Transaction Fees

Over the past few weeks transaction/gas fees on both Bitcoin and Ethereum have been a lot higher than average. A transaction/gas fee is an added payment to the miner/validator of a given network to compliment the block reward subsidy from the coinbase. As demand to transact on the network grows, so does the amount of the native blockchain asset (Bitcoin/Ether) it takes to send a transaction in a short amount of time. Below you can see a visual representation of the Bitcoin blockchain’s mempool. The mempool is how many transactions are waiting to be confirmed. In the summer and winter of 2017 the mempool become overwhelmed with transactions resulting in super high transaction fees which is not optimal for your average retail customer. For someone who wants to send .01 BTC or less from one address to another, it doesn’t make much sense to pay 10% more of that payment amount in fees. On the other hand if someone or some entity is sending 1000 Bitcoin ($10,000,000) that fee isn’t a deal breaker. Since 2017 a lot has been done to scale the Bitcoin blockchain such as batching transactions, ability to send through the Lightning Network, and enterprise solutions like Liquid BTC from Blockstream. These help take the load off the network in hopes of preventing mempool congestion. This is not to say the blockchain won’t get backed up again but to say transaction fees are historically high today is quite an overstatement.

Market Update

Bitcoin- $8,814.14

Ether- $203.74

Gold- $1,730.98

DJI- 24,465.16

NASDAQ- 9,324.59

S&P- 2,955.45

NYSE- 11,331.97

New Developments

1. UniswapV2 introduces flash swaps, ERC-20/ERC-20 pooling, and a price oracle

2. 50 Bitcoin mined in February of 2009 was moved for the first time on 5/20/2020

3. ETH-A Vault #9431 minted 7,500,000 Dai with 150,000 ETH as collateral

4. Fuel Labs creates a Layer 2 solution for Reddit’s new ERC-20 tokens

Industry Opinion’s

• A Thesis for Institutional Investment: Why Bitcoin?

• Winklevoss Twins: Stablecoins Are Still Missing Their "Facebook Moment"

• Chris Burniske, Partner at Placeholder

Chris Burniske @cburniske 1/ Crypto’s not seeing mainstream user traction, but it is seeing mainstream developer traction, and the developers are the precursors to the users.

March 3rd 2019

245 Retweets933 Likes

FinTech Activity

Classification Models in Machine Learning (Supervised):

• Logistic Regression

• Decision Tress

• Random Forest

• Naive Bayes

• Support Vector Machine

Earn Opportunity

PoolTogether is a no-loss lottery game built on top of Ethereum. Players purchase a lottery ticket with Dai, native stablecoin (USD) on Ethereum, which allows the player to be included in every lottery moving forward. The winner is chosen once a week, around 2:30 PM Eastern Time every Friday. The winner receives the interest accrued on all the Dai used to purchase the tickets. Anyone can participate in this lottery by downloading an Ethereum wallet like Argent.