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How many people really understand what they’re buying, especially when it comes to highly specialized hardware companies? Most NVidia investors seem to be relying on a vague idea of how the company should thrive “in the future”, as their GPUs are ostensibly used for Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, holograms, etc. Having been shocked by how this company is represented in the media, I decided to lay out how this business works, doing my part to fight for reality. With what’s been going on in markets, I don’t like my chances but here goes:
Let’s start with…
How does NVDA make money?
NVDA is in the business of semiconductor design. As a simplified image in your head, you can imagine this as designing very detailed and elaborate posters. Their engineers create circuit patterns for printing onto semiconductor wafers. NVDA then pays a semiconductor foundry (the printer – generally TSMC) to create chips with those patterns on them.
Simply put, NVDA’s profits represent the difference between the price at which they can sell those chips, less the cost of printing, and less the cost of paying their engineers to design them.
Notably, after the foundry prints the chips, NVDA also has to pay (I say pay, but really it is more like “sell at a discount to”) their “add-in board” (AIB) partners to stick the chips onto printed circuit boards (what you might imagine as green things with a bunch of capacitors on them). That leads to the final form in which buyers experience the GPU.
What is a GPU?
NVDA designs chips called GPUs (Graphical Processing Units). Initially, GPUs were used for the rapid processing and creation of images, but their use cases have expanded over time. You may be familiar with the CPU (Central Processing Unit). CPUs sit at the core of a computer system, doing most of the calculation, taking orders from the operating system (e.g. Windows, Linux), etc. AMD and Intel make CPUs. GPUs assist the CPU with certain tasks. You can think of the CPU as having a few giant very powerful engines. The GPU has a lot of small much less powerful engines. Sometimes you have to do a lot of really simple tasks that don’t require powerful engines to complete. Here, the act of engaging the powerful engines is a waste of time, as you end up spending most of your time revving them up and revving them down. In that scenario, it helps the CPU to hand that task over to the GPU in order to “accelerate” the completion of the task. The GPU only revs up a small engine for each task, and is able to rev up all the small engines simultaneously to knock out a large number of these simple tasks at the same time. Remember the GPU has lots of engines. The GPU also has an edge in interfacing a lot with memory but let’s not get too technical.
Who uses NVDA’s GPUs?
There are two main broad end markets for NVDA’s GPUs – Gaming and Professional. Let’s dig into each one:
The Gaming Market:
A Bit of Ancient History (Skip if impatient)
GPUs were first heavily used for gaming in arcades. They then made their way to consoles, and finally PCs. NVDA started out in the PC phase of GPU gaming usage. They weren’t the first company in the space, but they made several good moves that ultimately led to a very strong market position. Firstly, they focused on selling into OEMs – guys like the equivalent of today’s DELL/HP/Lenovo – , which allowed a small company to get access to a big market without having to create a lot of relationships. Secondly, they focused on the design aspect of the GPU, and relied on their Asian supply chain to print the chip, to package the chip and to install in on a printed circuit board – the Asian supply chain ended up being the best in semis. But the insight that really let NVDA dominate was noticing that some GPU manufacturers were focusing on keeping hardware-accelerated Transform and Lighting as a Professional GPU feature. As a start-up, with no professional GPU business to disrupt, NVidia decided their best ticket into the big leagues was blowing up the market by including this professional grade feature into their gaming product. It worked – and this was a real masterstroke – the visual and performance improvements were extraordinary. 3DFX, the initial leader in PC gaming GPUs, was vanquished, and importantly it happened when funding markets shut down with the tech bubble bursting and after 3DFX made some large ill-advised acquisitions. Consequently 3DFX, went from hero to zero, and NVDA bought them for a pittance out of bankruptcy, acquiring the best IP portfolio in the industry.
Some more Modern History
This is what NVDA’s pure gaming card revenue looks like over time – NVDA only really broke these out in 2005 (note by pure, this means ex-Tegra revenues):
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394577731223552/tumblr_Ikb8g9Cu9sxh2ERno
So what is the history here? Well, back in the late 90s when GPUs were first invented, they were required to play any 3D game. As discussed in the early history above, NVDA landed a hit product to start with early and got a strong burst of growth: revenues of 160M in 1998 went to 1900M in 2002. But then NVDA ran into strong competition from ATI (later purchased and currently owned by AMD). While NVDA’s sales struggled to stay flat from 2002 to 2004, ATI’s doubled from 1Bn to 2Bn. NVDA’s next major win came in 2006, with the 8000 series. ATI was late with a competing product, and NVDA’s sales skyrocketed – as can be seen in the graph above. With ATI being acquired by AMD they were unfocused for some time, and NVDA was able to keep their lead for an extended period. Sales slowed in 2008/2009 but that was due to the GFC – people don’t buy expensive GPU hardware in recessions.
And then we got to 2010 and the tide changed. Growth in desktop PCs ended. Here is a chart from Statista:
📷https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394674172919808/tumblr_OgCnNwTyqhMhAE9r9
This resulted in two negative secular trends for Nvidia. Firstly, with the decline in popularity of desktop PCs, growth in gaming GPUs faded as well (below is a chart from Jon Peddie). Note that NVDA sells discrete GPUs, aka DT (Desktop) Discrete. Integrated GPUs are mainly made by Intel (these sit on the motherboard or with the CPU).
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394688079200256/tumblr_rTtKwOlHPIVUj8e7h
You can see from the chart above that discrete desktop GPU sales are fading faster than integrated GPU sales. This is the other secular trend hurting NVDA’s gaming business. Integrated GPUs are getting better and better, taking over a wider range of tasks that were previously the domain of the discrete GPU. Surprisingly, the most popular eSports game of recent times – Fortnite – only requires Intel HD 4000 graphics – an Integrated GPU from 2012!
So at this point you might go back to NVDA’s gaming sales, and ask the question: What happened in 2015? How is NVDA overcoming these secular trends?
The answer consists of a few parts.Firstly, AMD dropped the ball in 2015. As you can see in this chart, sourced from 3DCenter, AMD market share was halved in 2015, due to a particularly poor product line-up:
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394753459994624/tumblr_J7vRw9y0QxMlfm6Xd
Following this, NVDA came out with Pascal in 2016 – a very powerful offering in the mid to high end part of the GPU market. At the same time, AMD was focusing on rebuilding and had no compelling mid or high end offerings. AMD mainly focused on maintaining scale in the very low end. Following that came 2017 and 2018: AMD’s offering was still very poor at the time, but cryptomining drove demand for GPUs to new levels, and AMD’s GPUs were more compelling from a price-performance standpoint for crypto mining initially, perversely leading to AMD gaining share. NVDA quickly remedied that by improving their drivers to better mine crypto, regaining their relative positioning, and profiting in a big way from the crypto boom. Supply that was calibrated to meet gaming demand collided with cryptomining demand and Average Selling Prices of GPUs shot through the roof. Cryptominers bought top of the line GPUs aggressively.
A good way to see changes in crypto demand for GPUs is the mining profitability of Ethereum:
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394769378443264/tumblr_cmBtR9gm8T2NI9jmQ
This leads us to where we are today. 2019 saw gaming revenues drop for NVDA. Where are they likely to head?
The secular trends of falling desktop sales along with falling discrete GPU sales have reasserted themselves, as per the Jon Peddie research above. Cryptomining profitability has collapsed.
AMD has come out with a new architecture, NAVI, and the 5700XT – the first Iteration, competes effectively with NVDA in the mid-high end space on a price/performance basis. This is the first real competition from AMD since 2014.
NVDA can see all these trends, and they tried to respond. Firstly, with volumes clearly declining, and likely with a glut of second-hand GPUs that can make their way to gamers over time from the crypto space, NVDA decided to pursue a price over volume strategy. They released their most expensive set of GPUs by far in the latest Turing series. They added a new feature, Ray Tracing, by leveraging the Tensor Cores they had created for Professional uses, hoping to use that as justification for higher prices (more on this in the section on Professional GPUs). Unfortunately for NVDA, gamers have responded quite poorly to Ray Tracing – it caused performance issues, had poor support, poor adoption, and the visual improvements in most cases are not particularly noticeable or relevant.
The last recession led to gaming revenues falling 30%, despite NVDA being in a very strong position at the time vis-à-vis AMD – this time around their position is quickly slipping and it appears that the recession is going to be bigger. Additionally, the shift away from discrete GPUs in gaming continues.
To make matters worse for NVDA, AMD won the slots in both the New Xbox and the New PlayStation, coming out later this year. The performance of just the AMD GPU in those consoles looks to be competitive with NVidia products that currently retail for more than the entire console is likely to cost. Consider that usually you have to pair that NVidia GPU with a bunch of other expensive hardware. The pricing and margin impact of this console cycle on NVDA is likely to be very substantially negative.
It would be prudent to assume a greater than 30% fall in gaming revenues from the very elevated 2019 levels, with likely secular decline to follow.
The Professional Market:
A Bit of Ancient History (again, skip if impatient)
As it turns out, graphical accelerators were first used in the Professional market, long before they were employed for Gaming purposes. The big leader in the space was a company called Silicon Graphics, who sold workstations with custom silicon optimised for graphical processing. Their sales were only $25Mn in 1985, but by 1997 they were doing 3.6Bn in revenue – truly exponential growth. Unfortunately for them, from that point on, discrete GPUs took over, and their highly engineered, customised workstations looked exorbitantly expensive in comparison. Sales sank to 500mn by 2006 and, with no profits in sight, they ended up filing for bankruptcy in 2009. Competition is harsh in the semiconductor industry.
Initially, the Professional market centred on visualisation and design, but it has changed over time. There were a lot of players and lot of nuance, but I am going to focus on more recent times, as they are more relevant to NVidia.
Some More Modern History
NVDA’s Professional business started after its gaming business, but we don’t have revenue disclosures that show exactly when it became relevant. This is what we do have – going back to 2005:
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394785029472256/tumblr_fEcYAzdstyh6tqIsI
In the beginning, Professional revenues were focused on the 3D visualisation end of the spectrum, with initial sales going into workstations that were edging out the customised builds made by Silicon Graphics. Fairly quickly, however, GPUs added more and more functionality and started to turn into general parallel data processors rather than being solely optimised towards graphical processing.
As this change took place, people in scientific computing noticed, and started using GPUs to accelerate scientific workloads that involve very parallel computation, such as matrix manipulation. This started at the workstation level, but by 2007 NVDA decided to make a new line-up of Tesla series cards specifically suited to scientific computing. The professional segment now have several points of focus:

1. GPUs used in workstations for things such as CAD graphical processing (Quadro Line)
2. GPUs used in workstations for computational workloads such as running engineering simulations (Quadro Line)
3. GPUs used in workstations for machine learning applications (Quadro line.. but can use gaming cards as well for this)
4. GPUs used by enterprise customers for high performance computing (such as modelling oil wells) (Tesla Line)
5. GPUs used by enterprise customers for machine learning projects (Tesla Line)
6. GPUs used by hyperscalers (mostly for machine learning projects) (Tesla Line)

In more recent times, given the expansion of the Tesla line, NVDA has broken up reporting into Professional Visualisation (Quadro Line) and Datacenter (Tesla Line). Here are the revenue splits since that reporting started:
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394798232158208/tumblr_3AdufrCWUFwLgyQw2
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394810632601600/tumblr_2jmajktuc0T78Juw7
It is worth stopping here and thinking about the huge increase in sales delivered by the Tesla line. The reason for this huge boom is the sudden increase in interest in numerical techniques for machine learning. Let’s go on a brief detour here to understand what machine learning is, because a lot of people want to hype it but not many want to tell you what it actually is. I have the misfortune of being very familiar with the industry, which prevented me from buying into the hype. Oops – sometimes it really sucks being educated.
What is Machine Learning?
At a very high level, machine learning is all about trying to get some sort of insight out of data. Most of the core techniques used in machine learning were developed a long time ago, in the 1950s and 1960s. The most common machine learning technique, which most people have heard of and may be vaguely familiar with, is called regression analysis. Regression analysis involves fitting a line through a bunch of datapoints. The most common type of regression analysis is called “Ordinary Least Squares” OLS regression, and that type of regression has a “closed form” solution, which means that there is a very simple calculation you can do to fit an OLS regression line to data.
As it happens, fitting a line through points is not only easy to do, it also tends to be the main machine learning technique that people want to use, because it is very intuitive. You can make good sense of what the data is telling you and can understand the machine learning model you are using. Obviously, regression analysis doesn’t require a GPU!
However, there is another consideration in machine learning: if you want to use a regression model, you still need a human to select the data that you want to fit the line through. Also, sometimes the relationship doesn’t look like a line, but rather it might look like a curve. In this case, you need a human to “transform” the data before you fit a line through it in order to make the relationship linear.
So people had another idea here: what if instead of getting a person to select the right data to analyse, and the right model to apply, you could just get a computer to do that? Of course the problem with that is that computers are really stupid. They have no preconceived notion of what data to use or what relationship would make sense, so what they do is TRY EVERYTHING! And everything involves trying a hell of a lot of stuff. And trying a hell of a lot of stuff, most of which is useless garbage, involves a huge amount of computation. People tried this for a while through to the 1980s, decided it was useless, and dropped it… until recently.
What changed? Well we have more data now, and we have a lot more computing power, so we figured lets have another go at it. As it happens, the premier technique for trying a hell of a lot of stuff (99.999% of which is garbage you throw away) is called “Deep Learning”. Deep learning is SUPER computationally intensive, and that computation happens to involve a lot of matrix multiplication. And guess what just happens to have been doing a lot of matrix multiplication? GPUs!
Here is a chart that, for obvious reasons, lines up extremely well with the boom in Tesla GPU sales:
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618394825774989312/tumblr_IZ3ayFDB0CsGdYVHW
Now we need to realise a few things here. Deep Learning is not some magic silver bullet. There are specific applications where it has proven very useful – primarily areas that have a very large number of very weak relationships between bits of data that sum up into strong relationships. An example of ones of those is Google Translate. On the other hand, in most analytical tasks, it is most useful to have an intuitive understanding of the data and to fit a simple and sensible model to it that is explainable. Deep learning models are not explainable in an intuitive manner. This is not only because they are complicated, but also because their scattershot technique of trying everything leaves a huge amount of garbage inside the model that cancels itself out when calculating the answer, but it is hard to see how it cancels itself out when stepping through it.
Given the quantum of hype on Deep learning and the space in general, many companies are using “Deep Learning”, “Machine Learning” and “AI” as marketing. Not many companies are actually generating significant amounts of tangible value from Deep Learning.
Back to the Competitive Picture
For the Tesla Segment
So NVDA happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from the Deep Learning hype. They happened to have a product ready to go and were able to charge a pretty penny for their product. But what happens as we proceed from here?
Firstly, it looks like the hype from Deep Learning has crested, which is not great from a future demand perspective. Not only that, but we really went from people having no GPUs, to people having GPUs. The next phase is people upgrading their old GPUs. It is much harder to sell an upgrade than to make the first sale.
Not only that, but GPUs are not the ideal manifestation of silicon for Deep Learning. NVDA themselves effectively admitted that with their latest iteration in the Datacentre, called Ampere. High Performance Computing, which was the initial use case for Tesla GPUs, was historically all about double precision floating point calculations (FP64). High precision calculations are required for simulations in aerospace/oil & gas/automotive.
NVDA basically sacrificed HPC and shifted further towards Deep Learning with Ampere, announced last Thursday. The FP64 performance of the A100 (the latest Ampere chip) increased a fairly pedestrian 24% from the V100, increasing from 7.8 to 9.7 TF. Not a surprise that NVDA lost El Capitan to AMD, given this shift away from a focus on HPC. Instead, NVDA jacked up their Tensor Cores (i.e. not the GPU cores) and focused very heavily on FP16 computation (a lot less precise than FP64). As it turns out, FP16 is precise enough for Deep Learning, and NVDA recognises that. The future industry standard is likely to be BFloat 16 – the format pioneered by Google, who lead in Deep Learning. Ampere now does 312 TF of BF16, which compares to the 420 TF of Google’s TPU V3 – Google’s Machine Learning specific processor. Not quite up to the 2018 board from Google, but getting better – if they cut out all of the Cuda cores and GPU functionality maybe they could get up to Google’s spec.
And indeed this is the problem for NVDA: when you make a GPU it has a large number of different use cases, and you provide a single product that meets all of these different use cases. That is a very hard thing to do, and explains why it has been difficult for competitors to muscle into the GPU space. On the other hand, when you are making a device that does one thing, such as deep learning, it is a much simpler thing to do. Google managed to do it with no GPU experience and is still ahead of NVDA. It is likely that Intel will be able to enter this space successfully, as they have widely signalled with the Xe.
There is of course the other large negative driver for Deep Learning, and that is the recession we are now in. Demand for GPU instances on Amazon has collapsed across the board, as evidenced by the fall in pricing. The below graph shows one example: this data is for renting out a single Tesla V100 GPU on AWS, which isthe typical thing to do in an early exploratory phase for a Deep Learning model:
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618396177958944768/tumblr_Q86inWdeCwgeakUvh
With Deep Learning not delivering near-term tangible results, it is the first thing being cut. On their most recent conference call, IBM noted weakness in their cognitive division (AI), and noted weaker sales of their power servers, which is the line that houses Enterprise GPU servers at IBM. Facebook cancelled their AI residencies for this year, and Google pushed theirs out. Even if NVDA can put in a good quarter due to their new product rollout (Ampere), the future is rapidly becoming a very stormy place.
For the Quadro segment
The Quadro segment has been a cash cow for a long time, generating dependable sales and solid margins. AMD just decided to rock the boat a bit. Sensing NVDA’s focus on Deep Learning, AMD seems to be focusing on HPC – the Radeon VII announced recently with a price point of $1899 takes aim at NVDAs most expensive Quadro, the GV100, priced at $8999. It does 6.5 TFLOPS of FP64 Double precision, whereas the GV100 does 7.4 – talk about shaking up a quiet segment.
Pulling things together
Let’s go back to what NVidia fundamentally does – paying their engineers to design chips, getting TSMC to print those chips, and getting board partners in Taiwan to turn them into the final product.
We have seen how a confluence of several pieces of extremely good fortune lined up to increase NVidia’s sales and profits tremendously: first on the Gaming side, weak competition from AMD until 2014, coupled with a great product in form of Pascal in 2016, followed by a huge crypto driven boom in 2017 and 2018, and on the Professional side, a sudden and unexpected increase in interest in Deep Learning driving Tesla demand from 2017-2019 sky high.
It is worth noting what these transient factors have done to margins. When unexpected good things happen to a chip company, sales go up a lot, but there are no costs associated with those sales. Strong demand means that you can sell each chip for a higher price, but no additional design work is required, and you still pay the printer, TSMC, the same amount of money. Consequently NVDA’s margins have gone up substantially: well above their 11.9% long term average to hit a peak of 33.2%, and more recently 26.5%:
📷 https://hyperinflation2020.tumblr.com/private/618396192166100992/tumblr_RiWaD0RLscq4midoP
The question is, what would be a sensible margin going forward? Obviously 33% operating margin would attract a wall of competition and get competed away, which is why they can only be temporary. However, NVidia has shifted to having a greater proportion of its sales coming from non-OEM, and has a greater proportion of its sales coming from Professional rather than gaming. As such, maybe one can be generous and say NVDA can earn an 18% average operating margin over the next cycle. We can sense check these margins, using Intel. Intel has a long term average EBIT margin of about 25%. Intel happens to actually print the chips as well, so they collect a bigger fraction of the final product that they sell. NVDA, since it only does the design aspect, can’t earn a higher EBIT margin than Intel on average over the long term.
Tesla sales have likely gone too far and will moderate from here – perhaps down to a still more than respectable $2bn per year. Gaming resumes the long-term slide in discrete GPUs, which will likely be replaced by integrated GPUs to a greater and greater extent over time. But let’s be generous and say it maintains $3.5 Bn Per year for the add in board, and let’s assume we keep getting $750mn odd of Nintendo Switch revenues(despite that product being past peak of cycle, with Nintendo themselves forecasting a sales decline). Let’s assume AMD struggles to make progress in Quadro, despite undercutting NVDA on price by 75%, with continued revenues at $1200. Add on the other 1.2Bn of Automotive, OEM and IP (I am not even counting the fact that car sales have collapsed and Automotive is likely to be down big), and we would end up with revenues of $8.65 Bn, at an average operating margin of 20% through the cycle that would have $1.75Bn of operating earnings power, and if I say that the recent Mellanox acquisition manages to earn enough to pay for all the interest on NVDAs debt, and I assume a tax rate of 15% we would have around $1.5Bn in Net income.
This company currently has a market capitalisation of $209 Bn. It blows my mind that it trades on 139x what I consider to be fairly generous earnings – earnings that NVidia never even got close to seeing before the confluence of good luck hit them. But what really stuns me is the fact that investors are actually willing to extrapolate this chain of unlikely and positive events into the future.
Shockingly, Intel has a market cap of 245Bn, only 40Bn more than NVDA, but Intel’s sales and profits are 7x higher. And while Intel is facing competition from AMD, it is much more likely to hold onto those sales and profits than NVDA is. These are absolutely stunning valuation disparities.
If I didn’t see NVDA’s price, and I started from first principles and tried to calculate a prudent price for the company I would have estimated a$1.5Bn normalised profit, maybe on a 20x multiple giving them the benefit of the doubt despite heading into a huge recession, and considering the fact that there is not much debt and the company is very well run. That would give you a market cap of $30Bn, and a share price of $49. And it is currently $339. Wow. Obviously I’m short here!

19th of September 2020 AMA
Segment 1: Introduction
Jazie: Welcome to our community Khurram, Martin and Sem. Before we can go to first segment, please introduce yourselves first.
Semre S: Hi Jazie! firstly thanks for having us! I am Sem - the Head of Communications and Illustrations for Zin.finance.
Martin Pijlman: Hi all. My name is Martin Pijlman and I am Sales Lead at Zin Finance. I am working in financial services already for 14 years.
KM: Hello everyone, this is KM - marketing lead for Zin.finance.
Jazie: Thank you for your introductions about yourselves. Let’s proceed to the first segment. Are you ready guys?
Semre S: Yes!
Martin Pijlman: Yes I am Jazie.
KM: Yes.
Jazie: Alright! Here comes the first question...
Question #1:
What is Zin Finance?
Semre S: I will take that one.
Zin is a DeFi investment platform. We are building a platform which will combine the advantages of traditional investments with DeFi. The Zin platform will focus mainly on investments and growing savings nests for our users rather than trading. Our token is 100% deflationary – now that’s a unique proposition! For details you can read the About us section on our website.
Jazie: Thank you for explaining to us Sem! Let’s move to the next question.
Question #2:
What are your plans for the next upcoming months/years?
KM: These are exciting times for Zin, Zin community is growing organically beyond our expectations. We recently finished Zin presales which was a huge success, so much so that we had to finish it earlier. In the upcoming few weeks Zin community will be pleased to hear exciting updates from us including exchange listing announcements, while the back end team is busy working on maturing Zin roadmap features like introduction of web platform and staking. In parallel, we are in talks with corporate investors, bringing on board new staff and shortlisting like minded, long term partners.
Jazie: Interesting plans, thanks Khurram.
And the last question for Segment 1.
Question #3:
What distinguishes you from your competitors?
Martin Pijlman: We plan to introduce traditional investment tools like stocks and commodities as well. We will launch a Zin Card linked to Zin pay and last but not least we will introduce Zin Lending in dec 2022 (as per roadmap).
Jazie: Alright thank you guys for the answers on my introduction questions. Let’s go to 2nd segment which is the twitter questions!
Segment 2: Questions from the Twitter
Question #1 From: u/_rhythms29
Two features of Zin Finance is it's staking and burn mechanism. However, these 2 are also present on other projects. What makes ZIN's features "unique" compared to the others?
Semre S: About Burn and staking: Our token is 100% deflationary which means that all supply must be burned. Only bitfinex’s Leo offered this but their starting marketcap was $1B ours is $1M, so you can imagine the growth potential that Zin offers for early investors.
Our uniqueness is that we are not competing in the exchange space, we are building an investment platform for stable growth so that mainstream passive investors can also enter deFi.
Jazie: Awesome, thanks for that Sem!
Here's the next question.
Question #2 From: u/Crypto_Isaac
ZIN made a strategic marketing partnership with Zeugma Marketing and X10 Agency. What's your go-to market strategy for global adoption and expansion of the ZIN project?
KM: We are proud to be in partnership with Zeugma and X10. We have a purpose to deliver and using the same manifesto in go to market strategy whereby adoption shall be pulled based on project delivery led hype attracting both crypto native and mainstream passive investors. Going forward we will continue to get into similar partnerships at a regional level as well.
Jazie: Looking forward for your upcoming partnerships!
Let me send the third winning question.
Question #3 From: u/Oluwamayowa06
Zin Finance platform uses its proprietary swarm intelligence algorithm. Can you tell us more about this AI, especially its mechanism of action? Also, what advantages does it offer Zin ecosystem?
Martin Pijlman: Good question! We are using many algorithms for different functionalities. For example, for staking, our algorithm calculates Daily wallet balances through snapshots and then decides to give out dividends based on the formula set in the whitepaper. When we will introduce portfolio (see roadmap for timing), the algorithm will learn from different portfolio managers techniques and offer the right mix of stocks to the platform users.
Jazie: Wow, very easy way to stake. You heard that guys.
Let's move to the fourth ones.
Question #4 From: u/Radss99
What is the algorithm used by Zin Finance? What does it solve the problem of blockchain system? How do you manage the algorithm and operate it?
Semre S: Firstly Martin has already talked about the algorithims we use in Staking. I will briefly touch upon swarm Intelligence in Portfolio Management.
Swarm intelligence is a generic AI technique - which simply means that the AI searches for best profit maximisation portfolio in a constrained or given budget. We will build algorithms that will learn from the portfolio performance of our experts and through this self-learning they will be able to recommend the right portfolios for the platform users according to their risk profile. BTW also wanted to show you a sneak peak of our clickable demo. We take all the complexity in the background and present the user with a very simple UI as you can see in this demo: https://youtu.be/y9kmykBf950
Jazie: Thanks Sem, this will help us a lot about portfolio management.
And here's the last question from twitter.
Question #5 From: u/maharanigis
I'm interested on one of Zin Finance feature, Zin Wallet & Staking. Can you explain more about this? How do we can stake on Zin Finance? What APR will we earn?
Martin Pijlman: We have put at least 40% of the supply for the Staking dividends. It is one of our major features and benefits for the token holders. Zin dividends will be given according to how much is staked by the community. The dividends will increase as more community will stake, and reduce when less community is staking. Therefore, there is no Set APR%. But the formula is detailed in our whitepaper, which will give you a fair idea of why we have built it like this. It is to benefit HODLERS and long term backers.
Segment 3: Live questions from the community
Jazie: Thank you so much for your answers Khurram, Martin and Sem for all twitter questions. We appreciate it a lot.
Martin Pijlman: Our compliments for all the questions on Twitter!
Jazie: Yeah they have an amazing questions!
Semre S: it was a pleasure!
Jazie: So guys, are you ready with our last segment?
Martin Pijlman: We are.
Jazie: Chat closed! Thank you for your plenty of questions chat, let’s give our guests some time to answer good questions.
Semre S: Wow that is super impressive! So many questions Zinsters - we are really thankful for your interest.
Round 1 of Community Questions:
Q1 From: u/Alika061
How many ZIN Tokens will be circulated in the beginning if all are sold?
Martin Pijlman: It depends on the crowdsale. We expect the initial circulating supply to be between 100-250 Million Zin tokens and the marketcap accordingly with $0.015 per Zin. We cannot tell exactly about the $ market cap as it depends on the price, but these are estimates.
Q2 From: u/heyyy9
Most each project has interesting stories before it’s created. So, can you tell to people about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop a great project like Zin Finance?
Semre S: That’s a wonderful question. Our story is on the About us section on our website. We wanted to build a platform which is focused towards stable growth rather than trading. Normal middle classes stay away from investments due to the volatility in the system and we wanted to change that. People don’t realise how cash depletes in value over time if not invested. We wanted to educate and show the results to people through this platform.
Q3 From: u/OlegDubinskiy
DeFi will be actively developing in 2020. What role will Zin Finance play in driving the adoption of DeFi using a blockchain solution?
KM: True Defi is on exponential growth, while there are 100s of projects do note that in terms of addressable market we are still just at the tip of the potential. Our end in mind is to have an investment platform (away from many trading exchanges already available) which is simple to navigate even for non crypto users and hence should even attract the traditional assets investors. Zin and its team solely believe in value delivery through timely release of Zin platform’s roadmap (as available on our website).
Q4 From: u/SmAG_23
What services does the project provide? Is there any exchange you are negotiating to be listed?
Martin Pijlman: We are already listed on Coincodex, Coinhill and Chaindex and negotiations with others are ongoing. For the services the project provides I will recommend you to read this: https://zin.finance/zin_faq_page/#hfaq-post-404
Q5 From: u/flowerfromwho
What are the biggest challenges for Zin Finance for building DeFi Platform? Can you tell me some memorable milestones during the development of Zin Finance?
Semre S: Since we are building Zin for passive investors including a lot of non-crypto people the first challenge is the image of our industry. Understandably there is a negative perception due to the ICO scams of 2017. However we are tackling this by following regulatory compliance, incorporation in the UK as an established company and making the onboarding easier to remove fears and encourage mass adoption. We will also comply with local regulations in order to satisfy the users of our platform.
Q6 From: u/sofia_c3
Recent DeFi projects often have a deposit and profit mechanism, which is a good idea for attracting long-term investors, is that your reason? And what is the annual interest rate for the ZIN deposit mechanism?
Martin Pijlman: We have put at least 40% of the supply for the Staking dividends. It is one of our major features and benefits for the token holders. Zin dividends will be given according to how much is staked by the community. The dividends will increase as more community will stake, and reduce when less community is staking. Therefore, there is no Set APR%. But the formula is detailed in our whitepaper, which will give you a fair idea of why we have built it like this. It is to benefit HODLERS and long term backers.
Q7 From: u/laty99
How is the ZIN token used? How to keep motivated to hold ZIN tokens for a long term? When will ZIN token be listed on more exchanges? Where will they be?
Martin Pijlman: Good question! Zin token is a utility token for the Zin Ecosystem. It is an ERC20 token built on the Ethereum blockchain using solidity Smart Contracts. It is the utility backbone of the Zin platform ecosystem and can be used for fee discounts on the Zin platform and for the governance protocol. Zin will be burned as part of the fee until all 1 billion is burned. This way Zin token is 100% deflationary.
As DeFi space is every evolving, later on, Zin token may have other usages which we will explore as we go along on our roadmap journey.
Q8 From: u/Yami_Ochinchin
What do you want to do before the end of this year? What are the goals of the project?
Martin Pijlman: Thank you for your question. On our website you can read the complete roadmap. You can see it here: https://zin.finance/#roadmap
Q9 From: u/Dreamy_genius
How does your Zin Finance platform provide factors such as multiple risk indicators, behavior analysis, and data analysis?
Semre S: The Zin finance platform will try to take away complexity from the user and present them with a simpler UI and decision making. In the background our algorithms will analyse the user’s risk profile, their budget constraints as entered by them and their goals of savings. Accordingly it will recommend a portfolio based on the learnings of our expert portfolio managers.
Q10 From: u/solozgi
Many DeFi project coins have dropped dramatically over the past week. What is the Zin Finance project doing to make a difference and provide users with a better user experience?
KM: We are here for the long term and intend to give value to our community through solid development efforts, focus on user experience and timely delivery of our roadmap. Agnostic of market highs and lows of crypto we intend to stay focused on this deliverables. A functional purpose led project has a much better long term value than piecemeal pump and dump.
Jazie: Okay thank you for answering the first round of questions, can we go for the next round?
KM: Yes sure.
Jazie: Chat closed! Thank you for the last round of questions everyone.
Khurram, Martin and Sem, the floors is yours.
Round 2 of Community Questions:
Q11 From: u/EmEmCrZ
What are your advantages over the other competitor?
Martin Pijlman: Zin is a platform that enables a user to build growth nests and save efficiently with investment tools like crypto and traditional stocks. Anyone who wants to build long term value in their savings can become an investor with Zin. We will introduce staking on web in the first phase.
Next to that, we will launch a Zin Card linked to Zin pay and last but not least we will introduce Zin lending in dec 2022 (as per roadmap).
Semre S: Traditional finance is too slow and in many countries only allows elite investors to thrive. We want to change that by simplifying the process for everyday investors. We see traditional finance as partners in many things but we want to remove their slowness and bureaucracy.
Q12 From: u/fokinni
It’s easy to make a token but it’s really hard to make this token valuable? So what’s your startegy to make the token more valuable and what’s your plan to maintain token price and supply?
Semre S: We are offering a full burn of the supply. This is an interesting experiment as very few projects have offered it so far and even those who did started with a very high marketcap. We are building Zin purely out of our passion and we want to try how our community will take this novel idea that from a low marketcap we burn all supply. Apart from that Zin tokens offer many other values detailed in our whitepaper.
Q13 From: u/Cuzz1
Besides transactions and exchanges, can I use Zin Finance for other things? If I am a Zin Finance long-term investor, are there any special policies or long-term rewards for us?
Martin Pijlman: Zin is a 100% deflationary cryptocurrency with a burn mechanism. It will include a savings account to keep your money or Zin, and it will have an investment tool to invest in the portfolio you wish to invest in.
Q14 From: u/xwidex
What is Zin Finance? Where does "Zin Finance" name comes from & What it’s stand for?
Semre S: That’s a good question!:) Our inspiration for the name ‘Zin’ came from this Urban dictionary reference:
Zin is a legend. A real OG. A person with a name of Greek origin, Zin is someone that can literally do everything, adapt to any situation and get along with everyone. A very likable person who will most likely be remembered by anyone who has ever crossed paths with them.
Q15 From: u/FFdior
Among different blockchains and cryptocurrency projects, what are some key features that set Zin Finance aside? What does Zin Finance have that other projects don’t?
Martin Pijlman: We plan to introduce traditional investment tools like stocks and commodities. Besides that we will launch a Zin Card linked to Zin pay and last but not least we will introduce Zin lending in dec 2022 (as per roadmap) To read all the features of Zin I would recommend you to read this article: https://www.zin.finance/zin_faq_page/#hfaq-post-404
Q16 From: u/sunaoie
With the current market, which development direction do you think is suitable for Zin Finance at the present time as well as in the near future?
KM: I am not too sure what you mean by current market, but the platform development efforts are focused on the exciting roadmap unique to Zin platform. While delivering so, loyal community members and token holders shall be rewarded.
Q17 From: u/yadav_199
The main aim of this AMA to convince community to buy and hold Zin Finance, please tell me 3 reason why I as investor should invest in this project and hold coin for long term?
Semre S: I’ll answer this one. Well it depends on each individual whether to invest or not but the 3 reasons, I think most valuable, could be: 1. Continuous burning of the token. 100% deflationary. 2. Voting rights on governance such as fees decisions and investment pool decisions. 3. An extremely low starting marketcap for a project of our calibre which is incorporated in the UK.
KM: Before year end we shall have exchanges enlisting, staking and web platform launch, regional partnerships and always-on engagement with our community :)
Q18 From: u/tv100029
Can I generate ZIN through smart contract in solidity? Which token will be able to stake, save, reedem and swap in solidity? How does Zin Finance apply for a witness node or deploy/manage a smart contract? Has your smart contract been audited by any blockchain system?
Semre S: You can generate more Zin. The staking supply will come from our Staking reserve wallet which holds minimum 40% of the total supply right now. Yes you will be able to stake, redeem and swap through our smart contracts built in Solidity. Even today our token sale is happening through a smart contract with zero human intervention. Check it out at app.zin.finance.
Q19 From: u/Baby_Crypto
I heard that Zin Finance has a deflationary Zin token, how often and in what amount will you burn tokens? Why did you choose this model?
Martin Pijlman: Zin is a 100% deflationary token with a burn mechanism. We will burn all 1 billion tokens. With an average of 50% locked in supply, we expect to run the staking rewards for 6 years, with 30% locked in supply 9 years and with 90% locked in supply 3 years. This formula will balance the demand and supply of tokens in the market. If people take the tokens out of stake and in to the exchange, new supply will slow down.If people will keep their tokens in stake lock -in, they will be rewarded with a higher number of tokens.
Jazie: I think that’s all. Thank you so much for your answers on the first and second round. We’re glad to have an AMA session with you guys that was fun.
Do you have any messages to our community u/Virginiawoolfe u/KhurriM and u/MartinPLM ?
Semre S: Thanks again for having us. We can assure you of our long term commitment and passion to Zin. That is precisely why we have locked our team tokens until we deliver the Dec 2022 roadmap. Our locked tokens can be seen in our wallets on the transparency page on our website. Thank you Zin Fam - we loved answering your questions!
My message is on behalf of all three of us. Thanks Jazie for having us!
Martin Pijlman: Good questions all and very happy that such an amount of people took the time to participate! We hope you will be a part of the Zin Fam! And indeed, loved answering your questions.
Jazie: Looking forward for your long term goals for Zin Finance! I hope to see you again next time guys.
Guys, don’t forget to join and follow Zin Finance social media accounts.
Telegram group: https://t.me/zinfinance Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ZinFinance?s=09 Official website: http://www.zin.finance/
-END of AMA session-

Pssst! Hey you. Scroll down for commentary!
Important/Notable/Highlights:

• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/19/the-three-phases-of-global-digital-currency-adoption/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/wirex-approved-to-issue-mastercard-backed-bitcoin-debit-cards/
• https://cointelegraph.com/news/mastercard-expands-cryptocurrency-program-for-crypto-card-issuers
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/22/paypal-teaming-up-with-new-york-based-trust-company-to-launch-crypto-service-report/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/23/payments-giant-visa-reveals-roadmap-to-supporting-bitcoin-btc-and-cryptocurrency/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/23/etoro-quarterly-report-q2-2020-stablecoins-find-a-mainstream-use-case/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-race-heats-up-bitcoins-dominance-ratio-drops-to-lowest-level-in-12-months/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/22/paypal-teaming-up-with-new-york-based-trust-company-to-launch-crypto-service-report/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/25/federal-court-rules-bitcoin-btc-is-form-of-money-under-d-c-financial-services-law-report/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/26/cardanos-highly-anticipated-shelley-upgrade-hits-launch-pad-hard-fork-countdown-underway/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/25/coinbase-ceo-says-bitcoin-and-cryptocurrency-must-evolve-to-reach-mass-adoption/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/steve-wozniak-sues-youtube-google-bitcoin-giveaway-scam/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/dr-seuss-crypto-cat-in-the-hat-lorax-horton-grinch/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/vegasbetting-com-study-found-us-sports-betting-market-is-leading-the-way/

Special Mentions:

• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/19/binance-burns-60500000-in-bnb-the-largest-in-crypto-assets-history/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/20/coinbase-ceo-cautions-newbie-bitcoin-btc-traders-says-monetary-policies-boosting-case-for-crypto/ (BULLISH)
• https://news.bitcoin.com/us-regulator-banks-cryptocurrency-custody/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-race-heats-up-bitcoins-dominance-ratio-drops-to-lowest-level-in-12-months/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/24/chess-grandmaster-garry-kasparov-says-rising-popularity-of-bitcoin-btc-and-cryptocurrencies-is-inevitable/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/25/little-known-crypto-asset-skyrockets-10000-as-analysts-track-nascent-defi-market/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/23/top-us-regulator-says-banks-can-hold-bitcoin-btc-and-cryptocurrency-on-behalf-of-customers/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/us-regulator-banks-cryptocurrency-custody/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/ethereums-2020-defi-boom-doubles-active-ether-addresses-but-fees-skyrocket/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/leadership-feud-at-bitmain-10000-antminers-go-missing-in-inner-mongolia/
• https://btcmanager.com/confirmed-cardano-ada-shelley-mainnet-live-successful-final-weekend-tests/?q=/confirmed-cardano-ada-shelley-mainnet-live-successful-final-weekend-tests/&q=/confirmed-cardano-ada-shelley-mainnet-live-successful-final-weekend-tests/
  
  • https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/21/cryptocurrency-whitepapers-why-they-matter-and-how-to-write-them/
  • https://news.bitcoin.com/how-to-check-bitcoin-address-scam/
  • https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-security-101-how-to-create-a-2-of-2-multi-signature-bch-wallet/

You haven't had enough news? Here is some more:

• https://cointelegraph.com/news/worthless-coin-mcafee-says-he-never-believed-bitcoin-would-hit-1m GENTLEMENS AGREEMENT, EAT YOUR DICK MCAFEE.
• https://cointelegraph.com/news/nexo-finance-accused-of-being-behind-zeus-capital-and-chainlink-short
• https://news.bitcoin.com/german-court-rules-limit-authorities-access-to-peoples-data/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/21/whale-alert-uncovers-10000000000-in-bitcoin-btc-owned-by-mysterious-crypto-creator-satoshi-nakamoto/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/21/ethereum-based-crypto-asset-surges-2400-as-defi-tidal-wave-intensifies/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/26/ripple-director-or-product-launches-xrp-payments-and-e-commerce-platform/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/how-bitcoin-allows-cloudbet-to-offer-the-fairest-odds-in-socce
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/26/binance-reveals-five-most-heavily-traded-altcoins-as-xrp-makes-exchanges-list-of-worst-performers-in-q2/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/24/new-bitcoin-whales-emerge-as-2197000000-in-btc-exits-crypto-exchanges-in-just-seven-months/
• https://news.bitcoin.com/russia-shelves-plans-to-criminalize-bitcoin-transactions-for-now/

Speculation:

• https://cryptopotato.com/5-promising-cryptocurrencies-besides-bitcoin-that-can-break-their-all-time-high-in-2020/
• https://u.today/top-3-price-analysis-btc-eth-xrp-has-resistance-been-found-before-a-possible-decline
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/20/bitcoin-appears-ready-for-extraordinary-move-in-just-48-hours-according-to-morgan-creek-digital-partner
• https://news.bitcoin.com/analysts-claim-bitcoins-76-day-stability-bullish-hash-ribbons-cross-and-2016-patterns/
• https://cointelegraph.com/news/chainlink-utility-drives-link-price-but-a-correction-could-be-coming
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/22/whales-are-buying-three-altcoins-as-bitcoin-and-ethereum-tread-water-crypto-research-report/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/27/high-profile-crypto-strategist-says-bitcoin-targeting-50000-with-xrp-signaling-potential-bull-run/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/26/weiss-ratings-says-one-crypto-will-become-centerpiece-of-billion-dollar-revolution-and-its-not-bitcoin-btc/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/25/trader-who-saw-bitcoins-last-crash-coming-predicts-huge-bitcoin-bull-run-but-theres-a-catch/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/24/prominent-bitcoin-btc-whale-says-ethereum-may-never-return-to-its-all-time-high-heres-why/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/24/top-analyst-bullish-on-ethereum-and-five-altcoins-says-bitcoin-wont-lead-surge-in-crypto-market-cap/
• https://dailyhodl.com/2020/07/21/bitcoins-status-as-crypto-king-is-coming-to-an-end-predicts-blockchairs-nikita-zhavoronkov-heres-why/

You made it! :)
First up, SORRY! This has been a late post, I have my reasons don't question them (if you must know I'll be posting in the discord - one time only haha). Secondly, I am sure you can agree with me when I say "Wow!" What an incredible week it has been. Last week I thought it was going to take a couple more weeks for more moving price action when it had only taken a few days which has seen Bitcoin reach and pass the $10,000 region. We have also seen the total Market cap for cryptocurrencies increase from about 280B to over 300B (308B at time of writing) within just a few days. A huge injection of liquidity, about 40B, into the market and just to name a few of the best rises in the top 20 (on Coinmarketcap.com), the price of ETH BTC ADA have given good performances/positive responses (With this I will start adding screenshots at the end of each week for timestamp purposes).
This may be a combination from Binance, Mastercard, Paypal, Grayscale investments, VISA AND the DEFI sector. Let me explain... Last week we read about Binance integrating with the company Swipe (SXP) to issue there own debit card expanding the use and reach of cryptocurrency to 31 countries within Europe. ^Binance's Q2 scheduled token burn of $60.5 Million, this figure correlates with its exchange, margin and futures trading platforms where approximately 20% of profits get burned to increase the price of BNB token (careful as the price has been steady after the burn).
This week we find out Mastercard's expansion into the Cryptosphere as they expand and integrate with the Wirex team to issue a Mastercard-backed Bitcoin debit card, thus further extending the reach of cryptocurrency availability internationally.
"The cryptocurrency market continues to mature and Mastercard is driving it forward, creating safe and secure experiences for consumers and businesses in today’s digital economy " "...Our work with Wirex and the wider crypto ecosystem is accelerating innovation and empowering consumers with more choice in the way they pay"
Mastercard is also reaching out to other emerging cryptocurrency firms to apply to become principal members [Partners] with Mastercard as they have relaxed their digital assets program and look to expand into the Digital Assets and Blockchain environment.
Paypals expression of interest in cryptocurrency facilitiation may bear fruits as it is said Paypal has partnered up with stablecoin operator Paxos (who is already in partnership with Revolut in the US) to facilitate trading through a cryptocurrency brokerage which will enable other firms to integrate cryptocurrency trading functionalities with them. In my opinion this looks much more promising than the Libra association they pulled out from last October as regulations.
Grayscale Investments clears regulatory hurdle as they have been given the green light for its Bitcoin Cash Trust (BCHG) and Litecoin Trust (LTCN) to be quoted in over-the-counter (OTC) markets by US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
“The Trusts are open-ended trusts sponsored by Grayscale and are intended to enable exposure to the price movement of the Trusts’ underlying assets through a traditional investment vehicle, avoiding the challenges of buying, storing, and safekeeping digital Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin directly.”
^More green lights for Cryptocurrency in the US as regulators allow banks to provide cryptocurrency custody services (which may go further than just custody services). A little bit strange as it seems unnecessary and undermines one of the key factors and uses of cryptocurrency which is to be in complete control of your own finances... On another outlook this may be bullish as it allows US banks to provide banking services directly to lawful cryptocurrency businesses and show support for Bitcoin.
Visa shows support stating they have a roadmap for their further expansion into the Crypto sphere. Already working with Crypto platform Coinbase and Fold they have stated they recognise the role of digital assets in the future of money. To be frank, it appears to be focused on stable coins, cost effectiveness and transaction speeds. However they are expanding their support for crypto assets.
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, DeFI! Our very own growing section in crypto. Just like the 2017 ICO boom we are seeing exorbitant growth and FOMO into the Decentralised Finance sector (WBTC, Stablecoins, Yield farming, DEXs etc). The amount of active addresses on Ethereum has doubled but with the FOMO on their network have sky rocketed their fees! Large use-cases of stable coins such as USDT ($6B in circulation using ERC-20 standard), DAI, TUSD, and PAX. $114M Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) on their network acts as a fluid side chain for Bitcoin and DEX trade volume has touched $1.6B this month. With all this action happening on Ethereum I saw the 24HR volume surpass BTC briefly on Worldcoinindex.com
In other news, Bitcoin has been set as a new precedent in a US federal court in a case against Larry Dean Harmon, the operator of an underground trading platform Helix. Bitcoin has now legally been ruled as a form of money.
“After examination of the relevant statutes, case law, and other sources, the Court concludes that bitcoin is money under the MTA and that Helix, as described in the indictment, was an `unlicensed money transmitting business´ under applicable federal law.”
Quick news in China/Asia as floods threaten miners and the most dominant ASIC Bitcoin mining rig manufacturer Bitmain loses 10,000 Antminers worth millions alledgedly goes missing or "illegally transfered" with ongoing leadership dispute between cofounders.
Last but not least, Cardano (ADA) upgrade Shelley is ready to launch! Hardfork is initiated as final countdown clock is switched on. At time of writing the point of no return has been reached, stress tests done and confirmation Hardfork is coming 29/07 The Shelley Mainnet upgrade is a step toward fast, capable and decentralised crypto that can serve billions of people. With the Shelley Mainnet is ADA staking rewards and pools! Here is a chance for us Gravychainers to set up a small pool of our own. Small percentage of profits going into the development of the community, and you keep the rest!
If you read all of my ramblings thanks heaps! I appreciate it! I have added an extra piece of reading called speculation. Most you can speculate on by just reading the headline some others have more depth to them.
Another post next week for a weekly round up! Where do you think the market is going? What is in your portfolio? Let us know in the Gravychain Discord Channel
See you soon!

• DISCORD LINK: https://discord.gg/zxXXyuJ

🍕 Bring some virtual pizza to share 🍕
Come have a chat, stimulate a discussion, ask a question or share some knowledge. We are all friendly crypto enthusiasts up for a chat, supportive and want to help each other with knowledge and investments!
Big thanks to our Telegram and My Crypto HQ for the constant news updates!

• The Gravychain Collective: https://t.me/gravychain
• My Crypto HQ: https://t.me/My_Crypto_HQ

P.S.
Dr Seuss collectables on the blockchain HECK YEAH! and Bitcoin enters NASCAR, remember when Doge did this? it was like when Doge was trending on TikTok.
... Oh yeah did I also mention Steve Wozniak is suing Youtube, Google over rampant Bitcoin scams. Wait, what? Sydney based law firm JPB Liberty is suing Google, Facebook and Twitter for up to $300B. Just another day in the Cryptosphere.

If blizzard doesnt start providing a better experience for classic the inevitable is that the private server community will join forces to create a pirated copy of WOW that cannot realistically be shutdown by any authority.
A simple mechanism, of hosting a private server that requires tokens to some blockchain/DLT (for example ethereum, IOTA or other DLT) on a monthly basis as opposed to $USD.
Every single night, the character data would be persisted to the blockchain/DLT using the monthly subscriptions as fuel for the transactions.
Then, the actual servers that are running the game would have to load the new data from the blockchain at night (free), and run the server with that new data. Rinse and repeat.
There are further optimizations that could be taken, such as conflict resolution or sharing to allow for multiple smaller private servers to contribute to the same data set.
If blizzard ever got uppity and decided to DCMA one of the servers, any idiot could spinup another application the next day and load the data directly from the blockchain.
Or, each server could compete with eachother allowing the most "successful" server to overwrite the data of the dead/dying servers. It all depends on how the protocol is defined.
This would result in a completely uninterruptible WOW server experience, allowing for years and years of classic WoW playing without the risk of losing your progress.
Blizzard is currently destroying their own intellectual property with their actions. It is now up to the community to decide what actions must be taken to save WoW from Blizzard.
I hope this post spurs the curiosity of some intelligent individuals from the private server and cryptocurrency communities to put your heads together for a solution.
Some body who successfully implements such a protocol has the opportunity of becoming a millionaire completely anonymously.

I'm not sure if this is something that bothers anyone else, or if anyone here is interested in helping with this project, but I'm tired of dot/hidden folders filling my home folder.
I've been making a list of programs that create these folders, and I'm trying to make bug reports / feature requests to the projects. If anyone here is interested, maybe we could work together and make this list bigger, and a few of us can create the reports. I've found that the developers of these projects are very receptive each time I've suggested this, and a few have been fixed in a very short time. It seems like a fairly simple request and fix.
Most newer programs and major projects use this spec -- so most of the programs that need changing are older or have few developers (or in many cases only one).
The bug reports are just asking that the developers use the freedesktop $XDG standard/spec found here.
Config files in ~/.config
Data in ~/.local/share
Temp/Non-Essential files in ~/.cache.
Maybe some developers here on reddit would be able to submit patches or change their own programs to follow this spec.
If anyone here creates a report, please let me know and I'll update the list.
Anyway, here is the list I've started.
Edit: Wow, this blew up. I didn't realize there were so many programs, or that this annoyed more people or created an inconvenience for more than just myself.
If you read this please consider reporting/requesting/helping just one program you use. If we all did this they'd all have reports by now, and maybe even fixes already! Thanks everyone for the help and info!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Apps that don't follow the freedesktop $XDG spec
Unless otherwise noted, the name of the program is also the name of the created .folder

-- REPORTED --
atom	https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/8281
cargo	https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1615 https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/1734
chatty	https://github.com/chatty/chatty/issues/273
Cryptomator	https://github.com/cryptomatocryptomatoissues/710
dbus	[WONTFIX] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40387
firefox (creates .mozilla)	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356
Flatpak (creates .var)	[WONTFIX] https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io/issues/191
goldendict	https://github.com/goldendict/goldendict/issues/151
gramps	https://gramps-project.org/bugs/view.php?id=8025
grsync	https://sourceforge.net/p/grsync/feature-requests/15/
hplip	https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/307152
menulibre	https://bugs.launchpad.net/menulibre/+bug/1786655
npm	[WONTFIX] https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/6675
ssh	[WONTFIX] https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2050
snapd (creates snap)	https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
stellarium	https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/issues/76
thunderbird	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735285
travis	https://github.com/travis-ci/travis.rb/issues/219
vscode	https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3884

--------------------------

-- FIXED --
hardinfo	https://github.com/lpereira/hardinfo/commit/06b0d18501c7e25c8d22fa53a9cd5f381334fc44
rnm	https://github.com/neurobin/rnm/commit/a8ce3f45feac698a754c453fd57cf49e2891c602
gimp	reportedly changed in 2.10
lutris	reportedly changed in latest version

--------------------------

-- UNREPORTED / UNFIXED --
* If you use a program here please do consider taking a minute or two to add a feature request / bug report *
acetoneiso
amule
ansible
anthy
Arduino
audacity (creates .audacity-data)
bash (creates .bashrc & .bash_history files)
BitwigStudio
bluefish
calcurse
ccache
cinnamon
citra
clamtk
claws-mail
cmake
cura
dia
docker
dreamchess
eclipse
emacs (creates .emacs.d)
ethereum
flowblade
freac
gdmap
git (creates .gitconfig file)
gitbook
gmvault
gnome-color-chooser
gnome-keyring (creates .pki)
gnupg
gradle
howl
httpie
hydrogen
irssi
jupyter
kivy
libdvdcss used by VLC/Mplayer (creates .dvdcss)
mame
mednafen
mixxx
mono
mpd
mpdscribble
mutt
nano
netbeans
ncmpcpp
Nvidia (creates .nv)
OpenJDK (creates .java)
Pale Moon (creates .moonchild productions)
parallel
Pidgin (creates .purple)
PlayOnLinux
praat (creates .praat-dir)
psensor
putty
PyCharm (creates .folder for each release)
pypar2
pyrenamer
remmina
rustup
scilab
SiriKali
Skype (creates .skypeforlinux)
slic3r
snes9x
steam
subversion
synaptic
teamspeak (creates .ts3client)
tox
tumbler (creates .thumbnails)
tunapie
tuxguitar (creates .tuxguitar-1.2)
unison
vim / vim-gtk / vim-gtk3 (creates .vim)
w3m
wicd
wine
winff
x2go
xsane (creates .sane)
yadm

--------------------------
Unconfirmed. If anyone could confirm these I will move them to the proper list. Thanks to sithiLoe, there is a long archwiki list here of possibly still-offending apps. If anyone can confirm these and/or send a bug report to the devs it would be appreciated.

-- UNCONFIRMED --
adb (may create .android)
kodi
mplayer
PeaZip
tupi
wget (may create multiple .files/folders)

--------------------------

Potential news every body was speculating on

Libra will start using Chainlink as an oracle to peg their coin the major currencies 

= maybe a total of 5000 calls a day to Chainlink nodes = meeh
​
but the potential real news is

in 2020 Libra developer with focus on gaming/betting will start using Chainlink to query data to incorporate that in their blockchain 

= that could be millions per day in 2020 = WOW
​
My Model valuing Chainlink at $20

My assumption until now was that Chainlink will have a slow growth reaching 100k transactions per day at the End 2020. Main reason is lack of scaling for Ethereum (this of course will change once Ethereum will scale) 

Restating my estimates

My assumption is now that we will reach 1 million transactions per day by the End of 2020 (Main driver will be Libra developer as their chain probably won't have scaling issues) 

​
Cherry on top

Off chain contracts will also be able to use LINK (Matic announced it , but Loom is also able to query Chainlink nodes) Loom announced that they reached 100k transactions per day + any private blockchains like JPM coin, Polkadot etc will contribute to the growth too 

​
Long term target

Market Cap of LINK > Market Cap of Ethereum