Blockchain Confidential: 17 December 2021

Prices went haywire again, some CBDC projects showed early results, and Tim O'Reilly weighs in on Web3

The Week

Big improvements are coming to two significant DeFi building blocks, with Balancer introducing Boosted Pools on Aave and the smart order router protocol 1Inch releasing V2 of their limit order mechanism, which helps optimize gas usage. And does your smart contract only pay out when it’s cold outside? There’s an oracle for that now thanks to a partnership between AccuWeather and Chainlink.

BBVA Switzerland added ETH to its crypto platform for private banking clients. SEBA launched a regulated token backed by physical gold. And in continuing experiments to link up CBDC systems along the lines of the BIS Innovation Hub’s Project Dunbar, HSBC and IBM successfully demoed a multi-ledger system.

In a kind of hype-superstorm collision, Bored Ape Yacht Club is getting into play-to-earn gaming. Coinbase wants to ape in on the metaverse with a focus on NFT-based identity as an enabling technology. Sotheby’s has so far printed an astonishing $100M in NFT art sales in 2021. And finally, be careful about those fake metaverse handbags.

And finally: no, you are not a crypto-trillionaire, but at least it’s not Pyth’s fault.

The Good Read

The legendary Tim O’Reilly had a post on the ebb and flow of decentralization and recentralization in technology which caught our eye, especially given his historical perspective. Read Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3.

From the Research Desk

This week Ilya continues his exploration of questions of value in digital assets. Read Bitcoin as a store of value: evidence through Information Theory.

Regulator Radar

After an initially warmer reception for crypto execs in front of Congress, the knives came out again, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Sherrod Brown calling out stablecoin risks in DeFi. But credit unions can partner with third-party digital asset services so they don’t go the way of Blockbuster Video in the face of innovation, so there’s that. It was a similar story overseas, with a mixed bag of pushes for much tighter regulation and tiptoes in the direction of innovation, with the BoE joining calls for global crypto regulation and the Russian central bank considering a Bitcoin ban, while German savings banks contemplated opening up Bitcoin and Ethereum trading services, and both Ukraine and France announced CBDC pilots, with the latter releasing early results. Want to follow all the CBDC action? Check out the Atlantic Council’s awesome interactive CBDC tracker.

At the Office

We launched new Cloudwall Capital website over the weekend. Setup is well underway for Cloudwall Capital SG Pte. Ltd., our Singapore legal entity, with hope held out that Jia Yng will get a corporation for Christmas. In NYC we secured virtual office space at 40 Wall Street and got the U.S. company fully operational financially. Ilya kicked off our research efforts in earnest and we made our first offers for 2022 hiring, which we hope to announce shortly. We got accepted into the Microsoft for Startups program, which will help support our Azure-based cloud build, and we evaluated potential software development partners to help us get the MVP up and running faster in 2022. We will be spending much more time on the MVP in the weeks ahead, and Serenity will start taking shape.