Denys Artemiev

About

What is Grayscale? - Grayscale Investments is an investment fund that manages crypto assets for the benefit of clients. It was founded in 2013 as a "daughter" of the Digital Currency Group.

It is the largest digital asset manager that attracts accredited investors from the stock market to crypto through its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) product. In fact, Grayscale is an ETF fund, but only for US investors. This allows large players from traditional markets to buy bitcoin without violating various restrictions and laws.

What is the point of investing? A major player cannot transfer money directly from the stock market to an exchange like Binance and buy bitcoin. There are a lot of problems with this and the solution to these problems is the Grayscale fund, which, in fact, is a bridge between the stock and cryptocurrency markets. An investor, buying bitcoin from this fund, receives a blocking of shares for a period of 6 months (GBTC) and, after unlocking, has the opportunity to sell these shares. Shares are a kind of way to manage physical bitcoins.

On June 9, 2020, the fund began buying bitcoin with investors' funds, and continued to do so until February 18, 2021, buying a total of 655.4k bitcoins. By the time of the last purchase, the first purchased bitcoins began to be unlocked and gradually sold, at the moment the fund owns 651k bitcoins (4.4k less).

Grayscale's portfolio

Grayscale Investment Fund offers financial products in Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Zcash and other cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin ranks first in terms of investments. By October 18, under the management of the company - coins worth more than $ 39.7 billion.

Next comes Ethereum at $11.8 billion. This makes the company one of the largest holders of this cryptocurrency.

Also among the assets are Ethereum Classic ($643 million), Litecoin ($287 million), Bitcoin Cash ($193 million), and other cryptocurrencies.

In addition, Grayscale was previously an XRP whale, but now it does not have this token in its portfolio at all.

In total, the company has 15 cryptocurrency funds.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC)

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) how it works?

GBTC trades both at a premium and at a discount to the actual price of Bitcoin, making it attractive to investors. In addition, since this fund is publicly traded, it has certain tax benefits.

However, now that the SEC has allowed bitcoin ETFs, GBTC and Grayscale as a whole are facing serious competition.

For example, in Canada, where exchange-traded bitcoin funds were approved earlier, more than 14 thousand bitcoins of potential customers were “stealed” from the company. The difference between the GBTC premium and the underlying bitcoin per share has turned negative.

In light of new developments, the company has applied to convert its bitcoin fund into an ETF.

About

Joystream is a project that works in full force, despite the fact that it is at the testing stage. A very strong and technically savvy team, led by the founder of Bedeho Mender, is working on the project.

Previously, the community that helps the development of the project is called the council, and its members are consuls. They are selected by the type of voting on the work platform for a certain period of time and are engaged in important tasks for the platform, for which, by the way, they receive awards from the management.

The platform called Atlas is one of the main products of the project and also allows early users to take an active part by uploading videos to their own channel, in accordance with the rules established by the management.

You can find more detailed information on the links that I will leave below.

Atlas

Atlas is the flagship app for viewing and sharing content on Joystream. Watch videos, subscribe to authors, discover new content or create your own channel and build your audience.

Pioneer

Pioneer gives you the ability to do and manage your community. Vote in elections, organize a fundraiser for your own project, or support the work of the platform by taking part in paid roles.

Problem

We believe that creativity, whether it be literature, music, films, games or performance, is an essential tool for spreading collective knowledge among community members. These means of self-expression determine common values ​​and, ultimately, participate in the formation of a common culture, value system, and even a political vector. Therefore, the sources and methods of their financing, as well as the ways of dissemination, play an extremely important role.

Today, digital media have become the main means of disseminating self-expression, and media platforms have begun to play the role of key organizers of this activity.

Unfortunately, today, due to the effects of networks, economies of scale, regulations and political interests, only a handful of big players remain to dictate their own rules. These players practically do not obey the laws of the market and political mechanisms.

As a result, our stories, self-expression and interaction are all controlled by them and filtered by their rules. This gives rise to a whole kaleidoscope of problems, such as

inflexible monetization, censorship of speech, unfair distribution of profits between content creators and audience, low level of innovation or lack of trust in third-party developers.

Purpose

We believe that media platforms must be accountable to the people they influence, whether they be their end users, content creators, third party developers or staff members.

The absence of such a form of reporting is the root of the problem.

Main thesis

Our main thesis is that in order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve two main tasks, and the way to solve them correctly is to use modern technology of distributed systems, including blockchain, as well as smart contracts and tokens.

Obstacles

First of all, the question arises of creating an alternative platform with a pronounced effect of use, which reduces the effectiveness of any platform to use, regardless of the manifestation of the capabilities of this platform. As history shows, the creation process is almost an art, and success can rarely be repeated.

We found that the tokens earned impact on the impact of the platform of work include the use of means to mobilize, strengthen and motivate a dynamic community of participants from different countries.

In the past, this has helped create communities, in a way like Bitcoin, by overcoming the initial energy consumption of the network [1, 2, 3]. And while there will be no guarantee that enough will be enough, this strategy looks promising in the future.

Reporting scaling

The second question is: how to organize and maintain reporting when the scale of the platform increases?

According to A.O. Hirschman [4], there are two main methods by which participants can hold any type of organization accountable: voice and exit.

Voice

Voice is an attempt to improve or reform the structure of an organization from within. In this case, the effectiveness of the method depends both on the ability to exchange reliable information with other platform participants, and on the ability to influence management processes. Both of these features are not available on modern platforms.

We believe that blockchain technology can provide an organizational and economic infrastructure that can help solve both problems. A public, verifiable and immutable history of economic transactions and public actions that anyone can verify is the starting point for any user to understand the current as well as past state of the platform. And this will allow everyone to make judgments based on indisputable facts and circumstances.

Going forward, blockchain tokens will unify the use and management of the platform, allowing everyone to participate in decisions at the platform level.

All that is required to create, implement or convey the ability to participate in such activities is the ability to sign messages with identifiable cryptographic keys. Ideally reliable interaction gives a wide, dynamic and unlimited range of users the means to control the platform. This can serve a wide range of purposes, such as making project decisions, internal regulation, participating in formal roles, or even changing the structure of the organization itself. Putting such interaction on an economic footing seems to us more appropriate for the goals set than an infrastructure built on the principles of trust management.

Exit

The way out is a complete cessation of interaction with the organizational structure in favor of joining an alternative one or creating one's own alternative. The effectiveness of this approach depends on comparing the costs of leaving the relationship and joining the alternative, or creating one's own alternative. To date, the cost of leaving the platforms is very high.

Creating platforms based on open source code, protocols and public data, as in the case of systems based on blockchain technology, can drastically reduce this cost. Since users are in control of their own information, account, and assets, they can easily join the new platform, even taking all their friends with them.

Open protocols and the availability of open data will lead to the development of opportunities for simultaneous participation in several platforms without even switching between them, which will promote competition at the platform level [5].

Moreover, the use of open source means that all the platform's developments can be easily reused, and since the entire organizational structure and its state are public, it is possible to clone an entire ecosystem and create an alternative platform with alternative goals and policies.