Ethereum Core and Ethereum Classic for Dummies

[Note: I neither own nor have any trading position on any cryptocurrency.  The views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any organization I advise.]

If you’re bored of catching Pokemon and happen to have a lot of butter stored up, now is the time to break out the premium organic popcorn kernels and enjoy Fork Wars: Summer 2016 Edition.

As mentioned in the previous post: last week many miners, exchanges, and developers coordinated a hardfork of Ethereum.  At the time there were lots of celebrations for having done something that flew in contrast to the views prominently held by the Bitcoin Core development community: namely that a fast hardfork can’t be done safely on a public blockchain.

Well, it has been done, but there were also some consequences.  Some intended and others unintended.  The biggest consequence — which was touched on in my last post too — was that there were now parallel universes: Ethereum Core (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

What does this mean?

If you owned a coin on pre-hardfork Ethereum, you now own not just the ETH facsimile but also the Classic coin (ETC) too.  Two for the price of one!1

This also opens up the very real possibility of replay attacks which was also a possibility when Ethereum moved from Olympic to Frontier.

A replay attack predates cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum:

[I]s a form of network attack in which a valid data transmission is maliciously or fraudulently repeated or delayed. This is carried out either by the originator or by an adversary who intercepts the data and re-transmits it, possibly as part of a masquerade attack by IP packet substitution.

In this case, it is the retransmission of a transaction (not IP packet).  Or in the Ethereum world, a replay attack would be to take a transaction from one Ethereum fork and maliciously or fraudulently repeating it on another Ethereum fork.

A little confused?  Check out: Sirer, Rapp, and Vessenes.

At first most of the Ethereum community assumed that Classic would effectively become deprecated and fade away into history much like Olympic.  After all, so went the argument, who would want to use or support a network in which at least one participant owned/controlled roughly ~10% in now “hot” ether?

Sidebar: recall that the main motivating force behind the hardfork was spurred on by the successful attack on The DAO, an investment fund created by Slock.it who did not adequately test the smart contract for security vulnerabilities (among other issues).

Well, it seems that Classic will not go silent into the night, at least not yet.

From a technical integration standpoint, while all of the large exchanges initially supported ETH, one altcoin exchange based in Montana — Poloniex — began supporting both forks.2

Traders — seeing a potential arbitrage opportunity — began doing what they do best: speculating and driving up demand for ETC via posts on social media.  As a consequence of their marketing efforts, the price of ETC dramatically rose over 380% in one 24-hour period alone.  In return, some of the miners that had abandoned the original Ethereum chain (ETC) to mine on the ETH hardfork have now begun mining on both which means that the original ETC network actually has once again begun seeing an increase in its hashrate (recall that it had dramatically dropped a week ago).

This is an interesting twist because less than 3 days ago, Chandler Guo an executive at BW.com — a large mining pool — announced he would undertake a 51% attack on the ETC blockchain because of the decision by Poloniex to support it.  Chandler later announced he would not carry it out.

Incidentally, it is likely that the noise that was created from this threat actually drew more attention to the Poloniex arbitrage opportunity, creating a type of Streisand Effect.3

Visual

What does this situation look like?

ethereum classic

Source: slacknation

Above is a line graph that is auto-generated and reflects the past 48 hours of two types of ratios: the Ethereum Classic (ETC) to Ethereum Core (ETH) price; and the ETC to ETH hashrate.  Price is derived from the two largest exchanges in terms of ether liquidity (Bitfinex and Poloneix).

This is actually not surprising behavior, we empirically observe the same type of trend with other cryptocurrencies: when price increases more hashrate comes on-board and vice-versa.45

Precedence

Over the past several days there has been much guessing as to which chain will live or die, but rarely do people suggest that both will live on in the long-run.

And I think that is short-sighted.  While not a fully direct comparison, even though they’re effectively based on the same code, we have seen how Litecoin and Dogecoin have permanently conjoined at the hip via merged mining: they co-exist via the Scrypt Alliance.  In addition, we have seen for years the continued existence of multiple multipools, which automatically direct GPU-miners to the most profitable cryptocurrency usually with a payout in bitcoin.

I cannot predict who which chain outlasts the other.  Perhaps now that ethcore has said it will also support Ethereum Classic, the two (or more!) chains will both continue to exist and grow.  Either way, we do know that the maximalist thesis, that there is a “coming demise of altcoins,” continues to be empirically incorrect and I suspect that it will remain incorrect for as long as there is continued speculative demand for cryptocurrencies in general.  This includes both ETH and ETC.

Other winners and losers

Who else gains from this phenomenon?  In the short run, anyone interested in trading will probably be able to find some kind of arbitrage — assuming demand grows or at least stays at the same level.

Anyone else?

Other cryptocurrency communities that see Ethereum as a competitor could believe they now have an incentive to support multiple forks too, as it draws hashrate and potential mindshare away one chain at the expense of the other.  And the more that the Ethereum community is painted as being “chaotic” the less of a threat it is seen to other public blockchains.  But maybe this is shortsighted too and will simply enlarge the Ethereum community because they now end up as ETC holders and want it to appreciate in value.

Either way, it sounds like the makings of some kind of TV miniseries staring Jean-Luc Bilodeau as Vitalik Buterin (they’re both Canadian).

Want to read more on the topic?

Conclusions

Ignoring the above quasi-illustration of the many-worlds interpretation, surprisingly not much has been discussed regarding the analog world of when fiat currencies are created or even removed at certain exchange rates and the unintended consequences therein.

For instance, in the comedy Good Bye, Lenin! we see the repercussions for those who were unable to convert East German marks for West German marks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

More recently we have seen multiple Iraqi dinar scams, in which individuals were deceived and conned into acquiring pre-war dinar (a deprecated fiat currency) with the fraudulent pitch that at some point in the future, the previous pre-war exchange rate would somehow be reached.

However, one of the biggest differences with the Ethereum-based chains above is that cryptocurrencies are anarchic — without terms of service or ties to the legal system. Therefore it is difficult (impossible even?) to say which chain is the de jure legitimate chain.  Consequently it is unclear if anyone has a legal claim to prevent or create additional forks in the future and because of this, it is hard to see who has liability for past, present or future forks on these chains.

Whether that is a risk organizations and regulated institutions are willing to take is a topic for another post.  Perhaps if or when this is done, there will be even more chances to consume warm buttery popcorn as we watch and learn from the trials and tribulations of anarchic blockchains.

Endnotes

  1. It is closer to a spinoff than a stock-split.  Similar to the Ebay/Paypal spinoff, where a company that once had single market capitalization (EBAY) now trades under two different symbols (EBAY/PYPL) that trade and move independently. []
  2. Note: by this I mean that the existing exchanges that had already on-boarded ether, not that all large cryptocurrency exchanges had on-boarded ether. []
  3. Guo wanted to remove something (a chain in this case) but by advertising his intention to do so, only drew more interest and activity back into the very chain he intended to remove. []
  4. See Appendix B []
  5. See also Ethereum chain state []

Archy and Anarchic Chains

[Note: the views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any organization I advise.]

Yesterday, at block height 1920000, many elements of the Ethereum community coordinated a purposeful hardfork.

After several weeks of debate and just over a couple weeks of preparation, key stakeholders in the community — namely miners and exchanges — attempted to create a smooth transition from Ethereum Prime (sometimes referred to as Ethereum Classic) into Ethereum Core (Ethereum One).1

Users of exchange services such as Kraken were notified of the fork and are now being allowed to withdraw ETH to Ethereum Core, which many miners and exchanges now claim as “mainnet.”

Was the hardfork a success?  To answer that question depends on which parallel universe (or chain) you resided on.  And it also depends on the list of criteria for what “failure” or “success” are measured by.

For instance, if you ended up with ETH on the “unsupported” fork (Classic), who was financially responsible for this and who could attempt to file a lawsuit to rectify any loses?

Maybe no one.  Why?  Because public blockchains intentionally lack terms of service, EULA, and service level agreements, therefore it is difficult to say who is legally liable for mistakes or loses.

For instance, if financial instruments from a bank were sent to miners during the transition phase and are no longer accessible because the instruments were sent to the “unsupported” chain, who is to blame and bears responsibility?  Which party is supposed to provide compensation and restitution?

De facto versus de jure

This whole hardfork exercise visualizes a number of issues that this blog has articulated in the past.

Perhaps the most controversial is that simply: there is no such thing as a de jure mainnet whilst using a public blockchain.  The best a cryptocurrency community could inherently achieve is a de facto mainnet.2

What does that mean?

Public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, intentionally lack any ties into the traditional legal infrastructure.  The original designers made it a point to try and make public blockchains extraterritorial and sovereign to the physical world in which we live in.  In other words, public blockchains are anarchic.

As a consequence, lacking ties into legal infrastructure, there is no recognized external authority that can legitimately claim which fork of Bitcoin or Ethereum is the ‘One True Chain.’  Rather it is through the proof-of-work process (or perhaps proof-of-stake in the future) that attempts to attest to which chain is supposed to be the de facto chain.3

However, even in this world there is a debate as to whether or not it is the longest chain or the chain with the most work done, that is determines which chain is the legitimate chain and which are the apostates.4 5

And this is where, fundamentally, it becomes difficult for regulated institutions to use a public blockchain for transferring regulated data and regulated financial instruments.

For instance, in March 2013 an accidental, unintended fork occurred on what many participants claimed as the Bitcoin mainnet.

To rectify this situation, over roughly four hours, operators of large mining pools, developers, and several exchanges met on IRC to coordinate and choose which chain they would support and which would be discarded.  This was effectively, at the time, the largest fork-by-social-consensus attempted (e.g., proof-of-nym-on-IRC).

There were winners and losers.  The losers included: OKPay, a payment processor, lost several thousand dollars and BTC Guild, a large mining pool who had expended real capital, mined some of the now discarded blocks.

In the Bitcoin world, this type of coordination event is slowly happening again with the never ending block size debate.

One team, Bitcoin Classic, is a small group of developers that supports a hardfork to relatively, quickly increase the block size from 1 MB to 2 MB and higher.  Another group, dubbed Bitcoin Core, prefers a slower role out of code over a period of years that includes changes that would eventually increase the block size (e.g., segwit). 6

Yet as it lacks a formal governance structure, neither side has de jure legitimacy but instead relies on the court of public opinion to make their case.  This is typically done by lobbying well-known figureheads on social media as well as mining pools directly.  Thus, it is a bit ironic that a system purposefully designed for pseudonymous interactions in which participants were assumed to be Byzantine and unknown, instead now relies on known, gated, and trusted individuals and companies to operate.

Note: if the developers and miners did have de jure legitimacy, it could open up a new can of worms around FinCEN administrative requirements. 7  Furthermore, the miners are always the most important stakeholders in a proof-of-work system, if they were not, no one would host events just for them.

arthur twitter pow

Source: Twitter

Ledgers

With this backstory it is increasingly clear that, in the legal sense, public blockchains are not actual distributed ledgers.  Distributed, yes; ledgers, no.

As Robert Sams articulates:8

I think the confusion comes from thinking of cryptocurrency chains as ledgers at all. A cryptocurrency blockchain is (an attempt at) a decentralised solution to the double spending problem for a digital, extra-legal bearer asset. That’s not a ledger, that’s a log.

That was the point I was trying to make all along when I introduced the permissioned/permissionless terminology!9 Notice, I never used the phrase “permissionless ledger” — Permissionless’ness is a property of the consensus mechanism.

With a bearer asset, possession of some instrument (a private key in the cryptocurrency world) means ownership of the asset. With a registered asset, ownership is determined by valid entry in a registry mapping an off-chain identity to the asset. The bitcoin blockchain is a public log of proofs of instrument possession by anonymous parties. Calling this a ledger is the same as calling it “bearer asset ledger”, which is an oxymoron, like calling someone a “married bachelor”, because bearer assets by definition do not record their owners in a registry!

This taxonomy that includes the cryptocurrency stuff in our space (“a public blockchain is a permissionless distributed ledger of cryptocurrency”) causes so much pointless discussion.

I should also mention that the DLT space should really should be using the phrase “registry” instead of “ledger”. The latter is about accounts, and it is one ambition too far at the moment to speak of unifying everyone’s accounts on a distributed ledger.

As I have discussed previously, public blockchains intentionally lack hooks into off-chain legal identification systems.

Why?  Because as Sams noted above: a KYC’ed public blockchain is effectively an oxymoron.  Arguably it is self-defeating to link and tie all of the participants of the validation (mining) process and asset transfer process (users) to legal identities and gate them from using (or not using) the network services.  All you have created is a massively expensive permissioned-on-permissionless platform.

But that irony probably won’t stop projects and organizations from creating a Kimberely Process for cryptocurrencies.

I cannot speak on behalf of the plethora of “private chain” or “private ledger” projects (most of which are just ill-conceived forks of cryptocurrencies), but we know from public comments that some regulators and market structures might only recognize blockchains and distributed ledgers that comply with laws (such as domestic KYC / AML regulations) by tying into the traditional legal infrastructure.10 This means tying together off-chain legal identities with on-chain addresses and activity.

Why?

There are multiple reasons, but partly due to the need to reduce settlement risks: to create definitive legal settlement finality and identifying the participants involved in that process.11

Finality

As illustrated with the purposeful Ethereum One hardfork and the accidental Bitcoin fork in 2013, public blockchains by design, can only provide probablistic settlement finality.

Sure, the data inside the blocks itself is immutable, but the ordering and who does the ordering of the blocks is not.

What does this mean?  Recall that for both Ethereum and Bitcoin, information (usually just private keys) are hashed multiple times by a SHA algorithm making the information effectively immutable.12 It is unlikely given the length of time our star is expected to live, that this hash function can be reversed by a non-quantum computer.

However, blocks can and will be reorganized, they are not immutable.  Public blockchains are secured by social and economic consensus, not by math.

As a consequence, there are some fundamental problems with any fork on public blockchains: they may actually increase risks to the traditional settlement process.  And coupled with the lack of hooks for off-chain identity means that public blockchains — anarchic blockchains — are not well-suited or fit-for-purpose for regulated financial institutions.

After all, who is financially, contractually, and legally responsible for the consequences of a softfork or hardfork on a public blockchain?

  • If it is no one, then it might not be used by regulated organizations because they need to work with participants who can be held legally accountable for actions (or inactions).
  • If it is someone specifically (e.g., a doxxed individual) then you have removed the means of pseudonymous consensus to create censorship resistance.

In other words, public blockchains, contrary to the claims of social media, are not “law” because they do not actually tie into the legal infrastructure which they were purposefully designed to skirt.  By attempting to integrate the two worlds — by creating a KYC’ed public blockchain — you end up creating a strange hydra that lacks the utility of pseudonymity (and censorship resistance) yet maintains the expensive and redundant proof-of-work process.

These types of forks also open up the door for future forks: what is the criteria for forking or not in the future?  Who is allowed and responsible to make those decisions?  If another instance like the successful attack and counter-attack on The DAO takes place, will the community decide to fork again?  If 2 MB blocks are seen as inadequate, who bears the legal and financial responsibility of a new fork that supports larger (or smaller) blocks?  If any regulated institution lose assets or funds in this forking process, who bears responsibility?  Members of IRC rooms?

If the answers are caveat emptor, then that level of risk may not be desirable to many market participants.

Conclusions

Who are you going to sue when something doesn’t go according to plan?  In the case of The DAO, the attacker allegedly threatened to sue participants acting against his interests because he claimed: code is law.  Does he have legal standing?  At this time it is unclear what court would have accepted his lawsuit.

But irrespective of courts, it is unclear how smart contract code, built and executed on an anarchic platform, can be considered “legal.”  It appears to be a self-contradiction.

As a consequence, the fundamental need to tie contract code with legal prose is one of the key motivations behind how Richard Brown’s team in London approached Corda’s design.  If you cannot tie your code, chain, or ledger into the legal system, then it might be an unauthoritative ledger from the perspective of courts.13

And regulated institutions can’t simply just ignore regulations as they face real quantifiable consequences for doing so.  To paraphrase George Fogg, that’s akin to putting your head in the sand.

We continue to learn from the public blockchain world, such as the consequences of forks, and the industry as a whole should try to incorporate these lessons into their systems — especially if they want anyone of weight to use them.  Anarchic blockchains will continue to co-exist with their distributed ledger cousins but this dovetails into a conversation about “regtech,” which is a topic of another post.

Endnotes

  1. Rejecting Today’s Hard Fork, the Ethereum Classic Project Continues on the Original Chain: Here’s Why from Bitcoin Magazine []
  2. This doesn’t mean that regulators and/or financial institutions won’t use public blockchains for various activities; perhaps some of them will be comfortable after quantifying the potential risks associated with them. []
  3. Ethereum developers plan to transition Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake within the next year. []
  4. See Arthur Breitman’s interview on Epicenter Bitcoin and Mike Hearn’s interview on Money & Tech []
  5. Philosophically when Bob connects to “The Bitcoin Network” — how does Bob know he is actually connected to the “real” Bitcoin network?  One method is to look at the block header: it should take a specific amount of time to recreate the hash with that proof-of-work. This proves which network has the most work done.  However, in the meantime, Bob might connect to other ‘pretenders’ claiming to be “The Bitcoin Network.”  At this time, there does not appear to be any legal recognition of a specific anarchic chain. []
  6. The Bitcoin Core fork, which is euphemistically called a softfork, is basically a hardfork spread over a long period of time. []
  7. See Section 3.4 []
  8. Personal correspondence: March 9, 2016 []
  9. See Blockchain Finance by Robert Sams []
  10. This is not to say that regulators, governments, and various market participants will not use public blockchains for other activity. []
  11. See Section 3.1 []
  12. For proof-of-work mining, Ethereum uses ethash instead of SHA256.  For hashing itself, Ethereum uses SHA-3 which is part of the Keccak family (some people use the terms interchangeably but that isn’t technically correct). []
  13. See Section 9 []

Looking at public information for quarterly usage

[Note: the views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any organization I advise.]

It’s the beginning of a new quarter so that means its time to look at the last quarter and find out where public blockchain traction and usage is taking place, or not.  After all, we are continually bombarded by cryptocurrency enthusiasts each day telling us that exponential growth is occurring.  Or as GIF party posters like to say, “It’s Happening!” — so in theory it should be easy to find.

For more background, see previous posts from January and April.

Softballs

P2SH Q2

Source: P2SH.info

  • P2SH usage: above are two charts from P2SH.info which illustrates the movement of bitcoins into what most assume are multi-sig wallets of some kind.  There has been a visible increase over the past quarter, with about 200,000 or so more bitcoins moving into P2SH addresses.  Year-on-year, bitcoins held in P2SH addresses has increased from 8% to 13%.
total transactions over time blockstack

Source: Opreturn.org

  • OP_RETURN: above is a line chart from Opreturn.org which illustrates various 3rd party applications that typically use the OP_RETURN field in Bitcoin as a type of datastore (e.g., watermarked tokens).  It is hard to see it on this time scale but the average transactions during Q1 were roughly 1,500-2,500 per day whereas in Q2 it was a bit higher, between 2,500 to 3,500 per day.
percentage of transactions by each protocol opreturn

Source: Opreturn.org

  • Above is another chart looking at the percent of OP_RETURN transactions used by different watermarked token platforms.
  • Compared to Q1, the top 5 have shifted:
    • Blockstack 142,754 transactions (24.9%)
    • Colu 106,489 (18.6%)
    • Open Assets  82,696 (14.4%)
    • Monegraph 54,914 (9.6%)
    • Factom 47,328 (8.3%)
  • While Blockstack (Onename) still rules the roost, Colu has jumped ahead of the other users.  This is slightly interesting because the Colu team has publicly stated it will connect private chains that they are developing, with the Bitcoin network.  The term for this is “anchoring” and there are multiple companies that are doing it, including other Bitcoin/colored coin companies like Colu.  It is probably gimmicky but that’s a topic for a different post.
  • Incidentally the 5 largest OP_RETURN users account in Q2 for 75.8% of all OP_RETURN transactions which is roughly the same as Q1 (76%).
localbitcoins volume

Source: LocalBitcoins.com / Coin Dance

Above is a weekly volume chart denominated in USD beginning from March 2013 for LocalBitcoins.com.  As discussed in previous posts, LocalBitcoins is a site that facilitates the person-to-person transfer of bitcoins to cash and vice versa.

While there is a lot of boasting about how it may be potentially used in developing countries, most of the volume still takes place in developed countries and as shown in other posts, it is commonly used to gain access to illicit channels because there is no KYC, KYCC, or AML involved.  Basically Uber for cash, without any legal identification.

Over the past 6 months, volumes have increased from $10 million and now past $13 million per week. For comparison, most VC-backed exchanges do several multiples more in volume during the same time frame.1

Hardballs

bitcoin volatility 6 months

Source: Btcvol.info

In April, several Bitcoin promoters were crowing about how “stable” Bitcoin was.  Not mentioned: cryptocurrencies can’t simultaneously be stable and also go to the moon.  People that like volatility include: traders, speculators, GIF artisans, pump & dumpers. And people who don’t like volatility: consumers and everyday users.

What articles and reporters should do in the future is actually talk to consumers and everyday users to balance out the hype and euphoria of analysts who do not disclose their holdings (or their firms holdings) of cryptocurrencies.2

As we can see above, volatility measured relative to both USD and EUR hit a five month high this past quarter.  The average user probably would not be very happy about having to hedge that type of volatility, largely because there are few practical ways to do so.  Consumers want boring currencies, not something they have to pay attention to every 10 minutes.

And ether (ETH) was even more volatile during the same time frame: doubling relative to USD during the first half of the quarter then dropping more than 50% from its all-time high by mid-June.

Counterparty all time

Source: Blockscan

Counterparty is a watermarked token platform that, as shown in previous quarters, has hit a plateau and typically just sees a few hundred transactions a day.  Part of this is due to the fact that the core development team has been focused on other commercial opportunities (e.g., building commercial products instead of public goods).3

Another reason is that most of the public interest in “smart contract” prototyping and testing has moved over to Ethereum.

etherscan ethereum transactions

Source: Etherscan

As shown in the chart above, on any given day in Q2 the Ethereum blockchain processed roughly 40,000 transactions.  In Q1 that hovered between 15,000-30,000 transactions.  Note: the large fluctuations in network transactions during the spring may coincide with issues around The DAO (e.g., users were encouraged to actively ‘spam’ the network during one incident).

In addition, according to CoinGecko, Counterparty has lost some popularity — falling to 14th from 10th in its tables from last quarter.  Ethereum remained in 2nd overall.

Another trend observed in the last quarterly review remains constant: Ethereum has significantly more meetups than Counterparty and is 2nd only to Bitcoin in that measure as well.

long chain transactions q2

Source: Organ of Corti — Time period:  January 1, 2014 – June 27, 2016

We’ve discussed “long chain” transactions ad nausem at this point but I have noticed on social media people still talk about the nominal all-time high’s in daily transactions as if it is prima facie evidence that mega super traction is occurring, that everyday users are swarming the Bitcoin network with commercial activity.  Very few (anyone?) digs into what those transactions are.  Perhaps there is genuine growth, but what is the break down?

As we can see from the chart above, while non-long chain transactions have indeed grown over the past quarter, they are still far outpaced by long chain transactions which as discussed in multiple articles, can be comprised of unspendable faucet rewards (dust), gambling bets and a laundry list of other non-commercial activity.

Furthermore, and not to wade into the massive black hole that is the block size debate: even with segwit, there will be an upperbound limit on-chain transactions under the current Core implementation.  As a consequence some have asked if fee pressure would incentivize moving activity off-chain and onto other services and even onto other blockchains.

This may be worth looking into as the block size reaches its max limit in the future.  As far as we can tell right now, it doesn’t appear users are moving over to Litecoin, perhaps they are moving to Ethereum instead?  Or maybe they just pack up and leave the space entirely?

Wallets

We have looked at wallets here multiple times.  They’re a virtually meaningless metric because of how easy it is to inflate the number.  What researchers want to know is Monthly Active Users (MAU).  To my knowledge no one is willing to publicly discuss their monthly or daily user number.

For instance, two weeks ago Coinbase reached 4 million “users.”  But it is almost certain that they do not actually have 4 million daily or monthly active users.  This number is likely tied to the amount of email-based registrations they have had over the past four years (circa May 12, 2012).

Similarly, Blockchain.info has seen its “users” grow to just over 7.8 million at the time of this writing.  But this is a measure of wallets that have been created on the site, not actual users.

Any other way to gauge usage or traction?

Let’s look in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

abra downloads

Source: GoAbra / Google Play

Last October Abra launched its GoAbra app and initially rolled it out in The Philippines.  This past May, when CoinDesk ran a story about the company, I looked in the Google Play Store and it says the app had been downloaded 5,000 times.  Last week, Abra announced it was officially launching its app into the US.  As of this writing, it was still at 5,000 downloads.

“Wait,” you might be thinking to yourself, “Filipinos may prefer the iOS app instead.”

Perhaps that is the case, but according to data as of October 2015, Android has a ~81.4% market share in The Philippines.  Furthermore, the iOS version for some reason doesn’t appear on App Annie.  So it is unlikely that Abra has seen traction that isn’t reflected in these download numbers yet, perhaps it will in the future.

Anything else happening in the stores?

As of this writing, the top 5 Bitcoin wallets in the Google Play Store in order of appearance are:

  • Andreas Schildbach’s Bitcoin Wallet (1 million downloads)
  • Mycelium Bitcoin Wallet (100,000 downloads)
  • Coinbase (500,000 downloads)
  • Blockchain.info (100,000 downloads)
  • Airbitz (10,000 downloads)

The Apple App Store does not publicly state how many times an application has been downloaded.  It does rank apps based on a combination of user ratings and downloads. The top 6 on the iPhone in order of appearance:

  • Coinbase
  • Blockchain.info
  • Sollico (bitWallet)
  • breadwallet
  • Xapo
  • Airbitz

Interestingly however, the order is slightly different in the App Store on an iPad.  The top 6 are:

  • Coinbase
  • Blockchain.info
  • Sollico (bitWallet)
  • breadwallet
  • Airbitz
  • BitPay (Copay)

It may be worth revisiting these again next quarter.  If you want to burn some time, readers may be interested in looking at specific rank and activity via App Annie.

Incubators

Most new cohorts and batches at startup accelerators and incubators usually only stay 3-4 months.  A typical intake may see 10-15 companies each get a little bit of seed funding in exchange for a percentage of the equity.  During the incubation period the startup is usually provided mentorship, legal advice, office space, access to social networks and so forth.  It is common place to hear people of all stripes in Silicon Valley state that 9 out of 10 of these startups will burn out within a couple years — that the incubator relies on one of them having a big exit in order to fund the other duds.4

500 Startups, Boost.VC, Plug and Play, YCombinator and other incubators have added and removed startups from their websites and marketing material based on the traction startups have had.  And cryptocurrency startups are not too different from this circle of life. 5

For instance, at YCombinator, Bitcoin-specific mentions on applications has declined by 61% over the past year.

Based on pubic information, as of this writing, it appears that out of the roughly 100 Bitcoin-related startups that have collectively come and gone through the incubators listed above, just a handful have gone on to raise additional funding and/or purportedly have active users and customers.  Unfortunately, no one has consistently published user numbers, so it is unclear what the connection between funding and growth is as this time.

In fact, in an odd twist, instead of measuring success by monthly active users, customers, or revenue, many Silicon Valley-based companies are measuring success based on how much money they raised.  That’s probably only a good idea if the business model itself is to always be raising.

For example, 21inc regularly boasts at being the “best funded company in Bitcoin” — but has not stated what traction four separate rounds of funding have created.  How many bitcoins did it mine prior to its pivot into consumer hardware?  How many 21 computers were sold?  How many users have installed 21?  And what are its key differences relative to what Jeremy Rubin created in 2014 (Tidbit)?

Again, this is not to single out 21inc, but rather to point out if companies in the public blockchain space were seeing the traction that they generally claim to on social media and conferences — then as discussed in previous posts, they would probably advertise those wins and successes.

Hiring

With funding comes hiring.  Since it is very difficult to find public numbers, there is another way to gauge how fast companies are growing: who and how many people they are publicly hiring.

The last Bitcoin Job Fair was last held in April 2015.  Of its 20 sponsors, 6 are now dead and ~7 are either zombies and/or have have done major pivots.  It is unclear how many people that were hired during that event still work for the companies they worked for.

Where else can we look?

Launched in 2014, Coinality is a job matching website that connects employers with prospective employees with the idea that they’d be compensated in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and dogecoin.  Fun fact: Coinality is one of the few companies I interviewed for Great Chain of Numbers that is still alive today and hasn’t pivoted (not that pivoting in and of itself is a bad thing).

It currently lists 116 jobs, 105 of which were posted in the past 2 months.

A number of VC-backed companies and large enterprises (or head hunters recruiting on their behalf) have listed openings in the past month.  For example: WellsFargo, Blockchain.info, Circle, Fidelity, IBM, KeepKey, itBit, BNYMellon and SAP logos pop up on the first couple pages of listings.

Among the 67 job listed in June, twenty-six of the positions were freelance positions cross-listed on Upwork (formerly known as Elance / oDesk).

Notable startups that are missing altogether: many cryptocurrency-centered companies whose executives are very vocal and active on social media.  Perhaps they use LinkedIn instead?

Other stats

  • According to CoinATMRadar there are now 690 Bitcoin ATMs installed globally.  That is an increase of 78 ATMs since Q1.  That comes to around 0.86 ATM installations per day in Q2 which is a tick higher than Q1 (0.84).
  • Bitwage launched in July 2014 starting out with zero signups and zero payroll.
    • Fast-forward to January 2016: Bitwage had 3,389 cumulative user signups and cumulative payroll volumes of $2,456,916
    • Through June 2016 it has now reached 5,617 cumulative signups and cumulative payroll volumes of $5,130,971
    • While growing a little faster than ATM installations, this is linear not exponential growth.
  • Open Bazaar is a peer-to-peer marketplace that officially launched on April 4, 2016.  It had been in beta throughout the past year.  The VC-backed team operates a companion website called BazaarBay which has a stats page.
    • It may be worth looking at the “New Nodes” and “New Listings” sections over the coming quarters as they are both currently declining.6

Conclusion

It is unclear what the root cause(s) of the volatility were above.  According to social media it can be one of two dozen things ranging from Brexit to the upcoming “halvening.”  Because we have no optics into exchanges and their customer behavior, speculation surrounding the waxing and waning will remain for the foreseeable future.

Based on process of elimination and the stats in this post, the likely answer does not appear to be consumer usage (e.g., average Joe purchasing alpaca socks with bitcoins).  After all, both BitPay and Coinbase have stopped posting consumer-related stats and they are purportedly the largest merchant processors in the ecosystem.

Most importantly, just because market prices increase (or decreases), it cannot be inferred that “mass adoption” is happening or not.  Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence: there should be ample evidence of mass adoption somewhere if it were genuinely happening.

For instance, the price of ether (ETH) has increased 10x over the past 6 months but there is virtually no economy surrounding its young ecosystem.  Mass consumer adoption is not happening as GIF artisans might says.  Rather it is likely all speculation based — which is probably the same for all other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.

About a year ago we began seeing a big noticeable pivot away from cryptocurrencies to non-cryptocurrency-based distributed ledgers.  That was largely fueled by a lack of commercial traction in the space and it doesn’t appear as if any new incentive has arisen to coax those same businesses to come back.  After all, why continue building products that are not monetizable or profitable for a market that remains diminutive?

Let’s look again next quarter to see if that trend changes.

Endnotes

  1. For more granularity see also BNC’s Liquid index. []
  2. Speaking of interest and hype, CB Insights has some new charts based on keyword searches over time. []
  3. Several members of the development team also co-founded Symbiont. []
  4. Many of these incubators are too young to have a track record that proves or disproves this “conventional” wisdom.  See also Venture Capitalists Get Paid Well to Lose Money from HBR. []
  5. For instance, Mirror closed its Series A round 18 months ago, but was removed from Boost’s website because it no longer is involved in Bitcoin-related activities.  Boost currently lists the following companies out of the 50+ Bitcoin-companies it has previously incubated: BlockCypher, BitPagos, Abra, Stampery, Fluent, SnapCard, Verse.  500 Startups has removed a number of startups as well and currently lists the following on its website: HelloBit, Melotic, Coinalytics, BTCJam, Bonafide, CoinPip. []
  6. Since it has only been “launched” for a quarter, it is probably a little unfair to pass judgement at this time.  But that hasn’t stopped me before.  OpenBazaar has a lot of growing pains that its developers are well aware of including UX/UI issues.  But beyond that, it is unclear that the average consumer is actually interested in using peer-to-peer marketplaces + cryptocurrencies versus existing incumbents like Alibaba, Amazon and eBay — all of whom have customer service, EULAs, insurance policies and accept traditional currencies. I had a chance to speak with one of their investors at Consensus in May and do not think their assumptions about network operating costs were remotely accurate.  Furthermore, where is the market research to support their thesis that consumers will leave incumbents for a platform that lacks insurance policies and live customer service?  Note: OB1 developers and investors insist that their reputation management and arbitration system will increase consumer confidence and customer protection. []