Happy New Year Still, Everyone!
The Digital Decade signed off and ushers in a Decade of Decentralisation. We wrote a review looking back at 2019 (by Keld), and a forecast on what we’re seeing in 2020 (by George), see both linked below as well.
KR1 & The Year Ahead
Growing Investment Portfolio
What we are looking forward to in 2020 is to add to our growing investment portfolio by picking winners (especially in the Cosmos & Polkadot ecosystem here) and realizing solid profits from earlier projects that allow us to reinvest in both ecosystems. We lasered in on Cosmos way before others and invested early. With ATOM being up more than 4,040% since their fundraiser in April 2017 (see graphic below, as of 21 December 2019), it signals a very positive and thriving ecosystem, a community is much healthier and more projects pop up when everyone is excited about the future of the project and people didn’t get burned on their contribution (vs. many other layer-1 platform projects, see the graphic below).
Staking Activities Revenue
We are also very excited to be one of the first organised investment companies globally to generate revenue from proof-of-stake networks in this manner, certainly the only publicly listed company to do so. As announced earlier last year, currently we generate staking income from the Cosmos network with many other projects from our portfolio to follow in 2020 (major networks being Polkadot, Ethereum and Dfinity here).
DeFi Strategies & Crypto-Native Strategies
There have been lots of tiny opportunities brewing up in the immature and inefficient DeFi space. We are running experiments with Compound, Uniswap, Maker & DAI, Nexus Mutual and of course some Melon Protocol funds to squeeze tiny revenues from DeFi yield (more details in our blog post from the summer) and to bootstrap some liquidity here and there.
Another recurring theme (and gaining in adoption) is token distributions via “free” sort-of airdrop coins from locking up certain crypto assets as collateral for some time (aka. “Lock-drops”) or from pointing your assets to “virtual mining”. As announced, we participated early in the pioneering Edgeware Lock-drop, and are continuously participating in the ChainX PCX mining with some of our BTC and DOT tokens since ChainX launched in the summer (not announced as insignificant for the KR1 plc entity as of yet). ChainX is going to become an important Polkadot parachain but we’re also talking to many early-stage projects in the Polkadot (and Cosmos) ecosystem that intend to follow similar models as Edgeware or ChainX did. That means signalling and locking up more tokens for us to be part of those distributions.
KR1 Portfolio Updates
Polkadot
Polkadot is coming and all the 2019 activity is summarised neatly in this Polkadot State of the Nation blogpost by Gav, the founder of Polkadot and former co-founder of Ethereum. If 2019’s progress is anything to go by then development in 2020 will be rapid and very exciting.
Cosmos
Cosmos take their work seriously, but not themselves seriously. We love that! IBC is coming in 2020. A nice Happy New Year video from lots of people in the Cosmos community to start off 2020, see below.
KR1 Strategy Session
We had a progressive board meeting in the Isle of Man office attended by Simon, George, and Keld reviewing the years and putting plans in place for 2020. Stephen handed over to Simon in October last year.
KR1 in the Media
Keld’s review of 2019 was published on our blog and some news sites.
George’s forecast of 2020 was published on our blog and some news sites.
George was quoted on Bitcoin.com;
KR1 is Europe’s leading digital asset investment company supporting early-stage decentralised and open-source blockchain projects. Founded in 2016, KR1 has been a notable first investor in many key projects that will power the new wave of decentralised platforms, digital assets and protocols.
In the spirit of the open and decentralised movement, investors or institutions can buy KR1 shares to gain exposure to crypto markets through the London-based NEX public stock exchange (KR1:NEX).
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