Robbie Heeger’s Endaoment has facilitated the donation of over $30 million of cryptocurrency to 243 different charities. These donations come from altruistic cryptocurrency investors who are also partly motivated by reducing their tax burdens to Uncle Sam and keeping more of their profits.

Born in Silicon Valley, Heeger, now in his early 30’s, was exposed to entrepreneurship from a young age. Though he initially worked in big tech, he soon became so enthralled with blockchain that he dropped everything to pursue his new passion in 2018. This led him to create Endaoment, which he calls the first regulatory-compliant nonprofit built entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. The project allows anyone to donate one of over 150 cryptocurrencies to a charity of their choice and, in doing so, reduce their tax liabilities.

Endaoment represents the latest generation of blockchain giving — but it is not the first. In 2017, a mysterious figure calling themselves Pine anonymously donated 5057 Bitcoin, worth $55 million at the time, to a collection of over 60 charities.

These donations not only encouraged major charities to accept cryptocurrency contributions for the first time but also served to counteract the perception of Bitcoin being primarily used in dishonest or criminal activities. While the Pineapple Fund helped legitimize cryptocurrency as a medium of charity, it was by no means the first. As early as 2011, Bruno Kučinskasin created Bitcoin 100, an initiative to donate Bitcoin to charities that would openly accept BTC.

Despite many charities‘ early exposure to cryptocurrency, few have continued to receive substantial donations on the blockchain and many even removed such donation options from their websites. The reason was simple on one level and yet complex by nature — taxes.

Endaoment

Upon graduating from university in 2012, Heeger accepted a full-time position with Apple where he first worked as a content publishing quality assurance engineer before becoming a manager of production operations. As his career progressed, his fascination with blockchain technology grew and in 2018, he “left Apple with this understanding that crypto was not just something that I could be tangentially interested in anymore — it was consuming.” Despite his experience at a major tech company, he saw himself as technically weak and took boot camp-style classes in solidity coding and blockchain web development.

“I started brainstorming ways that I could take this new skill set and try and build something that would funnel crypto capital into non-profit organizations that otherwise would have had very little exposure to crypto,” Heeger recounts of his early days. One of his initial ideas was to create a “media chain” by which to verify news content and make it resistant to censorship.

The brainstorming paid off, as he recalled how he had made it a habit to give away a portion of his Apple stock to a donor-advised fund each year because he “had stock that had tax obligations on it and I wanted to give that stock away without having to sell it first.” Charity can, of course, be more than simply selfless giving, as strategic donations can often allow for both individuals and businesses to reduce their tax burdens. While selling AAPL stock before donating it would have incurred additional capital gains taxes, giving the stock to a donor-advised fund allowed him to receive tax benefits for the entire value of the stock without incurring capital gains taxes, as charitable donor-advised funds are not liable to tax.

“I had crypto that had appreciated significantly and I didn‘t want to sell it first in order to donate it. I thought ‘wouldn‘t it be cool if there was a donor-advised fund that took crypto’ and that was the seed that became Endaoment.”

Heeger, now in his early 30’s, founded Endaoment in March 2019. Its core function is to provide a tax receipt in exchange for a donation of cryptocurrency. As a donor-advised fund, those making donations receive “advisory privileges” which means that they can suggest where they would like the proceeds of their cryptocurrency to be donated. In practice, this means that 99% of the time, funds go to the donor’s desired U.S. charity of which Heeger says there are about 2.5 million. The 1% of times when the funds do not reach the donor’s first choice of destination include situations where the grant recommendation “is to a hate group or an organization that‘s not in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service, or one that presents some conflict of interest for the organization,” Heeger explains.

“Give us your crypto and we will give you a tax receipt that says you donated it to a 501C3 tax-exempt non-profit public benefit corporation called Endaoment,” he clarifies regarding the business model.

Thank you for the bids on Grifter #659. One of three rats in the collection and without doubt the most pretty.

All proceeds will go to the Grifter Fund in collaboration with @endaomentdotorg 🙏

Check out all the auctions: https://t.co/hpSUANo3Dl pic.twitter.com/OJ5Ktei1QB

— XCOPY 🏴 (@XCOPYART) December 23, 2021

Here’s how it works in numbers

Suppose Fred bought 1000 ETH at $3 for $3,000. At $3,000 per ETH, he now has $3 million worth. Presuming a 33.33% capital gains tax, he would owe the government about $1 million upon sale, being left with $2 million for himself. Alternatively, he could choose to donate 250 ETH to Endaoment, which would issue him a tax receipt for the equivalent of the $750,000 donation — which would count against and fully cancel out his $750,000 tax liability when selling the remaining 750 ETH, meaning he would be left with $2.25 million, with $750,000 sent to the charity of his choice and zero going to the IRS. 

The talk of the IRS reveals a bottleneck: In order to maintain its status as a U.S. tax-exempt public interest corporation, Endaoment can only issue grants to 501C3 charities registered with U.S. authorities. This means that while many local charities outside the U.S. would not be valid recipients of donations, various international causes can still be targeted as many of the charities act globally.

“We‘ve done a lot of work in Sub-Saharan Africa and Afghan refugee relief, and donations to organizations that do work in Europe and all over the world that just have US 501C3 entities that they use as fundraising vehicles for donors in the U.S.,” Heeger clarifies.

Though Heeger notes that he “cannot solicit services to people outside of the U.S.,” people outside the United States have used the Endaoment software to make crypto donations for which they receive U.S. tax receipts just as any American would. Success in getting tax deductions in such international cases is far from guaranteed, and Heeger notes that not all countries issue tax deductions on the basis of charitable giving. Many users have asked about the possibility of creating tax receipts that meet the requirements of various governments, as the tax systems of many countries consider self-directed donations as societally desirable and therefore encourage them by granting tax reductions based on registered donations.

“We‘ve seen people in Japan, in Australia, in the U.K. and in France come and use the site in order to effect impact — They have taken on the burden of figuring out how they prove the deductibility with their local regulators themselves.”

Heeger sees many opportunities for future expansion including to charities in other countries which he believes would upgrade the number of options from 2.5 to over 7 million charitable organizations. It is clear that his mind has never left Silicon Valley, as he characterizes the project as a “minimum viable product that supports straightforward crypto giving of any crypto asset to any U.S. nonprofit as dollars.” 

Born in Silicon Valley

Heeger grew up in California’s Palo Alto in the early 2000s, which he describes as an intense and highly competitive environment where various parents of his classmates would “show up on keynotes for the iPhone or some Google service.” The setting made for an environment with lots of access to and encouragement to use and experiment with new technologies, with tech companies often using the schools he went to as testing grounds for new products.

Driven by a passion for storytelling, in 2008, Heeger began studies in broadcast and digital journalism at the University of Southern California. He specialized in publishing technology, inspired by what he saw as a “disruption of the legacy media institutions by the internet” causing a change in the way people got information. He also grew interested in ethics such as the need to balance profitability and the journalistic duty of honest reporting. Soon, he found himself running iTunes’ social media channels as an Apple intern.

“I really loved the triangle of business, technology and ethics, and having to try and find balance between those three key drivers — journalism had that in spades.”

Throughout his studies, he worked for the campus TV news station, where he eventually oversaw 25 reporters and other staff as a multimedia director. In 2010, Heeger had “a real eye-opener” when he traveled to Tanzania to volunteer as an English teacher at a rural town on the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro through an organization called Cross-Cultural Solutions. Though he looked for teaching methods that would help the children gear up for their future in a competitive world, he saw that providing a Palo Alto-style education was a “challenge when you‘re trying to do work in a space that‘s chronically underfunded.”

2021 was a breakout year for @endaomentdotorg, from major gifts 💰, to #NFT powered #philanthropy 🖼, to fiscal sponsorships 📜 and beyond! 🚀

Learn about the community behind nearly $30 million in #CryptoPhilanthropy in our full Annual Impact Report: https://t.co/OYAKGgFc3v pic.twitter.com/rd8OD3Nxuk

— endaoment.eth 👉 ETHDenver (@endaomentdotorg) January 19, 2022

Anonymous donors

One case in which Endaoment is unable to issue tax receipts is when the donor is fully anonymous. Though anonymous donations can be accepted and Heeger notes that many “religions will say that the anonymous giver is the most righteous kind of giver because they don‘t expect anything in return,” only a very small percentage of donors fit that category. 

Heeger explains that there are various degrees of anonymity when it comes to donating such as whether the donor wants to be unknown to only the receiving charity or to Endaoment as well. When sending crypto from an address with an ENS name, for example, it may be easy for anyone tracking transactions to deduce who the donor is, though the receiving charity itself will not see such information. If funds are routed directly from an exchange, Heeger says that not even Endaoment has any way to figure out the identity of the donor. In such cases, he often checks with the organization to ensure that they are comfortable receiving anonymous money.

In one example of semi-anonymous giving, the developers of SushiSwap donated $1 million SUSHI, with each donation being labeled as being from the SushiSwap core developers rather than from any particular individual.

Journey to DAO

In the future, he says Endaoment will support complex investment strategies and international giving. These strategies would include the gauntlet of crypto-assets like NFT’s, vote-locked tokens and interest-bearing tokens. “You should be able to give whatever it is that you want to give and direct those proceeds to an issue that you care about,” he emphasizes.

What Endaoment is not yet, despite the name, is a DAO. That is meant to change soon, however, as Heeger’s plan is that “people who are actively advancing the mission of Endoament are rewarded with tokens that give them membership, interest and oversight power over the nonprofit entity itself.” This would make EnDAOment a decentralized autonomous organization, which comes with the Web3 dream of leveraging a community to make happen what no small centralized team could ever do.

Soon, Heeger imagines that it will be easy for anyone to become the next Pine, even on a much smaller budget, and create a fund through which they and others use to distribute their crypto wealth to charities around the world.

“We want to democratize those philontrophic tools and make them as easy as interacting with a DeFi Protocol or as easy as transacting using MetaMask.”

Source

Are future prices written in the stars? Meet Maren Altman, presciently named for cryptocurrency, who combines astrology and day trading crypto into a winning blend.

In 1973, Princeton University professor Burton Malkiel published his book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, in which he famously states that a “blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.”

Fast forward to 2013, and Rob Arnott, CEO of Research Affiliates, conducted research mimicking monkeys using AI and actually discovered the monkeys had done a much better job than both the experts and the stock market. Closer examination proved the success was a result of the random selection of companies by the “monkey approach,” optimizing their success. However, it is a sobering thought that not only machines but possibly primates can outperform humans in stock picking.

It’s a small step, perhaps, to look at the potential of astrology to determine the future price of Bitcoin. Unlike a  stock, whose performance is dictated by both the business performance of a company and the sector in which it operates, technical analysts’ predictions for Bitcoin price movements depend on reviewing charts and patterns — similar to that performed by astrologists.

In the gutter, looking at the stars

So, how do you predict the price of Bitcoin with astrology? Enter Maren Altman, who calls herself “your personal poet to the stars, especially on TikTok,” and has made a name for herself over the last two years by using astrology to predict price — but not without attracting some controversy.

“I was always the weird girl who asked people about their star signs. In college, I used to earn pocket money by doing people’s charts at parties. I have always been fascinated by astrology.”

It was a natural fit for Altman to run Bitcoin through the charts, using the genesis block as the birth date — after all, anything with a birth date can be plugged into the astrology charts. Altman bought some Bitcoin back in 2017 but had largely forgotten about it until she became interested again in March 2020 when she was studying philosophy at NYU, along with the rest of the student population — nothing like a good pandemic and soaring price to grab interest.

“I grew up with astrology where patterns and cycles are tracked. I was also familiar with financial astrology, so it just made sense to apply it to cryptocurrency,” says Altman.

That’s a big call

One of her first notable calls was in January 2021, where she observed that the new moon in Capricorn, on Jan. 13, looked big for Bitcoin. She went on to predict a dip followed by a bull run. Her call was prescient, with Bitcoin continuing to double in price before April. To counter that, she predicted all-time highs in May, with largely unremarkable success, and Bitcoin floundering instead in its first notable dip of 2021.

Becoming a day trader proved profitable for Altman, but it was not without its stresses.

“It was not enough to call the price; I had to be able to execute,” she says. “And, some days, I made mistakes and lost money, but it was not the fault of the charts but my errors.”

She sees astrology as a giant mirror where certain signifiers of planetary alignments represent themes such as world growth, or even world aggression or peace. By reading those patterns and overplaying them on what has already happened, she can trace future movements or, in the case of cryptocurrency, prices.

Altman acknowledges that it can be hard to read the charts — there is a system of patterns but also multiple cycles that can result in misreading. Having said that, she is still ahead of the game.

“Either way, I am 100% transparent with my trades. I share everything,” she says.

She began trading and posting on social media in earnest in the summer of 2020, and today, she has more than a million followers on TikTok and more than 2 million combined on all her socials.

“It just blew up over the summer of 2020,” Altman explains.

When asked why she gained such traction, Altman shrugs her shoulders.

“I am a bit of a character. I’m young, I’m a woman and I wear mostly red. But, I am also serious, I don’t dumb myself down and I make my living though crypto. I guess it just blew up in a perfect storm of weirdness.”

Did she predict Jan. 6, or did she just read the newspapers?

It might also be down to her humor and calling both the Biden presidential win and the Jan. 6, 2021 uprising, although political majors might have achieved similar success through reading the papers.

She also picked up a number of high-profile features in tier-one publications such as The Washington Post, Reuters and The New Yorker — not magazines that frequently publicize highly improbable predictions.

Scrolling through her popular TikToks at one point when talking about flipping NFTs, she explains that she put a down payment on an apartment in Dubai by flipping one NFT. It’s pretty inspirational.

Mostly, though, her income is through her trading, and she is reluctant to do much monetization of her socials.

“I’ve been hesitant to partner with paid sponsors because everyone in crypto hates people that monetize their socials. It’s just not done,” she explains.

She has written several articles for crypto traders and for market analyst Mati Greenspan on his Quantum Economics platform, but she is not directly employed by him.

In other interviews, she points to her Astrology Academy, where she offers astrology training to paying clients. There are about 150 paying clients. She says that she has 1,000 people in her membership community paying between $7 and $50 a month for her teachings.

Charting a course through the storm

At this point, I ask if she has had much pushback. Yes, she has, to the point of having to flee the country because of death threats.

“New York was no longer safe for me, and so I went to friends in Dubai,” she says.

Altman is back in New York when we speak, but she references the trolling campaign spearheaded by a 2021 article in Rolling Stone where she was called a white supremacist, a racist, homophobic and transphobic, among other things. Worryingly, given her following, it accused her of plagiarism.

There is a lot to unpack in the series of tweets and articles written around this time. BIPOC astrologers in the same field, such as AstroDim, said that Altman had, at first, dissed their commentary that President Biden would die in office but then reposted similar predictions later on.

In other social media flareups, Altman, a vegan, has used inflammatory images and texts in support of her dietary choices. Again, it has caused some backlash.

the more importance you have to say, the more others will misrepresent you & take you out of context.

the key is to remember that what you have to say is more important than shutting up.

— MAREN (@marenaltman) January 7, 2022

The BIPOC astrologers in the same article also maintained that there is a general bias against BIPOC people across social media platforms, targeting TikTok in particular.

The biggest complaint made against Altman by the BIPOC astrologers in that 2021 Rolling Stone article is that when Altman talks about the same topics as they do, she gets more views. That might say more about America than astrology.

Altman apologized in a number of videos about her comments and videos on gender fluidity, trans people and animal/meat eaters before going offline during the Mercury retrograde when she went to Dubai.

According to Altman, she was not trolled by crypto heads but rather “spiritual crazies” who invented a lot of their claims.

She certainly does attract a lot of attention — good and bad — and there is even a Twitter account presenting an archive of her more standout tweets where she claims, among other things, that artificial insemination for dairy cows is a form of sexual assault.

Promoting disordered eating as well as an ongoing moral superiority complex pic.twitter.com/BImU7tO5Lf

— maren altman tweets (@marenaltmantwe1) February 9, 2021

Altman says she went to the police when the threats escalated and now has security.

A thread: #astrotwitter 2 nights ago I was shocked to see Maren Altman tweet she has a legal team handling the recent incident involing her and the rest of the astro community, it wasn’t a good look…

— Jalin (@C_Jalin) February 12, 2021

What we know for certain if you believe in the charts, however, is that she is assured of more success in her future.

“Not famous, as that is a very loaded word, but I always knew I would be successful. Funnily enough, my own astrology charts are entirely focused on finance, and it never made sense to me until now.”

“In time, I’ll move away from day trading and into angel investing, but I need to build my capital first.”

Source

As Ethereum gas prices rise, the chain that inspired Web3 is becoming gentrified, with high transaction costs pushing less wealthy users onto competing blockchains or scaling solutions.

This means that many use cases are becoming unfeasible in the proverbial layer-one downtown, and suburban neighborhoods are being developed to allow for a cost-effective layer-two blockchain experience. 

Since getting acquainted with Polygon around the time of its launch in late 2019, Sameep Singhania has been an avid supporter of projects built on the protocol. In 2021, he created QuickSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) serving the needs of the budding Polygon ecosystem.

Singhania left a promising career as a software developer in 2017 to work as a freelance developer, only to find himself writing code for an array of blockchain projects in the DeFi and layer-two sector. Among the many projects he worked on, he spent 18 months with blockchain e-commerce site OpenBazaar, and served as lead developer for DeFi exchange ParaSwap.

Polygon is one layer-two solution built on Ethereum, and it offers users lower fees when transacting on-chain. QuickSwap is Polygon’s primary DEX and functions as a heart of the network. 

A DEX for Polygon

After working on perhaps dozens of projects on Polygon from 2019 onward, Singhania “realized that to grow the Polygon ecosystem, we need a DEX.” 

This was because while “99% of blockchain projects have a token,” listings on popular exchanges are not easy to arrange, and many users are not willing to create an account at an obscure exchange just to trade a particular token that is not listed elsewhere. A DEX can function as the central market square of a blockchain network, giving its users access to everything they need without having to venture to another chain.

Singhania recalls being encouraged to create a DEX by Polygon’s co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, who put him in touch with Roc Zacharias, a marketer with Lunar Digital Assets. “That’s how we set up a team — we had developers, we had a marketing team, a perfect mix, and we launched the app,” he explains.

Polygon — previously called Matic Network, with MATIC remaining its ticker — is a layer-two blockchain. That means it’s a blockchain built on top of an existing chain. Whereas Lighting is an example of a layer-two, or L2, built on Bitcoin, Polygon is built upon Ethereum. As a result, Polygon-based tokens can be sent to Ethereum addresses, whose users can retrieve them simply by switching to the Polygon network on a DApp such as MetaMask.

The oft-stated advantage of L2 solutions is that they are more nimble than their behemoth parents, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions. With Bitcoin transactions costing over $10 and taking approximately 10 minutes for the first of six confirmations, it is clear that transacting on the parent chain is not practical for everyday transactions in El Salvador, for example, where laborers can earn as little as $100 per month. Instead, Salvadorans use Bitcoin Lighting, whose transactions cost as little as 1 satoshi.

The transaction costs on the Ethereum network are much higher, making it “unusable by the small users” who are effectively priced out of using DeFi solutions or decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. In January 2021, a “normal Ethereum transaction on Uniswap cost around $100,” Singhania recalls.

“If I’m a normal user and I want to do a small trade, I cannot do it on Ethereum — the average transaction size on Uniswap is somewhere around $50,000.”

“Polygon is there to scale Ethereum,” Singhania says, which has its pros and cons. He further explains that while “Ethereum is the most secure solution out there,” it comes at the cost of high gas fees and relatively slow transaction times.

That’s not exactly desirable for an economy — smaller denominations of currency exist because not everything can be done with $100 bills. L2s are the answer for allowing smaller transactions on existing networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. On Polygon, users can exchange Ethereum-based tokens, NFTs, and interact with smart contracts cheaply. 

📣LIVE NOW: @mcuban, @hackapreneur, @CryptoRocky, @AaveAave, & @0xPolygonspeak on Polygon Power Hour!

– @mcuban “People are probably a whole lot more active on Aave and QuickSwap on Polygon, than Ethereum L1 versions” – Mark Cubanhttps://t.co/99rGSoa04U pic.twitter.com/ySjxu049td

— QuickSwap (@QuickswapDEX) June 15, 2021

The pressing need for L2s is relatively new, because transaction costs have risen significantly in the past two years along with the blockchain user base. On QuickSwap, transactions between the over 23,000 available pairs cost only a few cents. “You can basically use QuickSwap to trade any ERC-20 token which has liquidity and exists on the Polygon network,” Singhania says. Fees are naturally paid in MATIC.

Considering the savings, switching digital assets from Ethereum to Polygon seems like an obvious solution for many users. However, some activities, like the trading of six-figure NFTs, remain decisively away from the Polygonian suburb. Similarly, Singhania acknowledges that those making million-dollar trades have less to gain from Polygon. 

There are two primary ways to move assets to Polygon, according to Singhania: exchange withdrawals and bridges. “A lot of big exchanges like Binance support deposits and withdrawals on the Polygon network,” which means that the Ethereum network can potentially be avoided entirely. As for assets already on Ethereum instead of on a centralized exchange, they can be bridged, which is effectively an inter-blockchain transfer.

“Both L1 and L2 applications have their own pros and cons and they both have their use cases — now it’s up to the user to choose which platform better suits their needs”

Learning the ropes

Singhania, 31, grew up in India’s capital, New Delhi. He had an early passion for coding since high school, describing the process of coding “like magic happening,” whereby “wonderful stuff” could be created with just a few lines of code. He followed his passion in 2008 to JSS Academy of Technical Education, on the outskirts of the capital, where he completed a bachelor in computer science and served as a campus IBM Ambassador.

Graduating in 2013, he began his career in software testing and automation at Dell, but soon realized that he wanted to “focus more on development” instead of remaining a software tester, a role with less opportunities for creative input, for the remainder of his career. He made the switch to software developer in 2015 at Drishti-soft Solutions, where he worked on customer service software and organized web development training sessions.

Still not quite settled in the role and in search of “something where I don’t get bored,” Singhania switched over to software freelancing in 2017. “When you do freelancing, you get to know a lot of people and learn about a lot of new industries and domains,” he recalls, noting that he was finally interested in his work. One of these new industries was blockchain, which he had previously heard about while working as a developer. 

“I again came across this blockchain and Bitcoin stuff while searching for a project, so I decided to give it some more time and do some more research — to figure out ‘what is this Bitcoin? What is this blockchain?’”

By mid-2018, Singhania was a full-time blockchain engineer for a number of projects, including Akila Labs, Bitgrit, and Toptal, where he developed ERC-20 tokens and smart contracts for things like airdrops, token vesting and crowdsales. Notable among this was 18 months spent working with the decentralized marketplace startup OpenBazaar, “which was trying to build something very similar to Amazon — but on blockchain” using the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Singhania recalls with excitement.

Compounding knowledge

“When DeFi was just starting” in 2018, Singhania worked as the lead developer and first employee of ParaSwap, an aggregator DApp which brings together multiple DEXs so that users can seamlessly trade cryptocurrency pairs which do not exist together on any exchange. All of this trading is done through Singhania’s smart contracts, which “handle millions of dollars everyday,” he says proudly, adding that the platform saw 3.3 billion dollars in volume in the past month.

“That project allowed me to make an entry into DeFi — it basically introduced me to everything out there like Uniswap, Bancor, Kyber Network, because to build ParaSwap we needed to learn everything about DeFi.”

With DeFi under his belt, Singhania encountered layer-two blockchain solutions while working on a dice game for one of his clients, a blockchain casino.

He soon realized that “it was too expensive to do it on Ethereum” — even though 2019 gas fees were a fraction of what they are today. Something new was needed, and Singhania “started exploring for layer-two solutions,” he recounts. He first built his dice game on the now defunct layer-one Loom Network which shut down shortly thereafter, Singhania scouted out Matic Network, which was in late 2019 “very new and their mainnet was not launched.” Working with the Matic Network team, now called Polygon, Singhania got the dice game up and running, becoming acquainted with the Polygon network in the process.

Ethereum dice games are not the first to suffer from scaling issues. Erik Voorhees’ SatoshiDICE, for example, was launched in 2012 and soon accounted for over half of Bitcoin transactions. With transaction prices increasing, making small on-chain bets on Bitcoin’s main layer has since become impractical.

.@QuickswapDEX has shown tremendous growth on Polygon PoS & has become the biggest Polygon-native decentralized application in terms of users, TVL, & volume.

We’re offering them $1m in liquidity mining incentives to strengthen the platform’s liquidity

🌐:https://t.co/Z3fb8BOCmw pic.twitter.com/gHN9ZL89U6

— Polygon | $MATIC 💜 (@0xPolygon) September 30, 2021

Onboarding the next generation

Now that Polygon is a low-cost option to L1 and has a reliable DEX, Singhania believes that the next step in scaling the layer is to improve the user experience in order to make it user-friendly for millions of people who are new to cryptocurrency. As QuickSwap is a central point of the Polygon ecosystem, much of the responsibility falls to his shoulders.

“The way that things are designed right now, it’s not for a novice —  it’s for a well-trained crypto user.”

In Singhania’s view, the price of MATIC can be expected to follow the adoption of the Polygon layer. If the team continues to execute, “it is just a matter of time” as to when prices might begin a steady climb. One thing is clear: Singhania is no longer bored with his work and is “not doing any kind of freelancing because I don’t have time.”

Source

Colin Fitzpatrick is a Dubliner based in Dubai who turned a bad time during quarantine into a business that promises to bring your favorite artists to a metaverse near you. His company Animal Concerts, which launches in January, is in the process of signing world-class artists to perform in the decentralized worlds of the Metaverse.

Among the first to get the Animal Concerts treatment was Grammy-winning rapper Future, who performed at an in-person Animal Concerts-themed Halloween party in Miami, which was filmed in such a way that it can later be broadcast in the Metaverse. In this startling new land, there are no COVID restrictions nor travel bans, and artists can sell NFT memorabilia to fans with little overhead, investment or middlemen. 

Virtual concerts have already begun to appear, most notably Ariana Grande’s October 2021 performance in Fortnite. Around 78 million Fortnite users attended Grande’s show, with some commentators speculating that she was set to earn over $20 million from the virtual gig.

Travis Scott pulled in $20 million for a Fortnite performance in 2020, and Ed Sheeran similarly took to the virtual stage of Pokemon Go in November 2021. When Swedish star Zara Larsson held a concert on Roblox, she earned seven figures for sales of “in-game items like hats, backpacks and sunglasses” which started at just $1.

[embedded content]

Fitzpatrick says that he is in the last stages of signing a concert with a top-100 Grammy-winning artist who I agree not to name. In preparing for the concert, she would “go into a green screen studio where she does our performance, and we record it and then we can essentially turn her into an avatar where she is properly in one of the decentralized blockchain-run worlds,” he explains, regarding the process of concert digitalization.

Holding concerts in the Metaverse comes with a slew of advantages for artists, according to Fitzpatrick. Whereas streaming services like Spotify are reducing music revenues, Animal Concerts allows performers to earn 50% of the revenue from both ticket and NFT sales. With celebrities benefiting directly, they have a big incentive to entice their fans into the Metaverse, where many of them will encounter blockchain for the first time.

A former DJ who has been passionate about music from a young age, Fitzpatrick points to a cupboard behind him where he keeps a box with “ticket stubs and flyers from gigs that I went to when I was in my youth.” For him, they are priceless mementos of his formative experiences.

A changing industry

Just as the idea of a Metaverse powered by virtual reality (VR) was gaining steam along with the explosion of NFTs earlier this year, Fitzpatrick realized the two could be combined to offer solutions to a struggling music industry, which he says has seen declining revenues with countless concert tours canceled since the beginning of the pandemic. 

The platform will soon allow people at home to stream VR-augmented concerts live and experience them as an interactive event rather than as one-sided TV broadcasts. NFTs can be given out as Metaverse-age equivalents of the ticket stubs in Fitzpatrick’s memory box. 

“With 360-degree cameras on stage, you can use a VR headset to get an immersive experience — like you are dancing on stage with your favorite bands, from your living room anywhere in the world. We want to enable you to enjoy the concert with friends by seeing their avatars,” he explains. The goal is to become the “Netflix of live streaming concerts.”

“There’s been a lot of very high profile concerts already in various different Metaverses”. 

Fitzpatrick explains that virtual concerts are desirable from the artist’s perspective because they do not require travel and the number of viewers is not limited by venue size. There is naturally also an economic driver, as virtual venues do not demand the same amount of stagehands, security or other costly infrastructure, and also because the number of middlemen is reduced. 

With the view that different scheduled events are happening in various virtual worlds, the idea of the Metaverse as a reality consisting of numerous intertwined virtual worlds is becoming increasingly current.

Animal Concerts is honored to be working with 15-time GRAMMY Award winner @aliciakeys as she plays at her One Night Only event celebrating the launch of her new double album “KEYS”.#KEYS #KEYSUnlocked #KeysOriginal pic.twitter.com/YhzDPiPXiJ

— Animal Concerts (@animalconcerts) December 16, 2021

What these metaverses have in common, whether games like Roblox or blockchain worlds like Decentraland, is that “they have a huge user base and they’re going to be selling digital assets in one way or another,” Fitzpatrick says. While most centralized worlds will require a user account, decentralized worlds allow access via wallet software, such as MetaMask. The major difference between centralized and decentralized worlds is their interoperability — items purchased in Pokemon Go cannot be transferred to Roblox, whereas NFTs can be displayed in a large number of different decentralized virtual worlds.

“Today’s kids are used to purchasing skins — digital assets in games. It’s a very simple step for them to look to purchase NFTs released by their favorite musicians,” Fitzpatrick says.

The need for a wallet can be a barrier for those who are new to crypto, Fitzpatrick admits. Similar to Beeple, who wanted to make sure his NFTs can be purchased by credit card, Fitzpatrick sees a future where virtual concert-goers have the option to “go to a website, putting in the credit card details and purchasing tickets and then purchase an NFT without worrying about a cryptocurrency.”

In many cases, these NFTs could be combined with physical memorabilia, such as an NFT and a physical copy of handwritten lyrics by the artist. They might also be combined with virtual meet and greets — specifics are largely up to the artists.

Dublin to Dubai

Fitzpatrick, 41, began on his path in 1999 when he began studying business management at Portobello Institute in his native Ireland. He immediately began doing freelance web design work, soon expanding to DJing and working as a nightclub organizer.  “I used to organize club nights and do festivals,” he recounts of his younger days.

He chose the corporate path upon graduation, joining Dell as a relationship manager in 2002, and in 2006 took an enterprise sales job with Oracle where he spent five years until 2011. After about two years with Salesforce and HubSpot, Fitzpatrick returned to Oracle for seven years, which saw him rise through the ranks from a sales strategy manager to a leadership position in the “Multi-Cloud Ecosystem” unit, with the latter promotion taking him from Dublin to Dubai “to build new business here for them” in late 2018.

Fitzpatrick discovered Bitcoin at around $100 in 2013, but he was “sadly persuaded out of it by a friend,” he recalls. He got back in the game in late 2016, however, becoming “a full convert” when the concept of blockchain clicked for him. Soon enough, he started chatting with another employee at Oracle who was interested in crypto, and “then we found someone else,” and it started to “spread like wildfire,” he recounts with a laugh.

“Fast forward a couple of months — halfway through 2017, there was more cryptocurrency trading being done in the office than there was selling Oracle software!”

Spending much of his time researching cryptocurrencies, he “wanted to go work for a blockchain company, but there was nothing in Dublin,” and “virtual jobs” were not as common as they are post-COVID, he explains. 

COVID wreaked havoc on Oracle. The company, despite having recently moved Fitzpatrick, an employee of 13 years, to a new country, “made me redundant smack bang in the middle of COVID, which absolutely sucked — it was just when the lockdown started,” he recalls with a hint of shade. “I was in big trouble” as almost no companies were hiring at the time, but Fitzpatrick managed to find work as a director of business development with Eastnets, “a local company who do payments and software compliance.”

A year in, however, he quit. It was time to strike his own path as an entrepreneur. 

Fan tokens for music

Fitzpatrick says that the average Animal Concert will cost between $10 and $30 to attend, with tickets available on sites like Ticketmaster as if for any event taking place in the “meatspace,” as some Metaverse proponents humorously like to call the physical world. Those purchasing tickets with Animal’s native token will receive discounts, “so if you want to buy with our token, it will be cheaper, so that’s an incentive to use our native token,” he adds. 

There’s always a token, of course, and the Animal token will also function as a governance token, allowing fans and artists to engage in interesting new ways, such as by “voting on which songs artists will play or what outfit they will wear.” Fitzpatrick believes that a highly engaged fan base is “sticky,” and will attend numerous concerts while purchasing artists’ NFTs. Those staking the token will be eligible for “first access to the hottest NFT drops, or you get free tickets to future concerts,” he adds.

This model can be compared to the fan token phenomenon, of which Socios is the market leader. Socios has a tradeable native token which comes with various utility functions, and the fan tokens created by the firm for different sports teams gather more chatter from fans who seem to view them as akin to investments in their favorite teams. Such tokens can also provide sports clubs with massive liquidity, as they can slowly release them as fans open their wallets. 

Could Animal become the Socios of music?

“We have a plan to create a token for each artist,” Fitzpatrick responds, explaining that each artist has a group of very loyal fans who would be sure to be interested in holding tokens based on their idol. Looking through the lens of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens that cannot be subdivided, a fungible token can be imagined as a single, fractionalized NFT which represents the name, idea, or concept it pertains to. 

As such, “Ariana Grande Token” could quite possibly be expected to rise in value in relation to her star power, and investing in the coin of an emerging artist could prove fruitful. Just as with Socios-created sports tokens, music fan tokens could, in the future, function as a sort of quasi-share of the artist.

Star power is sure to have a big impact on any future tokens, as Fitzpatrick agrees that fans “won’t necessarily care about the Animal Token, but they would care about the Ariana Grande Token.”

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Platon, the British photographer famous for his close-up portraits of world leaders, is using NFT photos of the human iris to show how humans can be reduced to a unique but unrecognizable image. He even did one self-portrait of his own iris — but, if placed in an iris lineup, he could not tell his own from anyone else’s.

Platon only uses one name – like Prince, he says.

His first human portrait reduction took place in June 2021, when he auctioned 12 anonymous irises as NFTs, each one priced at $111 on the LGND.art marketplace. People bidding for the NFTs, each a single mint, did not know whose iris NFT they were buying.

They were in for a pleasant surprise: It turns out they were bidding to purchase NFTs depicting the irises of Kobe Bryant, Harry Styles, Harvey Weinstein, James Comey, George Clooney, Donald Trump, Cara Delevingne, Bill Clinton, Caitlyn Jenner, Alicia Keys, Spike Lee, and Maria “Masha” Alyokhina. They all sold out but have remained static on the secondary market, as the holders appear to want hodl the strange art pieces.

Photographer to the stars

In a career littered with outstanding celebrity portraits, Platon is now consumed with human rights causes and is more concerned with and fulfilled by capturing the faces of activists. In 2008, he spent a year documenting civil rights leaders across America as part of a project commissioned by The New Yorker.

But, while his mission is now virtuous, his world leader and celebrity shoots are legendary; he used the camera to tell stories, posing often provocative or eclectic questions — that is his superpower.

For Platon, moving into NFTs was logical. “Photographers, artists, often innovate and seek out new technologies. We like to move into new space and experiment,” he says.

He now revels in his work documenting human rights, working on projects with the U.N. He has set up his own foundation, The People’s Portfolio, which amplifies the voices of the ignored. Important people don’t scare him — he doesn’t scare easily. He quotes Martin Luther King, who said “beware the illusion of supremacy.” The funds raised from these recent NFT drops go straight to this foundation.

Platon treats everyone the same. He doesn’t care if they are a human rights defender, an activist, a former political prisoner, or a head of state.

“They’re all people. Be nice. Be curious,” he says.

“My job is to be a cultural provocateur. When I saw NFTs, I understood this was a way for me, as an artist, to gain control over my work. To feel a sense of empowerment – there is a long history of artists losing control over their creative output through history. With NFTs, I could see we were cutting out the middlemen — we artists were going straight to the collectors. I got that.

“I also understood that, with NFTs, I wanted to put storytelling back into this new, exciting technology. It’s more than tech; it’s an opportunity to talk about the big issues we face in society — issues such as human rights, climate change, poverty, women’s rights, social inclusion, racial equality.

“When I saw the buzz about NFTs, I wondered if I could hijack some of that excitement and draw it towards important social issues.”

Platon’s first NFT was a portrait of Edward Snowden. He admits the vagaries of the world move in mysterious ways. In April, an auction of the Snowden NFT raised $5.5 million for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and then $5,000 for his own foundation.

Back to the beginning

Born in 1968, Platon studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He began working in London, earning his stripes as a photographer. Soon, he was accumulating portraits in his arresting style, which could be both authentic and dramatic, earning himself a name at British Vogue.

He did not realize it, but John F. Kennedy Jr. was scouting for a photographer to launch his new George magazine in New York. Kennedy picked out multiple of Platon’s portrait photographs in magazines and told his aides he wanted that photographer, without even knowing his name at that stage. Kennedy just knew he wanted a photographer to shoot people in a way that felt real. He had grown up inside the inner circle, but wanted to present people – politicians and celebrities – as real people. So, Platon was found and invited to New York based on his work.

It was 1995. The magazine’s tagline was “Not Just Politics As Usual” and neither were the images. Platon says:

“John told me we were working on a secret new project. He wanted to humanize the world’s most powerful people. He gave me access, he said I must always be respectful but he wanted me to produce real photography.”

When Kennedy was tragically killed in 1999, Platon was doing a cover story for him the same day. Platon had just landed in Hollywood when the FBI met him at the airport to tell him the news.

“I was by then rooted in the States but I had to continue without my mentor,” he says.

Presidential, suite

It’s 2000. President Bill Clinton is in the White House. Platon is commissioned by Esquire Magazine to do a formal shoot. Platon figures this might be the one and only time he shoots a living president (actually, he goes on to shoot six in his illustrious 30-year career).

Camera dangling from his hands like a James Dean cigarette, he asks, “Will you show me the love?”

Instant concern within the White House team — the impeachment trial over the Monica Lewinsky affair had concluded the year earlier. A hush descends, everyone looks aghast at Platon while an aide leans over and says, none too quietly, in Clinton’s ear, “That is not advisable, Mr. President. We’ve had enough love in this administration.” Instead, Clinton brushes him aside and says in his distinctive drawl, “Shut up, shut up, I know what he wants.”

The result is the famous crotch shot with Clinton sitting, hands on knees, legs akimbo, and oozing charisma and power. People said afterwards the tie was an arrow pointing to the seat of power.

Putin on the Beatles

Cut to President Vladimir Putin in Russia in 2007. He’s Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.” Platon is taking pictures. He thinks: What to ask this powerful man? So, he asked him about The Beatles. Turns out Putin really likes the Beatles, and Paul McCartney is his favorite member of the seminal band. Look at the resulting portrait of Putin and see him humming “Yesterday.” Not “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” laughs Platon.

It’s not just questions – it’s storytelling and a way of relating to his subjects. Platon has a son called Jude and a dog called Sgt. Pepper. Platon clearly likes The Beatles too.

A lifetime of photography has allowed Platon to tap into the authentic and look inside the heads of his subjects. Sometimes these subjects are the most powerful people in the world, sometimes people whose power has been taken from them, and sometimes people who are just ignored.

It’s the ignored who he obsesses over now. “It’s not that they don’t have a voice, it’s just that people are not listening,” he says.

In all Platon’s portraits, he is in them too. With Putin, he got so close he could feel Putin’s breath on his hands as he held the camera inches from his face.

“All my photography is 50% subject and 50% me,” he says.

He is dismissive of the constant taking of photographs and sharing on social media.

“That’s not photography, there is no connection. It’s just mechanical. We’ve been robbed of our connection and COVID has clearly highlighted that.”

Pussy Riot NFT

Putin famously hated the feminist punk band Pussy Riot and defended their imprisonment on the grounds that they threatened the moral foundations of Russia.

Platon first met Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot after her release from prison. Ten years ago, he photographed her in his studio. They messed about, fashioned homemade masks from rubbish in his studio. He photographed her in the masks and not. As we speak, he quotes from her speech on the dock prior to being sentenced to two years’ incarceration in a penal colony.

She said: “It’s not us three women from a punk rock group that’s on trial here. It’s you, the Russian Federation. it’s not for you to judge us. It’s for history to judge us all. And history will be the ultimate judge as to whether our values are right or wrong.”

He knew he wanted to combine this powerful speech with her iris in an NFT to celebrate her bravery.

Platon took her iris and coupled it with her reading her statement of reconciliation to create a unique NFT. The auction ran for seven days in September but, owing to the aforementioned vagaries of this world, this NFT did not sell. It’s not stopping Platon, though. He has many more irises and causes to celebrate and he’s planning multiple iris NFT drops in the future.

The trouble with Harvey

At the core of these drops is a story. Each iris tells a story. Each story asks a question.

Included in the first drop was filmmaker Harvey Weinstein, prior to the #MeToo movement.

“At the time the portrait was themed ‘bad boy Hollywood’. Now we know him to be a modern-day monster.

“What if I took away 90%, 95% of the picture. Just reduced it to the eye, the window to the soul, and even further reduced it to the iris. What can we see then? Can we even judge?”

Which brings us to the title of the drop – “Eye Love You, Eye Hate You II.”

“The eye is the most intimate part of the body; when we are in love, we look deeply into our partner’s eyes,” says Platon.

“If I strip away everything except the iris – can we love, can we hate? And if all our irises are indistinguishable, then who can judge?”

Source

When Nicholas Merten saw a video explaining Bitcoin in November 2011, he brushed it off, later lamenting that “I unfortunately did not do the right thing.” It’s hard to blame him, after all, he was only 13. 

Now 23, he runs DataDash, a YouTube channel with over 470,000 subscribers, making it among the largest focused on the cryptocurrency industry. There, he shares tips about trading and makes thoughtful, balanced, and interesting commentary on various relevant topics along with occasional speculation. What is notable about his channel is that it is almost entirely absent of hype, preferring calculated and tempered analysis. 

Merten is also the CEO of Digifox, a DeFi startup that aims to act as a one-stop shop for new cryptocurrency investors, soon allowing them to automatically deposit portions of their paychecks into crypto by way of dollar-cost averaging.

Drop-out entrepreneur

Merten got started with investing at 13, though “even before that I was doing research,” he adds, leaving one to wonder whether his first words were stock tickers. He was quickly bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and by 17 he was experimenting with a clothing company of his own making, and separately “tried to make relaxation beverages” by formulating recipes with a partner company.

“It was a nice head start to understand a lot of the emotional nature of markets and market cycles.”

It was due to this “intimate interest” in entrepreneurship that Merten, who grew up in Virginia, chose to study business administration and finance at Virginia Commonwealth University. He quickly dropped out, however, opting instead for alternative education through Praxis, which matches accepted students with six-month internships for on-the-job learning after a three-month training period. Often, these internships convert into full-time positions, and Merten “was really hungry to get my first job.”

That first job as a sales data management intern came at age 18, located “six blocks down from where Steve Jobs used to live” in San Francisco, Merten recalls. This was followed by six months as a content manager at ClickUp, a project management software company that is “like a billion dollar unicorn now,” he says, emphasizing the learning opportunities that come with working at such a high-growth firm.

While working at ClickUp, Merten created his YouTube channel called DataDash, which he originally envisioned as dealing with data science and data analytics. Soon, DataDash became a cryptocurrency channel after Merten made a few videos on the subject. “I got a couple hundred views, and I was like ‘you know what, I’ll keep going’,” he recalled.

With the 2017 bull market in full swing, Merten decided to leave his job at ClickUp in order to devote his full-time efforts towards his crypto craft. 

Don’t trade, DCA

In 2019, he expanded by founding Digifox, “which I originally started building back in 2013.” The startup consists of a smartphone wallet app that allows users to trade and earn interest on their cryptocurrency deposits via a plug-in to Celsius.

In the weeks ahead, Digifox will come out with a “get paid in crypto” feature, which will help people to receive a portion of their salary in cryptocurrency, received right in the app. Initially available in the USA and later the EU and UK, workers earning a salary will be able to simply request their human resources departments to direct a portion of their paychecks to a bank account owned by Digifox. ”Your employer doesn’t even have to know your earning crypto,” Merten clarifies, adding that the app charges a 1% flat fee.

“Buying crypto but in the US, I know that a lot of banks, they’ll freeze transactions on debit cards or bank accounts — we think of this as the ultimate crypto on-ramp.”

This method of regularly buying into a cryptocurrency is called dollar-cost averaging, or DCA, and is a common concept from the old world of traditional investing. Merten says that many new investors ask him “if it is a good time to buy, price-wise,” to which he recommends DCA as a way to spread out risk. 

Why should you #GetPaidinCrypto?

💲Larger investment increments mean smaller fees

🧘‍♂️Averaging over time mitigates volatility

💸Earn up to 5% interest

📈Bitcoin has grown 400% annually on avg.

Getting paid in crypto needn’t be complicated – sign up on the Digifox app today.

— Digifox (@digifox_finance) October 1, 2021

This is because the average buyer may have no way of knowing whether they are buying into a temporary peak. If we were to imagine a continuously rising asset, an investor who does not previously have a large amount of investment capital for immediate allocation would be better off to invest $1,000 per month for 12 months, rather than to save up for a year in order to invest $12,000 at the end. That’s why I get paid in Ethereum — an arrangement that has treated me well. 

“It’s a great strategy. In this case, for someone to passively invest and not have to stress about the market,” Merten confirms. Another useful factor in the dollar-cost-averaging method is that its systematic nature tends to mitigate against the oft-dreaded “panic selling” which many new investors succumb to after seeing their investment drop in value.

Unlike many other channels, Merten’s DataDash does not encourage its followers to over-trade or enter leveraged positions despite the potential rewards. “The first principle I say is ‘do not day trade’,” he emphasizes, saying that passive investors are 95% more likely to end up in profit. But there’s something potentially even more dangerous than day trading — doing it on leverage.

🥳 We’re hosting a webinar and LIVE Q&A with @Nicholas_Merten on Dollar Cost Averaging next week!

You can ask him a question by joining us on zoom.

Click the link below to get your invite before all of the spots fill up!https://t.co/NUIMI4Qvzt pic.twitter.com/d2Lz6CSmNW

— Digifox (@digifox_finance) October 11, 2021

According to Merten, leveraged trading is the biggest danger faced by crypto investors today. It is enticing, with a single correct call “easily” netting huge returns in a short timeframe — but at great risk. Despite his warnings, leverage is seen as an intrinsic part of crypto-investing by many, with a large number of influencers referring to leveraged trades as “positions” to differentiate them from mere “spot” holdings which are 1:1. 

“It’s really bad that a lot of people are getting into leverage trading — you know they’re getting into trading on derivatives platforms, and it’s generally a losing game for most people.

Time to DeFi

With margin trading off the table, Merten encourages users to put their cryptocurrency to work using decentralized finance, or DeFi solutions. Merten believes that the app’s DeFi-like functionality is important, because high gas costs on Ethereum make on-chain transactions expensive for retail investors even if they know exactly what they are doing. “A small investor, like a $1,000 investor, they’re going to have a difficult time because there’s an immediate 5-10 percent fee on their trade,” he says, his example very likely an understatement.

ETH gas fees are highest from 4 pm to 12 am EST, especially on Tuesday & Thursday.

It’s cheapest to trade ethereum on weekends, especially Sunday, from 1 am to 6 am EST. 👀 pic.twitter.com/wj8pLHHnpZ

— Digifox (@digifox_finance) September 28, 2021

Gas fees rack up quickly when trading tokens or adding liquidity pairs to decentralized exchanges like Uniswap or SushiSwap. “As great as it is for someone who might be trading thousands, hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it doesn’t make sense for our everyday users,” Merten claims. Recently, NFT minting has been blamed as a cause for spikes in gas prices.

Once the crypto hits the Digifox wallet, users can choose to deposit it into a yield account, where it “can earn up to 5%” in interest denominated in the same currency. This is done through a direct plug-in to the external Celsius platform. Similar to traditional banking, earnings of depositors ultimately come from other users who elect to borrow from Celsius using cryptocurrency as collateral. “We try to say it’s like a kind of savings account,” Merten explains.

“I think that this is one of the few major opportunities we have in our lives in the 21st century — where you can invest in something and really make a sizable return”

Though, “Celsius doesn’t have a major insurance policy” for the user’s cryptocurrency they hold in custody while paying interest, Merten says he chose the platform after researching the security protocols of its competitors including BlockFi and NEXO. In the future, he expects that the company will allow users to earn a lower amount of interest, also known as yield, in an insured pool where “some of the yields that they’re giving up goes into an insurance fund” to compensate for potential losses. 

He admits that it “provides some peace of mind” that Celsius has $20 billion under management, which makes Digifox a very minor player at around $10 million.

Expert outlook

Merten believes that we are now halfway through the cryptocurrency market cycle — not in a period of fear or doubt, but neither yet at peak optimism, which he sets at Bitcoin approaching $200,000 and Ethereum trading between $15,000 and $20,000. He says this would bring the crypto market to a total value of $10 trillion, a far cry from the current $2 trillion market valuation.

“Different from most people, I don’t think the cycle is going to end this year, and I don’t think it’s going to end in early 2022 — I think it will be late 2022 or early 2023,” he says, referring to the many industry pundits who are calling for a peak around the upcoming new year.

Instead of relying on times of the year, Merten believes in “expanding cycles,” where the market cycles expand by “11 to 13 months from previous cycles.” He explains that in his view, the first Bitcoin market cycle was 11 months, followed by the second which lasted 24. As the cycle ending in 2018 took 35 months, he anticipates the 2022 bull market to last about 47 months.

“If history repeats, it would be December 2018 for the start and November 2022 for the cycle end,” he says referring to Bitcoin, adding that altcoins are likely to top “soon after.”

Despite his tendency to make predictions, he admits that he was entirely blindsided by this year’s NFT boom “I thought CryptoKitties was kind of the end of it in 2017, and I did not see it coming back with such a vengeance,” he recounts with a sense of bewilderment, referring to the cat-breeding NFT project which clogged up the Ethereum network in 2017. Merten says he is keeping an open mind despite fraud and “over-hype” in the sector.

With 10 years of investing experience, Merten considers a long-term outlook as a key virtue for those looking to make long-term profits. 

“I like to make a few simple coordinated investments for trades — over a one to two year timeframe. I like to get into the maximum point of fear and doubt in the market when prices are at historic discounts, and I like to ride the wave.”

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