The Weekly Waffle Jan 15 2023

Wowser, that was a great week! #Bitcoin and friends rallied after a stable CPI print, and the rally seems sustainable as we are breaking through major resistance. Heightened activity in the futures market also offers a glimpse of hope. Just like last year, the war in #Ukraine will be instrumental. We now see what I’ve been saying since the outbreak (and what the Fed seems to have missed, thus overshooting unnecessarily): this is "war inflation," not systemic, but highly dependent on extraneous factors.??

I went to see my first ice hockey game ever, and it reminded me of crypto: the same tribalism, hero worship, and team allegiance we have with competing blockchain projects. Plus, it's bloody brutal and fast just like crypto. (EHC Chur won 6;1 against EHC Arosa, just in care you give a damn.)

Me old matey, Cardano founder Charles H tweeted that Cardano and Solana should get married, a match not made in heaven, but on chain. The idea isn't at all ridiculous, albeit curious: Cardano has (allegedly) always stayed away from #venturecapital, while Solana is (allegedly) a poster child of #VC manipulation.

Solana recovered nicely from its FTX hangover on speculation that its backers haven't gone away. Changes to the protocol may ultimately make the chain technically competent rather than a complete disaster.

Goldman Sachs?officially released details about its DAML project. The catchily named “GS DAP” was developed on top of Digital Asset’s DAML smart contract language and Canton, its privacy-enabled blockchain. The press release stated that “Daml-based tokenization platforms, such as GS DAPTM, capture the full complexity of rights, obligations, and cash flows throughout the lifecycles of assets.” (Hashtag: smart tokens & cashflow). Such a platform would allow for the “digital representation and workflow accessible and fully automatable across distributed interconnected ecosystems of participants.” Additionally, Digital Asset ensures that data is only shared with entitled stakeholders with its privacy protocols while supporting the necessary scalability. In summary, that is a direct competitor to projects like Tgrade or Aleph Zero . As we know next to nothing about Canton, however, it’s difficult to choose a winner here. What it does show is that digital assets may end up being mostly run on?proprietary solutions rather than public blockchains, in direct opposition to the spirit of crypto.?

In the?NFT?world, the craziness of 2022 seems to be making a comeback as several nonsensical pixelated JPGs doubled and tripled their floor price. Other than that, nothing caught our eye. The real story of 2023, we think, will be projects that effectively replace?trademarks and patents?with NFTs. Think about the cumbersome and ultimately pointless process we have now, with a gazillion separate entities verifying and granting rights that can only be contested in court. Now replace that with an immutable entry on the blockchain.?Aarweave?is one of the most promising projects alongside Polygon, which is considering a hard fork to combat rising fees -- a scenario eerily reminiscent of January 2022 when Eth gas shot through the roof.

I'm off to the WEF in Davos and the super exciting #BlockchainHub to speak on "safeguarding digital assets" and meet with my favorite peeps in the space, the team of Prove AI which btw have a cool new logo. Check it out. It really looks like a blockchain. And it's squared and red and white like the Swiss flag. Cool.