This week, Ethereum will go through its largest upgrade ever. This event is known as “the Merge” and is the biggest technical event happening in crypto this year. This month we will dive into what the Merge is, how it is expected to take place and what the longer-term implications of the Merge are for Ethereum.

For crypto to become truly mass-market, on-chain privacy must be enhanced, which is where zero-knowledge proofs come in. This month we will dive into what zero-knowledge proofs are, how they work and why advancing privacy and security in public blockchains will help drive mass market adoption.

In June, Solana hosted an event in New York where it announced a mobile phone alongside the “Solana Mobile Stack”, a range of software releases that will allow developers to build dedicated Solana mobile apps. This month we will dig into the Solana announcement and explore what the Solana Mobile Stack is and how it works.

This month we will investigate the contagion that has been felt by the crypto industry in the wake of the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and now the spill over into companies like Celsius and Three Arrows Capital. We will explore how contagion has resulted in correlated price movements between digital assets and how it illustrates the interconnectedness of the crypto ecosystem.

The UST stablecoin and the Terra ecosystem dramatically collapsed last week. This has resulted in devastating losses for investors in the project. This month, we will offer our perspective on what took place last week and why the project failed.

This month, we are going to dive into the NFT marketplace LimeWire, one of our latest Fund 4 investments. We will explore what the platform does and why it is well placed to bring millions of new users to crypto.

Gnosis is steadily building one of the most interesting ecosystems in the blockchain space. As we have begun building a position in Gnosis for Fund 4, this month we are going to dive into the history of Gnosis, its product suite and how it is on track to grow in importance and adoption.

Projects such as Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Solana Pay are targeting the payments space and for the first time have a real chance to disrupt legacy systems. This month we will dive into why crypto is perfectly placed to be a payment solution, what products already exist and how crypto payments will go mass market.

This institutionalisation of custodianship marks a significant U-turn for financial institutions and a welcome turn of events for investors in the digital asset space. This month we will dive into the technical details of how custodians work in crypto and the impact that they are having on the ecosystem.

This month we are going to dive into our latest Fund 4 investment, Perion. Perion is a fascinating project that could be described as one of the world’s first metaverse lending DAOs.

The Cosmos ecosystem is growing at an electrifying rate. The Cosmos SDK is becoming the default standard for the creation of blockchains, resulting in the sprouting of new platforms connected to one another via Cosmos’ Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol.

Digital assets are heading for mass adoption. From grassroot crypto users to institutional DeFi traders, international usage of digital assets is growing steadily. This month we will dive into the data to see where crypto adoption is taking place.

Bitcoin is becoming globally recognised as money, but slow settlement and high transaction fees remain a critical barrier to adoption. The solution to these issues is the Lightning Network.

Anoma is a revolutionary new blockchain platform that is reimagining how Layer 1 protocols can operate. It is looking to solve a new category of coordination problem through radical new technical designs.

In early August, Ethereum is scheduled to undergo its “London upgrade”, one of the most significant Ethereum updates ever. Included in this upgrade is Ethereum Improvement Protocol 1559 (EIP-1559), which will change Ethereum’s fee mechanism. This amendment will include the burning of a portion of the network fee in each block, reducing the supply of ETH over time.

Over the last year Terra has evolved from being a single use case stablecoin platform out of South Korea to a global ecosystem of financial applications that utilize Terra’s stablecoins. This evolution has led to significant growth in the market cap of Luna, the native token of the Terra network, from around USD50m in early 2020 to over USD2.5bn today.

Over the weekend Rari Capital suffered from a hack, losing USD10m worth of Ether to an attacker. This represents 60% of user funds that were held in one of Rari’s yield pools. It is against this backdrop that we now publish our investment case for Rari. The team is building something unique. At face value, it is a yield aggregation platform that allows users to easily earn yield on crypto.

In June 2018, we wrote about the emergence and promise of non-fungible tokens (abbreviated to NFTs). This was a new type of crypto token that could represent ownership of all kinds of asset from physical ones like houses and artwork, to digital ones like digital art, memes, music and intellectual property.

The Solana ecosystem is growing rapidly. From network validators to wallet providers and applications, there is excitement surrounding the Solana smart contract platform. While blockchain networks rely on technical consensus to function, the value of a network depends on social consensus.

Bitcoin outperformed all major asset classes in 2020. An investment in Bitcoin returned +305% in 2020 as compared to 42% for the NASDAQ, 19% for Gold and 15% for the S&P 500. This performance is a result of institutional adoption and acceptance of Bitcoin as its own asset class.

In November we interviewed Do Kwon, the CEO of Terra, and spoke at length about the use of stablecoins in ecommerce and beyond. As Do highlighted, there is clear product-market fit for stablecoins as a method of online payment.

Crypto exchanges have evolved from limited platforms offering a small number of spot trading pairs, to expansive platforms offering spot and derivative markets, lending and borrowing products, and crypto-native “yield” products such as staking.

Over the last year the DeFi ecosystem has seen significant growth, with the total value locked in DeFi contracts on Ethereum growing from USD500m in September 2019 to over USD10bn today.

FTX, one of the world leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges, has launched a decentralized exchange called Serum that runs on Solana. Serum is a decentralized exchange for spot and derivative trading and has been met by excitement in the industry as FTX is one of the most prominent and well-respected exchanges in the digital asset space.

Cosmos is set to release its Stargate update, the largest upgrade to date that activates Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) and unleashes full network functionality.

In November 2019, we wrote about the proposed rollout of Ethereum 2.0. The first phase of this upgrade is expected to take place in Q3 2020 and is being eagerly monitored by the crypto community.

The trading infrastructure surrounding digital assets is maturing. Trade volumes have risen dramatically over the last three years, helped to a large degree by the creation of derivative markets and over USD1 billion in investments allocated to institution-serving firms.

The third ever Bitcoin Halving takes place on 12 May. This is where the issuance of new bitcoin to miners is cut in half. This is more than just an interesting technical characteristic of the Bitcoin protocol. It is the reason that Bitcoin is becoming recognized as a true alternative form of money.

数字人民币试点工作初见端倪，这给国内的移动支付吹来新风，也会在世界范围产生深远影响。 A Digital RMB pilot has been released in China. This will impact local payments in China, but also has strategic significance for the rest of the world.

The Solana smart contract platform boasts a string of technical innovations and one of the most experienced teams in the blockchain ecosystem. Solana’s newly launched network is operating at speeds 1000x that of Ethereum and is poised to take the blockchain world by storm.

In 2016, Leemon Baird, a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, released a paper describing the hashgraph consensus algorithm. This novel algorithm formed the basis of what would become Hedera Hashgraph, a new type of distributed ledger system.

Bitcoin was the first truly unique digital asset built using blockchain technology. But a glance at the top 10 digital assets by market capitalization shows that there are three different assets using the Bitcoin brand; Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV).

Over the last few years, central banks and governments around the world have started looking into how they might use blockchain technology to digitize their national currencies. The benefits of doing so range from the benign, such as lower transaction fees for businesses and efficiency gains, to the more sinister motivations of improved censorship and societal control.

Ethereum is the world’s leading smart contract protocol, with a market cap of over USD16bn. It has the largest community of users and applications, and attracts the majority of developer mindshare in the blockchain space. However, the platform is facing a scalability issue.

In the physical world it is easy for an individual to prove their identity. Trusted centralized bodies, like governments, issue physical proofs such as passports, driving licences and health cards. In the online world, user credentials are stored in data silos all over the Internet, sold to third parties and often get stolen. Blockchain technology has the ability to re-invent this.

Decentralized finance, also known as DeFi, has been a growing movement in the world of blockchain and smart contracts. New projects are launching with increasing frequency that focus on areas such as decentralized lending and insurance, trust-less trading, stablecoins and zero fee payments.

In South Korea, ecommerce transactions are expensive to process, with sites paying up to 3% in transaction fees to traditional payment processing companies. With over USD0.5 billion in annual fees, it is no wonder that ecommerce companies in Korea and other parts of Asia are looking for a cheaper solution.

In June Facebook announced that it would be releasing its own blockchain called the Libra Network. This is a hugely significant announcement for the ecosystem. With one of the largest companies in the world designing its own solution, Facebook has validated the idea of public blockchains.

Over last the two years, a group of talented engineers has been researching and developing a project called Cosmos. The idea behind Cosmos is that it will become an “Internet of Blockchains”, building bridges to connect many different chains together.

Proof of History, the consensus algorithm underpinning the Solana blockchain offers a novel approach to blockchain scalability without the need for sharding. By using Proof of History, Solana aims to run thousands of times faster than Ethereum.

In December 2017, the Ethereum network became heavily congested.The reason for this was the release of a new application, CryptoKitties, that dramatically increased transaction volumes on the network.