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The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
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The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanBitcoin as Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.Bitcoin at first was "weird internet money...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
Subscribe to The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
>1.2K subscribers
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One thing that's interesting about yesterday's Basic Attention Token sale is how quickly it went - $36M transacted in 30 sec. Lots of people were surely disappointed as they attempted to buy into the token sale only to have their orders canceled for missing the sale window. I haven't nailed this down for certain, but I suspect that all of the successful buys in the token sale were programmatically executed through smart contracts, rather than by hand. The entire sale was tied to milestones in the Ethereum blockchain, making this possible. From the BAT sale site:
"The sale of BAT will begin at the time that mining commences on Ethereum block 3,798,640 and continue until the time that 156,250 Ether has been received or mining commences on Ethereum block 3,963,480, whichever is earlier. This is the “sale period."
I honestly don't know the mechanics of Ethereum well enough to really diagnose this, but my guess is that there were lots of buy contracts that were triggered to execute along side block 3,798,640. I don't think that we are quite prepared for what a world driven by "smart contracts" will feel like - despite the fact that we have had high frequency trading for years, smart contracts that auto-execute on blockchains will bring really fast transaction execution to lots more areas of life. I am not sure that there's anything wrong with that, just pointing out that it's going to feel quite different than what we are used to today.
One thing that's interesting about yesterday's Basic Attention Token sale is how quickly it went - $36M transacted in 30 sec. Lots of people were surely disappointed as they attempted to buy into the token sale only to have their orders canceled for missing the sale window. I haven't nailed this down for certain, but I suspect that all of the successful buys in the token sale were programmatically executed through smart contracts, rather than by hand. The entire sale was tied to milestones in the Ethereum blockchain, making this possible. From the BAT sale site:
"The sale of BAT will begin at the time that mining commences on Ethereum block 3,798,640 and continue until the time that 156,250 Ether has been received or mining commences on Ethereum block 3,963,480, whichever is earlier. This is the “sale period."
I honestly don't know the mechanics of Ethereum well enough to really diagnose this, but my guess is that there were lots of buy contracts that were triggered to execute along side block 3,798,640. I don't think that we are quite prepared for what a world driven by "smart contracts" will feel like - despite the fact that we have had high frequency trading for years, smart contracts that auto-execute on blockchains will bring really fast transaction execution to lots more areas of life. I am not sure that there's anything wrong with that, just pointing out that it's going to feel quite different than what we are used to today.
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