Ten31 Timestamp 730,561
Ten31 Timestamp 730,561
At Ten31 we strive to align ourselves with bitcoin and the open, permissionless network the protocol provides. Grant’s lastest piece The Case for Building, Supporting and Investing in Open Source Businesses discusses the reasoning behind why supporting open source businesses makes sense. As the barriers to entry continue to flatten for new entrants on the monetary network, open companies with a global audience will out-compete closed, in-house-only competitors. Instead of creating walled gardens as moats to provide a competitive advantage, companies will race to build the best user experience.
Our latest live Tribe event is another example of our alignment with principles of bitcoin. We had a great turnout in March at the Bitcoin Commons where we were able to provide insight into Satoshi Energy and Statmuse. The Bitcoin Commons is a dedicated place for co-working and the home of TFTC’s new studio. The Bitcoin Commons is located in the Littlefield Building along with Unchained Capital’s new office.
Seetee and Ten31 have agreed to a strategic partnership to help accelerate the development of bitcoin infrastructure through increased investment in projects, companies, and founders building exclusively in the bitcoin ecosystem. As part of the partnership, Seetee has directly invested in Ten31's most recent fund, Low Time Preference Fund II, becoming a leading investor with Ten31. Seetee and Ten31 will each continue to independently invest directly in bitcoin companies, with Ten31 serving as Seetee's preferred lead partner for investments pursued together or alongside one another.
Fund II New Investments
Nodl is a leading bitcoin infrastructure company with both consumer focused hardware full node products as well as a cloud based node product. Nodl is focused on making it easy to use your own high performance bitcoin node, whether that is a consumer running hardware at home or a business spinning up thousands of nodes on their cloud servers. Nodl is among multiple companies focused on bitcoin node infrastructure but are the only one with both a hardware and cloud product on the market. Their hardware nodes are some of the most powerful and robust on the market and their cloud product is one of the few in the space that runs on their own servers rather than those of major tech hosting companies. Nodl’s team has decades of experience in the network management and financial services industries.
Zaprite is a company providing companies the ability to provide bitcoin invoicing, project management and expense tracking in clean and sleek format. Today, companies who are operating or attempting to operate on a Bitcoin Standard do not have the ease of use tools to properly document and account for bitcoin transactions. Zaprite is bringing those tools and features to individuals and companies to facilitate the seamless adoption of a Bitcoin Standard.
IBEX Mercado announced a seed round of $4 million via Bitcoin Magazine. IBEX is a lightning service provider who was instrumental in El Salvador rolling out bitcoin as legal tender to its citizens. IBEX is currently focusing on Latin American banks and companies adopting bitcoin and plugging in to its monetary rails. BTC Media partnered with IBEX as the payments provider for the Bitcoin 2022 conference. Over the last few months IBEX has worked night and day to roll out their Lightning services in Miami to allow all Bitcoin 2022 conference goers to spend bitcoin at the event.
Selected Portfolio News
Satoshi Energy announced raising 60 bitcoin in their seed round for a total of $3 million USD. This is the first time a company has displayed their raise in bitcoin denominated terms. The capital infusion gives Satoshi Energy the runway to continue to execute on the co-location market with miners and renewables along with the build out of the technical stack that will provide pertinent information to miners about performance as well as enabling the streaming of lightning payments.
Strike announced their app availability in Argentina. Initially providing USD stablecoin access and rails for individuals and businesses. Argentine citizens have suffered double digit inflation over the last 10 years and have had their currency devalued by the government multiple times. Argentina’s inflation rate in 2021 was ~50%. Strike is en route to onboard 1 billion users over the next 5 years and where better to start than with those markets who need it most.
Media
Opt Out Podcast: Samourai Wallet at 1:18:00 discusses the recent Ten31 partnership and desire for partnering with like minded individuals.
Zaprite on the Talking LNBits Podcast. Founder, John Magill, discusses how he got into Bitcoin and how Zaprite came out of a necessity to provide provide professional Bitcoin invoicing. He also discuss what is on the horizon for Zaprite’s future.
@Jack publishes a letter creating the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund to support and protect open source developers in the Bitcoin community from lawsuits.
@jkirkwoodmd - From Doctor To #Bitcoin Fund Investor. #236 Jonathan discusses Medicine and Bitcoin on the Daniel Prince’s Once Bitten Podcast.
Jimmy Song publishes Decentralization Requires Responsibility. He highlights Ten31 with: Grant Gilliam explains why Ten31 is investing in Bitcoin Infrastructure companies. The main argument is threefold. First, for any non-100% BTC portfolio, Bitcoin companies present a different risk/reward tradeoff. Second, some Bitcoin companies can outperform Bitcoin. Third, Bitcoin companies are not as volatile as Bitcoin is. The argument makes a lot of sense from a capital allocator perspective and we’ll see how this thesis works in a world of post-modern investing.
Market Happenings
LSAT is a new standard to support the use case of charging for services and authenticating users in distributed networks. It combines the strength of macaroons for better authentication with the strength of the Lightning Network for better payments. Aperture is an implementation of this standard. It functions as a reverse HTTP proxy with support for gRPC and REST requests. It allows the safe and efficient creation of paid APIs that separate the logic of payments, permissioning and fulfilling requests. Aperture is used today by Lightning Loop and Pool, a non-custodial swap service for Bitcoin.
The mayor of Rio de Janiero says he plans to allocate 1% of the treasury to bitcoin. He also mentions a 10% discount on taxes if paid in bitcoin.
Intel has announced their new Bitcoin mining chip Blockscale. The bitcoin mining chip will be shipped directly instead of a completed mining rig. When a miner is outfitted with 256 chips the resulting output will be 148TH/s on 3,860 watts. For comparison Bitmain’s latest miner is 140 TH/s on 3010 watts. So, Bitmain is still outperforming Intel at 21.5 J/TH to Intel’s 26 J/TH for now.
Regulatory Update
Senator Lummis introduces bill to exclude capital gains tax on crypto payments <$600. “Can you imagine tracking every cup of coffee or hamburger purchase for currency gains or loses at time of transaction? Let lightning do its thing.” -Senator Lummis
The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON), a committee of the European Parliament, has rejected a "de facto" Bitcoin ban. The committee voted 32:24 against the proposal due to strong criticism.
Thailand has decided not to impose an addition 15% withholding tax on cryptocurrency gains. The country will continue with only the 15% capital gains tax.
In the State of Idaho a bill was introduced to provide clarity on digital assets. Regulatory definitions on property claims, adverse claim, and control with smart contracts.
Noteworthy
Mechanicville NY hydroelectric station now mining Bitcoin. A renewable power generation station, which was built in in 1897, was scheduled to be decommissioned until Bitcoin mining came and now the station is more profitable than when it was selling energy to National Grid.
Fidelity releases a research report on Bitcoin First. In this 26 page report Fidelity Digital Assets covers why Bitcoin should be considered separately from other digital assets.
Travel
Miami Bitcoin 2022 April 6-9
Oslo Freedom Forum May 23-25
BitBlockBoom 2022 (Austin) Aug. 25-28
