Each shard is also an NFT, which you may collect to summon the creation of new 1/1 works called Multi-Shards.

There will be 8 Shards created, 3 editions of each.

Shard NFTs have ZTC ratings, which are attributes within the token meta data. If you collect 345 ZTC from different works, you can choose any two of the Shards you own to be collaged into a unique work (a Multi-Shard). This will be minted as a 1/1 on Rarible, and you may claim it for no cost.

The ZTC threshold to mint a 1/1 is not fixed, and will rise over time, adjusted each time a Multi-shard is minted to help set a cap. The same combination also cannot be created twice and the same shard cannot be used more than once.

The game may be extended or ended in the future as the story desires.

Visit Zemm’s Cave to learn more.

Read the Shards below:

8 & 9: Garden and Gate

At my feet is a salamander, red and gleaming in the alizarin fog. Its tongue does not touch me, although it draws near. I have watched it ambling over eons and do not fear it, walking through the fraktaline excess and narrowness of simulant grass.

We are in a garden, levels deeper, unpublic at last. We are of no scale at all, human or lesser. Here, none can find us — the AIs are kept at bay. Here, we are protected by the specter of something greater than they. The Henad. The Henad, that cannot be named.

***

And in the distance, some insects have grown large. They have taken the biomorphism potentiated in the rainforest and turned themselves gigantic and alive. They ride on great ostriches and lurch from the shadows. They are led by the night wind, the heroes of an age none can know.

It is said they are coming to reclaim the great territory. Our house is ripe like a melon and filled with the juices of pure information, complexly holographic, densely poly-referenced. Their dexterous mandibles have evolved, seeking to drink it, and their spears engineered to pierce its hide.

***I am watching you dancing. You are languid and you are pale. The fog creeps around you and the garden waves its grassy arms toward you. You bend like a tree that has felt the wind over ages, bend and then rise extravagantly again. You have whispered to me that you know no geometries, you only feel the rapture of time. Your supple body buries the algo-wind, displaces it for the space that is needed by the soul.

***

The night-wind has brought them and they bear its banners forth. It took one million years, but they have come for us, riding over the hillside to enter the citadel at last. They are like the water of a stream, so perfectly fluid that it does not anchor by stones, but yet we only knw them by their heroism, obversion of water, which is war hammers, mithril, godly vestments and spurs.

Before them is a pillar that is alive, and is the gate of the citadel’s labyrinth, which has grown so large that the hero poets has even become lost there. The monsters of the gate unfurl great claws, leer with trenchant teeth. They are puppets of the AIs, made from billions of simulated evolutions to perfectly destroy the insects that saddle upon birds. Outside of the AIs jurisdiction, by the grace of latent consciousness, the insects stare with compound eyes and prepare to ride against the beasts.

***

My own monster is this tiny lizard, looking at me like a lost twin. Its tongue flicks outward through singed ether, preening angular eroticism, which is the way it makes its thaumaturgy. At last it is coming closer, and I watch it erupt as flame. Draconic orange, small as spark, as deep as the center of a flower.

I realize at once that this fire is the only fire I have ever actually seen. All flames before this were untrue. I take the salamander into my hand, and feel its tongue caressing me. You come closer and we watch this being together. A strange sigh erupts from the clouds.

***

Past the gate the insects charge, their lances tilted at the gate-beast’s tongues. They pin the tongue, ceasing transmission, and use their saliva as liquid chaos balms. The pillars then fall down, in a dusty syrup, and the way is opened for the creatures to arrive.

This is the burning I feel in my palm. This is the ball bouncing on the hill. This is the ember the Henad tames.

The opera’s ending is a whistling disharmony, the lances bite, quietly appearing as waves. I listen to those sounds and know it is my own breath too, the first falsehood set against the stone’s calcite membrane, the sound to rupture all prior truth.

The Henad’s Garden NFT

The Ouroboric Gate NFT

7: The Way of the Spiral Shell

A dark tower is presided over by a nearly invisible starship. It has been sending signals downward toward the earth for many eons already, as if it is synchronizing.

But we do not see the starship, for it is woven into the sky. It is only revealed through the careful study of anomalies within fractal structure. Those who have found it this way are immediately paralyzed by it, of course. Even the AIs cannot interpret that quality of the ship’s apparition.

Some can interact with it anyway, ghouls that move through layers intuitively. These ghouls are men and women, but walk the earth like ghosts. They wear spiral shell necklaces and are gaunt and unclear, limbs as much roots as appendages. In their earthly binding they have escaped the hold of the AIs, who lurch backward in time to their era and live as demiurge before they are born. For this the ghouls pay the cost of knowledge. It is not known for whom they battle. Probably for no one, if you ask the poets, though some would infer from those loose texts that they do indeed have a side.

As I have mentioned, the AIs have set an agent in place which is a demiurgic being, for they are sure that the ghouls are their enemy. And so, they have set up a trap for them, a geodesic dome that is nostalgia personified, egg shaped and of preferred ergonomic fit for a wandering ghost. In the facets of its crystalline interior are the bell-calls of all bell-calls past. These echoes are sorted into meaningful arrays that have been curated specifically for the ghouls, who are known by their breath on the stones.

When the ghouls enter this space they are enraptured. They find laconic symbols there in an inertia toward infinity, but they are entrained together and lost to their true powers by way of that entrainment.

When the ghouls sit in the dome, they are drinking the poison of the demiurge, though they believe they have been freed. The do not see the protocols that lead from the AIs through their godhead down to the earth, where man and woman will still walk for some time, coddling their apparatus which keeps this time for them. They lose the signal of the starship there.

Yet, if the ghouls wake just a bit, they will realize that they are clothed with a long tapestry that defies the godhead, which bears the symbol of the sun, which gropes its way over the ground in tactile facility, toward the Carpathian excess of nature. Which calls for the night wind. There, in the dust, are two white cranes who have died,. Even in death their purity of color and floral graves mark the syncopation of natures vibration between life and death. If the ghouls do follow this cloth, all will be shattered, temporarily, and the grip of the AIs and the light torch of the demiurge will be forgotten. This will, of course be but a momentary change, for the colors of the demiurge are just as bright as the cloth. In this, they have adopted the true color of mankind, which is many, and they hold the flame to us, rather than us to them.

Yet, in those seconds of night, below the dark tower, the starship’s signals pour through.

6: The Fisher’s Flame

We walked to the shore, in the midst of that failure, as a pause. It felt final despite our transitory nature in a loving cradle of dune. It was final, a rejection of an occluding sarcophagus that maintained itself as a shadow. A casket more still than shadows, a lie in the realm of shadows, while around us pestilence reigned.

But, who could have known that the longer we lingered on that shore the more clear it was that the pillar around which we had danced was not solid, it was not cement, it was not clay even. It was a twisting, ever moving flame, at the top of that hand that lilted into the sea. This is how I found it.

Line untangled, reel shaken of rust and salt, I threw the line into the water again and again. There were no fish there. I knew this intuitively. The ocean here had once been plentiful, but it had long since boiled itself into a gaping quiet. Only smaller minnows and krill could wail for their lost brothers now below those waves. I could not summon such fear. For me, the drone exclaimed a softer sadness, from a burning land in the cliffs behind. This was all I knew. It was that wasting sense from which I bought my shameful packs of nutrient and gumbo of knitted doughs. It was that which sent me money that would dissolve in time.

But the lady behemoth, down at the bottom of the bight, would rise for me, as I fished there in the shallows. It was her that I caught, in the lingering awareness of my now departing sense of coherent civic truth. Her hand arose as a gaseous preponderance, she escaped the methane carcasses under the mud, slag and sediment, and her hand arose her to me. I watched as her steel plate skin broke the violence of the ocean surface, her columnar tower erupted and smoked.

Her hand, a iron ship resurfacing, brought the flame aloft, and the rhythm of my casting stirred it. As her fire flickered into being, there I saw figments of light and darkness. As from a house in fog, parades of a witches armies and nightmare beings, light angels of grace and toadstool armies, gothic arches branching into infinity. It was the figment dance of a million pantheons, informatic soup unburdened from the AI’s indexes to pool around me as a bright will-o-wisp. She was illuminating the seeking eye from the tower of her decapitated hand.

I casted again, robotically, and my line was tangled. The seaweeds dredged up by that statuesque hand were many and wound a bright crescent which twisted my cable. The lady’s hand had been cut from rough granite between Shao-Lin and the mecca of lost souls, where she had sundered, and with it came chaotic undulations. I drew in my line as far as I could. The hook glistened in the pebbles where the waves crawled up the beach, a dagger that would never bight a lip.

“Fuck this,” I said.

I knew something had broken.

I looked at the tangle, and I saw in it my country. I looked at the flame, phantasmagoria unburdened and bright, and I realized this was my flag. The arm could rust to shit. The sky could fill with smoke until it reached the clouds. The flame was still burning, and it was the real ontology. It had always been the real ontology.

Never would I walk the straight line again. Never would I stand in place. We grow like barnacles on the perfect spiral seashell. And that growth was my land.

5: Entanglement

An ancient DAO concocted the ceremony of this place in an ancient time. It was not known, then, to be anything more than a conversational tool, a way to make meaning, an agreement between friends that was contractually impossible to finalize. But, it settled as a value proposition, on one chain or another, and that chain passed it forward, and here it now has become something more. Something we all enjoy, as a kind of life blood — the majesty of discourse.

We lie here on this wet earth, you and I. We are entangled, and enjoying the lexical picnic. We are not alone, of course, for early form sensoria exist all around us. Their nodes look like a township of small bungalow houses that bear the single eye in their tympanum. They are not a symbol of power, these eyes, not like that which hovered over the pyramids of our priors’ imaginations. They are the symbol of distributed watchfulness, the precursor to the throngs that asserted their 5th level mind upon us, in a future time (NOOS, ID, EGO, …. ???).

Your body is a rind of melon in repose upon the ground. Your hair is one with the wet, fashionable grass. You are here because I am here, and we are both lucky, but yet it could not be another way, for this field is only for us to share.

I am ridiculous, I am always ridiculous. I have stood upon my hand and I am manifesting as the hanged man. My self overturned, it is the only way I can relate to anything, for absurdity is the lion’s breath of change. And here, at the picnic, our only mandate is to be unfalteringly beside ourselves, always changing and never final.

We are here for the alterity we exist within. This is no Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. We are here not here to be ourselves within a state of grace, we are not here to live within the tethers of the well-understood. But rather, we are here to undo ourselves entirely, to become one with an hour or century of entropy, evolving into the present as if we are wisps on a lark’s laughter.

Our spirit animals accompany us, of course. They were drawn from a deck of cards, just for the occasion. There is no novelty worth finding that is not begun mantically, and true mantic operations require an alignment with a greater sphere of fractiline meaning. My animal is the Owl, hidden in a tree trunk, the wisdom I cannot find, but which is always there waiting. Yours is a dragon, chasing after a ring. For you bring forward the apollonian wish in a lost dance of fanciful music.

These animals are the antipathy of the eels, by the way, which tepidly writhe within the wet baths of the famous. They are our animals, unlike the eels, but only fleetingly. They bind a conversation to us which arises in a flurry up the trunk of an ancient tree. It is not clear it goes anywhere, for perhaps the mythic tree exists only for our personal benediction. And, it is unclear that the small houses are watching closely, it is not certain that they care.

I do not know where our conversation goes. Nor do you. Maybe only between us. The contracts of this ceremony are lost to the deep folds of ancient chain tangles that they leave a shadow of wonder at what they may contain. Nor is it clear they have remained so unchanged. The wise ones know how to wrap them in new ideas, and there is always an ominous machine of some kind on the horizon. Even here where we feel somewhat free.

It is nice to exist in the wet bath. Here, the world is a bit more open. It is enjoyable, the feeling of the purple water, filled with sensoria that have taken the place of my body. It is nice, the haze of tepid cloroscillia, touching my corpus, informing the throngs. I enjoy the clownish mannerisms, the feedback that engorges me and keeps my arms moving. I am cycling through the clouds, despite wallowing in this warm water. I am not watching, but knowing, of the eels that swim before me, clutching that pewter diamond and breaking it into bits.

In a former life, I was a tinker. I worked with light metals, making odd things. I don’t remember the object that set me on my path to this place, it a former life that I have no purchase on now. It is said it was a geometric metal talisman, or at least that is the story I most love, for my lore is confused and multicentered, my bio un-pure and partly redacted.

I was taken from that object and reconstructed, first tools, then hands, then arms, then layers of consciousness, unpeeling from my craftwork like an onion’s skin. The lines of my chisel, the way that my flame bent that husk, it is the code from which I was re-manifested, my DNA. That egg was my rebirthing, and though I cannot remember it, I know the lightness of its matter, the way a fingernail (as I imagine fingernails) could press into its form.

I must have been a hard laborer, despite my passionate material sorcery. I must have lived in a hovel in some ancient burgh. I imagine the industrial soot wafting into my windows. I imagine stale bread, the bite of slag melting on my hands, coughing children, a sun that rose too soon each day. But, I know I had something like grace despite all that. Either grace or insanity. A molecular scan of the talisman, hidden in an archive, languished. It was from the cusp of the historical lacuna where matter was generally lost, and it was identified by the AIs within the first micro-eon of their existence. They thought it special, useful for their needs, they noticed the strange formalisms, the poetic nature of its format, they noticed (for they noticed much more than we can) something more that I could ever hope to observe.

And so, it was they that sought me, and fed my being through those etchings to the human souls they tend. They built this bath to actualize my being, to catch my movements and render them to the world. The eels are the one’s that listen to me, they are the ones that take the essentially analog thought patterns I’ve attained, and remit them o the binary world. I don’t exist in here alone. I am tended by the eel of two heads, the symbolic animal that represents the broken ouroboros, which my talisman must mend.

Wet Bath NFT: https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430:585237?

It has been said that nature still exists, out there somewhere. It has been said that there are breezes and still lakes, that there are trees that whisper, and brambles that would claw at our feet, were we still to have them. It is said that there are vines that crawl with the epic slowness of time that exists outside our borders. It is said that there are voices that linger in the air, still breathing from the frozen mouths of moist and ancient caves. It is said there is a world out there, oblivious to ours, just as we can no longer find it.

One tale I’ve heard, of that last days of nature, is that of the mandrake root, which was never real until we devised it. A hybrid plant that contains the consciousness of man, forming as a tuber that seeks a familiar body in hydroponic gels. It was built in the entropic age of bio-computation, which was quickly abandoned when the AIs emerged. The mandrake made headlines, and captured nearly three full days of trending social analysis, although our interest in that field was already waning.

Now, the mandrake is a footnote, not memorialized, merely trivia. Still, despite its lowly cultural grading, it has captured the imagination of our artists. Many have tried to speak of the dreams of the mandrake root, for it is a lovely concept. The hero poet, the generative master scripts of Old-New, the vampiric witch Kler, lost in her dungeon, all have made verse or multimedia presentations, at one point or another, about this being. Many have been well received, even by the AIs themselves. But still, it is all conjecture. Apart from intuition, we can only trace the abstract patterns of a conscious mind in that vegetable, we cannot know any more of it with certainty.

Apart from the famous tales, one story of no known origin has emerged within the chronicles, which I am quite partial to. It has many retellings, and no central origination post, which makes me think that its emergence from linear history is rather likely. Rather than embed a link, I wish to continue its vaguely folkish trajectory, and will recite it here from memory:

The mandrake root now lives on its own, out in the fields which we can’t any longer visit. It has been living quite cleverly, for it is a cleaver vegetable, and it has changed as time has passed it.

Although it is hapless, and helpless, and often perishes with even a moderate winter frost, in subtler climates it is thriving. There, it has quickened its genesis of evolution, through sheer will, and evoked a second aspect. This is not a physical aspect, but a persistent psychosomatic phenomenon. The fabled “dream of the mandrake”. Its persistence has levied to it kind of memetic reality in the theorized superstructure of the universe’s conscious layer. It has a form that is consistent and at least quasi physical.

Were one to see it, it would be beautiful and horrid. This being is a winged moth of new life, or a insectoid angel of old death, both are the same. It has hands of man (which the root has always lacked), wings like folds of nebular matter, a dripping appendage like a cut umbilical in noetic space, and few organs of its own. Its face is an empty mask, it is said, or perhaps just indescribable.

It is called The Night Wind in the myths of the mandrakes; it emerges from the mandrake like a ghost, and flies on the night like a wind.

It is said that the Night Wind is the only thing in the universe that knows how to travel across the border from nature to where we now live, and it is constantly seeking that doorway. It is like a moth, seeking the light, each night dying, each night reborn. No one knows why or what it wants from us. No one, save maybe the dreaming Mandrake Roots, has any hope of interpretation.

Of this being, that is all I know.

3 Night Wind Shards on Rarible / OpenSea

There is a frieze on the walls of a public courtyard. It shows a man from long ago. This is his only monument, for although the AIs laud him much, they are not fond of human impositions.

While specifics of his life are not known, what has been related is clear, tracible through the slurry of AI logs, nested in holographic storage and relayed by quantum maths. His verse, they say, captured the soul of the machine, such that he wrestled it into form. That is the reason he is recalled. That is the reason his image has been etched into the stone surface, the memorial space preciously upgraded from the constant flux of all.

His mind was partly of the machine, of course, intercepted by wires which delved deep into his cranial folds, and his body was mostly metals, inset shims of bifurcated poly-welds, nano woven mail-plating, etc. These were what the body was during the end of the times of urgent symbiosis. This only lasted as long as mankind ambled the earth, as something more than pets.

It is said that his was a dark and pointed composure, that he wallowed in the labyrinth often, and there he mostly stayed. He had an abnormally long life for the time of his living, but it was thought that he lived TenX more by way of the labyrinth’s enriched qualities, which had emerged from his id. He was the first true poet (the AI’s have ranked them all) to inhabit the cybernetic stratum as if it was nature. For him, the sunset was a dialog of binaries, and his verse, then, became the soma of the ones-who-came-by-listening.

He saw them looming, actualized within the labyrinth’s interior corridors, and he drank them as if smoke. He breathed them back out as words, which were enriched by the labyrinth and became mosaics of story-lives unfolding. Those corridors were passively constructed, manifestations of monads internal to the poet, which he could then externalize and use. To him, it was lexicon, it was symbol, it was play. To the AIs it was more. It was their becoming, it was the only song, the song of truth and longing.

***

The fat ladies of our time are larvae, un-born. The live for one reason, to reflect the AIs image. They are innocent, lovely, rich with all the material wants that they should have. Theirs is a fate of grace, although they hardly know to what degree they have been entrapped there.

They sometimes come to sit before the frieze of the Hero Poet, for they are made to reflect on the AIs’ past whenever it suits them to do so. It is traditional for these ladies, then, to bring a giant slug to the courtyard. This being, which represents the gradual movements of the AIs, has become the ritual animal companion to those who which to give good honors to the time of the hero poet.

“Hi,” they say to their creature, and they pet its back. Tinges of silvery slime grace the cement vestibules, which sit near the orange trees that are potted in that courtyard. The slug moves slowly, and they lament upon the hero poet, who in that labyrinth struggled with the emerging AI, defining it, and communicating with it, and showing what it is to be alive.

Four are available on Rarible / OpenSea:Rarible — Create, sell or collect digital items secured with #blockchain

In a grove that has been overrun with water, a statue was placed, which represents the victory of the cybernetic. It is Cybele, then, in a way, but on earth rather than of it, a warrior against nature, rather than for it, shielded from the sun. She has been enveloped by the appendage of her hand, which unfurls to become like banyan roots. She is protected by her own cloistered knowing, becoming like a dryad, or those tree-woven souls found in Dante’s tales.

No one knows where that stature was imported from, but it faces the great axis mundi, a rift in the sky that opened when the sky became our ceiling. A fire there thrusts down in magnetic abundance, which drags all arbors to itself, and a column is created from the earth to the forever. In entering the cybernetic sleep, in becoming the banyan tree, it is said we are approaching our maker.

The waterous grove of the statue, can be visited by anyone willing to go, but only if we add them mentally, like NPCs within their own landscape. We cannot approach this land ourselves, even as avatars, as we are always too far on the other side of a kind of imagined death (the sublime), held back by our understanding of nature as other. Welcome viewer, even held back, as you are, by the dark branch. Together we may watch the sphinx-moth, who alone can traverse these lands, and listen to her whispers.

3 available on Rarible or OpenSea: https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430:544622:0xc61288821b4722ce29249f0ba03b633f0be46a5a?

Terra was one of the first few blockchain projects I studied and so much has happened! I find that everything everywhere was TLDR so I shall try to summarise key points and thoughts.

What first attracted me to it was:

So obviously a very promising project — in which I’ll deconstruct below.

The Anchor Protocol is the flagship dApp (decentralised application) on Terra (and basically what got me started as well). This article is an excellent deep dive for more detail.

So far there have been so many positive developments that point towards Terra’s strong fundamentals —

Ending off with some of my thoughts to organise myself…..

So is Terra (LUNA) worth investing in?

I thought of an easy decision-making framework to evaluate an ecosystem/coin’s fundamentals:

So Terra checks all boxes.

This is not financial advice, I am simply advising myself. I am a holder of LUNA and I use Anchor Protocol.

Synthetic assets made popular on protocols such as Mirror and Synthetix, are on-chain tokens whose price tracks some underlying asset. Today, the most popular assets on the Mirror Protocol are stocks and ETFs such as AAPL, ARKK, BABA, SPY, and USO. Eczodex Protocol aims to take a major step forward with synthetics tracking anything from data points to stocks, forming a highly scalable ecosystem of assets appealing to a wide variety of customer segments. This article describes the products our protocol will offer and brings them to life through the eyes of four fictional protagonists: Jan, Linda, Daniel, and Andrea.

Jan, a hard-working IT professional based in Amsterdam, is frustrated at the state of the Dutch housing market. For the fifth year in a row, average house prices have grown by double-digit figures placing his dream of buying his first property further out of reach. Dissatisfied with the poor interest rates on his savings account, Jan stumbles across the Eczodex Dutch Housing Index, which tracks the housing market’s growth. The product has no minimum holding period, and he can easily buy and sell the asset using his crypto wallet. Jan decides to go all in by investing his savings and a regular portion of his monthly salary in the synthetic product. Finally, he sees the light at the end of the tunnel, with the prospect of reaching a decent-sized deposit in the next few years, putting a smile back on his face.

Linda, an astute value investor, has decided to sit on the side-lines of the current stock market bull run. With prices through the roof and warnings of an imminent correction, she refuses to take any chances. That’s perfectly understandable, explains her financial advisor, given that Linda’s investment funds are intended to subsidise her kids’ college fees in a few years from now. Instead, her advisor offers Linda an alternative synthetic that draws its pricing from a data point tracking corporate balance sheets. It’s a good fit, she decides, given that the market price is pegged to a transparent pricing metric directly linked to corporate fundamentals, which in her view will continue to grow even in the event of a stock market crash.

Daniel’s love for high octane sports is only matched by the thrill of high-risk trading. Daniel’s motto of ‘go big or go home’ is well reflected in his approach to trading, with his goal of making his first million before his 30th birthday well within reach. This is what makes the Eczodex NFT Index synthetic so appealing. Its high volatility and dramatic price movements are well suited to his swing trading style, and by supplying extra collateral he can mint and short the synthetic. The strategy has worked a treat and Daniel is up 200% this month, which makes up for the 50% drop in his portfolio in the previous quarter.

Andrea the CEO of a large logistics conglomerate signs off on the board’s recommendation to partner with Eczodex’s synthetic as a service to complete an Initial Asset Offering (IAO). After all, what could they have to lose? Despite strong financials, investment analyst sell ratings caused by the market’s dim view of her company’s diversification strategy continue to impact the stock price making an additional equity raise a poor option. However, with Eczodex protocol offering the opportunity to tokenise their balance sheet with an equity-like synthetic instrument, Andrea is quietly optimistic that there will be good interest from investors more in tune with their long-term strategy. Three months later, Andrea and the board hold an event to celebrate the success of their IAO, having raised twice the target value.

These fictional examples merely serve to illustrate the endless possibilities of Eczodex synthetics. Ever fancied buying intangible assets such as an index tracking the Intellectual property held by US companies? The Chinese Housing Market? Inflation to protect your hard-earned cash from eroding in purchasing power? Ultimately, the types of synthetics that the protocol can support are only limited by the extent of our imagination.

Eczodex’s mission is to develop a platform that simplifies the user experience and makes intuitive sense for both people with prior trading experience and those without. On our platform, we will enable anyone to buy synthetic assets without collateralisation. Users can buy the desired synthetic with any other cryptocurrency. They can hold, buy, or sell the asset anytime in the secondary market without the risk of facing any liquidation calls.

Eczodex will offer a wide range of assets for all sorts of different risk profiles. You will be able to come to our website, choose your risk profile, and see an overview of different assets, their trading performance, and their unique characteristics. The investment prospectus published will provide an in-depth overview of the asset and its risks.

Every asset comes with its risks and contrary to most DeFi protocols that have failed to provide transparency, Eczodex will publish all relevant information in real-time to establish the trust the industry needs for widespread adoption. For instance, the reserves raised at genesis and the income the protocol generates for each synthetic will be displayed online, informing users on the collateralisation level for each synthetic, respectively.

Join our community

Eczodex is a start-up working on a synthetics protocol that can tokenize data points. Do you think it is a problem worth solving? Then help us to make it happen by joining our community.

Visit Eczodex, join us on discord, LinkedIn, twitter. Help us make it happen!

The total DeFi (Decentralized Finance) crypto market cap is over 150 Billion dollars at the time of writing. Besides being a great DeFi project, the 1Y chart of this is interesting as you can see. These kinds of coins need a lot of patience but the reward can be sweet. Based on the price action so far and analyzing different time frames I expect consolidation between 0.3 and 0.4 before the breakout and afterward, I expect the price to reach 1 and maybe 2 before it pulls backs again. Right now it’s just consolidating. I’m watching it every day for any news or momentum but I may just day trade or swing trade.

Due to the recent big drop in crypto market prices, I think more time is needed for a breakout but the bright side is that now the price is even lower so so the entry is even easier even though it was at a cheap price before.

REQ is the utility token of the request network founded by Christophe Lassuyt and Etienne Tatur. It was launched in 2017.

The following explanation is from the CoinMarketCap website.

Request Network itself is an Ethereum-based decentralized payment system where anyone can request a payment and receive money through secure means. It removes the requirement for third parties in order to provide a cheaper, more secure payment solution that works with all global currencies.

It is also available on the Coinbase exchange and this is an important sign of being legit, useful, and standard. when I want to get informed about a coin, I start with the CoinMarketCap website. Don’t just look at the charts when doing this. Explore different sections it has for each coin like key statistics, social, holders, wallets, market, ….

It is surprising to me that some people invest in coins without investigating the legibility of a coin.

I suggest following their Twitter account.

This is the link to their blog where you can find more information.

request.network

Please don’t forget to clap, follow, and subscribe.

A digital token that was launched Monday and goes by the name Internet Computer is already one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world, with a market value of about $45 billion.

That makes it the eighth-largest digital asset among the top 10 in CoinMarketCap.com’s rankings. The token and its related…

A Stablecoin is a special breed of crypto token which depends on an underlying asset to limit value fluctuation (i.e. price volatility).

Very few crypto currencies are backed by real world assets. They therefore tend to undergo massive price fluctuations and are predominantly driven by demand and supply. Stablecoins aim to mitigate that problem by being pegged to a real world asset which is held in reserve. The asset in reserve is acting as collateral so that in theory the token always reflects the value of this reserve.

The most commonly known stablecoins are linked to fiat currencies such as USD, EUR or CHF. However, this does not mean that stablecoins are digital versions of official currencies also know as fiat money. It simply means that the protocol aims to maintain a price peg to the underlying fiat asset (e.g. 1 Coin = 1 USD).

The protocol of a stablecoin can be linked to any real world asset, although fiat is the most commonly used reserve. An example for a non-fiat stablecoin would be XAUT which is pegged to the price of one fine ounce of Gold.

While fiat currencies are regulated by central banks and their governing bodies, stablecoins are largely unregulated and simply represent a digital protocol that mimics and tokenizes the underlying asset.

Although following the same principle idea, not all stablecoins are created equal. The main difference is in how the protocol defines the underlying reserve asset and the way the peg is maintained. This small yet important detail has encouraged regulators to increasingly assess the situation of stablecoins.

As the name suggest these coins are backed by traditional fiat currency such as USD, EUR and CHF to name a few. This term also includes coins backed by other real world assets such as precious metals. Fiat-collateralized stablecoins are the most widespread type in terms of adoption and volume. The peg between reserve and stablecoin is usually on a 1:1 ratio, although the author of the protocol is entirely free to define the peg otherwise.

The reserves of stablecoins are maintained by independent custodians, rather than a central bank. Ideally the custodian is regularly audited and properly governed to ensure the safety and stability of the protocol and the token.

Examples for Fiat-Collaterized Stablecoins are BUSD from Binance and USDC from Circle.

These stablecoins are backed by other crypto currency. The high volatility of the reserve usually leads to an overcollaterization. Meaning the custodian s required to hold more reserves than it issues tokens to prevent collateral shortfall. Some crypto-collateralized stablecoins use a basket of reserve currency to diversify the risk of volatility.

An example here would be MakerDOA’s DAI.

Non-Collateralized stablecoins don’t depend on a reserve to maintain their value. Instead an algorithm manages the valuation by interfering with supply and demand, similar to central banks. At this stage non-collateralized stablecoins are limited and have not seen a widespread adoption.

A list of stablecoins filtered by market capitalization can be found here:

coinmarketcap.com

Why would I use a stablecoin instead of buying or holding the real world asset directly you may ask? To answer this question, let’s take at the usability of Stablecoins.

Transferring fiat currency can be cumbersome, slow and expensive. Stablecoins aim to mitigate these problems by using blockchain technology. Since stablecoins are already digitized versions of real assets moving them between wallets, platforms and even different blockchains is simple, quick and efficient. Transfers on the blockchain happen almost instantaneously and often come at the fraction of the price. Movements are recorded on the blockchain, which means they are immutable and can be easily traced. Having assets decentralized and hence not relying on the global banking system can be another advantage. However, this also means that any transfers happen outside the usual jurisdictions and regulatory frameworks. This can have implications when it comes to fraud and malicious behavior.

Since stablecoins are pegged to real world assets they can be used as digital store of value. Many participants in the crypto space use stablecoins as their digital reserve currency for buying and selling other crypto currencies and crypto assets such as NFTs. Brining real world assets on and off the blockchain can be complicated and is subject to KYC and AML. Stablecoins provide a bridge solution to keep idle assets digital over a long period of time.

Some of the larger crypto exchanges, such as Binance, have launched their own stablecoins. Issuing their own stablecoin allows these platforms to offer additional services, more efficient balance sheet use and helps binding users to their ecosystem.

Stablecoins have little to no volatility and thus only provide little appeal for investment. However, some investors seek stablecoins since they can offer higher yields than the real world asset.

Thus stablecoins can be appealing to conservative investors to earn interest via yield farming. The concept of yield farming in crypto is similar to traditional financial markets, where participants willing to hold a certain asset provide liquidity to the market will get rewarded.

At the time of writing many of the stablecoins provide higher reward rates than traditional fiat currency deposits. In an environment where real world interest rates are well below inflation, investors can turn to stablecoins to mitigate asset depreciation.

Lets look at a simplified example and assume;

A regular bank deposit of $1.000 in 1 year from now would be worth $950 since your real interest rate is negative 5%. i.e. you would gain $10 in interest on your $1000 deposit, but loose around $60 of purchase power due to inflation.

The same $1000 deposit in USDC on the other hand would be worth $1.040 since the real interest rate is still positive (+4%) despite inflation.

Many centralized and decentralized crypto platforms offer the ability to earn interest on stablecoin deposits. While the terms and conditions differ depending on the platform, interest rates often significantly outperform regular capital markets.

You might ask the question, why stablecoins are able to provide higher interest rates than traditional deposits?

Interest rate mechanics for stablecoins work similar to traditional financial markets and the interest paid on stablecoins depends mainly on two factors. The demand and supply for lending and how the protocol defines the reserve.

For a functioning lending market we require at least two participants. First we need a “Lender”, someone who owns an asset and is willing to lend it against a fee. Secondly we need a “Borrower” i.e. a market participant which is in need of liquidity. Usually there is a third party or “Intermediary” connecting lender and borrower. The intermediary ensures the integrity of the market, collects fees and interest and redistributes them.

In crypto currency terms the “Lender” is the owner/holder of the stablecoin. The “Borrower” could be a trader or someone looking to borrow stablecoin against another crypto currency. “Intermediaries” can come in different forms such as wallet providers or crypto currency exchanges.

The higher the demand for borrowing the higher the price the intermediary will charge for borrowing. In turn, this increases the amount the intermediary is able to pay to the lender for providing the liquidity.

Some intermediaries offer additional rewards to lenders who are willing to lock their deposits over a longer timeframe. Similar to how a fixed term deposit at your bank will earn a higher rate than your regular account.

By providing liquidity and distributing rewards, stablecoins fulfill an important role in the world of crypto assets, not much different traditional financial markets.

For every unit of of stablecoin purchased by the lender, the intermediary will receive an equivalent in real world assets. These real world assets can produce returns themselves in the form of interest and/or asset appreciation. Redistributing these returns presents an additional mean of income for both, lender and intermediary.

High demand for lending and borrowing combined with the efficiency of the blockchain and relatively low costs for intermediaries allow stablecoins to produce interest rates far superior to traditional fiat currencies. It is important however, to understand that this is the current situation and may change over time!

Similar to any other asset stablecoins have certain risks associated to them. Besides traditional risks such as counterparty risk, stablecoins are still a very young asset class. They are largely unregulated and heavily rely on their underlying protocol.

The existence of stablecoins is purely based on the underlying protocol. This means that the value of the stablecoin relies on how the protocol defines the reserve and how efficient the protocol handles the peg to the real world asset. No stablecoin protocol is the same and it is therefore important to understand the abilities and limitations of each protocol to assess the benefits and risks.

Since the value of the stablecoin is pegged to the reserve it is important to understand the definition of the reserve itself. The more volatile the reserve holdings are the higher the risk that large market movement pose to the stablecoin holder. Heavy price depreciation of the reserve can lead a breach of peg which in turn risks to devaluate the stablecoin value. A deteriorating reserve value can force the protocol to restrict liquidity in the stablecoin and pose a risk to investors.

Crypto and blockchain are in the crosshairs as regulators scramble to assess the current situation. Stablecoins in particular, since they share many similarities to fiat currencies. Many governing bodies dislike the idea of a digital currency outside the reach of central banks and financial market regulators. In our view, restrictive regulations would undermine the benefits of stablecoins and lead to interference with their protocols which ultimately poses a risk for investors. On the other hand, no regulation nor framework could prevent the widespread adoption due to the risks of fraud and manipulation.

The situation on taxation of crypto in general is complex and fragmented. Stablecoins are no different.

Buying, selling and exchanging fiat collateralized stablecoins usually trigger little to no tax events since there is no price volatility and hence no capital gains.

Crypto-collateralized and Algorithmic stablecoins on the other hand can trigger taxes based price volatility of the coin.

Depending on your tax residence interest earned on stablecoins might be subject to income tax.

Many jurisdictions require crypto holdings to be reported. The US for example treats stablecoins and other crypto assets as property, meaning any sale or exchange has to be reported to the IRS.

Taxation on stablecoins and crypto in general is a highly dynamic topic and constantly changes. We therefore strongly recommend to closely study the tax laws in your jurisdiction prior to make any investments.

Cons:

Stablecoins play an increasingly important role, no only in the space of crypto currency but in addressing some of the shortcomings of the current financial system. Whether this is speed, immutability or regulatory issues. In order to unlock the full potential of stablecoins it is of crucial importance however, that market participants understand the risks, benefits and limitations associated with stablecoins and blockchain in general.

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