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Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#21

Post by steveharman »

muneeb wrote: post #14
gremlinsinc wrote: post #11

I've been following your company on hn for awhile. I'm still iffy on whether crypto will really change the world but if it does I'd rather see your offering beat out libre. FB et al shouldn't be creating a coin but join with companies like yours who have a solid footing and create new stuff within existing ecosystems.

I agree with you that the crypto industry in general over-hypes, and everything is a "revolution." The scalable infrastructure and developers tools still require a lot of work and getting "killer apps" is a whole new phase of traction. With that said, I'm optimistic as all signs seem to point to the fact that security and privacy are going to become more and more critical. Facebook Libra is a great example. Even FB w…

Will you be opening your documentation and legals (where possible), so that others might follow a similar regulatory path with the SEC?

Thanks

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#23

Post by muneeb »

thecupisblue wrote: post #18

Pretty intrigued by this, especially because of Clarity (Lispy) and the storage system (I can save stuff on S3, not "on the chain". Pretty awesome, I might build a social network on top of this, just what I wanted/needed.

I didn't get into Clarity in my summary above but really into the decidable smart contract language design. The reason I didn't mention Clarity is because most programs on Blockstack are not smart contracts. We think that smart contracts are only a subset of use-cases and should only be used when needed vs. making smart contracts the only way to program decentralized apps.

For any readers that are intrigued by what is Clarity, it's Blockstack's smart contract language that is different in two mains ways:

a) Clarity is a decidable language i.e., it is intentionally Turing-incomplete. This allows for complete static analysis of the entire call graph of smart contracts.

b) Clarity is interpreted. The contract source code itself is published and executed by blockchain nodes i.e., no compiler.

More details on Clarity are here: https://blog.blockstack.org/introducing-clarity-the-language...

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#24

Post by muneeb »

siavosh wrote: post #22

Hi Muneeb, curious to take your take on the following: (1) main reason dapps haven't found an audience yet (2) if you see a way forward through 'hybrid' architectures, say like coinbase but for non-financial applications?

I think that the industry needs to move from infrastructure phase, to developer traction phase, to user traction phase. Not in discrete steps but in general.

By the 2017 "crypto mania" the infrastructure was barely there. Imagine that even a single app/smart-contract on Ethereum could not scale beyond 500K users without choking the entire network. Cryptokitties comes to mind.

Just building infrastructure is not a magic solution. You need to iterate over developer tools, give developers the right tools, have educational resources, raise awareness around why decentralized apps are important etc. That's generally the developer traction phase where I believe Blockstack is now (we've had 170 independent apps/startups built on top -- most in the last 6 months).

With an active community of developers organically building decentralized apps and playing around with tools, you can see a lot of experiments but can still end up with a graveyard of apps that no one uses. That's the user traction phase which I do not think we're in yet for Web 3 / decentralized apps. I remain confident that as the UX of these apps gets better and as security/privacy becomes more and more imp, we'll start seeing "killer apps". Some of these will be "crypto native" meaning they are not just "decentralized X" but they'll have some crypto native functionality that was simply not possible in web 2.0 and the traditional client/server model.

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#25

Post by muneeb »

maz1b wrote: post #20

Good luck Muneeb! It's always nice to see a fellow Pakistani doing great things. I particularly have to give you props on all the effort and investment required to be the first SEC qualified token offering. The vertical has been dominated by bad headlines and bad players, so this legitimacy is a great step forward, and you guys are trailblazing here. Highly commendable.

Mujhay bhee Pakistani logon sey mil kar achaa lagta haay

(That's Urdu in case anyone is wondering.)

Appreciate your support! Crypto is generally a wild west and we're trying to help mature this industry.

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#26

Post by muneeb »

steveharman wrote: post #21
muneeb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that the crypto industry in general over-hypes, and everything is a "revolution." The scalable infrastructure and developers tools still require a lot of work and getting "killer apps" is a whole new phase of traction. With that said, I'm optimistic as all signs seem to point to the fact that security and privacy are going to become more and more critical. Facebook Libra is a great example. Even FB w…

Will you be opening your documentation and legals (where possible), so that others might follow a similar regulatory path with the SEC? Thanks

Yep, the filing is already public and available through the SEC Edgar website. See also https://stackstoken.com/circular

Our hope is that the work we've done (and the $1.8M legal and accounting fees that we've paid!) helps other projects as well. That would take some sting out of the legal/accounting costs of doing this :-)

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#27

Post by jorgeribs »

Several companies have tried to create blockchain-based products using offline mesh networks, but there's the problem of there not being a ledger, and thus transactions not being able to be confirmed. Do you think blockchain-centric companies could integrate technologies like, say, Bridgefy to enable their mobile products to work without Internet and thus become more decentralized?

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#28

Post by thecupisblue »

muneeb wrote: post #23
thecupisblue wrote: post #18

Pretty intrigued by this, especially because of Clarity (Lispy) and the storage system (I can save stuff on S3, not "on the chain". Pretty awesome, I might build a social network on top of this, just what I wanted/needed.

I didn't get into Clarity in my summary above but really into the decidable smart contract language design. The reason I didn't mention Clarity is because most programs on Blockstack are not smart contracts. We think that smart contracts are only a subset of use-cases and should only be used when needed vs. making smart contracts the only way to program decentralized apps. For any readers that are intrigued by what i…

> We think that smart contracts are only a subset of use-cases and should only be used when needed vs. making smart contracts the only way to program decentralized apps

Totally agree.

Great job with blockstack, the APIs seem real easy to use - only thing I'm worried about is that the mobile SDK's are just JS wrappers so the JS bridge might be a speed bottleneck in mobile apps. Also, are there plans for a Flutter SDK (pretty easy to make a wrapper for both platform SDK's)?

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#29

Post by siavosh »

muneeb wrote: post #24
siavosh wrote: post #22

Hi Muneeb, curious to take your take on the following: (1) main reason dapps haven't found an audience yet (2) if you see a way forward through 'hybrid' architectures, say like coinbase but for non-financial applications?

I think that the industry needs to move from infrastructure phase, to developer traction phase, to user traction phase. Not in discrete steps but in general. By the 2017 "crypto mania" the infrastructure was barely there. Imagine that even a single app/smart-contract on Ethereum could not scale beyond 500K users without choking the entire network. Cryptokitties comes to mind. Just building infrastructure is not a mag…

Thanks. I think the best metaphor I can think of is how you can't convince a meaningful number of people to give up meat and buy the new vegetarian imitation meats by telling them it's better for the larger good; the only way is to make it better than actual meat (also like the Tesla approach). Other than some financial applications, do you have a favorite current dapp you think is fundamentally better than it's centralized equivalent?

Re: Launch HN: Stacks (YC S14) – The first SEC-qualified crypto token offering

#30

Post by eriktrautman »

If these are registered securities they will need to trade on regulated exchanges where the company knows all the token holders only and thus cannot be used in decentralized applications by normal people. Which seems to defeat the purpose in the first place. Or..?
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