Member Info for ragnarr

House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee Report on Water quality in rivers was published this month all 139 pages of it. The Government have 2 months to respond to the recommendations.

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8460/documents/85659/default/

Poor monitoring arrangements mean that river users cannot currently make informed decisions about when it is safe or not to use rivers. The prevalence of plastic pollution, the presence of persistent chemicals and spread of antimicrobial resistant pathogens in rivers in England are all issues of grave concern. Not a single river in England has received a clean bill of health for chemical contamination. (Paragraph 40)
4. The current range of pollutants being monitored is too narrow. The Environment Agency must begin work to extend the number of substances it is regularly monitoring in rivers. Existing datasets do not provide a comprehensive picture of risks to human health, aquatic life nor microplastic contamination in rivers. (Paragraph 41)
5. We recommend that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs commission, in conjunction with the devolved administrations, a UK-wide survey of emerging pollutants and microplastic pollution of river environments, including an assessment of their potential impact on aquatic ecology. (Paragraph 42)

26.The technology for continuous monitoring of water quality is evolving rapidly. We recommend that the Environment Agency invite manufacturers to submit products for evaluation so that the Agency can rapidly introduce cost-efficient and effective sensors at an increased number of locations. (Paragraph 170)

reachforthestars - Ahh youve embarrassed me now as I didnt go more into Dapps, so thank you for mentioning and going through it - I concur with all your thoughts.

3) Dtransfer

So I have already been though the potential value of DTransfer in part 4 (ie If Dtransfer were able to capture only 0.5 percent of that annual market it would equate to 600 million USD revenue) But Dtransfer states that it can carry out transactions quicker and cheaper, again there is no info about how much cheaper so even if you assume it could be done 50 percent cheaper we are still looking at 300 million annual profit. So what would that make Satoshipay worth.

Well take Coinbase. Coinbase is the largest crypto currency exchange in the US with just under 2 billion USD Revenue and between 800m USD – 1.2billion USD profit, Coinbase is now listed on Nasdaq with a market cap of 42 billion USD.

If you want to extrapolate that same ratio to Pendulum/Dtransfer a producing 300 million USD (0.5 percent of the potential market) it would be valued at around 10 billion USD

There you have it – I have finished. No predictions, no real valuation, and certainly no advice. All I hope to achieve is to have given anyone the opportunity to have enough information to decide for themselves.

For what its worth I am a believer and have added substantially to my position over the past few days but remember for every apple corporation there is a Betamax (you’ve got to be a certain age to get that)
Im off, a good single malt awaits

Skol

Part 5 Value.

Everything here is purely academic as everything is down to the success or the failure of Pendulum. All I can do is state the fact and let everyone else decide for themselves whether or not the potential will come to fruition and/or at what level and therefore what it is going to be worth. I simply do not know. My impression of Meinhard and his team is they are far more intelligent than me. I think I understand their vision and if successful it could simply be mind-blowing

But my caveat is there are far more participants the dead-ducks graveyard than there are in Unicorns heaven. If you get my drift

So in simple terms the current valuation is simply built on the fact that several crypto investors have seen the vision and are prepared to stake 5million USD for 20% of Pen Tokens and so the current book value has to be 25m USD everything from here is potential.

As I see it currently Satoshipay (micro payments) and DTransfer have little or no value. We have no idea of revenues so its all about Pendulum

I believe there are three avenues for value

1) Pen Token
From what I can gather there are currently 200,000,000 Pen tokens issued with 20 percent pre-sold. Pendulum will not be retaining all of those tokens. They will be using them for Auction incentives and possible further sales. So until Pendulum enters auction and becomes a Parachain its pretty well impossible to put a true value on how many are retained or their value.
I think it is important to note that the Pen token is not a crypto currency like Bitcoin a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin run off their Blockchain and act as money. Cyrpto tokens do not have their own blockchain they actually represent an asset (ie a pen token represents a stake in Pendulum) whereas a crypto coin is basically digital cash that can be spent. That is not to say they will not increase but their value will be linked to the success of Pendulum, so my gut feeling is that it could be a while before the pern token sees real growth.

But to give an example of what can happen Binance (a crypto currency exchange) launched on the Ethereum blockchain in 2017 with the BNB token priced around £5 today is at £343. But Binance is huge. (last reported profit of around 1 billion USD)

2) Pendulum Blockchain

If my understanding is correct, as the Pendulum blockchain is opensource it will be open to other applications to run off of it in the same way that DTransfer will. My understanding is that this will generate income as Pendulum allow other applications to join (in the same way Pendulum will lease its Parachain slot on Ethereum)

I cant put a value on this as I simple have no idea of the value of this as I cant find any info accordingly but the more applications that join the more the income and I would assume that this would be in the form of the relevant applications native tokens. So again this income will relate to the success of the Pendulum Blockchain.

If Dtransfer were able to capture only 0.5 percent of that annual market it would equate to 600 million USD revenue. Jeez what does that make Satoshipay worth

Last part coming. Promise

So imagine a scenario where if you need to transfer a large sum of money from one country to another and instead of going to a bank you simply go online choose where your money is, and choose where you want to sent it and do instantly.

Or if you want to borrow or invest and you go online choose your preferred deal and simply do it, no banks, no brokers, no accountants.

Well this project of mine has convinced me that is where this is all heading and our dear friends at pendulum are developing the first piece of that new jigsaw. The ability to automatically link crypto to Fiat without all the current phaff that goes with it.

What Pendulum are building is the open source blockchain that will allow various Defi applications to interact with the likes of you and I, for borrowing, lending and transferring money instantly without even really realising that digital currency is involved.

This is exactly what Dtransfer is designed to do – transfer large sums of cross border money, cheaper and faster that using an institution. The value of cross border transactions is estimated to reach 250 trillion USD by 2027 according to Bank of England – all done by bankers. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/payment-and-settlement/cross-border-payments

A few years ago I sold a business to a foreign company for a substantial sum (relative to me) and on the day of completion It didn’t happen for some banking reason so was set for the following day. I was waiting another 4 hours the next morning for my solicitor to tell me I could retire, and in that time there were exchange rate differences, and fairly considerable costs involved. Dtransfer would have sorted the transaction instantly.

Now from what I can tell the current glitch with Dtransfer and is the liquidity pool due to the large figures involved. If I have this right in simple terms the Fiat money is converted to digital currency which is instantly in the blockchain system, which then comes out the other end and is then converted into say GBP. This is really only computers doing smart contracts but it has to be backed up by the equivalent amount of digital crypto to facilitate the exchange. So knowing the huge amounts of money that is being transferred every minute this liquidity pool also needs to be huge. In Meinhards interviews he referred to this problem as being the catalyst for developing Pendulum because the connection to the blockchain allows access to unlimited digital currency, hence solving the problem.

I think it is with Dtransfer where the real value is going to come from. As someone pointed out to me yesterday 1 percent of the cross-border transaction market makes it a unicorn.

According to JP Morgan The annual cost of cross-border payments is 120 billion USD – That not the amount that’s what the banks are getting.
https://www.oliverwyman.com/content/dam/oliver-wyman/v2/publications/2021/nov/unlocking-120-billion-value-in-cross-border-payments.pdf

Part 4 Pendulum

Every time I think Ive got to the end of this project of mine more crops up that need research,

I apologise now and understand if everyone has got bored by now but to have any idea of working out the potential I need to fully understand exactly what Pendulum can open up and if I am going to attempt to make any kind of valuation I need to back it up. I will try to be make it short.

So I have had to delve more into the whole DeFi world to understand precisely what can be achieved here.

So in traditional finance everything has to go through an intermediary, a bank or financial institution. If you want a loan, transfer money, or invest money you have to physically have bank accounts where that money is stored or borrowed from. Although this is done on-line it is still a numerous number of individual institutions trying to co-operate with each other using different (outdated and clumsy) technology. They also take your hard-earned money ay every junction along the way.

Decentralised Finance effectively operates without the need for those decentralised intermediaries. Everything within the DeFI blockchain is connected and automated via algorithms and facilitates transactions directly between parties. The Blockchain infrastructure replaces the centralised financial institutions. This is done through the smart contracts (computer programmes). Through these smart contracts, a set of ‘rules’ are set as to how the particular financial service will work and once the smart contract has been deployed it cannot be altered. So basically, you know exactly what, when and how you are getting, which effectively cuts out any fraud because the smart contract cannot be altered in any way is executed immediately.

In order to create a reliable and secure DeFi system you obviously need a stable base currency. Bitcoin or Ether are simply no good as they are way too unstable and volatile. This is why stablecoins are so important. A stablecoin is pegged to a currency – pretty well exclusively to the American Dollar

For the Pendulum project enter Stellar. Stellar stablecoin protocol is specifically designed to create, send and trade digital and fiat and is pegged to over 20 different fiat currencies – and growing.

So this stuff is already going on, and its growing and its brillian, but heres the rub – you really have to fully understand the crypto world and become part of it. You have to own some crypto, so you have to set up your wallets and do stuff that most of us don’t really understand. And if you want to transfer your Bitcoin to someone in Chile who doesn’t have crypto accounts you have to transfer it back to USD and then use the banks again etc etc. This can all be done now but the whole process is inefficient, time consuming and complicated.

Clearly the development of Defi is to bring it to the masses, the old gits like me that just want to go online and buy or transfer something.

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Nominators do not actually have to run network computers/nodes so they don’t actually have to do geek stuff, (although I assume they are still geeks) but they must have a DOT stake. Their responsibility is to nominate validators and again they have to put up a DOT stake and get a share in the rewards. But if they nominate badly and a Validator misbehaves, they can lose their stake. This is called being slashed. All in all the whole Polkadot governance is a self-governing community whereby if you mess up or misbehave you are kicked out and you loose money. If you perform and behave you make money.

So any new Parachain hopefuls have to go through an auction whereby validators/nominators stake their DOTs in a project and the winner becomes a Parachain. The DOTs that are staked in the auction are then held for the full length of the Parachain lease and released back at the end. So why bother staking - because each new project will reward a DOT token vote with a token of their own, so it’s a way of investing in a project that you believe in. For example:

In the current Auction Efinity are winning, they have received 8607 staked DOTs and Efinity are rewarding those stakes at a rate of 26 EFI tokens to 1 DOT token. If Efinity win the auction the stakeholders DOTs are ‘frozen’ but they will receive the relevant EFI tokens. Then if Efinity are successful the EFI token will increase in value and money has been made. Its an investment in new tech. Obviously if it fails then they loose the opportunity but do get their DOTs back. So in a sense it is pretty safe way of investing and means only the best or most popular projects get on the network. A minimum of 5 DOTs is requires as an auction stake.

There have been 7 completed auctions so far and there are currently 16 Parachain hopefuls in the running for one of the 100 slots.

Part 4 - Will be trying to see where this all leaves us shareholders. Probably tomorrow now.

Part 3 - finally got my head around Parachain Auctions (I think)

To create this fully expandable, fast and efficient blockchain, Polkadot was deiberatly built to provide minimal functionality. It acts as the engine that keeps the infrastructure together, providing the security and cross-chain interoperability. It provides the connection and coordination to all the other network projects and the system as a whole. The Parachains.

Parachains stands for Parallelized Chains. They are independent blockchains using their own tokens and governance offering specific applications. But they run parallel on the Polkadot relay chain using its security and interoperability. Apparently one of the advantages of this protocol is the ability to continue to develop applications whilst they are still running on the relay chain. This enables new applications to come to market far quicker and develop along the way with no downtime (I think) A Parachain will lease its spot on the Main blockchain for a period of 96 weeks after which time it will go back up for lease. This way dead wood applications get replaced whilst successful applications get voted to continue.

Thera are also Parathreads. These are effectively a lower level Parachains. These are slotted on a pay as you go basis and I think are geared more towards smaller developing applications that can use the main blockchain in a flexible manner and can elevate to a Parachain is successful.

Finally there are Bridges (really important to Pendulum) these allow the Parachins and Parathreads to communicate with other networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum allowing different coins and tokens to be swapped without the need for a central exchange .

Polkadot have decided to Limit the number of Parachains to 100 in total. I am not sure exactly why, but I believe that the lesson learnt from previous blockchains is that they are just full of ****ty applications, many doing the same thing which creates one of the overall problems of blockchains – most people do not have a clue where to look or what does what. I suspect that polkadot is the first blockchain that is really looking to the future, to open up blockchain to the masses – something we can all understand and use (thats just my opinion)

Now this bit is confusing. On Polkadot there are Validators and there are also Nominators. The Validators are as previously mentioned active participants (humans with computers) that engage in the whole blockchain production. They participate in consensus with other validators on producing new stuff and verify stuff and generally do all the stuff that keeps the whole thing going forward. In return they receive rewards in the form of DOTs based on what they do and what size their own stake of DOTs is.

To become a validator you have to be good geek, as well as trustworthy geek and also have support from the rest of the other geeks, as you are voted in as a validator by Nominators

Thee Duke - I am going to try and work on valuations, Nico asked the same thing - I have a feeling you will become a very rich young man :-)

Part 3 (hopefully last part) coming

It is worth mentioning that there are other DeFi blockchains appearing out there, I have found about 15, which considering the market potential is not surprising. Ethereum is by a long way the daddy with over 60 percent of the market, the next is Binance smart chain (bsc) with about 7 percent and then Solana with about 6%. But their share is falling as newer more scalable blockchains gain traction.

Polkadot is (from what I can ascertain) the newest and most technically advanced and unique as it is the flagship Web3/Parachain protocol. And as it is faster, cheaper and allows each Parachain to be interconnected is seems to be the general way forward. I now completely see why Pendulum have chosen this route. It will also mean with the added interconnected resources the Pendulum project will reach completion far quicker and probably a better application all round.

How these blockchains actually work

As these blockchains are open-source permissions and permissionless ecosystems (see previous part 1) there are thousands of computers/Nodes and these are run by Validators (humans). Now I am pretty sure these validators are all the aforementioned geeks with huge computers doing stuff that I simply do not comprehend. But to become a validator you have to stake minimum amounts of money into the relevant Blockchain tokens and you earn approximately 10 percent return. I Suppose the fact that these thousands of strange people are getting paid for doing what they love doing and probably don’t fit in world outside anyway, make it a perfect scenario (I have probably just offended every Computer geek out there. Sorry just my idea of a joke)

So these Validators are really important as they are the stakeholders or guardians of the blockchain and have a say in the running, development and growth of the blockchain. This seems to be called Governance and is how the community of stakeholders keep everything going. Apparently one of the problems with bitcoins progress is the lack of formal Governance and Ethereum kind of inherited a lot of that same process but definitely made it more efficient. But there have been issues, as these validators vote on various changes and implementations (for example a legal amendment or protocol change) votes can be subjective as there is no financial stake in the decision. This has on occasion cause quite serious problems for the system, but that’s another five pages so I will leave it.

So learning from these lessons Polkadot has taken a more structured approach. Polkadot has been described as more of a way of life that a network and to approve the transparency and accountability of the validator voting protocol, all proposed changes have to be a stake- weighed coin vote process. Basically they stake their DOT tokens to vote or not. For basic standard developments there is an elected council of 6 people who make these decisions, but these people are again voted for by staking tokens and only serve a one year term

Need

1of 2
This whole research project on mine is far bigger than I first expected and is taking longer for me to get my head around it and try to formulate into something that I hope normal people can understand. So I think it is going to be in several parts. Here is part 2

Part 1 we have established that polkadot is basically the next generation blockchain ecosystem moving on from Bitcoin and Etheureum. It s built on the best rated framework (Substrate) and is fully expandable for all future Defi related blockchain applications that are (Web3)

Its worth just starting with the whole reason for all this – Decentralised finance –
What is Defi ?
The best definition of Defi for us crypto non-nerds is from Wikipedia
DeFi offers financial instruments without relying on intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges or banks. Instead, it uses smart contracts on a blockchain. Defi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks and earn interest in savings-like accounts. Defi uses a layered architecture and highly composable building blocks. Some applications promote high interest rates but are subject to high risk. As of October 2021 the value of assets used in decentralised finance amounted to $100 billion.

Defi only really started late 2018, so three years the it has grown from zero to $100 billion( there are estimates of obver $200 billion) and there is so much more to come.

The current orthodox fiat global retail banking revenue is $2.3 trillion. The global cross-border payment revenue is $2 trillion (important to remember this figure because of Dtransfer) and the Global stock exchange revenue is $35 billion. The whole global market capitalisation is estimated to be $100 trillion.

Basically defi is still only makes up 1 or 2 percent of the potential market place. There are various estimates of how Defi will grow but even growth of x100 from here would still only be 10 percent.

For Blockchains to carry out all these transactions cheaper and more efficiently they use Smart contracts Smart contracts are basically computer programmes which automatically execute and control every part of a transaction, documenting all relevant legal issues and actions depending on the particular contract or agreement. It cuts out all the intermediator, legal and enforcement costs, and cuts out fraud, malicious or accidental issues.

Due to the transparency security encryption and total storage backup of all details of the transaction and speed efficiency of smart contracts it seems they literally provide a guaranteed outcome almost immediately (in the case of cross border payments it is practically instant – there is no interbank delay and absolutely no chance of the money going missing)

Thee Duke - hep keeping an eye on both Acala and Moonbeam. In the initial auction they were the clear stand out winners because what they offered was unique. When Pendulum are ready to enter the auction process I have absolutely no doubt they will win that batch hands down as what they are proposing is way bigger and more important because it connects crypto to fiat.
Gamechanger:-)

had to post in two as LSE system regulates size of posts

There is no point in me trying to explain Substrate as my brain is simply no big enough but it is apparently good, very good and has become the go to framework. To give some idea back in 2018 Gavin wood gave a live demo where he built a blockchain and dApp from scratch in 15 minutes.

This is where Nodes come in because nodes are the problem for Ethereum scaling. Nodes are basically computers that connect and support the network validating transactions. For a blockchain to expand, these nodes to store and process huge amounts of data/stuff and apparently this is where Ethereum design falls short.

Enter Parachains (got there in the end). The flexibility of the Polkadot blockchain solves this scaling problem by allowing multiple sizable blockchains (parachains) which only need to utilise the nodes/computers on that on that chain. This means that it allows numerous independent transactions to be actioned at the same time without blocking up the other chains nodes.

As thing have stood Defi applications have been tied to the relevant blockchains. If you wanted to use Solana for a transaction based on Ethereum – you couldnt. Each blockchain token is stuck on that blockchain. Polkadot is different as any blockchain can plug in as a Parachain, thus enabling previously isolated blockchains to connect and do business. This is basically known as web3.

So these parachains are custom blockchains built and designed for various projects and applications, and integrated on the Polkadot main blockchain which is called the Relay chain.

For example Acala were the first parachain. Acala is a platform that enables you to swap assets from other blockchains(Solana to Ethereum). And Pendulum will enable defi transactions to be exchanged from other blockchain crypto assets into Fiat assets simultaneously (which is currently a complicated and expensive process) which pens up FOREX for the first time.

The other huge advantage of this technology is that all Parachains benefit from Polkadots base features and security without having to set their own, but the applications are still independent which enables transactions to perform faster and at lower costs as they are not go through the rest of the blockchain (as with ethureum)

Not sure if this all will have been of much interest here but if it has I can also post about the Parachain process and why it has the potential for making Pendulum huge.
Skol

1/2
One of the huge problems with the world of crypto is that it is ridiculously complicated, not helped by the fact is designed, developed and run by a bunch of geeks that have a complete language of their own, which means that words and descriptions used have literally no obvious correlation to the real-world systems.

Reading all the posts here regarding Crypto, blockchains and Parachains etc it seems that there is very little understanding (myself included)

so as I have a sizeable stake in BLU, I decided to research and try and translate into normal human being speak. Initially did this for myself but thought it might be of interest here. I am not an expert and this is simpoly what I have learnt, there could be some technical errors as it is based only on my understanding of this strange world of crypto. Hope it helps someone.

As this (for me) is all about Pendulum/Satoshipay/dtransfer I concentrated on the main parts of the jigsaw that matter.

Firstly Bitcoin, whilst it is irrelevant here it is important to note the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Invented by satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was first (and now biggest) online currency launched in 2009 and importantly it is based on a permissionless blockchain.

In normal speak this simply means that no permission is required to become part of the blockchain so in theory anyone can become part of the blockchain which means it is completely open and de-centralised. But with the success of Bitcoin the big brains soon realised that actually for the concept to evolve you could need more control and privacy. Enter Ethereum.

Etherum was designed by another genuius, Vitalik Buterin who realised back in 2013 that this new Blockchain technology coukd be used for far more financial applications that bitcoin by creating a permissionless and permissioned Blockchain in one, thereby having all the advantages of Bitcoin but also allowing permission (or private) blockchain where the owner can control who sees what

This is very important as institutions like financial institutions require privacy and this has opened up the Ethereum blockchain to the whole world of Defi.

But technology keeps moving on as the blockchain grows the network needs to continually be split into more portions to be able to scale. This is apparently F****g complex. Enter Polkadot

Polkadot is the Brainchild of Gavin Wood, Co-founder of Ethereum who set out to develop a ‘sharded’ version of Ethereum whilst still at Ethereum in 2013. There is a huge amount of technical stuff, disputes, stuck funds and all sorts of goings on during the development, but for this purpose the important thing is that Wood went on to Co-found EthCore which later became Parity and Polkadot was launched. Polkadot is able to scale/shard far more efficiently than Ethereum because it is built on a framework (developed by parity called substrate)

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These links might help. Its a minefield :-)

https://www.kraken.com/en-gb/learn/what-are-parachains
https://www.publish0x.com/lets-talk-crypto/polkadots-parachain-auctions-give-crypto-enthusiasts-a-treas-xyyzdek
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/polkadot-parachain-winners-strides-building-112207050.html