9:30am, Weds 26th Oct 2022, Draper Startup House My Khe Beach, Danang, Vietnam

Key Words: Ultrasound Money, OPStack, OPCraft, Optimism Quests, Hopr Dappnode, Solana and Mango Markets Hack

Contents

• Introductions

• Questions from the floor

• New features on Ultrasound Money website

• OPStack – Optimism’s making it easy to spin up a custom blockchain

• OPCraft – a blockchain just to play Minecraft!

• Hopr Dappnode – physical device dedicated to validating blockchains from home

• Jobs in Crypto

• Solana / Mango Markets hack

• Optimism Quests

• Mirror

• Glossary

Introductions

Go round the group, make brief introductions, does anyone have questions to ask today, or topics to discuss?

Questions from the floor

1. How to invest more safely in blockchain? Ideas from the group:

• Buy fully collateralised stablecoins (USDC, DAI, USDT) and invest them in protocols with yield (we looked at Polynomial Protocol: earn.polynomial.fi) – since downside of a hack is 100%, choose protocols carefully and perhaps spread over a few different protocols

• Buy only the largest cap cryptocurrencies (ETH, also mentioned were BTC, MATIC, SOL, XRP) – can buy slowly via DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) to reduce risk further. You can find out more about large cap crypto coins on Coin Gecko: www.coingecko.com

• Stake ETH for even more gains – liquid staking tokens include RETH (Rocket Pool), STETH or WSTETH (Lido) – or home staking (see Hopr Dappnode below)

• Avoid dog coins or meme tokens! These have only speculative value, they will pump, and when the market runs out of “greater fools” then they will dump

• Avoid small cap tokens which have huge VC holdings which will get dumped on the market in future

• Most NFTs are highly speculative and are going to zero, avoid overinvesting in any NFT project

• Safe way of investing in NFTs: find a free mint, and sell at floor price on Opensea or Quix (or other market place)

• Safe(r) way of investing in dog coins etc – only use a small percentage of portfolio that you can afford to lose

(Disclaimer – this is not financial advice, just some ideas from the group discussion!)

2. What are the blockchain communities around the world, especially dev communities?

• This group has keen users and some devs!

• Cairo Vietnam Developers group

• Go to Ethereum Devcon (Bogota this year, perhaps Nha Trang next year?)

• Twitter is the public square for crypto, follow all the core developers and organisations there

3. What educational resources to follow for a newbie?

• Use Twitter to follow reliable people such as core developers

• Bankless YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/c/Bankless

• The Daily Gwei YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/c/TheDailyGwei

Both Bankless and The Daily Gwei (by Anthony Sassano) are produced to educate people about crypto, not to shill people useless tokens. Listening to these podcasts in the background each day will help anyone to keep up to date with the Ethereum ecosystem.

4. Reddit NFTs!

Reddit has released their new “digital collectibles” and they are proving very popular! It was a free mint, but they’ve been speculated on and today’s floor price is over 1.3 ETH! Apparently in the past NFTs have been very unpopular on Reddit, but by rebranding to “digital collectibles” apparently the community now loves them. Here is the collection on OpenSea: opensea.io/collection/the-senses-x-reddit-collectible-avatars

New features on Ultrasound Money website

The Ultrasound Money website reports on the progress of the ETH asset to becoming deflationary. New features have been added, such as viewing Ethereum base fee chart over 1, 7, or 30 days. Interesting patterns of daily and weekly gas fee spikes emerge! Great tool for timing transactions during the day or week to get lower fees.

OPStack – Optimism’s making it easy to spin up a custom blockchain

From the article: "The OP Stack is a modular, open-source blueprint for highly scalable, highly interoperable blockchains of all kinds. It makes it easier than ever to build your own blockchain, empowering you to focus on what matters – the cutting edge."

OPCraft – a blockchain just to play Minecraft!

This is Minecraft, but every block built or mined is a transaction on an OPStack blockchain, making Minecraft into a fully on-chain crypto native game – OPCraft!

Hopr Dappnode – physical device dedicated to validating blockchains from home

We looked at a physical Dappnode device (sponsored by Hopr project) and talked about the benefits of staking from home and validating blockchains, which include making profits and passive income, and being able to connect directly to blockchains via the Dappnode’s own RPC endpoints, bypassing all centralised infrastructure such as Infura.

Here are some tutorials on getting started with staking from home:

Jobs in Crypto

Bear markets are for building! There are various cryptocurrency job sites available, for both developers and non-developers. “Jobs in Crypto” is a Twitter account that tweets out various job listings, give them a look if you want to go “full time crypto”:

Solana / Mango Markets hack

Mango Markets on Solana got hacked for $100M. The attacker manipulated the price of the native token $MNGO upwards, and then used $MNGO to take out (under)collateralised loans. The same native token was used in a governance hack where the attacked voted on the Mango protocol to make a very generous 40% settlement with themselves! (10% bug bounty is widely considered by the community to be a reasonable settlement for a hacker to be considered “white hat”.)

Optimism Quests

We looked at the Optimism Quests website where users can obtain 18 different free NFTs by using 18 different protocols on Optimism. The user remains in control of the funds throughout, approximately $200 to $1000 will be needed to complete all of the tasks to get the NFTs, it might cost up to $50 gas. Highly recommended for people to onboard into using Optimism, an Ethereum Layer 2 (rollup). Potentially those with most of the 18 NFTs might be eligible for a future $OP airdrop, if Optimism community decide to go that route.

Mirror

Each week the meeting notes are published in a web3 native way using Mirror!

Glossary

NFT – Non Fungible Token – ownership of a unique token on the blockchain, might be art or have other digital information attached

VC – Venture Capital – invest in seed rounds of crypto startups, often sell a lot of the project token when it launches

USDC – US Dollar Coin by Circle. 1 USDC = $1 USD

ETH – Ether, coin of the Ethereum blockchain network

DCA – Dollar Cost Average, e.g. to buy $5 of $ETH every day.