channels

Incentive-compatible time-limited unidirectional channel; or, Satoshi's Vision, Fixed (if transaction malleability hadn't been a problem, that is).
Now, we know the bartender will turn into a bear and maul you if you try to cheat the payment channel, and now that we've revealed you're good friends with Jihan Wu, the bartender will no longer accept a payment channel scheme that lets one you cooperate with a miner to cheat the bartender.
Fortunately, Jeremy Spilman proposed a better way that would not let you cheat the bartender.
First, you and the bartender perform this ritual:

You get some funds and create a transaction that pays to a 2-of-2 multisig between you and the bartender. You don't broadcast this yet: you just sign it and get its txid.
You create another transaction that spends the above transaction. This transaction (the "backoff") has an nLockTime equal to the closing time of the bar, plus one block. You sign it and give this backoff transaction (but not the above transaction) to the bartender.
The bartender signs the backoff and gives it back to you. It is now valid since it's spending a 2-of-2 of you and the bartender, and both of you have signed the backoff transaction.
Now you broadcast the first transaction onchain. You and the bartender wait for it to be deeply confirmed, then you can start ordering.

The above is probably vaguely familiar to LN users. It's the funding process of payment channels! The first transaction, the one that pays to a 2-of-2 multisig, is the funding transaction that backs the payment channel funds.
So now you start ordering in this way:

For your first drink, you create a transaction spending the funding transaction output and sending the price of the drink to the bartender, with the rest returning to you.
You sign the transaction and pass it to the bartender, who serves your first drink.
For your succeeding drinks, you recreate the same transaction, adding the price of the new drink to the sum that goes to the bartender and reducing the money returned to you. You sign the transaction and give it to the bartender, who serves you your next drink.
At the end:
- If the bar closing time is reached, the bartender signs the latest transaction, completing the needed 2-of-2 signatures and broadcasting this to the Bitcoin network. Since the backoff transaction is the closing time + 1, it can't get used at closing time.
- If you decide you want to leave early because your liver is crying, you just tell the bartender to go ahead and close the channel (which the bartender can do at any time by just signing and broadcasting the latest transaction: the bartender won't do that because he or she is hoping you'll stay and drink more).
- If you ended up just hanging around the bar and never ordering, then at closing time + 1 you broadcast the backoff transaction and get your funds back in full.

Now, even if you pass 50 drinks to Jihan Wu, you can't give him the first transaction (the one which pays for only one drink) and ask him to mine it: it's spending a 2-of-2 and the copy you have only contains your own signature. You need the bartender's signature to make it valid, but he or she sure as hell isn't going to cooperate in something that would lose him or her money, so a signature from the bartender validating old state where he or she gets paid less isn't going to happen.
So, problem solved, right? Right? Okay, let's try it. So you get your funds, put them in a funding tx, get the backoff tx, confirm the funding tx...
Once the funding transaction confirms deeply, the bartender laughs uproariously. He or she summons the bouncers, who surround you menacingly.
"I'm refusing service to you," the bartender says.
"Fine," you say. "I was leaving anyway;" You smirk. "I'll get back my money with the backoff transaction, and posting about your poor service on reddit so you get negative karma, so there!"
"Not so fast," the bartender says. His or her voice chills your bones. It looks like your exploitation of the Satoshi nSequence payment channel is still fresh in his or her mind. "Look at the txid of the funding transaction that got confirmed."
"What about it?" you ask nonchalantly, as you flip open your desktop computer and open a reputable blockchain explorer.
What you see shocks you.
"What the --- the txid is different! You--- you changed my signature?? But how? I put the only copy of my private key in a sealed envelope in a cast-iron box inside a safe buried in the Gobi desert protected by a clan of nomads who have dedicated their lives and their childrens' lives to keeping my private key safe in perpetuity!"
"Didn't you know?" the bartender asks. "The components of the signature are just very large numbers. The sign of one of the signature components can be changed, from positive to negative, or negative to positive, and the signature will remain valid. Anyone can do that, even if they don't know the private key. But because Bitcoin includes the signatures in the transaction when it's generating the txid, this little change also changes the txid." He or she chuckles. "They say they'll fix it by separating the signatures from the transaction body. They're saying that these kinds of signature malleability won't affect transaction ids anymore after they do this, but I bet I can get my good friend Jihan Wu to delay this 'SepSig' plan for a good while yet. Friendly guy, this Jihan Wu, it turns out all I had to do was slip him 51 drinks and he was willing to mine a tx with the signature signs flipped." His or her grin widens. "I'm afraid your backoff transaction won't work anymore, since it spends a txid that is not existent and will never be confirmed. So here's the deal. You pay me 99% of the funds in the funding transaction, in exchange for me signing the transaction that spends with the txid that you see onchain. Refuse, and you lose 100% of the funds and every other HODLer, including me, benefits from the reduction in coin supply. Accept, and you get to keep 1%. I lose nothing if you refuse, so I won't care if you do, but consider the difference of getting zilch vs. getting 1% of your funds." His or her eyes glow. "GENUFLECT RIGHT NOW."
Lesson learned?

Payback's a bitch.
Transaction malleability is a bitchier bitch. It's why we needed to fix the bug in SegWit. Sure, MtGox claimed they were attacked this way because someone kept messing with their transaction signatures and thus they lost track of where their funds went, but really, the bigger impetus for fixing transaction malleability was to support payment channels.
Yes, including the signatures in the hash that ultimately defines the txid was a mistake. Satoshi made a lot of those. So we're just reiterating the lesson "Satoshi was not an infinite being of infinite wisdom" here. Satoshi just gets a pass because of how awesome Bitcoin is.

CLTV-protected Spilman Channels

Using CLTV for the backoff branch.
This variation is simply Spilman channels, but with the backoff transaction replaced with a backoff branch in the SCRIPT you pay to. It only became possible after OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (CLTV) was enabled in 2015.
Now as we saw in the Spilman Channels discussion, transaction malleability means that any pre-signed offchain transaction can easily be invalidated by flipping the sign of the signature of the funding transaction while the funding transaction is not yet confirmed.
This can be avoided by simply putting any special requirements into an explicit branch of the Bitcoin SCRIPT. Now, the backoff branch is supposed to create a maximum lifetime for the payment channel, and prior to the introduction of OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY this could only be done by having a pre-signed nLockTime transaction.
With CLTV, however, we can now make the branches explicit in the SCRIPT that the funding transaction pays to.
Instead of paying to a 2-of-2 in order to set up the funding transaction, you pay to a SCRIPT which is basically "2-of-2, OR this singlesig after a specified lock time".
With this, there is no backoff transaction that is pre-signed and which refers to a specific txid. Instead, you can create the backoff transaction later, using whatever txid the funding transaction ends up being confirmed under. Since the funding transaction is immutable once confirmed, it is no longer possible to change the txid afterwards.

Todd Micropayment Networks

The old hub-spoke model (that isn't how LN today actually works).
One of the more direct predecessors of the Lightning Network was the hub-spoke model discussed by Peter Todd. In this model, instead of payers directly having channels to payees, payers and payees connect to a central hub server. This allows any payer to pay any payee, using the same channel for every payee on the hub. Similarly, this allows any payee to receive from any payer, using the same channel.
Remember from the above Spilman example? When you open a channel to the bartender, you have to wait around for the funding tx to confirm. This will take an hour at best. Now consider that you have to make channels for everyone you want to pay to. That's not very scalable.
So the Todd hub-spoke model has a central "clearing house" that transport money from payers to payees. The "Moonbeam" project takes this model. Of course, this reveals to the hub who the payer and payee are, and thus the hub can potentially censor transactions. Generally, though, it was considered that a hub would more efficiently censor by just not maintaining a channel with the payer or payee that it wants to censor (since the money it owned in the channel would just be locked uselessly if the hub won't process payments to/from the censored user).
In any case, the ability of the central hub to monitor payments means that it can surveill the payer and payee, and then sell this private transactional data to third parties. This loss of privacy would be intolerable today.
Peter Todd also proposed that there might be multiple hubs that could transport funds to each other on behalf of their users, providing somewhat better privacy.
Another point of note is that at the time such networks were proposed, only unidirectional (Spilman) channels were available. Thus, while one could be a payer, or payee, you would have to use separate channels for your income versus for your spending. Worse, if you wanted to transfer money from your income channel to your spending channel, you had to close both and reshuffle the money between them, both onchain activities.

Poon-Dryja Lightning Network

Bidirectional two-participant channels.
The Poon-Dryja channel mechanism has two important properties:

Bidirectional.
No time limit.

Both the original Satoshi and the two Spilman variants are unidirectional: there is a payer and a payee, and if the payee wants to do a refund, or wants to pay for a different service or product the payer is providing, then they can't use the same unidirectional channel.
The Poon-Dryjam mechanism allows channels, however, to be bidirectional instead: you are not a payer or a payee on the channel, you can receive or send at any time as long as both you and the channel counterparty are online.
Further, unlike either of the Spilman variants, there is no time limit for the lifetime of a channel. Instead, you can keep the channel open for as long as you want.
Both properties, together, form a very powerful scaling property that I believe most people have not appreciated. With unidirectional channels, as mentioned before, if you both earn and spend over the same network of payment channels, you would have separate channels for earning and spending. You would then need to perform onchain operations to "reverse" the directions of your channels periodically. Secondly, since Spilman channels have a fixed lifetime, even if you never used either channel, you would have to periodically "refresh" it by closing it and reopening.
With bidirectional, indefinite-lifetime channels, you may instead open some channels when you first begin managing your own money, then close them only after your lawyers have executed your last will and testament on how the money in your channels get divided up to your heirs: that's just two onchain transactions in your entire lifetime. That is the potentially very powerful scaling property that bidirectional, indefinite-lifetime channels allow.
I won't discuss the transaction structure needed for Poon-Dryja bidirectional channels --- it's complicated and you can easily get explanations with cute graphics elsewhere.
There is a weakness of Poon-Dryja that people tend to gloss over (because it was fixed very well by RustyReddit):

You have to store all the revocation keys of a channel. This implies you are storing 1 revocation key for every channel update, so if you perform millions of updates over your entire lifetime, you'd be storing several megabytes of keys, for only a single channel. RustyReddit fixed this by requiring that the revocation keys be generated from a "Seed" revocation key, and every key is just the application of SHA256 on that key, repeatedly. For example, suppose I tell you that my first revocation key is SHA256(SHA256(seed)). You can store that in O(1) space. Then for the next revocation, I tell you SHA256(seed). From SHA256(key), you yourself can compute SHA256(SHA256(seed)) (i.e. the previous revocation key). So you can remember just the most recent revocation key, and from there you'd be able to compute every previous revocation key. When you start a channel, you perform SHA256 on your seed for several million times, then use the result as the first revocation key, removing one layer of SHA256 for every revocation key you need to generate. RustyReddit not only came up with this, but also suggested an efficient O(log n) storage structure, the shachain, so that you can quickly look up any revocation key in the past in case of a breach. People no longer really talk about this O(n) revocation storage problem anymore because it was solved very very well by this mechanism.

Another thing I want to emphasize is that while the Lightning Network paper and many of the earlier presentations developed from the old Peter Todd hub-and-spoke model, the modern Lightning Network takes the logical conclusion of removing a strict separation between "hubs" and "spokes". Any node on the Lightning Network can very well work as a hub for any other node. Thus, while you might operate as "mostly a payer", "mostly a forwarding node", "mostly a payee", you still end up being at least partially a forwarding node ("hub") on the network, at least part of the time. This greatly reduces the problems of privacy inherent in having only a few hub nodes: forwarding nodes cannot get significantly useful data from the payments passing through them, because the distance between the payer and the payee can be so large that it would be likely that the ultimate payer and the ultimate payee could be anyone on the Lightning Network.
Lessons learned?

We can decentralize if we try hard enough!
"Hubs bad" can be made "hubs good" if everybody is a hub.
Smart people can solve problems. It's kinda why they're smart.

Future

After LN, there's also the Decker-Wattenhofer Duplex Micropayment Channels (DMC). This post is long enough as-is, LOL. But for now, it uses a novel "decrementing nSequence channel", using the new relative-timelock semantics of nSequence (not the broken one originally by Satoshi). It actually uses multiple such "decrementing nSequence" constructs, terminating in a pair of Spilman channels, one in both directions (thus "duplex"). Maybe I'll discuss it some other time.
The realization that channel constructions could actually hold more channel constructions inside them (the way the Decker-Wattenhofer puts a pair of Spilman channels inside a series of "decrementing nSequence channels") lead to the further thought behind Burchert-Decker-Wattenhofer channel factories. Basically, you could host multiple two-participant channel constructs inside a larger multiparticipant "channel" construct (i.e. host multiple channels inside a factory).
Further, we have the Decker-Russell-Osuntokun or "eltoo" construction. I'd argue that this is "nSequence done right". I'll write more about this later, because this post is long enough.
Lessons learned?

Bitcoin offchain scaling is more powerful than you ever thought.

Bitcoin’s Price is Failing to Convince the Margin Markets ...

I bought $1k of the Top 10 Cryptos on January 1st, 2019 (Oct Update - Month 22)

Month Twenty Two – UP 66%

Question of the month:

In early October, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charged this crypto exchange with illegally operating an unregistered trading platform.

Ranking and October Winners and Losers

Overall update – BTC’s lead increases, XRP back to the basement, 2019 Top Ten pulls ahead of other Experiments.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

Bitcoin dominance:

Overall return on investment since January 1st, 2019:

Comparison to S&P 500:

Conclusion:

And the Answer is…

I bought $1k of the Top 10 Cryptos on January 1st, 2018 (Oct Update - Month 34)

Month Thirty Four – Down 74%

Question of the month:

In October, this global payment service announced it will support cryptocurrency buying, selling, and shopping through its platform.

Ranking and October Winners and Losers

Overall update – BTC far ahead and breaks even, ETH in distant second place. Dash in last place.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

Bitcoin dominance:

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2018:

Comparison to S&P 500:

Conclusion:

And the Answer is…

I bought $1k of the Top 10 Cryptos on January 1st, 2018 (Sept Update)

Month Thirty Three – Down 76%

Question of the month:

Which cryptocurrency exchange won approval to create America’s first crypto bank in September?

Ranking and September Winners and Losers

Overall update – BTC solidly in the lead, followed by ETH. Dash in the basement, LTC drops out of the Top Ten.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

Bitcoin dominance:

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2018:

Comparison to S&P 500:

Conclusion:

And the Answer is…

I bought $1k of the Top Ten Cryptos on January 1st, 2018. August update, -71%, special NEM EDITION!!

Month Thirty Two – Down 71%

Question of the month:

The US Justice Department announced in August that it had seized cryptocurrency from terror groups in the Middle East. How much did they confiscate?

Ranking and August Winners and Losers

Overall update – BTC in the lead and inching towards break-even point, followed by second place ETH. NEM escapes last place, replaced by Dash.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

Bitcoin dominance:

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2018:

Comparison to S&P 500:

Conclusion:

And the Answer is…

🔄 ETH updates highs

Q and A with Javis Lockhart creator of Tradeium/ Trendbot, a free to use Binance trading bot platform

Dash Competitive basket index for Wednesday, 24 June, 2020.

Kava In the News

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[Part 1] KAVA Historical AMA Tracker! (Questions & Answers)

Q1:

Kava is a decentralized DEFI project, why did you implement the countries restrictions to run the node? Will there be such restrictions by the time of the mainnet?

Q2:

According to the project description it has been indicated that staking reward (in KAVA tokens) varies from 3 to 20% per annum. But how will you fight with inflation?

We all know how altcoins prices are falling, and their bottom is not visible. And in fact, we can get an increase in the number of tokens for staking, but not an increase in the price of the token itself and become a long-term investor.

Q3:

In your allocation it is indicated that 28.48% of the tokens are in the "Token treasury" - where will these tokens be directed?

Q4:

Such a platform (with loans and stable coins) is just the beginning since these aspects are a small part of many Defi components. Will your team have a plan to implement other functions, such as derivatives, the dex platform once the platform is successfully launched?

Q5:

There are several options for using USDX on the KAVA platform, one of which is Margin Trading / Leverage. Is this a selection function or a compulsory function? Wondering since there are some investors who don`t like margin. What is the level of leverage and how does a CDP auction work?

Q6:

Most credit platforms do not work well in the current market. What will you do to attract more people to use your platform and the services you provide? Thank you

Q7:

KAVA functions as a reserve currency in situations where the system is undercollateralized. In such cases new KAVA is minted and used to buy USDX off the market until USDX becomes safely overcollateralized.