Europe is headed for a depression | Market Update

European Power Costs So Much It’s Now Equal to $1,000 Oil.
By Anna Shiryaevskaya (2022-08-23 11:06:44.939 GMT)

(Bloomberg) — European power prices have soared so much that they’re now equal to more than $1,000 per barrel of oil. A gas crunch is the main driver — with Russian supply cuts pushing the fuel’s price to about 13 times its seasonal norm – while heat waves and drought boosted electricity demand and cut hydro and nuclear output. Coal-fired plants may offer little relief since that commodity has hit a record.

Source: How Much Is Power in Europe? It’s Now Equal to Oil at $1,000 a Barrel – Bloomberg.

Bottom Line: How can the Fed continue to raise rates past September? Europe is sadly headed for a depression because of high energy costs.

ETH: 8-hour chart

Ethereum whales are selling pre-merge. link. If you believe in a September rally, this may create an opportunity. Support is at $1,459,  $1,324, and – worst case – $1,100.

Web 3.0 Mobile

Everybody’s watching web 3.0 in the crypto space, saying: what are the next hot trends that can attract the next big wave of users? 

We are seeing a confluence of different ecosystems developing mobile-first experiences for crypto and shipping hardware. The most well know is the Solana mobile phone Saga, a flagship Android phone for web3. We’re also seeing an Ethereum OS. The first Ethereum operating system (EOS). 

Also, Ethereum scaling solution Polygon is partnering with other mobile phone creators to build a web 3.0 phone. We don’t think it’s an accident to see all these different players come together simultaneously and release these mobile-first experiences for web 3.0. 

This trend has potential and is currently flying under people’s radar. 

Let’s use an example to talk about how mobile could be a game changer for web 3.0 and how it could gain adoption. Let’s start with the Ethereum phone. This isn’t an actual operating system that you can install on Android-based phones. It’s the world’s first Ethereum OS. We’ll look at some of the available features on this operating system and discuss how that could be big for web3 mobile adoption. Full disclosure, we have not used this. We have not personally vetted this project, so we are not necessarily recommending that you download and install this software just yet because we have no affiliation with them. This is not investment advice.

We are just using this as an example to show where this trend could go. We will discuss the benefits and why that could be big for web 3.0. EOS offers native dapps on the actual operating system itself. It doesn’t take any platform fees whenever you use decentralized applications. It also lets you have a light node. So you have an actual blockchain-based node running on your device, which is pretty impressive. Other features include crypto native payments and Ethereum Name Service (ENS) integration. 

Those are some of the features, but let’s talk about the benefit you can get from a mobile-first web3 experience. One of the biggest benefits is unlocking web 3.0’s full potential, a trustless, transparent, decentralization ecosystem where you own your data. Mobile can unlock that specific use case because most people spend a lot of time on their mobile phones rather than just on their desktops.

In many ways, it’s clunky to experience web 3.0 on mobile, but if you’re doing most of your life on mobile, that’s a vital part of owning your data. What does that mean? One of the biggest problems with web 2.0 right now is that whenever you do something – (ex:  you sign up for a website} – they take in your identity information and store it on a server. How can you take more ownership over your data in a web 3.0 paradigm? The key is NOT to put that data on a blockchain. That’s not any better because all that information is public. 

So, how do you retain your own identity? Optimally you would want to keep all the information on your device and only provide it when you explicitly allow somebody to see it. Essentially, if you could have a phone where you could keep all your identity data on the phone itself, and the only time you could share that information is when someone else is requesting it – and you consent to it. You might say, well, that sounds good, but you could even do that now. You don’t need a blockchain to make that happen.

There are a few ways that blockchain can make that problem better. One way is to use private key management on the device to authenticate that “you are you.” The next part is identity management; your phone becomes your hardware wallet. You could have a situation where your private key is just stored in your device, and the only time you could sign a transaction is to do some sort of biometric authentication, whether it’s a fingerprint or facial recognition, or a backup passcode. You can have it where your private key is stored on the device and never leaves. You could do everything on the phone to make that happen. If the digital signature is the key part that authenticates that “you are you,” that separates this from a web 2.0 context. 

There is another way that you can make mobile better with blockchain. Zero-knowledge-proof cryptography is another way to prevent people from just taking your data without your consent. In this case, you just have to prove that certain information is accurate, but you don’t have to provide the actual data. Let’s say you wanted to keep your identity completely private. But then you tried to use your phone to prove that you were of a certain age to do something online. You could prove age without revealing how old you are or anything else about you. That way, there’s no way that somebody could take your data and stick it on their server.

The next big thing we want to talk about here is how this phone can potentially run a local light node on the device itself. This is a huge part of decentralization. The best case scenario for running a truly decentralized ecosystem is where you have more people participating and running the blockchain infrastructure itself and signing transactions directly with their self-hosted nodes. That’s not the reality we live in right now, but later….

Most people use a wallet like Metamask thanks to a browser, then connect to somebody else’s node to access the blockchain. The blockchain is a peer-to-peer network of nodes or computers that all talk to one another. But to use a blockchain, you have to connect to a node. You can run your node, which is pretty cumbersome for many people, or you can use a self-hosted node like Infura or Alchemy to access any Ethereum-based or Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chain. Mobile is different because you can run a light node, which is not a full node. It is just a simpler, more lightweight light node on your device itself and a mobile device – which would be a real breakthrough. 

Initially, we are a bit skeptical about this implementation because that’s a pretty resource-intensive task, and we are curious to see how that works for battery life on a phone. If they can pull this off, that’s a huge leap in the right direction for the web 3.0 vision of decentralization and decentralizing the clients on people’s devices where they don’t have to trust third-party node software. 

The other big thing is native Decentralized Applications (Dapps). Dapps are powered by smart contracts in the blockchain. If you can connect the smart contract, anybody can build a user interface and have native dapps where you can have the applications on your computer that talk directly to the blockchain smart contracts. That will be significant because it will be a much faster and snappier user experience than using a website through a browser. It’s also interesting that they have 0% platform fees, so they’re not up charging you to use those applications. You could even be incentivized (as in financially) to use user applications on the device rather than accessing third-party sites. 

Those are a few reasons why web 3.0 on a mobile device could be a new trend. It could be a game changer if there are incentives for using mobile technology. We might see special incentives for people to get special airdrops who have got one of these phones or maybe had this operating system installed. Theoretically, a phone could pay for itself or make you passive income over the long term. We could see people sign up for a second phone even if they decide not to switch their operating system or their current phone. They might have a Web 3.0 phone and a Web 2.0 phone simultaneously. 

That brings us to the next point, which is the doubts. What are some reasons why this might not work as we think? The first is the switching cost. There could be a huge switching cost of just trading in an iPhone and then using Android just so that you can install a special operating system or buy the Solana phone. What are the answers to that? There could be the incentives we discussed earlier where people “get paid” to have a second phone running this type of stuff. They buy a used phone and install this operating system on it, or they buy a Solana phone, which ends up paying for itself with airdrops. They can use this as a crypto-native concept, and it’s even like a hardware wallet. Maybe we have this new category of phones. Everybody had a Blackberry and an iPod before the iPhone. Does anybody remember Palm Pilots? These devices are now laughable compared to your iPhone. 

If these mobile devices have hardware wallets, maybe there’s a new category created out of it that makes a compelling reason to have a second device. It can also eventually end up merging back into a phone that is crypto native. Essentially creating a crypto native wallet inside an android device or the android operating system and inside iOS. You can do private key management by doing digital signatures where people can store their data inside a device. The data never leaves the device, except when you allow it through biometric authentication or any other data. Then once you have that layer baked into it, we have software development kits (SDKs) that let developers build apps, talk to that part of the operating system, and use the blockchain—not operating systems but applications themselves.

Each of those individual apps can do precisely what we were talking about with something like the EthOS, where you have native dApps. These have fast, snappy user experiences that charge 0% platform fees. Maybe you have a situation where you can run a local light node inside your device. Although that may be less important than others, you can also have crypto native payments Ethereum Name Service (ENS) integration. You can do identity management and everything with a slightly different implementation that leads to lower switching costs for users but still has a lot of incentive for them to adopt it with less friction. 

What does all this mean for the future of crypto? Many people are watching this space: what are the next significant catalysts to fuel this next wave of crypto adoption? Web 3.0 mobile could help revive the crypto space.

Whenever we saw early blockchain use cases hit the scene in 2018 & 2019, Token Metrics was there. Remember Matic and Helium? We saw Decentralized Finance (DeFi) emerging, especially in 2019 and 2020. DeFi made its entrance onto the scene, and then NFTs came later. We saw things like gaming & metaverse. In my opinion, if we can see mobile start to mature in the way we have talked about and see integrations into major operating systems like iOS and Android. The idea is to create compelling financial incentives for people to install this “software” on their devices. That makes a snowball effect for the next big wave of crypto adoption. We don’t think it’s a question of “if,” it’s just a question of “when.” Ultimately, it takes time for that technology to get created, but we’re seeing a lot of momentum in the right direction.