Proof-of-stake protocols were designed to encourage users to lock up their coins, but synthetic assets are circumventing that design to allow double-dipping in DeFi. One of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Asia, Tushar Aggarwal wears many hats: He started the crypto podcast Decrypt Asia, works as a venture scout with LuneX Ventures, and runs Persistence, a platform that lets users earn liquidity rewards while they stake coins. Aggarwal’s platform issues synthetic assets, perhaps better understood as “redemption coupons,” for staked coins that can be used elsewhere to maximize returns. This method is relevant for proof-of-stake coins, which are not machine-mined but accumulate to those who lock their tokens away from circulation. Persistence allows these staked coins to be used regardless.Originally from India, Aggarwal believes that cryptocurrency holds great things in store for the nation on both the GDP and individual worker levels. However, he works from Singapore due to the Indian government’s hostility toward the industry from which it could so greatly benefit.  Liquid stakingAggarwal, aged 28, started his journey in crypto as an investor in 2017, soon founding and hosting the Decrypt Asia podcast where he interviewed “all kinds of players in the ecosystem — fund managers, investors, entrepreneurs and service providers.” The podcast worked as a springboard of sorts, opening up opportunities to write about the cryptocurrency revolution for Tech in Asia, “the equivalent of TechCrunch in the West.” Aggarwal was an authority.In 2018, he was contacted by a venture capitalist who had come across his writings and podcast. The VC sought advice on behalf of his firm, Golden Gate Ventures, which was looking to set up a crypto fund. “I basically asked them for a job on the spot and became the first employee for the crypto fund of Golden Gate — that fund is called LuneX Ventures,” he recalls. Aggarwal still serves as a venture scout for the fund, which he describes as the “only regulated crypto fund of a VC fund in Southeast Asia.”He founded the Persistence platform in 2019 after a string of hackathons because “I wanted to move over to being an operator, as opposed to a capital allocator.”  Source: pSTAKE The platform’s functions are based on the Tendermint algorithm, meaning that it accepts proof-of-stake coins such as Persistence, REN, LUNA, CRO, IRIS, BAND, and KAVA. The magic is that even after being staked, synthetic assets based on the coins can be deposited as liquidity to a decentralized exchange to earn fees while the original coins are still “staked in the background, earning you staking rewards as well.”“We’re allowing you to stake in one place but issuing you a representative coin that you can use in other places.”“Liquid staking” is thus an appropriate descriptor, seeing as both liquidity provision and staking are combined. This process is beneficial because the tokenholder does not have to take a chance on either liquidity fees or staking, providing a higher yield on their capital. While the “original” coins are staked, the representative coins used to provide liquidity are 100% backed by the staked assets, meaning that “whoever ends up holding the representative coin then will ultimately get access” to the underlying asset. “Liquid staking is something that basically addresses the problems of whatever 10,000–100,000 folks who hold proof-of-stake coins and are familiar with how staking works.”Golden yearsThough he describes his parents as normal middle-class Indian civil servants, Aggarwal spent five years of his teens on the foothills of the Himalayas with “kids of really powerful politicians and folks who run corporate India.” The Doon School is “the Eton of India, which has produced prime ministers, army chiefs, journalists, movie stars, government officials, businessmen,” he explains, comparing his school to the famous British boarding school with a similar reputation. As the school was founded when India was still a British colony, “it espouses a lot of those ideals still which might be a little bit ancient from today’s perspective,” Aggarwal muses. In 2010 he headed to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, “which is, I think, one of the top five universities in Asia,” where he studied business administration under an arrangement where he promised to stay in the country for three years after graduating in exchange for a 60% reduction of tuition fees. Aggarwal explains that this bond arrangement was part of a “policy that Singapore had in place to attract talent from very young ages” — a successful policy, seeing as Aggarwal has not returned to live in India.Graduating in 2013, he worked in private equity at PwC for two years before moving to Sia Partners, a French boutique consultancy specializing in financial services. That role saw him spend time in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand while working with the private banking departments of European banks operating in the region.  A monumental achievement: We’ve exceeded $2,000,000 in #TVL! 🚀🦾 Take advantage of our 0% wrapping and service fees. @Cosmos & #Ethereum #DeFi is taking off!🌐 Liquid staking awaits here: https://t.co/ubfqwuGNDr pic.twitter.com/OSMt0UMRKh— pSTAKE Finance (@pStakeFinance) August 21, 2021 Working as a traveling consultant meant the bulk of Aggarwal’s everyday expenses were covered by his employer, giving him ample savings to sock away. “It’s a very Indian and Middle Eastern thing to do — where every penny that you save up, you put into gold or real estate — and that’s what I did,” just as his parents had taught him. Instead of buying apartments, which “have only so much room to grow,” he looked at the bigger, long-term picture and focused on land itself.After selling some property in late 2016, Aggarwal considered new avenues of investment. He first looked into angel investing but soon “came across crypto and basically just went all in.” He says that he was at the right place at the right time, explaining that “crypto was super hot in Singapore” when he invested in 2017, before listing off multiple projects from the time such as Republic Protocol, OmiseGo, and Kyber Network. He was fortunate with his timing, gaining financial independence in only a few short months.“By the end of 2017, I had…

Whether working in visual innovation or merely acting as a reporter, I’ve made a career out of diving headfirst into ideas that I know nothing about.The fresher, more complex the puzzle to be solved, the more I dig into it, going from unknown to known. And if I’m lucky, I’m gifted a day-long adrenaline rush and some unusual dreams in return for my services.When I was starting out, I worked as a breaking news journalist — a job that had me writing up to six news stories a day. On top of that, the pressure to catch every word in a presidential press briefing, for example, can be mind-bendingly intense and require such inconceivable attention. The only comparison I could draw would be day trading cryptocurrencies.And like crypto, my work would often visit me late into the night. Once in bed, I’d feel a cursor blinking just beyond my peripheral vision, or I’d see foggy headlines being written and rewritten so that they didn’t bust through their character limits. “U.S. president seeks deal with Iran on….” Delete, delete, delete. “President calls for trust with Iran on…” Was I asleep? Was I whispering to myself? The questions were the same then as they are now.Even picking up a box of cereal at the grocery store during that time could trigger feelings of computer keys being smooshed between my fingers.As I learned back then, what I was experiencing had ties to the so-called “Tetris effect.”You see, when Tetris was released in the 1980s, people were so hooked on Russian-American engineer Alexey Pajitnov’s video game that they’d see and hear it in everything they did.One writer for Wired in the early 1990s even called the game a “pharmatronic” in reference to its addictive powers.Journalist Jeffrey Goldsmith wrote of playing the game: “Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together.”Sound familiar? Seeing crypto candlesticks, anyone?Pajitnov told Wired: “You can’t imagine. I couldn’t finish the prototype! I started to play and never had time to finish the code. People kept playing, playing, playing. My best friend said, ‘I can’t live with your Tetris anymore.’”Tetris dreams became widespread fodder for conversation among gamers and psychologists alike. In fact, psychiatry professor Robert Stickgold and colleagues of his at Harvard Medical School found that of those they trained to play the game, more than 60% reported dreaming of images associated with it.Stickgold argued that these Tetris dreams were simply part of how human beings process information from our waking hours.Tetris has also been linked to the “flow state,” the name given to the groove you achieve when you focus so heavily on a goal that the world around you melts away.Kerr agrees that the crypto visions I had, mostly late at night, sound like the Tetris effect. But he’s quick to point out that our brains will gravitate toward puzzles, no matter what they are.“We are natural problem solvers. And crypto is like a big puzzle in some ways. Dreaming has been linked to problem-solving abilities. And crypto is a problem we want to solve and get right and make money from,” Kerr says.

If you thought remote work was game-changing, wait until video game work gains traction. Blockchain-based NFT games such as Axie Infinity and Splinterlands have demonstrated that a play-to-earn business model has the potential to revolutionize the gaming industry.Pandora’s box has been opened, so to speak, and play-to-earn is here to stay. There are already people logging on to an online video game to spend their days earning a living. In this piece, we will explore what a world where earning income through video games is the norm will look like.After Venezuela endured cataclysmic hyperinflation, it left individuals working minimum wage jobs and earning an unsustainable $5 dollars a month. However, in the wise words of Jeff Goldblum, “life finds a way.” Individuals had devised a means to earn a living through playing the video game RuneScape (OS).This was achieved in a form of in-game labor — gold farming — where users would play the game to extract various items to sell to users for United States dollars. This happened despite the RuneScape developers Jagex forbidding any form of transaction of digital items for real-world currency.    It was a controversial practice and some RuneScape players thought farmers were simply exploiting the game without contributing anything to the community. This led to them PK’ing (player-killing) players they thought were farmers. Which in turn, opened up a new earning opportunity to provide security to these player’s farming accounts. This perfectly exemplifies how new job markets can snowball. Venezuelan players were able to provide a living for themselves, and there were even some media reports of players earning more than local doctors.  Gold farming meme from Reddit. (Source: Reddit) Economies emergingAs long as in-game transactions can happen between players, users will attempt to exploit this by buying items with real-world money. For the integrity of the game, it is not in the best interests of developers to allow individuals to pay to win, as it provides an unfair advantage to users with the most disposable income.However, the fact that digital items are gaining such value and new “jobs” are being created may lead to an all-out gold rush (pun intended). It parallels the emergence of the internet and the avalanche of developer jobs that brought with it.Blockchain gaming is still very new and if job markets can develop in games that weren’t designed for them, one can only imagine the possibilities found within games designed to allow economies and job markets to function properly.These new markets will need to be drastically different from what was observed in RuneScape. In-game items that provide an unfair “advantage” should not be on the market for real-world transactions, as this will discourage new players that feel they have to pay their way to a playable standard. But, there is no reason why items that don’t have utility can’t be sold. In-game items that don’t have utility will usually find value from aesthetics.Aesthetic value is not to be taken lightly. This can be seen in games like Counter-Strike where gun skins are being sold on secondary markets for $4200, and even in League of Legends where the character skin “PAX twisted fate” will set you back $300.  Splinterlands is a blockchain based game. (Source: Splinterlands) What sort of jobs?Looking forward, what might jobs that provide real income look like in a blockchain governed game? While it’s difficult to speculate, I will attempt to provide some rough ideas:Time-intensive tasksOne thing that will always be tied to value is time. Video games have long included time-intensive tasks in their games, and as we saw in the Venezuelan RuneScape example, players transacted their time to farm gold. The in-game items that are farmed have value because of the time it takes to gain these items. Blockchain gaming can take this one step further, where players can offer their time to extract certain in-game items for real financial incentives. This is clearly seen in Axie Infinity where players will grind quests to gain SLP, the native token for Axie Infinity. It is claimed that if Axie Infinity players invest the necessary time they can earn up to 4,500 SLP a month which is currently worth around $935.Item generation/designAs mentioned, aesthetics can represent serious value to some users. Blockchain sandbox MMORPG game Ember Sword has realized this and will open up the design process of items to game users who can spend time designing a new aesthetic skin (an item that represents the same utility but differs by how it looks) and sell this to other users as an NFT. These NFTs can have coded royalties that will allow both the user who designed the item and the developers to own a percentage of royalty to further receive profits if the item is sold for a higher price on the secondary market. There is then a further scaling possibility for users to brand their items and even create an in-game company by hiring virtual employees to apply their branded design fundamentals to items. This same principle can be applied to virtual architects, interior designers and stylists, and the list goes on and on.     Social/personalityPersonalities can be very valuable and this is most clearly seen in twitch streamers. There are individuals who, although lacking skill or technique in video games, attract millions of viewers. There are opportunities for certain individuals with “attractive” personalities being paid to simply spend time around a certain area of virtual land to bring in more users to the area. This may be something you would want to pay someone to do if you owned, for example, a virtual casino, so the deal may be mutually beneficial financially. Again, a form of royalty/commission can also be present here for certain users as an incentive to fulfill this role to a high standard.Playing For othersOne tried and tested in-game value generation task can come from dungeons, raids and boss fighting tasks. This will typically involve users having to battle their way through a large number of enemies to get a final boss who, if users can…

The summer of regulatory action has now become a global phenomenon. Lawmakers and politicians are waving their fingers and making threats toward the industry’s leading virtual asset service providers — a term coined by the FATF to describe exchanges, wallets, custodians and even DeFi platforms. But when it comes to crackdowns on cryptocurrency, few places do it with the effectiveness and experience of the Chinese government.Unlike in the United States, China’s regulators are not having a public discourse about it. Decisions are made behind closed doors, and announcements come swiftly, posted on government websites or in speeches from well-primed officials. The directives come from the very top and are swiftly reiterated and enforced by lower-level officials in provincial- or city-level government, by state-owned enterprises and by financial institutions. This top-down style of regulation tends to make the “China ban” seem very repetitive and severe. In reality, the same regulation can be repeated dozens of times by different branches, scaring the public but having very little additional impact on the industry.  3000 kilos of #bitcoin miners packing to be airlifted to the US. pic.twitter.com/d07y5GUBB3— 8BTCnews (@btcinchina) June 21, 2021  What’s the issue this time around?Although owning cryptocurrency has never been officially banned, the need for reform in other areas of the industry was probably present. According to Winston Ma, former managing director and head of North America at China Investment Corporation, the Chinese government has pushed the regulations with the aim of protecting consumers, becoming closer to carbon neutrality targets and achieving greater financial stability. While the last reason is more subjective, there’s no denying that China’s opportunistic mining industry and speculation-heavy retail investors were running largely unchecked at the beginning of the year. Ma will be among the first to note the effectiveness of the changes taking place, especially for the mining industry, telling Magazine: “So far, the impact from the energy perspective is the most obvious: After the central government initiated the cryptocurrency crackdown campaign in May, major coal-based power producers such as Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, which were previously the top two cryptocurrency mining hubs in China, have been among the first regions that quickly developed local rules to clean up mining businesses.” This won’t be a short-term adjustment. Most large mining firms have moved abroad, and the overall BTC mining hash rate is still down by around 40% from the highs of the spring, prior to the crackdown. Energy and climate policies were the focal point of China’s all-important five-year plan that was released this spring, cementing the importance of cleaner energy consumption for the foreseeable future.Despite its significance to the crypto community, mining is not much of a contributor to the national GDP. Revenue for Chinese miners was just shy of $7 billion for the 12-month period leading up to June, a number far too insignificant to move the needle for the government. The revenue of ride-sharing app Didi was by itself over three times that in 2020, and the Chinese government had very few hesitations about cracking down on it after it emerged that it had provided user data to U.S. regulators. Didi apps were removed from domestic app stores, and now competitors are lining up to fill a massive market share should Didi fail to resolve its legal issues.   Although Chinese miners were raking in money, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to stave off regulation from the government (data from June 2021)  Sally Wang, vice president of portfolio marketing at Sino Global Capital, notes that despite Chinese regulators not tolerating risk areas that threaten financial stability, there’s been a huge increase in blockchain use cases at national, regional and city levels.“We’ve seen miners move out of China, and we’ve also seen large fintechs, such as Alibaba, experiment with NFTs. Token-less blockchain projects in China have seen huge growth.” This type of development has allowed players to continue contributing to a healthy blockchain ecosystem in China, with local governments supporting major events like the World Blockchain Conference in Hangzhou and the upcoming Shanghai International Blockchain Week in September.    Regulator influence on the declineThe original crackdown that banned ICOs and exchanges in 2017 caught the crypto industry at a vulnerable time. The majority of worldwide trading volume at the time originated from China or happened on Chinese exchanges, and the large ones were registered and based within the mainland. This left them at the mercy of authorities and taught the industry a valuable lesson about managing geographic risk. After that, key industry players such as Binance, Huobi and OKEx began setting up in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where regulators were more open-minded. Subsequently, these exchanges are now slightly removed from the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, provided they aren’t too conspicuous when recruiting Chinese users.  Throwback to 2017: This Cointelegraph graphic shows how fearful the industry was after the future of many large exchanges was thrown in doubt.  As more and more of the industry shifts overseas, the impact of regulators is lessened. Unfortunately, miners who were keen to take advantage of low-cost energy from China’s abundant hydropower and coal-powered plants were not as quick to decentralize. That left them in a precarious position, sparking a wave of panic after China cracked down on miners earlier this year. The good news for investors is that miners have now responded by also relocating abroad, reducing the need for any future negative regulation against the mining industry.Reading the tea leaves with regulatorsRetail trading is still a major uncertainty, as large, predominantly Chinese exchanges like Huobi and OKEx make up around 20% of global volumes, according to FTX’s volume monitor. Binance makes up over 50% of global volume and likely has a large percentage of Chinese users as well.While users can’t directly buy cryptocurrency with fiat on these platforms, P2P transactions still make it easy for savvy users to purchase on platforms like Binance, using Chinese bank accounts and commercial payment apps to transact between the yuan and stablecoins.     To this point, the government hasn’t been successful in slowing this volume, even though bank accounts are…