On-The-Chain - July 24, 2019 - Q&A w/ Mark Nadal of GUN / Era

Q&A with Mark Nadal of GUN / Era, 3,000 MKR Burned in Stability Fees, DeFi NYC Presents: camlCase, Carbon, & Messari, sETH/ETH Uniswap Pool Makes Top 5, & Flux Market Releases AugurSets

Jul 24, 2019

Welcome to On-The-Chain, a focused look at the most interesting data, networks, and people pertaining to the chain and crypto economics.

This issue features a Q&A with Mark Nadal, Founder of GUN / Era.

Q&A with Mark Nadal, Founder of GUN / Era

Q: You have been working with decentralized data structures for nearly ten years. How has your view on the space evolved over the years?

A: The answers are certainly not with experts. Take away: If you're interested in this stuff, but feel like an imposter, don't! Go create value, your idea may be unique and not thought of before, test it, and don't let haters get you down.

Q: GUN recently surpassed 2 million hits on GitHub - Congrats! Looking back, what were the most defining moments along the way?

Raising money from Tim Draper, the earliest VC into Bitcoin, Skype, etc.
When we had to rewrite GUN to handle video games built for it.
When MIT colleagues did decentralized AI/ML on it.
When a Dutch Navy warship ran GUN during a live mission.
When we got Uber-like realtime GPS updates happening P2P, and other IoT systems.
When we got Telegram/Signal-like end-to-end encryption and cryptographic decentralized identity working in the browser (no phone numbers!).
When notabug.io (P2P Reddit), d.tube (decentralized YouTube), and Internet Archive adopted GUN.
When Martti Malmi (Satoshi's 1st Bitcoin contributor) joined the team.
Again, when people started doing AR/VR demos, and livestreaming HD video!
Crossing 2M monthly active users, and 10K+ developers.

Q: On a technical level, what differentiates GUN from other decentralized systems?

A: GUN can handle mutable and immutable data. Turns out that a lot of the scaling problems with Blockchain and other dWeb protocols is that you need to index things in order for performance to be fast. An immutable system does not let you update an index in place, instead you have to copy it, modify it, re-save it, link it, and then find it again - but by the time you've found the new index it is already out of date when there are thousands of transactions a second. GUN's decentralized mutable indices makes it scalable to the millions of users we have today, without sacrificing data integrity because everything is cryptographically verified.

Q: How and when do you think crypto / blockchain might achieve one billion users?

A: I should make a joke about Libra here. When will non-oligarchical systems achieve a billion plus users? I'm predicting in 5 years from now. For most, scaling to even millions of users is a technical challenge. For us, the challenge is now a social/political one - most people do not share our values of freedom, and do not act on privacy. Our solution is to introduce fun experiences that turn Facebook/Google/etc. into private decentralizedapps, to take advantage of network effects, rather than trying to convince people to move off of something they already know.

Q: What do you think are the most overrated and underrated aspects of token economics? What might "the perfect token" look like to you?

A: Scarcity and 0-sum thinking in general are the most overrated aspects of token economics. There is nothing economically new about most cryptocurrencies, they are prone to just as much greed as fiat. We have this magical thing called the internet that is post-scarce in information wealth, people should be creating economic models and cryptocurrencies that take advantage of that. The ideal token is one that is win+win and creates wealth while promoting generosity, as described in my groundbreaking article "Wealth: A New Era of Economics - Freeism".

Q: Why are you building GUN?

A: The world can only be more fair, caring, free, and honest when everyone is empowered. GUNs let us revolt against tyranny, AXEs let us harvest and mine resources, and an ERA is the new civilization humanity builds. I may not get to live in it, but if my children can, the world will be a better place.

Q: What is the best way to get involved with GUN as a user and developer?

A: Honestly, just join our community chat room - it has some of the friendliest people and developers out there! You'll get hooked. And check out our Cartoon Whitepaper over at AXE - the GUN powered blockchain.

3,000 MKR Burned in Stability Fees

MakerDAO recently surpassed 3,000 MKR burned in stability fees.

Furthermore, more than 5,000 MKR are set to be burned in the future based on the total accrued fees across all MakerDAO collateralized debt positions (CDPs).

Annual MKR burn rate (Outstanding Dai Supply * Stability Fee / MKR Price) is just shy of 24,000 MKR.

The Takeaway: MakerDAO is alive and well.

DeFi NYC Presents: camlCase, Carbon, & Messari

DeFi NYC is hosting camlCase, Carbon, and Messari this Thursday, July 25th, 2019 at Distributed Global.

sETH/ETH Uniswap Pool Makes Top 5

In just more than one week, almost 2,180 ETH has been added to the sETH/ETH Uniswap pool, making it now the fifth largest liquidity pool on the DEX.

This comes as a result of Synthetix’s cleverly designed incentives for providing liquidity to the Uniswap sETH/ETH pool.

The Takeaway: Composability. Composability. Composability.

Flux Market Releases AugurSets

Flux Market recently released the first version of AugurSets, a protocol for tokenized indexes of positions in Augur markets.

The Takeaway: The first prediction market index protocol - brilliant!

Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@ColeGotTweets), Telegram (@colekennelly), WeChat (@colekennelly). Alternatively, find time to connect here.

A special thank you to Mark for the time and Mable for the introduction!

Nothing in this email is intended to serve as financial advice. Do your own research.

Ξ: 0xA81A7e78f7FeC365c9016397e51F58125eE4842b

₿: bc1qa7328fdrww70kwqc3z682ssdeu2asydpfu0dqt