The proliferation of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) has led to the introduction of revolutionary changes to the global financial landscape, offering a platform for a more democratic financial system by eliminating traditional barriers to entry, and lowering transaction costs, while providing transparent, secure, permissionless and accessible financial services.

Introduction

Fecund Trust (Fund I) Fecund Trust is a thesis-driven high conviction digital asset-holding fund that invests in disruptive protocols leveraging on the power of blockchain technology and decentralized networks to create novel community incentives and network effects. I firmly believe that the fate of humanity will largely be determined at the frontier of the blockchain technology, which has the potential to create a free, fair, and open society.

SOME LESSONS FROM THE CRYPTO BULL RUN

Blockchain technology offers tremendous benefits such as trustless interactions, and immutable record-keeping which has largely generated enormous retail and institutional interest. However, the core architectures behind public blockchains lead to a trade-off between decentralization, security, and scalability. The Blockchain Trilemma which was postulated by Vitalik Buterin fundamentally asserts that projects can only optimize two of the three core properties of a public blockchain, which are (Decentralization, Scalability, and Security). Therefore, due to technical, or other limitations, one of these three must be sacrificed.

The concept of intellectual property rights has been a long-standing issue from time immemorial as humans inherently aspire to be duly acknowledged and rewarded for their unique creations, whether it be software programs, music, writings, or other forms of art. Over the years, legal measures such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks were initiated in order to enable creators including application developers and artists to gain adequate ownership, recognition, and remuneration for their inventions. Thereby, limiting unethical activities such as piracy or counterfeiting of original creations. However, it is an undeniable fact that the process involved in obtaining adequate intellectual property rights such as trademarks, patents, or copyright is inherently tedious and expensive. Hence, these constraints are significant limitations for upcoming artists or creators.

The rapid evolution of the cryptocurrency ecosystem having several projects being launched at a swift pace has propelled the emergence of creative and collaborative mechanisms for fundraising new projects. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) became a prevalent fundraising approach in the cryptocurrency industry during the 2016/2017 bull-run, through which projects were able to raise money by selling a part of their total token supply to the public. ICOs were mainly deployed through Ethereum’s ERC-20 protocol standard, and they rapidly became a leading use case for ETH-based tokens. However, there were enormous challenges associated with the ICOs, most of which revolve around inadequate investor protections or control mechanisms, that exposes most investors to existential risks. Nevertheless, after the market downturn and “ICO bubble burst” in 2018, the concept of Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs) became predominant in 2019, largely spearheaded by centralized exchanges. IEOs crowdfunding model was similar to ICOs, although in this case, most of the projects were vetted by the respective exchanges.

The cryptocurrency market, which is still in its infancy stage, has experienced exponential growth since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009. This tremendous growth has attracted enormous interest and capital inflow from both retail and institutional investors. However, as this nascent industry continues to evolve over time, many of the retail and institutional investors including major hedge funds, trading firms and Venture Capital (VC) firms are consistently seeking reliable indicators or sustainable valuation models for forecasting the future price of Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies.

The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space has witnessed exponential growth over the past years. As the disruptive Defi sector continues to evolve, there has also been an increased number of financial decentralised applications (dApps) developed to democratize equitable access to innovative financial services.