🥛 Meet the guy that got Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman into crypto 👀

His nickname is "Bitcoin Patient Zero". Find out who it is inside August 26, 2022 | [Read Online]( GM. This is the Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that has so much sauce you’ll be wondering where the spaghetti is. It’s Friday, so lets boogie: - Meet "Bitcoin Patient Zero" - Uniswap makin’ big moves - Funding Friday - Meme of the day MEET "BITCOIN PATIENT ZERO": WENCES CASARES We got in touch with one of the most interesting guys in the world. No, it’s not the Dos Equis guy. His name is Wences Casares. He’s… - “Bitcoin Patient Zero” - convinced heavy hitters in Silicon Valley (eg. Reid Hoffman) to look at Bitcoin way back in 2011-2012 - CEO of Xapo - a bitcoin wallet company that helps wealthy people & big institutions buy and store crypto. **They apparently hold ~$10B worth of crypto in underground vaults across multiple continents - Sold his last company (Pentagon) for $750M And he’s super lowkey. But we asked him for an interview…and we simply don’t miss. In fact, he sent us a 15-page doc with all his thoughts on Blockchains and Bitcoin. You know the rules: Never let a fellow hodlr spend more than 2 minutes reading something. Here are the top 5 takeaways: 1/ Why Bitcoin? Wences is a fan of Bitcoin. But he isn’t all “Hoorah! BTC is here to fix all our problems”. In fact, he thinks it can be slow and cumbersome at times. But there are the 3 things that make it special: - Open - Anyone can use it. There are no borders and it doesn’t discriminate - Uncensorable - No one has the power to restrict or change your transactions - Undilutable - There will only ever be 21m Bitcoin. No one can change that Wences makes the point that Bitcoin is an open protocol, not a company. Companies change (Myspace -> FB, eBay -> Amazon), but protocols don't (we still use the same email protocol). “Bitcoin could do for money what the Internet did for information.” 2/ Best use cases First, here’s where he says blockchains are NOT useful: - With systems that have any info that will need to be changed. Things like court docs, supply chain management, property titles, etc just don’t make sense to him - In most cases it’s actually easier & cheaper to run open protocols & standards than putting everything on a blockchain where it can be expensive and difficult Where it IS useful: - With systems that have info that won’t need to be changed. Things like your social security, date of birth, etc - As a global non-political standard of value & settlement. Similar to how meters and kilos are standards for length and weight - neither change due to political factors Everything will one day be quoted in Bitcoin or “satoshis”. USD? 107 satoshis Barrel of oil? 50 satoshis Global GDP? 97,365,765 satoshis The Milk Road? Still free Wences thinks our grandchildren will call us weird when we tell them we used USD (government money) to price a lot of things in the world. 3/ Price Prediction for Bitcoin If Bitcoin becomes the world standard of value and settlement its market cap will be: - worth more than gold ($12T market cap) - worth less than the world’s narrow supply of money ($40T market cap) If this happens, 1 Bitcoin will be worth between ~$500k and ~$1m 4/ How much to invest in Bitcoin Only up to 5% of your net worth. Wences doesn’t believe in DCA, he thinks you should just buy it all at once and forget about it for 5-7 years. But of course, Bitcoin is still an experiment. So only invest what you can afford to lose. 5/ How Bitcoin can fail - Price panic. If we all decide at the same time that bitcoin is worthless, that it will be worthless. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy - Bitcoin doesn’t become mainstream. And it’s only used by believers and fanatics. This could happen due to the government and institutions keeping it separate from the financial world Wences thinks there's only a 10% chance that Bitcoin fails at this point. Wanna read the whole 15-page doc? Reply below with "Cookies please" and we'll send it your way! UNISWAP IS MAKING MOVES [Uniswap]( is a place where you can swap any crypto coin for another. It has: - 70% market share for DEXs on Ethereum - $1T+ in cumulative volume - $1b+ in fees generated for LPs over the last year (sometimes even generates more daily fee revenue than Ethereum) And there are 2 big moves being made: 1/ [Creation of a Uniswap Foundation]( - Earlier this week, a proposal was passed to create the foundation to fund open-source development & support community governance. - It has a $74m budget. Most of it will go to the Grants Program to fund R&D and more projects that want to help grow Uniswap. 2/ Voting to turn the “Fee Switch” on Uniswap has been a money-making machine for liquidity providers. But what if I told you Uniswap, itself, doesn't make any money from those fees? Well, it’s true. And it’s all because the Uniswap fee switch hasn’t been turned on. Sidebar: I love saying I haven’t flipped the switch yet. Uniswap not making money? Haven’t flipped the switch yet I’m hungry? Hey ma’ flip the switch on that meatloaf! I’m single & lonely? Just need to flip that relationship switch Anyways - the Uniswap DAO members are voting on a proposal to flip the switch. - It would give them a 10% cut of LP fees for 3 pools (ETH-DAI, ETH-USDT, and ETH-USDC) - The fee switch would only be activated for 120 days. After that, there’s another vote on whether to turn it off or keep it on - For reference - Uniswap would’ve made ~$5m in protocol earnings over the last 120 days if the fees were turned on There’s one final vote left to pass the proposal. If it passes, the Uniswap fee switch will be flipped on for the first time ever. **Queue Drake** TODAY'S EDITION IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY [THIRDWEB]( Web3 is in its early days. We’re in the 'beer-drinking iPhone app' stage. The main problem is it’s difficult for devs to build in web3 - workflow is fragmented, complex, and slow. We need products to make it easier. Stripe made it easy to add payments to your app. AWS made it easy to add storage & compute for your app. Now it’s [thirdweb's]( turn - thirdweb makes it easy to add web3 tools like tokens and NFTs to your app. Some of the world's biggest brands (Afterpay, Coinbase, etc) are using it to launch and power their apps. Since launching: - 55,000+ developers have joined - 200,000+ smart contracts deployed - just raised a $24m Series A from Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and more. The Milk Road boys even got in on the fun. Companies like thirdweb are crucial to the growth of web3, as developer tools help builders create real-world applications of the technology. Interested in learning more? [Check it out here](! FUNDING FRIDAY Each Friday, we give you a rundown of Web3 companies that got funded. This week we saw ~$275M get invested into crypto companies. Here’s who got the money: [ReadyPlayerMe]( got $56M to develop a cross-game avatar platform for metaverses. One avatar, multiple worlds. [thirdweb]( got $24M to make it easy to build web3 apps. Your boys at the Milk Road invested. Because we’re smart. And handsome. [Comm]( got $5M to build the Discord of Web3. Holdup, isn’t Discord the Discord for web3? [Spectral Finance]( got $23M to create an on-chain credit score. If you wanna check out the full database of companies that have raised money in 2022, we got 'em for you [right here](. MEME OF THE DAY That's a wrap for this week. Stay thirsty and see ya on Monday! If you want more, be sure to follow our Twitter [(@MilkRoadDaily)]( Share The Milk Road You currently have 0 referrals, only 1 away from receiving An Inside Look At What The Crypto Whales Are Betting On. [An Inside Look At What The Crypto Whales Are Betting On]( [Click to Share]( Or copy and paste this link to others: Share The Milk Road You currently have 0 referrals, only 1 away from receiving An Inside Look At What The Crypto Whales Are Betting On. [Click to Share]( Or copy and paste this link to others: [ What'd you think of today's edition? - [🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛 F**king great]( - [🥛🥛🥛 Meh, do better]( - [🥛 You didn't bring the heat]( ROADERS REVIEW VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY 19. DAYS. LEFT. UNTIL. THE. MERGE DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. 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