Bitcoin is recovering from a weekend dip as traders anticipate the third U.S. futures-focused bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) listing. The VanEck Bitcoin Futures ETF is expected to launch on Tuesday and will trade under the ticker symbol XBTF. Analysts continue to expect further upside in bitcoin’s price given strong investor sentiment on ETF approvals.

Last week, crypto investment funds saw a record $1.47 billion in inflows as investors positioned themselves ahead of the first U.S. bitcoin-linked ETF launch, by ProShares. Alternative cryptocurrency-focused funds also saw inflows, which coincided with a near 30% rise in Solana’s SOL token over the past week.

Analysts are also monitoring the recent rotation to alternative coins (altcoins), which are starting to outperform bitcoin. “The crypto market is turning from being dominated by short-term traders who want to ride the speculative trends to longer-term investors who value the technical capabilities of the different blockchains, challenging bitcoin’s market dominance,” Anders Nysteen, quantitative analyst at Saxo Bank, wrote in a research report.

Latest prices

• Bitcoin (BTC): $62,813.67, +3.3%
• Ether (ETH): $4,191.45, +3.53%
• S&P 500: $4,566.48, +0.47%
• Gold: $1,806.85, +0.69%
• 10-year Treasury yield closed at 1.64%

Record $1.5 billion crypto fund inflows

Investors pumped a record $1.47 billion in new money into digital asset investment products last week, fueled by a rally in cryptocurrencies and the launch of the ProShares bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund, according to a CoinShares report Monday.

Bitcoin-focused funds dominated last week’s inflows, at 99%. During the prior week, inflows into bitcoin-focused funds were at $70 million, CoinDesk’s Lyllah Ledesma reported.

Bitcoin dominance declines

The bitcoin dominance ratio, or the measure of bitcoin’s market capitalization relative to the total crypto market, declined last week to 45%. The decline in the dominance ratio was due to the recent outperformance of several altcoins such as ETH and SOL.

Some traders are starting to rotate into altcoins, which suggests a greater appetite for risk. “Overall, we are structurally long BTC, ETH and most layer 1s such as ALGO and SOL,” crypto trading firm QCP Capital wrote in a Telegram chat.

But is the rotation to altcoins sustainable?

The chart below shows the bitcoin dominance ratio, which increased from a recent low of 40% in mid-September. A similar situation occurred in 2018 before the start of a crypto bear market. At that time, the bitcoin dominance ratio rose as investors reduced their exposure to altcoins and sought relative safety in bitcoin.

Currently, the bitcoin dominance ratio is declining from a high of 48% in July, which was when crypto prices stabilized from a correction earlier this year. Similar to February-March 2018, traders are returning to buy the dip in altcoins that have lagged behind a sharp recovery in bitcoin over the past month. For now, some analysts expect altcoins to take the lead, because cryptocurrencies typically produce positive returns during the fourth quarter.

Altcoin roundup

• Shiba Inu hits record high: Shiba Inu (SHIB) tapped lifetime highs on Sunday, trading at $0.0000455 at 11:20 UTC, topping the previous record reached on May 10, CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole reported. Prices for the meme token have risen by nearly 50% in the past 24 hours, with a month-to-date gain of almost 500%. SHIB’s latest rise comes amid rumors that Robinhood may soon list the cryptocurrency on its platform.
• Solana also hit a new record high: Prices for Solana’s SOL tokens hit a record high on early Monday as a majority of tokens representing layer 1 blockchains followed bitcoin, CoinDesk’s Muyao Shen reported. The token, which is backed by FTX crypto exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried, traded at $218.9 on Monday. According to decentralized finance data provider Defi Llama, the total value locked in Solana reached an all-time high of approximately $13.91 billion.
• Ether hit all-time high last week while seeing continued outflows: Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, hit a record high on Oct. 21 at $4,361, CoinDesk’s Lyllah Ledesma reported. However, despite the price increase, funds focused on the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization saw outflows for a third consecutive week, totaling $1.4 million last week. Other altcoins, including SOL, Cardano’s ADA currency and Binance coin (BNB), all saw inflows.

Relevant news

• ProShares Seeks Waiver From CME for Position Limits on New Bitcoin Futures ETF
• BlockFi to Develop Crypto Asset Management Products With Neuberger Berman
• Mastercard Is Integrating Crypto Payments Through a New Partnership With Bakkt
• FTX Crypto Exchange Finalizes LedgerX Acquisition

Other markets

Most digital assets in the CoinDesk 20 ended the day higher.

Notable winners as of 21:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

• Chainlink (LINK): +10.86%
• The Graph (GRT): +9.89%
• Algorand (ALGO): +9.71%

Notable losers:

• Tether (USDT): -0.02%
• USD coin (USDC): -0.01%

Last week, a crypto investment collective called PleasrDAO paid $4 million for a copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s seventh album, “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.”

If that sounds insane to you, consider the circumstances, which are also insane. The record was conceived as a one-of-one physical edition – just one CD would ever be made, and whoever bought that one copy would be contractually forbidden from distributing it for sale. Martin Shkreli, the notorious pharmaceutical executive and fraudster, bought the album back in 2015. He held onto it until 2018, when the federal government confiscated it in the wake of his fraud conviction.

This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.

Announcing their purchase of the record last week, members of PleasrDAO said they saw the concept as being in line with the values behind non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the blockchain-based collectibles that have become PleasrDAO’s bread and butter over the past year. NFTs are a form of cryptocurrency attached to media files – JPEG files are endlessly reproducible, thanks to the copy-paste function, but the crypto component can give them an element of scarcity. There’s only one of each token, and because transaction records are available publicly on the blockchain, imposter NFTs are easy to identify.

“The album itself is kind of the O.G. NFT,” one PleasrDAO member told The New York Times, making that connection explicit.

Read more: Martin Shkreli’s Wu-Tang Clan Album Now Belongs to a DAO

Predictably, the group has also turned “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” into an actual NFT. Per the Times article, “The 74 members of PleasrDAO… share collective ownership of the NFT deed, and thus own the album.” PleasrDAO is also saying it wants to find a way to skirt that baked-in contractual obligation and share the music with a wider audience (potentially through fractionalization).

It’s both an act of crypto evangelism (an ad, basically, for the organization) and an interesting argument for a new economic model centered around patronage. Streaming is unsustainable for most musicians because revenues tend to be divvied up pro rata. According to Rolling Stone, 90% of streams are going to the top 1% of artists on platforms like Spotify. In a pro rata model, that 1% ends up with 90% of the money these platforms have decided to set aside for artists.

In the NFT patronage model, a media file is treated as a public good. All you need is one person who’s willing to pay for the token; once it’s purchased, the work exists online for free. Anyone with an internet connection can enjoy the work, while the wealthy speculators do their thing amongst themselves, selling and reselling the token as value fluctuates over time. You can see this in practice on Catalog, a platform for music NFTs, where token-backed albums are selling for tens of thousands of dollars.

💽 TOUCH 💽

✨ Record by HALEEK MAUL
💰 Sold to 1conf for 17.1039 ETH ($68,491.03)https://t.co/HFkSK90xWL

— catalog sales bot (@catalog__bot) October 23, 2021

It’s happening with one-of-one NFTs, but it’s also happening with limited sets, as a kind of experimental alternative to Patreon or Kickstarter. The writers Kyle Chayka and Daisy Alioto funded their newsletter, Dirt, by selling NFTs of original artworks. Crucially, the NFTs don’t work as access passes – the posts are available for anyone to read – but the writers and editors get paid.

But just as the Wu-Tang album is a unique case (an album-as-gimmick, from one of the most famous hip-hop acts on the planet) it’s hard to imagine that every small artist or writer could make money this way. PleasrDAO bought “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” to make a point about the long-term value of crypto. And the people who bought into the Dirt crowdfund were by and large technologists and investors, many of whom have a stake in proving these models are viable.

NFT ownership isn’t intuitive. What do you own, really, when you buy the token for an album or a piece of writing? It comes down to a question of scale: what works in the siloed ecosystem of early adopters may not work for the general public.

The U.S. General Services Administration said Monday that it will host its latest bitcoin auction this week.

The auction will begin Tuesday morning, with an expected completion time on Thursday. Five lots containing a total of 4.94 BTC — worth approximately $311,000 at the time of writing — will be auctioned. Bitcoin is trading hands at roughly $63,000 as of press time, according to Coinbase. 

“These lots are a great introduction to the crypto community and GSA is pleased to be able to offer them for public auction,” Thomas Meiron, a regional commissioner for the Federal Auction Service, said in a statement. 

The GSA has conducted several auctions of cryptocurrency since the start of the year, primarily centered on bitcoin lots. This summer, the agency also auctioned off roughly 150 litecoins, as previously reported. 

On Monday, a regional justice ministry in Germany announced that it would sell 215 BTC, seized via criminal investigation, in an auction. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Last week Digital Currency Group, a crypto-industry holding company, opened its wallet to defend its Grayscale subsidiary’s Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), when the fund’s shares traded at a 20.53% discount to its underlying bitcoin holdings – the steepest in five months.

Digital Currency Group’s pledge to buy as much as $1 billion worth of GBTC shares might have represented savvy, opportunistic timing. Or it might have been a demonstration of support for the $39.45 billion GBTC, the world’s largest bitcoin fund, in the face of increasing competition.

Then, a day later, Grayscale officially filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to convert the trust into a spot-based exchange-traded fund (ETF), even though SEC Chair Gary Gensler has signaled his preference for an ETF investing in bitcoin futures. (In recent days several futures ETFs have been approved in the U.S.)

Thanks to these developments, the GBTC discount between the price of the underlying bitcoin asset and the price of the trust’s shares has since narrowed to about 16%, based on data from the crypto derivatives research firm Skew.

But will it decrease further?

Perhaps, if the futures ETFs already approved by the SEC lead to approval of funds that hold actual bitcoin, Bloomberg commodities analyst Mike McGlone wrote last week. He added that perhaps the GBTC discount would evaporate if the trust was allowed to convert to an ETF.

“We see increasing pressure for the Securities and Exchange Commission to approve the GBTC ETF,” McGlone said in the market update shared with CoinDesk on Oct. 20. “Grayscale has said it’s committed to converting GBTC to an ETF. We see that as a matter of time, notably with a new digital divide opening [against] China, which may make bitcoin and crypto success a vested interest of the U.S.”

However, other analysts talking to CoinDesk last week disagree, saying the price discrepancy will likely persist for the foreseeable future.

“Any announcements about purchasing GBTC on the open market, or signaling towards an ETF conversion, are just empty promises in an attempt to bring in arbitrageurs and likely will not have much impact,” Jeff Dorman, CIO at Arca Funds, told CoinDesk in an email. “I don’t think the discount will close any time soon and probably should widen.”

DCG, which also owns CoinDesk as an independent subsidiary, said it would buy much as $1 billion worth of GBTC, up from a prior authorization of $750 million. As of Oct. 19, DCG had already purchased $388 million worth of shares, according to the press release dated Oct. 20. DCG declined to comment on the issue.

Grayscale allows investors to gain exposure to bitcoin through shares in the trust, which currently holds 647,540 BTC, according to bybt.com. That amounts to around 3% of the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply.

GBTC shares are derivatives of bitcoin and, in theory, should closely track the cryptocurrency’s price. So a substantial discount or premium is an opportunity for arbitrageurs – traders exploiting price discrepancies – to make money.

For example, with shares currently trading at a discount of 16% at press time, an arbitrageur expecting the price discrepancy to narrow would buy GBTC shares in the secondary market and simultaneously sell bitcoin in the spot market. The market-neutral position would yield 16% returns if shares in GBTC converge with the spot price. An arbitrageur can also hedge the long GBTC trade with a short position in the futures market, in which case, the return would be higher as futures usually trade at a premium to the spot price and converge with the spot price on expiry.

“The ability to buy GBTC and short futures and get exposure to bitcoin with about a 25% price advantage should continue to attract arbitrage, reduce volatility and narrow spreads,” Bloomberg’s McGlone said on Oct. 20, when the discount was over 20% and the six-month futures contract was drawing a premium of 4%.

Grayscale Investments LLC recently filed the regulatory documents to convert the bitcoin trust into a spot-based ETF. A spot-based ETF would allow for more continual creation and redemption of new shares by market makers, so ostensibly it would track bitcoin’s price more closely than the current trust structure. Thus, it could be a big hit on Wall Street.

“The trust is desperate to return to par value, and I think they will need to in some manner,” Ben Lilly, a crypto economist at Jarvis Labs, said. “At a 17% discount, I find it attractive.”

‘Arb away’

According to Arca’s Dorman, traders may be less inclined to “arb away” the discount solely on the assumption that Grayscale’s plan to convert the trust into an ETF would win approval; that currently appears to be a low-probability event, in his view. Besides, traders can nearly earn double-digit returns via other strategies that appear relatively less risky.

Said Dorman: “Buying GBTC for that 17% discount is the equivalent of buying a 0% coupon, two-year bond at 83 cents on the dollar (not including Grayscale’s 2% management fee, which makes it even less attractive to own). That is a 9.5% annual yield, roughly equivalent to what you can earn lending a stablecoin right now – the ‘risk-free rate’ in digital assets. As such, GBTC is not a very attractive instrument to own.”

The prospect of the SEC reversing its stance and approving Grayscale’s plan to convert into a spot-based ETF strikes some observers as unlikely in the near future.

“The idea of turning the trust into an ETF was to close the discount in the open market,” said Kevin Kang, founding principal of BKCoin Capital. “However, with the SEC chair only mentioning that he was comfortable with the futures-based ETFs, I am not sure when that will happen.”

Says Laurent Kssis, director of CEC Capital and former managing director of exchange-traded products (ETP) at 21Shares: “You just don’t shift a closed-end fund into an open-ended structure overnight in the U.S.”

“Just like with European crypto issuers, I see a new ETF program being filed (previously closed-end structure) and introduced, marking a new era for Grayscale,” Ksiss told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat.

Dorman said he was skeptical that Grayscale would willingly forgo its management fees from the Grayscale trust, estimated at $800 million a year.

“If they convert to an ETF, that guaranteed revenue goes away, and they immediately enter an oversaturated race where fees will trend towards 0%, and they will be competing against companies with bigger, better brands than themselves. That’s a formula for failure,” Dorman said. “They are better off being hated by their investors but generating perpetual fees. Why voluntarily destroy the greatest business model in history?”

A ‘PR stunt?’

According to an Oct. 20 Twitter thread by Messari’s Ryan Selkis, DCG’s plans to expand purchases is a “PR stunt to make unwitting investors think DCG can close” the GBTC discount, which is “impossible given the size of the trust.”

But he says it may be hard for Gensler, the SEC chair, to argue that preventing GBTC from converting to a spot ETF would fall under the rubric of “investor protection” because it comes at “the expense of of shareholders,” Selkis wrote. If the trust were allowed to convert to an ETF, the fund’s shares would probably trade back close to the value of the underlying bitcoin. In other words, the Grayscale discount would go away.

While in ETFs, specialized traders known as authorized participants create and redeem shares to keep their price in line with the net asset value; that process is not available with Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust.

The vehicle can only create a basket of shares, offer liquidity under Rule 144 resales, and cannot provide a redemption program – meaning shares can only be created and not destroyed. (In 2016, the SEC slapped Grayscale for offering redemptions.)

For several years, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust was the only credible option for institutions to get exposure to bitcoin without buying the digital asset directly. That led to a steep premium on its shares in the secondary market. The persistent premium provided a strong incentive for accredited investors to buy GBTC at its net asset value by depositing bitcoin to capture the spread six months later. The premium reached as high as 40% in December last year.

According to the crypto derivatives research firm Skew, the premium was the function of “exposure to bitcoin in a regulated vehicle without having to deal with the challenges of custody, eligibility to some tax-efficient schemes, strong distribution through regular brokerage accounts, lack of alternatives such as an ETF.”

However, with the advent of the spot-based ETFs in Europe and Canada early this year, the demand for GBTC weakened, and the premium flipped to discount in the first quarter, killing the so-called Grayscale carry trade.

The number of options available to gain exposure to bitcoin has only increased with the launch of ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF and Valkyrie’s ETF last week. Both products invest in the CME-based bitcoin futures contracts in a bid to replicate the cryptocurrency’s performance.

“I don’t foresee any improvement in the performance levels of GBTC to its discounted rate as anticipated institutional-grade crypto products are coming to the market,” CEC Capital’s Kssis said.

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project, which promises to distribute a universal basic income (UBI) to global citizens willing to have their retina scanned, came in for a fresh round of incredulous backlash from privacy advocates after announcing new funding last week. Early info about Worldcoin first surfaced in June, and I eviscerated it for the ominous implications of gathering biometric data from the global poor (and the godawful optics of naming the Big Brother device at the center of it all the “Orb”).

But it seems Sam Altman doesn’t read CoinDesk, because four months later the project is moving ahead basically unchanged. Altman’s effort to build the CIA’s wet dream will now be backed by $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, and Digital Currency Group (Yes, that’s CoinDesk’s parent company: We don’t like everything the bosses do, and we write about it!). Somehow dropping that quarter in the piggy bank adds up to a $1 billion valuation for Worldcoin, a demonstration of just how absurd the VC shell game can get.

The announcement of new funding was met with renewed criticism on exactly the grounds we laid out in July, but from much more influential players than lil’ old me. Most notably, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden blew a hole in Worldcoin’s claim that its centralized database of hashed iris scans was not a privacy risk. Snowden argued that biometrics should never be used for identity or security, because “the human body is not a ticket-punch.”

This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans (for “fairness”), and waves away the implications by saying “we deleted the scans!”

Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans.

Don’t catalogue eyeballs. https://t.co/uAk0NYGeZu

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 23, 2021

Getting blasted for bad privacy practices by Edward Snowden pretty much demands a response, and Altman’s was… interesting.

All that said, I definitely underestimated the visceral reaction to using biometrics for identity verification (e.g., I love FaceID and I was surprised to hear from people who don’t) and it didn’t come through in Worldcoin’s field tests. Interesting update for me.

— Sam Altman (@sama) October 23, 2021

What makes this statement so shocking (and I believe disingenuous) is that it was made in the middle of perhaps the biggest-ever moment of reckoning for Web 2.0 companies that base their business models on data gathering. Altman was president from 2014 to 2019 of Y Combinator, arguably the premier Silicon Valley startup incubator, and is deeply enmeshed in the Web 2.0 data-mining world. Peruse YC’s portfolio page and you’ll see plenty of “machine learning,” “AI” and “computer vision” – almost always code for “we’re going to leverage user data.”

Over the past few weeks, that model has faced a withering, long-delayed backlash. Facebook is in the middle of what would, in a country with a functional legislature, be a fight for its life: Whistleblower Frances Haugen has revealed reams of internal documents showing that Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg personally, used its massive data-gathering operation in ways that it knew were bad for society – but would increase Facebook’s bottom line.

Google, meanwhile, is now the subject of an antitrust suit brought by 15 U.S. states and Puerto Rico, which alleges in part that the search giant gamed its own data-driven advertising engine to drive up prices, and engaged in other shady data-driven actions such as misleading or coercing Chrome users into accept additional tracking. (Funny how that Chrome logo looks a lot like … an orb.)

Meanwhile Apple, the nominal Big Tech privacy champion, has dropped a megaton bomb on data-hungry business models by making it easy and appealing for iOS users to opt out of tracking. Users have taken them up on that en masse, with immediate, major impacts on ad revenues at Facebook and Snapchat.

Every single person in Silicon Valley is watching these moving pieces like a hawk. They’re a threat to the way the Valley has come to do business over the last decade, with the potential for huge disruptions to the bottom line – including Altman’s, given his presumably substantial personal stakes in a variety of data gathering and surveillance-based operations. Y Combinator has supported some crypto projects, including Coinbase, but it doesn’t appear to be part of a principled stance: It’s been rumored that some recent Y Combinator startups have been pushed to abandon crypto-based ideas in favor of software-as-a-service models, which often involve some data-monetization angle.

But you can watch the trees attentively and still miss a whole damn forest, as Mark Mulvey, author of the tech and crypto investing newsletter Surf Report, summed up nicely in response to Altman’s declaration of surprise.

Interesting?

You missed the entire zeitgeist of tech, culture, and finance right now

The extreme surveillance and compliance measures in response to the pandemic combined with irresponsible centralized banking policy suggest now is not the time for a biometric coin corporation

— Mark (@MarkMulvey) October 23, 2021

There are really only two explanations here. One is that Altman truly is unaware of the turn against invasive technology, which makes him unfit to lead the Worldcoin project. The other is that he’s feigning surprise as a weak PR strategy to deflect criticism without actually addressing it. Either way, Worldcoin doesn’t seem likely to change its stripes.

Subverting privacy isn’t Worldcoin’s only faux pas: The funding announcement also revealed that 20% of all Worldcoin tokens will be set aside for the development team. In crypto, this used to be known as a “premine” and ranks among the biggest red flags that a project is intended to enrich insiders. The revelation invited critical comments from crypto-influencers including pseudonymous trader Dan Darkpill.

How about the reaction to you awarding yourselves and investors 20% of the supply to a coin you claim might solve the problem of UBI. Have you addressed that? And the fact, it’s wholly centralized, vulnerable to several attack vectors and will therefore fail.

— Dan Darkpill (@DanDarkPill) October 24, 2021

Wild that this guy is “alt man”, didn’t know that biometrics were a privacy landline, and then studiously avoids the more troubling “give 20% of supply to ourselves” aspect of things.

The simulation is winking at us. Or something. 😉 https://t.co/UWdTWktiIL

— Andrew M. Bailey (@resistancemoney) October 24, 2021

Worldcoin’s decision to use a massive premine is extremely strange given its supposedly charitable focus on distributing tokens to individuals in the developing world. Unlike equity in a company awarded to venture capitalists, premined tokens often have a shorter “lockup” period before insiders can sell, or none at all. Worldcoin’s declaration that the premine funds will be used for development indicates they will be market-sold for fiat, directly undermining the value of the tokens Worldcoin distributes in exchange for those heinous iris scans.

That’s a major reason crypto idealists have an ongoing debate about the best way to do a “fair launch” that doesn’t privilege insiders at the expense of users. It’s also a major sketch factor for a project that touts its social beneficience without a clear explanation (yet) of how it’s going to generate all those UBI payments while still turning the profit its investors expect.

There remains no indication that Worldcoin is going to revise its plans to Doxx The Entire World Or Get Rich Trying. The entire episode is grimly emblematic of the persistent appeal of the old Web 2.0 model of sucking data out of users like a vampire squid. Despite the towering mountain of evidence of its harms to individuals and society, the financial upside of surveillance capitalism is apparently just too addictive for Silicon Valley’s big-data junkies to kick.

Bakkt (NYSE: BKKT) shares jumped about 180% Monday and reached a record high of $28 after the digital asset platform announced two partnerships. Mastercard and Bakkt said Monday morning that they’re working to allow consumers to buy, sell and hold digital assets through custodial wallets offered by Bakkt.

Meanwhile, a Bakkt partnership announced Monday afternoon with Fiserv will allow for similar capabilities, allowing for merchants to expand their crypto payment offerings.

Bakkt shares went live on the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 18 after a SPAC deal that valued the company at about $2.1 billion. The firm’s current market capitalization is over $4 billion.

Read more: Mastercard Is Integrating Crypto Payments Through a New Partnership With Bakkt

Non-fungible tokens (NFT) are becoming one of the most important trends in the crypto ecosystem. The first generation of NFTs has focused on key properties such as ownership representation, transfer, automation as well as building the core building blocks of the NFT market infrastructure.

The hype in the NFT market makes it relatively hard to distinguish signal versus noise when even the most simplistic form of NFTs are able to capture incredible value. But, as the space evolves, the value proposition of NFTs should go from static images or text to more dynamic and intelligent collectibles. Artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to have an impact in the next wave of NFTs.

Jesus Rodriguez is the CEO of IntoTheBlock, a market intelligence platform for crypto assets. He has held leadership roles at major technology companies and hedge funds. He is an active investor, speaker, author and guest lecturer at Columbia University in New York.

We are already seeing manifestations of NFT-AI convergence in the form of generative art. However, the potential is much bigger. Injecting AI capabilities into the lifecycle of NFTs opens the door to forms of intelligent ownership that we haven’t seen before.

Intelligent ownership

Today, NFTs remain mostly digital manifestations of the offline word in areas such as art or collectibles. While compelling, that vision is quite limited. A more intriguing way to think about NFTs is as digital ownership primitives. Ownership representations have much wider applications than collectibles. While in the physical world ownership is mostly represented as static records, in the digital on-chain world ownership can be programmable, composable and, of course, intelligent.

With intelligent digital ownership the possibilities are endless. Let’s illustrate this in the context of collectibles that remain one the best-known applications of NFTs.

Read more: Jesus Rodriguez – When DeFi Becomes Intelligent

Imagine digital-art NFTs that could converse in natural language answering questions to explain the inspiration behind their creation and adapt those answers to a specific conversation context. We could also envision NFTs that could adapt to your feelings, mood and provide an experience that is constantly fulfilling. What about intelligent NFT wallets that, as they interact with a website, could decide which ownership rights to present in order to improve the experience for a given user?

Echoing William Gibson’s famous quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed,” we should think about the intersection of intelligent digital ownership as something that is possible with today’s AI and NFT technologies. NFTs are likely to evolve as a digital ownership primitive and intelligence should definitely be part of it.

AI and NFTs

To understand how intelligent NFTs can be enabled with today’s technologies, we should understand what AI disciplines have intersection points with the current generation of NFTs. The digital representation of NFTs relies on digital formats such as images, video, text or audio. These representations map brilliantly to different AI sub-disciplines.

Podcast: How Erick Calderon Turned NFT Squiggles Into a $6M Funding Round

Deep learning is the area of AI that relies on deep neural networks as a way to generalize knowledge from datasets. Although the ideas behind deep learning have been around since the 1970s, they have seen an explosion in the last decade with a number of frameworks and platforms that have catalyzed its mainstream adoption. There are some key areas of deep learning that can be incredibly influential to enable intelligence capabilities in NFTs:

Computer vision: NFTs today are mostly about images and videos and, therefore, a perfect fit to leverage the advancements in computer vision. In recent years, techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), generative adversarial neural networks (GAN) and, more recently, transformers have pushed the boundaries of computer vision. Image generation, object recognition, scene understanding are some of the computer vision techniques that can be applied in the next wave of NFT technologies. Generative art seems like a clear domain to combine computer vision and NFTs.

Natural language understanding: Language is a fundamental form to express cognition, and that includes forms of ownership. Natural language understanding (NLU) has been at the center of some of the most important breakthroughs in deep learning in the last decade. Techniques such as transformers powering models such as GPT-3 have reached new milestones in NLU. Areas such as question answering, summarization and sentiment analysis could be relevant to new forms of NFTs. The idea of superposing language understanding to existing forms of NFTs seems like a trivial mechanism to enrich the interactivity and user experience in NFTs.

Read more: Jesus Rodriguez – 3 Factors That Make Quant Trading in Crypto Unique

Speech recognition: Speech intelligence can be considered the third area of deep learning that can have an immediate impact in NFTs. Techniques such as CNNs and recurrent neural networks (RNN) have advanced the speech intelligence space in the last few years. Capabilities such as speech recognition or tone analysis could power interesting forms of NFTs. Not surprisingly, audio-NFTs seem like the perfect scenario for speech intelligence methods.

Three key categories at the intersection of AI and NFTs

The advancements in language, vision and speech intelligence expand the horizon of NFTs. The value unlocked at the intersection of AI and NFTs will impact not one but many dimensions of the NFT ecosystem. In today’s NFT ecosystem, there are three fundamental categories that can be immediately reimagined by incorporating AI capabilities:

AI-generated NFTs: This seems to be the most obvious dimension of the NFT ecosystem to benefit from recent advancements in AI technologies. Leveraging deep learning methods in areas such as computer vision, language and speech can enrich the experience for NFT creators to levels we haven’t seen before. Today, we can see manifestations of this trend in areas such as generative art but they remain relatively constrained both in terms of the AI methods used as well as in the use cases they tackle.

In the near future, we should see the value of AI-generated NFTs to expand beyond generative art into more generic NFT utility categories providing a natural vehicle for leveraging the latest deep learning techniques. An example of this value proposition can be seen in digital artists like Refik Anadol who are already experimenting with cutting edge deep learning methods for the creation of NFTs. Anadol’s studio have been a pioneer in using techniques such as GANs, and even dabbling into quantum computing, trained models in hundreds of millions images and audio clips to create astonishing visuals. NFTs have been one of the recent delivery mechanisms explored by Anadol.

Read more: Designer Eric Hu on Generative Butterflies and the Politics of NFTs

NFTs’ embedded-AI: We can use AI to generate NFTs but that doesn’t mean that they will be intelligent. But what if they could? Natively embedding AI capabilities into NFT is another market dimension that can be unlocked by the intersection of these two fascinating technology trends. Imagine NFTs that incorporate language and speech capabilities to establish a dialog with users, answer questions about its meaning or interact with a specific environment. Platforms such as Alethea AI or Fetch.ai are starting to scratch the surface here.

AI-first NFT infrastructures: The value of deep learning methods for NFTs won’t only be reflected at the individual NFT level but across the entire ecosystem. Incorporating AI capabilities in building blocks such as NFT marketplaces, oracles or NFT data platforms can prepare the foundation to gradually enable intelligence across the entire lifecycle of NFTs. Imagine NFT data APIs or oracles that provide intelligent indicators extracted from on-chain datasets or NFT marketplaces that use computer vision methods to make smart recommendations to users. Data and intelligence APIs are going to become an important component of the NFT market.

AI is changing the landscape of all software and NFTs are not the exception. By incorporating NFT capabilities, the NFTs can evolve from basic ownership primitives to intelligent, self-evolving forms, or ownership that enable richer digital experiences and higher utility for NFT creators and consumers. The era of intelligent NFTs does not require any futuristic technical breakthroughs. The recent advancements in computer vision, natural language understanding or speech analysis combined with the flexibility of NFT technologies already offered a great landscape for experimentation to bring intelligence to the NFT ecosystem.

“We’re stepping more and more into an almost bigger focus in the building in crypto.”

On this episode of The Scoop, Kanav Kariya, resident of Jump Crypto joined host Frank Chaparro for a rare interview to discuss Kariya’s vision for its 100-person large digital assets division.

Launched in the late 1990s, Jump is one of the most active trading firms across equities and crypto markets. Kariya spoke about his path from an internship in 2017 at Jump to becoming the president of the firm’s crypto wing.

“The way things work at Jump is you naturally assume positions and then you’re kind of handed the role after,” Kariya explained.

In addition to market-making and trading, Kariya outlined how the firm is also interested in building new projects. “The possibilities for the space are just far greater than DeFi and financial stuff,” Kariya said.

He went on to explain that a big part of the firm’s strategy has been to participate in governance and build on different networks, highlighting projects like Pyth, Oasis and Wormhole. Jump Crypto also has a dedicated staff building on Solana. 

“A lot of that is in translating the engineering work that we’ve done on building trading systems and bridging that over the building, tooling and contributing to these open crypto repositories,” said Kariya. In fact, he announced that Jump Crypto is focused on putting healthcare networks on-chain via the Oasis Network.

Kariya also expressed optimism about non-fungible tokens or NFTs, saying that Jump Crypto is watching the evolution of NFTs as an asset class.

“There’s no reason that those resources as an asset class could evolve to be like any other tokens or financial products,” Kariya commented.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Digital assets are resistant to censorship by design and give private key holders complete control over their crypto. The only caveat is that investors are solely responsible for protecting and safely storing their own funds.

The crypto community is growing at an exponential rate, with the number of users now totaling over 100 million. It’s reported that at least 14 million users are new market participants as of 2021, drawn in by the latest bull cycle excitement and eager to invest in their futures. These first-time crypto users can be easy targets for cybercriminals and scammers if they don’t follow basic online security protocols and crypto best practices.

According to recent findings from the Ciphertrace “2020 Cryptocurrency Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Report,” over $1.9 billion worth of crypto assets were stolen via hacks, scams and fraud last year. This figure is down from $4.5 billion the year before.

Among these, exit scams and decentralized finance (DeFi) hacks were highlighted as the leading causes of crypto theft. “Massive exit scams have dominated cryptocurrency crimes in the last two years. In 2019, the Ponzi scheme PlusToken netted $2.9 billion with its exit scam – 64% of the year’s major crime volume,” the report said. In 2020 was “WoToken, a similar scheme operated by some of the same people as PlusToken” that defrauded investors “out of $1.1 billion in its exit scam – 58% of 2020’s major crime volume. While major fraud volume saw a significant decrease, it still made up 73% of 2020’s crime total.”

Last year also saw a rise in sophisticated phishing attacks – fake emails used to deliver malware or dupe victims into handing over their crypto, passwords and personal information. In July 2020, Twitter was the target of such an attack, leading to a group of hackers gaining access to more than 130 high-profile accounts and using them to promote a bitcoin giveaway scam. Apple, Uber, Ripple, Binance, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian and even CoinDesk were among those affected.

We will explore online crypto safety at Unlocked 101, a free crash course running May 4-20 ahead of Consensus by CoinDesk, our virtual big-tent event. Register here.

So how do you protect yourself from these types of cyberattacks?

1. Be aware of the most common crypto scams

There are three main types of scams you will undoubtedly come across when starting out in the crypto space. It’s important to learn how to spot these scams before ending up a victim and potentially losing your assets.

1. Fake crypto giveaways
2. Trading bot scams
3. Phishing emails

Fake crypto giveaways

Crypto giveaway scams are online posts, usually on social media, that invite users to deposit crypto to an address with the promise the sender will receive double or more back. This type of fraud has been around since the initial coin offering boom of 2017 and tends to abide by a very rigid format. This makes fake crypto giveaway scams easy to spot once you know what to look for.

• They use the identities of famous celebrities or business icons to promote the scam. Most of the time, this is done from fake social media profiles or imposter accounts (blue arrow.) With last year’s Twitter hack, however, real accounts were used, so you always have to be on alert.
• Crypto giveaway scams ALWAYS promise to send you back more funds than you deposit, but this is a completely false statement and you should never send any money to the address provided.
• Scammers use other fake Twitter accounts to flood the comment sections with messages supporting the scam offer and confirming it works (red arrow.) This is just another tactic to convince genuine social media users to hand over their crypto funds. Shortly after, the fake user accounts are usually deleted.

Register for Unlocked 101, a free crypto crash course running May 4-20 ahead of Consensus by CoinDesk.

Top tip: The best way to spot a scam is to look for subtle changes to the profile’s username. In the example above, the scammer created an account with the Twitter handle @Elonmmusk. The extra “m” is subtle and can be easily overlooked at a glance. Verified Twitter accounts also have blue check marks next to the account name to help users identify legitimate accounts.

Trading bot scams

Fraudulent trading bot websites are another classic crypto scam. These involve platforms that promise users extremely high rates of return every month. These websites operate as a Ponzi scheme – where new money entering the scam is used to pay people who are already invested in the scam. Once the creators of the platform have accumulated enough funds they usually disappear with investors’ money and close down the website.

One of the most famous examples is Bitconnect. This platform promised investors 40% returns every month as well as additional interest for people who invested larger amounts. The platform ran over two years and its native token even became a top 10 cryptocurrency before regulators eventually shut it down. Over $250 million was believed to have been stolen when the creators of Bitconnect disappeared.

Here are some telltale signs of a fraudulent crypto trading bot platform:

• Crypto trading bot Ponzi schemes always promise very high rates of return.
• Usually, you cannot find any information about the team behind the platform. If the platform does have a team page, check to see if team members’ Linkedin, email or Twitter accounts are connected. You can also try searching for individuals on the internet to see if they’re real people.
• There is no information or documentation on how the trading bot works.
• It’s common to see multiple spelling errors on the website.

Phishing emails

Phishing scams are becoming increasingly difficult to detect as malicious agents take greater care in creating seemingly real emails from legitimate companies. Many will encourage people to click on links that instantly infect the device with malware, giving the perpetrator full access to information stored on it. Other phishing emails will redirect users to imposter websites and ask them to reset their passwords, send money or reconfirm their seed words.

When faced with a suspicious email that asks you to divulge sensitive information, send payments or click on links, it’s important to remember three key rules:

• Always check the sending email address.
• NEVER open links from an unknown sender.
• NEVER share your personal information, passwords or seed words with anyone. If you’re ever uncertain about any email, head to the official website and contact customer support.

2. Never make a digital copy of your personal crypto details

One of the biggest mistakes both first-time and experienced crypto users make is creating digital copies of their crypto wallet passwords, seed words or backup codes. Digital copies can be anything from:

• Taking a screenshot using your laptop or desktop
• Taking a photograph using your mobile phone
• Copy and pasting the code into an email, on a notepad app or anywhere else on your device

As soon as you create a digital copy of your sensitive information, you run the risk of a hacker gaining access to it through malware, brute force attacks and other attack vectors.

The best way to safely copy and store your crypto information is either through writing it down on paper away from people and any device camera, or etching it into metal plates. Providers of this solution include:

• Cryptotag
• Coldbit
• Cryptosteel
• Simbit

We will explore online crypto safety at Unlocked 101, a free crypto crash course running May 4-20 ahead of Consensus by CoinDesk, our virtual big-tent event. Register here.

3. Always enable 2-factor authentication when possible

When opening a new crypto account, it’s important to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) if the option is available on the platform. 2FA is simply a verification process that requires two or more pieces of information, usually from two different devices, to grant access to an account.

While there are several different methods to do this, including receiving an SMS or code via email, a vast majority of crypto platforms ask the user to download a third-party mobile app that links to the new account and generates a random, self-destructing, six-digit password that replenishes every 30-40 seconds. This adds a vital second layer of security to any service and makes it significantly more difficult for a malicious agent to access.

The main 2FA apps that are widely compatible with crypto websites are:

• Google authenticator
• Authy

To set it up, download whichever 2FA app is supported by the platform you’re using. Once that’s done, you’ll need to head to your online account settings, find the privacy settings and then click “enable 2FA.” Find the option to set up via a QR code and click it.

Then go on to your mobile 2FA app, find the “+” icon and then the “Scan QR code” button. Clicking this will open your smartphone camera. Simply aim it at the QR code that appears on your laptop screen and it will automatically add the account to your 2FA app and a password will appear.

When setting up 2FA for the first time you have to type in the password on your account settings as it appears in your mobile app. This then enables 2FA on your account. Once that’s done, every time you log into that service you’ll need to type in your login password and the 2FA password.

4. Use a different password for every crypto platform you use

So you’ve enabled 2FA on all your crypto accounts, you’ve copied all your sensitive information on paper or on to metal plates and you’re now always on the lookout for potential crypto scams. This is all great, but now let’s imagine one of the websites you’ve used accidentally leaks its customers’ information including your email and password. Let’s assume you use the same email and password for all your accounts, even the ones for which you haven’t enabled 2FA. Now you have a problem.

Using different passwords for all your crypto accounts is essential for reducing the impact data breaches and leaks can have on your online security. If you have multiple accounts and can’t feasibly remember several different passwords at the same time then there is a range of free password-managing browser extensions and apps you can use that store and generate secure passwords for your platforms.

All you have to do is set a master password to access the app and all the password data stored inside. Most password managers will automatically fill out any pre-saved login details when you arrive on a platform and prompt you to save any new login details to your vault when you create them.

Leading password managing services include:

• Lastpass
• 1Password
• Dashlane

So remember, while there are plenty of lucrative opportunities in the crypto space there are also countless scammers and cybercriminals looking to steal your digital assets. Be safe, follow these simple steps and make sure you always conduct your own diligent research before doing anything with your money.

We will explore online crypto safety at Unlocked 101, a free crypto crash course running May 4-20 ahead of Consensus by CoinDesk, our virtual big-tent event. Register here.

Between dogecoin’s cameos on U.S. television and bitcoin’s growing acceptance on Wall Street, cryptocurrency is reaching a wider audience than ever before. Skyrocketing prices are surely tempting to newcomers, but they should be aware of the risks before jumping in.

If you just started paying attention to cryptocurrency and are wondering whether to invest, here are 10 things you need to know before buying anything.

Even if you’re an old pro, you probably know someone who’s curious because they heard on TV or at the bar that the price of some coin is surging and they can get rich quickly trading it. Please share this post with him or her.

This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here. 

1. Don’t put in more than you can afford to lose

Crypto is riskier than many other investments. Nothing is guaranteed other than volatility. What’s more, it’s unregulated in most cases. There is no FDIC insurance for this stuff, nor is there a buyer of last resort. The prices of crypto coins swing wildly from minute to minute. While the market is basking in the glow of bull run, it has endured painful and protracted corrections and almost certainly will again.

Danger varies in degree. Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, has been around for more than a decade and it’s significantly less likely to disappear than most other coins. But it’s not free of risk either.

Hence, don’t bet the proverbial farm, or your life savings, on any coin.

2. Research thoroughly

Before you invest a significant amount of money in any digital currency, spend hours upon hours researching the technology so you understand the value proposition and the risks. (“Someone else will buy it from you for a higher price” is not a value proposition.)

Read everything you can find on the topic. (CoinDesk’s Learn section is a fine place to start, and our Research Hub can be your next stop.) Lurk on community forums and developer mailing lists. Listen to podcasts. Borrow books from the library, not only about digital currency but related fields like cryptography, game theory and economics. Read CoinDesk and even some of our competitors.

Go to local meetups, if your area is no longer on COVID-19 lockdown. Ask lots of questions. If you don’t understand what you’re hearing, don’t be afraid to ask someone to explain. If it is still not making sense, don’t assume that’s on you; people could just be talking gobbledygook. The sincere ones will take the time to help, but even then be wary of people “talking their book” (telling you to buy what they own so the price goes up).

And even if you’re convinced, seek out skeptics (there is no shortage of them) and consider their arguments as well. Remember John Stuart Mill: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

Once you think you’ve researched everything there is to know, do even more work. You’re probably not done yet.

3. Resist ‘fear of missing out’

If the only reason you’re investing in something is to avoid missing out, the only thing you won’t miss out on is losing everything.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a sure way to destroy whatever wealth you may have accumulated over the years. The problem is that it’s a gut reaction to something that should be researched first. Trading based on your gut will quickly lead to an upset stomach.

Know what you’re buying. Really know it. Going on a trading app and seeing a currency is up 30% or so over the past 24 hours isn’t research. It could be you’re the unlucky sap being sold a falling cryptocurrency.

Every coin has pumpers (shameless promoters), even bitcoin. Don’t succumb to peer pressure. This isn’t high school. Think for yourself and evaluate the case for an investment on the merits.

Research. Then research again.

4. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is

Much like Wall Street, the U.S. Congress or the American Bar Association, crypto is rife with charlatans. There are more than enough people promising their project will be the one to overtake bitcoin. But is it? There’s only one way to find out: Research.

Buyer beware, but also borrower beware. Some crypto exchanges offer more than 100x leverage, meaning you can borrow up to 99% of the cost of an investment. This will juice your profits if a coin goes up in value, but if it goes the other way you could quickly be wiped out.

5. Don’t trust, verify

Scammers abound in this market. Just this past weekend, some rascals on Twitter took advantage of Elon Musk’s appearance on television’s “Saturday Night Live” to defraud people out of $100,000 worth of various cryptos with a bogus “giveaway.” Impersonating the comedy show’s Twitter account, the miscreants instructed their victims to send small amounts of crypto to verify their addresses. If they did so they would get 10 times the amount back.

That too-good-to-be-true proposition was a red flag. Read this, this and this for more telltale signs.

6. Beware of ‘unit bias’

Just because a coin is trading around $1 does not mean it’s “cheaper” than bitcoin at $58,000. Not all coins are created equal.

There are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies, some of which seek to emulate bitcoin and some of which try to solve other issues. They all have varying levels of developer support and decentralization.

Determining the value of a coin means asking how and why was the coin created. What is its supposed utility? Who is working on it? How big is the developer community? How active is the repository on GitHub, where updates to the open-source software are usually logged? Like a building, a codebase requires maintenance, and neglect can leave a structure unsound.

Crucially, what is the coin’s security model – proof-of-work, proof-of-stake or something else? If it’s the former, how does the hashrate compare to other PoW coins? If you don’t know what these terms mean, you’re not ready to invest.

7. Not your keys, not your coins

Cryptocurrency is a bearer asset like cash or jewelry, meaning the holder is presumed to be the rightful owner. Once it’s lost or stolen it’s gone.

That is why advanced users will advise you not to entrust the cryptographic keys to a digital currency wallet to a third party, such as an exchange, because these firms are largely unregulated in many places and may be subject to hacks or exit scams (absconding with clients’ money).

Decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms have fallen prey to numerous high-profile exploits over the past 10 months, and centralized platforms like Binance have been subject to their fair share as well.

However, safeguarding keys yourself, on a hardware device or even a piece of paper with the string of numbers and letters written on it, can be a nerve-racking business, and it’s easy to mess up. This is why even some experienced investors prefer to use third-party custodians.

Crypto is all about trade-offs. Do you trust yourself not to lose that piece of paper or forget the “seed phrase” (a password for a key that unlocks your crypto)? If not, you have to be comfortable with someone else storing your digital valuables, and history gives you every reason not to.

(To mitigate the risks, there is something called a multi-signature wallet. These can be configured so that, for example, both Bob and Alice must sign off on a transaction to release funds from a wallet, or either Bob or Alice can do so, or three of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and so on. But yes, it’s complicated.)

Aside from exploits, exchanges may block you from withdrawing your funds at any time for a variety of reasons ranging from solvency issues to legal trouble. Even beyond that, some exchanges just don’t have the infrastructure necessary to remain up at all times – Coinbase and Robinhood, for example, often go down during periods of market volatility. If you aren’t running your own wallet, you can’t guarantee you have control over your coins.

That said, there are various reasons why you might want to use an exchange, so it’s important to check the user agreements and make sure you’re protected against different eventualities.

8. You can buy a fraction of a bitcoin (and most other cryptos)

You don’t need to buy a whole coin. Bitcoin, for example, is divisible to the eighth decimal. So if you’re curious about how this stuff works, you can purchase as little as $10 worth and just play around with it.

As billionaire Mark Cuban recently said on television of buying small amounts of dogecoin, “it’s a whole lot better than a lottery ticket.” Unfortunately, he also encouraged viewers to spend doge on merchandise without mentioning the tax implications (see below).

9. Understand the tax consequences

This is especially important in the U.S., for several reasons. First, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) considers crypto property, not currency, for tax purposes. The upshot is if you buy a coin for $1 and it doubles in value and you spend that extra dollar to buy so much as a pack of chewing gum, you are required to report that capital gain and pay tax on it. There is no “de minimis exemption,” despite the crypto industry’s lobbying efforts.

Also, centralized exchanges regularly send account information to the IRS. Sure, crypto isn’t as regulated as stocks or banks. However, the federal government is running a massive deficit and it won’t think twice about sending in folks with mirrored aviator glasses to visit you to ask about your crypto trades.

10. Buy using dollar cost averaging and don’t obsess about price

Go outside. Get some fresh air, exercise and sunshine. Spend time with your family. You can do all that AND invest in crypto.

The markets will fluctuate from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, but any crypto worth a damn, any investment of any kind worth a damn, is a long-term bet. If you want a dopamine hit, go for a run or watch an action movie.

What’s the best way to invest and not obsess? It’s using dollar cost averaging (DCA). Buy a set dollar amount of whatever crypto you like at regular intervals (Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Annually? You pick.) and don’t look at it.

If you have a long-term view, you’re not going to be pressured to sell or up your position based on short-term movements if you use DCA.

The purpose of this article is not to scare anyone away from a fascinating and potentially transformational field, but to make sure they come in with eyes wide open.

As the sergeant on an old cop show would say, “Let’s be careful out there.”