June 21, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

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What Do You Meme?


What’s Poppin’?

VC interest in the crypto industry is poppin’. 

In just six months, venture capital firms have invested $17B into the crypto industry, doubling the previous yearly record of $7.4B in 2018 (as reported by Bloomberg). 

According to a recent report from Forbes, five of the top ten largest venture rounds in crypto history have happened since the beginning of March, including Circle, BlockFi, Dapper Labs, Blockchain.com, and Bitso. 

Interestingly, as each company announced a raise of at least $250M since March 11th, the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies shrank nearly $200B (CoinMarketCap). 


Recommended Reads

  • @HodlNameless wrote a fantastic overview of Bitcoin’s cryptography (20 min):

  • Here is a brief summary on the history of money (5 min):

 

  • Christine Kim wrote about four common misconceptions surrounding Ethereum’s upcoming EIP 1559 upgrade:


On The Pod…

Polygon: The Layer 2 Solution Doing 8 Times as Many Transactions a Day as Ethereum

Jaynti Kanani, cofounder and CEO of Polygon, discusses why the layer 2 solution has seen so much success during a down crypto market. Show highlights:

  • what factors have led to Polygon’s and MATIC’s impressive performance YTD

  • how Polygon is scaling Ethereum

  • what types of projects are taking off on Polygon

  • how Polygon is attempting to address the issue of layer 2 composability

  • how Polygon plans to use its latest funding

  • why Jaynti is confident Polygon will still be necessary after ETH 2.0 launches


Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Nov. 2nd. Pre-order it today!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians