WOW! Bitcoin is over a TRILLION dollar market cap while Ethereum just broke $2,000 and looking to melt faces with it’s own parabolic moonshot. With all the daily hype around Bitcoin and Ethereum setting all-time highs (ATH) it’s not a surprise that you’ve missed the birth of the next multibillion dollar disruptive technology.
You see, back in 2017 I learned some really hard lessons on how expensive it can be to NOT do your own research. So I vowed to myself to become a student of financial markets and learn how to capture generational wealth. In my journey I learned that the rigor required to invest was far more time consuming then just watching some YouTuber shill their bags and gamble on the pump. I became a true student of this game and approached crypto with a new lens; committing endless hours watching interviews, listening to podcasts, and reading articles of some of the most intelligent people I could find in this space. I was looking for a way to deconstruct their thought process and catch a glimmer into the future narratives that will play out.
I was looking for an edge!……..and I found it!
Armed with a new skill set and thought process I began my search deep into the Alt Coin Forest. My intent was to discover some hidden gems and then find every reason why I shouldn’t invest. Naturally I am a salesman and I can sell nearly anything to anyone, including to myself. This skill is incredibly dangerous to take into crypto and I now understand this was a blind spot for me in 2017. I had to take the opposite approach and pick apart projects, questioning everything.
As you can imagine — all I could find was shit coin, after shit coin, after Doge shit coin. I got frustrated and almost gave up after a year of research. Then like most things in life, as soon as I stopped looking, I found it, or should I say Lukso found me.
Initially I didn’t understand the project or purpose, but what I did understand was the people behind it. Through all my years of studying millionaires each one of these guys invest in the people first, then the technology. I also learned that serious investors have very little tolerance for unproven leaders and hyped up marketing jargon. What they really care about is the underlining narrative and leadership path to disrupting the status quo in a scalable manner that provides them the best return on their assets. You see, billionaire and millionaire alike, don’t sell assets. They leverage them to make even more money while they sleep. The HODL mantra is really the right message but very few retail trader/investors actually do it. I think it’s because most people knowingly buy projects that have very little chance of success in the long term, but are blinded by they hype that they can become rich overnight.
This mentality is a guaranteed one way ticket to Rekt City. Believe me, I’ve visited this place many times and that place sucks.
Below you will find a very comprehensive view of why I decided to invest heavily into Lukso Network and have no plans of selling anytime soon. I am sharing this with the world because I think it’s important to help people understand how to do the research before you invest a penny into anything. I will take you through my thought process and opinions of Lukso, but what I am sharing with you IS NOT FINANCIAL OR INVESTMENT ADVICE.
I’m truly trying to educate you on how to approach an investment decision and then it’s up to you to formulate your opinion of value.
First Things First - The People
Fabian Vogelsteller is the primary reason I invested in Lukso. He has helped shape and author the vast majority of all cryptocurrency projects in the entire world. In my opinion, Fabian’s brilliance is found in his ability to forecast and directionally understand human behavior. He’s able to see things so clearly because his time horizon is grounded in patience and a desire to build a better future. I haven’t met Fabian,…yet. However when I do get the chance I will thank him for all that he’s done for so many people around the world, including me and my family.
According to the crypto app tracker, State of the Dapps, there are over 3,000 decentralized apps (also known as “dapps”) currently running on the Ethereum blockchain.
These Dapps are not possible without the ERC20 standards or JavaScript library which Fabian created.
Fabian and many others in the original Ethereum foundation don’t get enough credit for what they’ve collectively built. Some of the most popular names like Gavin Wood, Founder of Polkadot, and Charles Hoskinson, Founder of Cardano, dominate the headlines for their early contributions and have built massive projects that that are at or above $35 Billion Dollar Market Caps as of February 21st, 2021.
There are a finite amount of core developers in the crypto space that are genius level programmers and innovators. Fabian is clearly one of them and has recently launched his own brain child into the world, Lukso.
Marjorie Hernandez, who is the Co-Founder of Lukso and wife to Fabian, has a very impressive resume herself which you can read for yourself below. The one thing you won’t find online about Marjorie is her natural ability to network with the elites of Fashion and Luxury brands. Her connections run deep and together with Fabian, these two are clearly the Ultimate Power Couple of Crypto.
I think as you dig through Lukso Network you’ll find that this project is truly a project of passion for both Fabian and Marjorie — And when you can invest in two absolutely brilliant people dedicating their life to building the future, then you can sleep easy at night.
One of the huge benefits of the rICO was the stability of price action. When the price pumped on Kucoin or Uniswap it settled back down to the rICO price. When the price dumped on exchanges it later recovered back up to the rICO price. This price stability and programable risk is damn near impossible to find in crypto and it was refreshing to be apart of.
Kudos to the team at Lukso for solving this massive issue and not blocking out the little guy from getting in early.
Next Up - The Technology
I don’t feel like I am anywhere near qualified to provide an explanation on the technology so I will simply quote Fabian and provide my opinions accordingly.
“The Ethereum space makes up around 80% of all Blockchain developers and is by far the most active, therefore LUKSO should to be a Blockchain based on Ethereum’s technologies. A Blockchain that has more throughput, a high decentralization potential, and a better standards basis with a focus on new applications, protocols and users.”
Fabian Vogelsteller
There is a very common investment strategy in the tech arena that many Venture Capital (VC) firms employ, which is dead simple. They simply put their money into founders that have had previous success and into a space where all the developers are working. The Ethereum ecosystem and network is the dominate chain where the brightest minds in the world call home. This is not debatable and many crypto companies are forced to bend the knee to ETH because of the scale of intellectual energy. A blockchain that doesn’t provide interoperability with 80% of all the developers in crypto has very little chance at becoming a long term asset worth holding. This isn’t to say that other blockchains won’t find success in the short term and pump like crazy, but in the end, they all have a large probability of going to zero.
The market and industry has finally figured out what it’s going to take to gain mass adoption.
The answer isn’t tribalism, maximalism, or competition, it’s interoperability.
Polkadot has clearly demonstrated that building bridges is the answer and the market makers have agreed by buying DOT up to $37B in less than a year. By working together the entire space grows exponentially and avoids Crypto Civil Wars.
We are currently moving quickly towards LUKSO’s Mainnet architecture and feel confident that it will scale in transactions and decentralization and hold all the properties we wanted from the LUKSO network:
Compatibility to the Ethereum tooling
High decentralization (70k+ validators)
High throughput (we currently tested at peak 450 TPS, but we can surely go a lot higher) on a single shard
Full compatibility to ETH2.0 development, which the LUKSO network can adopt at any time
We are looking forward to launching the first Casper driven smart contract Blockchain, that will be used by a new generation of Blockchain users!
Fabian Vogelsteller
Anyone who has been crypto for any amount of time or recently performed a transaction knows that the Ethereum gas fees are insane! This is a huge industry problem and it’s being solved with ETH 2.0, but that solution is at least 12 to 24 months away. Consequently many other projects have stepped into the space to provide Layer 2 (L2) solutions that are faster and cheaper; conveniently capitalizing on the massive demand for less expensive fees. Many of these L2 solutions are far more centralized then advertised and being tolerated simply because of extreme greed to catch the bull market pump. In my opinion, when this market corrects the Mantra of Decentralization will be screamed at the rooftops and ETH 2.0 will dominate once again.
With this in mind, the next quote you will read is the most important technology update you will likely see in the next 2 years in crypto.
By combining an execution environment (Catalyst) with a beacon chain running Casper FFG, LUKSO will likely become the first ETH 2.0 Blockchain to execute smart contracts, even before Ethereum itself.
Fabian Vogelsteller
The super bullish case for Lukso is that this technology will act as a proxy for ETH 2.0 at Lukso Mainnet launch scheduled for June/July 2021; much like Kusama is for Polkadot. To provide some context, Kusama(KSM) has ran up over 11,600% in the past 6 months eclipsing a $2B Market Cap (MC). Keep in mind that Kusama is simply a testnet for the Polkadot blockchain. The same Polkadot which is NOT live and hasn’t proven anything despite capturing over a $37 Billion Dollar market cap (MC).
How many of the Ethereum Defi Protocols and ERC-20 Projects do you think would benefit from an L2 solution that is fully interoperable with Ethereum?
Answer: Every single one of them, over 3000 DAPPS!
When I first read the white paper for Lukso I was blown away by the level of detail and use cases Lukso can solve. Most of the technology stack details I was lost on, but I did understand Lukso was building a better, faster, less expensive Smart Contract blockchain that uses the security of Ethereum’s network.
A very common misconception is that Lukso is nothing more than an NFT for Fashion and Luxury brands. THIS IS NOT ACCURATE.
Fabian and Marjorie simply are building out their USE CASE for the Lukso blockchain, which so happens to be digital fashion. Many other use cases are in the white paper including lifestyle currencies, decentralized social media, universal profiles, NFT gaming, CryptoTags, and much more. The applications are endless for a NFT smart contract platform. Hence the reason high profile advisors have joined Lukso from massive brands like Nike, Burberry, Chanel, and Instagram.
What Lukso has built is a blockchain that all other projects can build on top of, much like Ethereum does for 3000+ ERC20 tokens and Defi Apps.
And at the same time using it’s own blockchain to prove out Digital Fashion.
Lukso is NOT competing with Ethereum or any ERC20 NFT projects. All of these projects can be Powered by Lukso and fully interoperable with ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0!
An advisor that nobody in the community is talking about yet is Julien Bouteloup with Stake Capital. Going to his Linkedin profile you will quickly see how connected Stake Capital is to Defi.
Going to Stake Capital’s website, partners section, you’ll see direct STAKING integration with the biggest names in the space including Cosmos, Tezos, Kusama, Kava, Matic, Polkadot, ETH 2.0, Elrond, and more!
This makes sense since Staking Lukso will be launched at mainnet this summer and Stake Capital aims to have effortless staking services.
Stay Tuned
Due to file size and length of acceptable email formats in Google, I am forced to break up this blog into 2 Parts.
Part 2 of Diamond Hands will concentrate on Partnership, Tokenomics, Announcements, and Price Predictions!
I’d love to read your comments and feedback so I encourage you to join in on the conversation.
Very nice entry. Solid research, thanks for sharing. This just made me more bullish about Lukso.
Thanks for your efforts.
Looking forward to what can be created with these new standards in the future.
Please check out a YTr by name of "Chico Crypto". He has done a few videos on Lukso and is very knowledgable