Insights

Comparison of Aptos, Sui, and Linera

Author: FL Research Team

The Libra gang gathers lots of attention these days. People know Libra gang because of their high valuations and funding from first-tiered VC. In this section, we will briefly talk about the innovations of Libra gang.

Timeline for the Merge, Tokenomics for aligning goals

Author: FL Research Team

Main Ethereum developer Tim Beiko’s projection of merge date is the first time that a merge date has been given, beyond a timeline of months or quarters, even though it is still a soft date. The price of ether spiked 45% over the weekend on the news.

How Is Blockchain Impacting Games?

Author: FL Research Team

In 2021, the total transaction volume of blockchain games exceeded $44.7 billion, the number of independent active wallets surpassed that of DeFi, and total financing of the industry was close to $4 billion. Traditional game developers such as Ubisoft and Zynga, and venture capital funds such as Bitkraft have also announced their entrance into GameFi. On the other hand, with breakthroughs in technologies such as blockchain, 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR)

GameStop NFT, Tableland and Next-Gen Smart Contracts

Author: FL Research Team

GameStop, primarily known as a brick-and-mortar video games retailer and reseller has had tumultuous recent years. GameStop has become a meme stock to the infamous r/wallstreetbets community on Reddit, which took part in a massive short squeeze in January 2021 that contributed to a stock price increase over +1750% in only three weeks.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Insights Weekly 2022.06.17

Author: FL Research Team

Web3 development libraries are become popular these days. More developers are interested in smart contract developments. Web3 development libraries are more and more influential in open source community. Several great web3 development libraires are nominated in Open Source Awards.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Insights Weekly 2022.06.10

Author: FL Research Team

Companies like Valve and Amazon, elite military units like the US Marines, and co-living environments like intentional communities all draw boundaries around themselves and carefully evaluate who they let in. By constantly attempting to raise the bar, they can keep scaling without the need for more structure and rules.

PoS economy landscape, will staking drive the next bull run?

Author: FL Research Team

Ethereum is turning from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) for higher transactions-per-second (TPS) and efficiency. Most of the major blockchains that support smart contracts use PoS, such as Solana, Cardano and Avalanche.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Insights Weekly 2022.06.03

Author: FL Research Team

Solana suffered its second outage in a month and the 5th outage in 2022. Solana halted block production for over four hours on Wednesday due to a bug in recently newly added features. This caused $SOL to go down around 13%.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Insights Weekly 2022.05.29

Author: FL Research Team

The technology behind non-fungible tokens unleashes a good chuck of untapped economy and enables ownership of digital assets. What we have today of our non-fungible tokens are mostly PFP, which is categorized in art and collectables, that so far have limited potential for yield generation but nevertheless great for building communities and social status. The technology of NFTs is much more versatile and the possibilities are endless when the technology is applied to different industries, both in the physical and virtual worlds.

Will Venture DAOs replace Venture Capital (VC)?

Author: FL Research Team

Bobbin Threadbare made a great talk introducing Miden VM at ZK Summit. We learned a lot about ZK VM from it.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Weekly Report 2022.05.22

Author: FL Research Team

Bobbin Threadbare made a great talk introducing Miden VM at ZK Summit. We learned a lot about ZK VM from it.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Weekly Report 2022.05.13

Author: FL Research Team

The mission of the cross-chain bridge is to fix the gap between different chains and lower the entry barrier for beginners. Staying on one chain, the user can reach other Dapps and liquidity on other chains. Compared to multi-chain wallets which offer better UX, the cross-chain bridge unit all chains to one and the user doesn't need to figure out which chain he/she stays on. Aligning with this mission, below are opportunities in the cross-chain ecosystem:

From LayerZero to Cross-chain NFTs

Author: FL Research Team

LayerZero is a cross-chain communication protocol that allows applications deployed on different chains to communicate with each other. LayerZero does not require intermediate nodes or consensus mechanisms like cross-chain bridges require. Instead, it allows applications to complete seamless cross-chain communication. The first DEX on LayerZero is Stargate Finance, a project that enables cross-chain swaps of Omni-chain assets - more on that later.

Cross-chain Bridge Overview

Author: FL Research Team

The multichain ecosystem is booming. cross-chain bridges are the base for the multichain ecosystem. There are lots of opportunities in the cross-chain market. In this report, we will explore the potential of the cross-chain market.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Weekly Report 2022.04.29

Author: FL Research Team

Hash Time Lock Contract (HTCL) is the most common method in local verification. The is one of the oldest solutions and the easiest one to implement.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Weekly Report 2022.04.22

Author: FL Research Team

Projects are customizing ERC-721 based on their use cases. Azuki released ERC-721A to further reduce the costs of minting NFT sacrificing read speed. There are more than 40 projects using ERC-721A, like Cereal Club, X Rabbit Club, and The Women of Crypto. Here is a gas fee comparison

FL Weekly | Fundamental Weekly Report 2022.04.15

Author: FL Research Team

In the last week, we released a research paper about opportunities in zero-knowledge industry. Customized chips for ZK mining would be a huge opportunity. This week, Paradigm released a blog about hardware acceleration for zero-knowledge proofs.

SocialFi: The Starlights of Web 3

Author: FL Research Team

SocialFi is currently the hottest term on the market. SocialFi is literally a combination of Social+Finance. Social refers to a decentralized situation, while Fi is a social token system added for social behavior management and incentive, thus naturally forming a combination of social and financial.

FL Weekly | Fundamental Weekly Report 2022.04.08

Author: FL Research Team

Since all Layer2 use the same base layer, it would be safer to construct cross-layer2 apps. For example, aggregate the fragmented liquidity between layer2. Starkware proposes dAMM to solve this. dAMM allows layer1 LPs to expose to layer2 traders.

Incomplete Guide to ZK: Why ZK Matters?

Author: FL Research Team

ZK is a way for a prover to convince a verifier that some statement is true but reveals no additional information except that the statement is true. ZK is designed for anonymity. Imagine that we can prove we have a valid ID without verifiers knowing our real name or ID.

Will Web3 Take Web2 as the New Paradigm of Creators Economy?

Author: FL Research Team

Will the emergence of Web3 mark the subversion of the creator economy in the centralized and advertising-based Web2? We try to first briefly describe the business model and core pain points of creators on mainstream Web2 platforms, and then prove that the arrival of Web3 will be a golden era for the creators. We hope that in the near future the technology based on Web3 will create new business and economic opportunities as a new golden era of creation.

Hunt for Opensea Killers: All You Need to Know

Author: FL Research Team

According to Nonfungible.com, NFTtrading volume has reached $17.6 billion untill 2021, a 21,000% increase from that of 82 million in 2020. More than 2.5 million crypto wallets in 2021 belong to those who hold or trade NFTs, while there was only around 89,000 a year ago. The number of buyers rose from 2.3 million to 7.5 million. Although the NFT market is progressing rapidly in 2021, at present, the total trading volume of the NFT market is only 20 billion US dollars. The 24-hour trading volume of decentralized exchanges has reached more than 3.7 billion US dollars, while the 24-hour trading volume of centralized exchanges has reached tens of billions of dollars. It can be derived that the actual size of the NFT market is very small and in an early development stage, whose growth potential is large in the future.

MicroStrategy’s Convertible Bonds

Author: Tao Huang

MicroStrategy has bridged the gap between the crypto and traditional finance worlds by using convertible bonds as a financial instrument to obtain low-cost capital from the traditional finance world and bet on volatile crypto assets. And because of its clever design, it theoretically avoids the liquidation risks which often associated with other leveraged instruments.

How to Hedge the Impermanent loss in Defi farming

Author: Tao Huang

In AMMs DEX protocols, users can deposit specific assets into the protocol pools to help providing liquidity for the protocols. We usually call them Liquidity Providers (LPs). When any trader executes trading orders in the protocol, LPs have to passively act as the counterparty and bear the potential losses which we called impermanent loss.

The state of Collectible NFT's (1/5)

Author: Howard Yuan, Edward Fan and Eric Yang

This research series requires prior understanding of the history of NFT’s. You can find more about Crypto Kitties & ERC 721 here and more about Crypto Punks here.

GameFi

Author: Ryan Emmigamefigamefick

The Summer of 2021 has seen an explosion of digital assets, particularly in the form of profile picture NFTs, but as with any trend there are more interesting innovations happening behind closed doors that take more time to come to fruition. Right now, that’s Gamefi. Just as Ethereum and Defi have enabled vast new economic primitives and reshaped finance, so will Gamefi reshape how we play games, consume media, and entertain ourselves digitally.