Balaji Applications

Video

1. A DB for storing things of value

• currency (BTC, ETH)
• tokens (ERC20)
• digital assets (ERC721)
• identity (ERC725, ERC735)

2. A protocol

Payments are now packets. Fully packet-driven transmission of value without reference to a bank. Once we invented ways of sending videos, songs, etc. over the wire we got the internet revolution

3. A protocol

Internet allowed programs to autonomously communicate. Blockchain allows them to autonomously transact. Fundemental for “intelligent agents”.

4. 10X

• 10X better than gold
• 10X faster than swift
• 10X larger than kickstarter
• 10X faster than delaware

This is truly a structural change that hasn’t fully rippled out yet.

5. Have created many billion dollar entities

6. You have a choice of who to trust

7. Enable internet-scale cap tables

• Who owns what shares of a company - used to be stored in an excel sheet or carta.com.
• Blockchain is far superior alternative - token holders - see their transactions and can trade them (liquid)

8. More is coming

• Games, logins, wiki, marketplaces, dns, browsers, web services

9. Breaks network effects

You have a new tool to issue value to customers early, like giving equity out, to fight the uphill battle of starting a network.

10. Transform social networks

Before: likes, pokes, messages; After: paid DMs, surveys, tasks - “bullish on this”

11. Partial move away from cloud to privacy

12. Blockchains make macroeconomics an experimental science

People can self-govern with these different economic experiments. Akin to the “lab of the states” (where different US states experiment with different laws/policies).

Applications: 2020

• 1B revenue: exchanges (e.g. Coinbase), miners, issuers (e.g. Eth)
• 100M revenue: hardware wallets (e.g. Ledger)
• 5B+ stored value: stable coins (e.g. Eth, USDC)
• 1B+ stored value: DeFi

Applications: 2025

Things that might be big by 2025

• Privacy coins (e.g. Dash, Monero, ZCash)
• Lending and interest
• Scaling (Tweet on things in the works)
• Decentralized cold storage (e.g. Casa)
• SaaS-for-gas (e.g. StarkWare)
• Insurance against DeFi contract and default risk (e.g. Opyn, Nexus Mutual)
• Multi-wallets w/ many verbs (e.g. vote, sign, buy, sell, etc.)
• Security innovation (e.g. ZenGo for keyless wallets)
• Novel financial instruments (e.g. Fomo3D, PoolTogether)
• Blockchain Games (e.g. egamers, Forte)
• Crypto social networks (e.g. Voice, Twetch)
• Decentralized DNS (e.g. ENS, Unstoppable, Blockstack, Handshake)
• Automated Market Making (e.g. Uniswap, Kyber Binding Curves) - “bearish on this”
• Decentralized Identity (e.g. 3Box)
• Personal Tokenization (in exchange for their time / consult)
• Mutuals and Guilds (Moloch, Gitcoin)
• Founder’s Rewards (pioneered by ZCash; biz model for funding devs, like 10 year vest)
• On-Chain developer bounties (e.g. Tezos)
• Clients for dApps (e.g. instadapp)
• Developer Tools (e.g. Alchemy, Bison Trails)
• Oracles and Prediction Markets (e.g. Erasure, Augur)
• Community-owned organizations - “will become a lot easier to do with crypo”