Here’s what I enjoyed reading and learning over the holiday break (in no particular order). Hope you find it useful :)

1. A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is virtual money backed and issued by a central bank. As cryptocurrencies and stablecoins have become more popular, the world’s central banks have realized that they need to provide an alternative—or let the future of money pass them by. Here is the CBDC tracker across the globe:

   https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/

2. I’m a huge admirer of Balaji Srinivasan’s writings/podcasts. Here is a (slightly older) article that helps in understanding how to measure and quantify decentralization:

   https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e

3. CityCoins are cryptocurrencies that allow you to support your favorite cities while earning Stacks and Bitcoin. There are CityCoins for New York and Miami and Austin (Coming soon). Some links that helped me learn more about CityCoins and Stacks protocol:

   https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-citycoins-and-how-does-it-work/

   https://www.citycoins.co/

   

4. Read this interesting EIP which allows contracts, such as NFTs that support ERC-721 and ERC-1155 interfaces, to signal a royalty amount to be paid to the NFT creator or rights holder every time the NFT is sold or re-sold. This is intended for NFT marketplaces that want to support the ongoing funding of artists and other NFT creators. This could be very useful for content creators, artists, and organizations that protect performance rights such as SESAC, ASCAP, BMI etc:

   https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981

5. Super cool way of visualizing, toying around with blocks, blockchains, distributed blockchains, mucking around with blockchain data, mining, understanding nonce etc:

   https://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/blockchain

6. Crypto asset compliance and risk management: Example, enter a wallet address and find out if its a sanctioned address or not --- and much more from TRM labs:

7. JP Morgan’s report on business opportunities in the metaverse, metanomics, DAO’s and the ownership economy:

   https://www.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm/treasury-services/documents/opportunities-in-the-metaverse.pdf

8. Using Hashed Timelocked Contract(HTLC) to reduce counter-party risks in decentralized smart contracts by effectively creating a time-based escrow that utilizes a cryptographic passphrase:

   https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hashed-timelock-contract.asp

9. This paper imagines a world in which bitcoin replace the US Dollar as the international monetary standard and compares it to how fiat currencies replaced the Classic Gold Standard (1880-1914):

   https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/bitcoin-standard-lessons.pdf

10. Again, a quote from a Balaji Srinivasan podcast on “Rough Consensus and running code” for building practical, working systems that can be built quickly by getting a “rough sense of the group”:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_consensus

11. Lens protocol: Very interesting to how it can be used to build decentralized Web 3 social media apps:

    https://www.lens.xyz/

12. An interesting wallet called the Fearless Wallet users can create accounts on the Kusama, Polkadot relay chains and their parachains:

    https://fearlesswallet.io/#Features

13. Play to earn games on the blockchain: A documentary on the rise and popularity of Axie Infinity in the Philippines that helped many earn money from home during the pandemic:

    

14. Case study of National Bank of Combodia creating a CBDC, called Bakong in order to de-dollarize and improve financial inclusivity:

    https://www.hyperledger.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Hyperledger_CaseStudy_Soramitsu_Printable_111220.pdf

15. A pretty interesting blockchain explorer from Algorand:

    https://algoexplorer.io/

16. Not related to Crypto/Web 3.0/Blockchain, but a pretty useful app to help startup founders build pitch decks:

    https://app.slidebean.com/signin

17. Last, but not the least, the decentralized Web 3.0 publishing platform on which this blog was written, which I highly recommend trying.

    https://mirror.xyz/