Why A Bitcoin Investment is a Massively Underrated Opportunity in Today’s Macro Landscape
Preface
We live in interesting times. With the advances in technology and the proliferation of the internet — software is eating the world. Coming out of the Great Recession — the world had seen massive economic growth in what was close to a 11 year bull run largely dominated by US tech equities.
Along with that, wealth inequality was increasing, central banks across the world had been expanding their balance sheets and global debt was not set to recover from its unhealthy levels — it was growing.
Then came the Coronavirus pandemic.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are…
Why Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools are the optimal way for initial token distribution
An optimal token launch for a new crypto project aims to both fairly distribute tokens to community members and bootstrap the necessary liquidity with as little capital as possible. Distributing tokens in such a manner has historically proven to be difficult.
An IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) is one means of initial token distribution — one where the project is listed on a centralized exchange like Binance and users buy from it directly. This goes against the core principles of decentralization and can limit who is able to participate.
Although a disputed topic, word of mouth and small data points lead…
How Radicle made a splash by leveraging Balancer’s LBPs to ensure optimal initial token distribution and beat the previous record
Intro
An increasing number of projects are choosing Balancer’s Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBP) as a means to distribute initial tokens fairly.
LBPs are preferred because they offer numerous advantages — a smooth price discovery process that discourages front-running, an even playing field of participation which results in an even token distribution, and a capital-efficient manner of bootstrapping liquidity.
Allowing for the pool’s token pair weighting (e.g 92.5%/7.5% USDC/TKN) to be skewed means projects can bootstrap liquidity with little investment; weighting changes throughout the sale gives average buyers the ability to participate in the project at a fair price. …
How Balancer V2 Has Everything You Would Want From An AMM
Introduction
We are living in an incredibly exciting time for DeFi. Having gone through the craziness that was the summer of DeFi in 2020 and seeing it flourish again this winter, just keeping up with the space is proving to be a full-time job.
Every week there are new projects being announced, claiming to be the latest and greatest in their target niche. With this increased attention comes increased risks. As such, it is important to be prudent as to where you put your hard-earned money to work in the decentralized finance space.
In this article, I will make the case…
How a Polkadot project executed the most successful LBP yet on Balancer
Introduction
A successful fair token launch optimally distributes initial tokens and bootstraps liquidity while deploying limited capital. It’s the objective of any serious protocol launch today.
Balancer’s Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBPs) are designed to enable projects to achieve a fair launch in a permissionless way, without requiring deep pockets or complex setups by the founding team.
In this article, we review the recently successful LBP launch of HydraDX — a new cross-chain liquidity protocol operating as a Polkadot parachain.
We will examine what aspects of the LBP helped the Hydra team achieve a fair launch, the speed bumps that were hit…
Dude, where’s my package-private access modifier?
Introduction
Kotlin is an amazing new up-and-coming language. It’s very actively developed and has a ton of features that make it very appealing.
It’s been steadily gaining market share ever since Google added Android Development support for it (back in 2017) and made it the preferred language for such development exactly one year ago (May 2019)
For any Java developer coming into the language, spoiler alert, there is one big surprise that awaits you — the package-private visibility modifier is missing. It doesn’t exist.
Access Modifiers
An access modifier is the way to set the accessibility of a class/method/variable in object-oriented languages. …
Visualizing Kafka’s most misunderstood configuration setting
Having worked with Kafka for almost two years now, there are two configs whose interaction I’ve seen to be ubiquitously confused.
Those two configs are acks and min.insync.replicas— and how they interplay with each other.
This piece aims to be a handy reference which clears the confusion through the help of some illustrations.
Replication
To best understand these configs, it’s useful to remind ourselves of Kafka’s replication protocol.
I’m assuming you’re already familiar with Kafka — if you aren’t, feel free to check out my “Thorough Introduction to Apache Kafka” article.
For each partition, there exists one leader broker and n…
The types of carbohydrates you care about on a ketogenic diet
Keto Bombs are a series of short, concise and informative pieces on various aspects of the Ketogenic diet.
For carbohydrate-restrictive protocols like the keto diet, it is no sercret that you need to diligently watch and control your carbohydrate intake.
Staying under 30 grams of carbohydrates may seem impossible at first glance, especially when you consider that 400 grams of broccoli contains 28 grams of carbohydrates!
Truth of the matter is, not all carbohydrates are created equal. While some are digestible, others can pass through the body without being absorbed at all! …
Let’s understand a bit more about the ketones that fuel us
Keto Bombs are a series of short, concise and informative pieces on various aspects of the Ketogenic diet.
We all know that when in a ketogenic state, we utilize fats rather than carbohydrates for energy. But what kind of fats are we burning exactly?
In this episode of Keto Bombs, we dive into our main fuel source — ketones!
Ketones
Ketones are the byproduct of the breakdown of fatty acids. In our body, fat gets mobilized and goes to the liver where it goes through ketogenesis.
ketogenesis — the process of creating ketone bodies from fatty acids.
Ketogenesis is not exclusively…
Lasting weight loss on the ketogenic diet
Keto Bombs are a series of short, concise and informative pieces on various aspects of the Ketogenic diet.
A common misconception shared by many people nowadays is that you cannot lose weight fast without gaining it back. That is partly true.
On the ketogenic diet, though, that need not be the case. The latest research shows that you have some beneficial changes happen to your metabolism once you lose weight on the ketogenic diet and that you do not gain weight back quite as fast as if you were on a standard calorie-restricted diet.
Water Weight
Stanislav Kozlovski
A generally curious individual — software engineer, mediterranean dweller, regular gym-goer, coffee lover and DeFi (Balancer) contributor.
