 What's up? I'm Max, and this is your Weekly Huddlers Digest, 90s edition. If you're watching this for the first time and want to know all the news in crypto, hit the subscribe button now. Ride sharing app Lyft launched a successful IPO this week, valuing the company at over 20 billion dollars. Perhaps this will allow them to guarantee their drivers a living wage, but let's be honest, probably not. Earlier this year, Lyft let its clients pay in crypto for rides to the hospital. Unfortunately, things don't look as great for crypto projects that want to do an IPO. The filing window for Bitmain's IPO expired this week, which means there won't be one. Investors who were promised almost an 18 billion dollar evaluation are disappointed and are preparing to sue Bitmain. This week, we spoke to Binance's CEO, CZ, about recent reports of fake trading volumes on CoinMarket Cap. If you want to know what CZ thinks about it, check out the video on our channel. And now to the news. We're going to talk about Weiss crypto trading, Irish coffee and metal giants using blockchain, Tim Draper in Argentina, and how to sell your ICO on eBay. But before we get started, let's have a look at the market update. Weiss crypto rating published its annual report with ratings of the 120 most promising cryptocurrencies and an assessment of the current situation in the crypto industry. The report, titled Dark Shadows with a Bright Future, suggests that, despite the risky situation for investors in the short term, the industry is moving in the right direction. In fact, compared to early 2018, the on-chain transaction volume of leading cryptos increased three times. The security and capacity of the industry's network have improved dramatically, and the underlying technology has evolved. The report contains two rankings, the first of which evaluates coins according to the criteria of adoption and technology, and refers to long-term perspectives. Here, XRP, EOS, and Bitcoin are leading with an A score, while Ethereum lags behind with an A minus. Due to difficulties in scaling, Cardano, Steam, NEO, Zcash, Litecoin, and Stellar all follow with a B plus. The second ranking incorporates the risk and reward factors into the previous one, thus considering short-term investment perspectives. In this case, the ranking changes significantly due to the unfavorable crypto price trends in recent months, and no coin was awarded an A. Again, EOS, XRP, and Bitcoin, as well as Binance, are leading with a B minus. Quite surprisingly, the top-rated cryptos in the report are EOS and XRP. While the first is challenging Ethereum to become the backbone of the new internet, the second is paving the way for a banking system grounded in distributed-ledger technology, with higher returns and increased protection for customers. We reached out to Martin Weiss, co-author of the report, and asked him for some more insights into it. So Martin, can you give us some more details about the methodology you used in your ranking? Let me start with the technology model. The technology model looks at the coin's potential to achieve high speeds, to achieve scalability, to achieve efficiencies, to achieve security, and so forth. Plus a host of other factors. The adoption model measures the actual performance of the distributed ledger in the real world. What are the main features to make EOS so strong? EOS has shown some remarkable growth since it launched its mainnet in terms, for example, of on-chain transactions, the volume of on-chain transactions. Those are not transactions in the exchanges by speculators buying and selling, they're actual usage metrics, and those have grown remarkably. In fact, EOS is now leading the entire space in the volume of those transactions. It's jumped ahead of Ethereum, it's jumped ahead of every other coin on the planet. So it's not yet at the same level of adoption as Bitcoin, but if you combine both the technology and the adoption, then that gives it an edge over Bitcoin based on our model. You know what it's like, you buy a $1,000 bottle of NaPoG Castle 1951 to enjoy with your friends after work, but when you open it to drink it, instead of the subtle notes of apple, it turns out to be actual apple juice. Hasn't happened to you? Yeah, neither to me. Well, if you do how to long enough to be able to find yourself in this predicament, don't worry, the answer is, as always, on the blockchain. William Grantonsons, a liquor company founded in 1887, plans to fight counterfeit liquor by tracking the entire distilling and manufacturing process from source to the store. Counterfeit liquor is no laughing matter either. The UK loses up to $288 million per year because of this particular crime. Ensuring authenticity is very important when you're dealing with such high ticket items. Recently, one of the less famous Koch brothers claimed to have lost as much as $4 million by mistakenly buying counterfeit wine. In other news, if you are a tea totaler and you have no interest in whiskey, I've got something for you too. The Coffee Board of India has launched a pilot blockchain project with the Ministry of Commerce to promote coffee production in the country. The aim is to better integrate coffee farmers with markets and to get rid of the middlemen. Do you mean baristas? The idea is that blockchain will improve transparency and traceability from bean to cup. The pilot phase will initially be rolled out to just a few growers, but if it is successful, it will expand to all 350,000 coffee growers in India. Recently, Tim Draper met with Mauricio Macri, the president of Argentina, in part to talk about crypto. In short, he advised Macri to legalize Bitcoin. The two men discussed the future of the Argentinian economy, which is in trouble, and the national currency, the Peso, is down 10% against the dollar already this year, and on Tuesday it fell to an all-time low. Things are so bad for Macri that he is now neck-and-neck in the polls with his predecessor, Kiuszner, who is the one many Argentinians blame for the current mess. Draper to the rescue? Unsurprisingly, Draper recommended Bitcoin as one way to improve it. Not only that, but you also argued that the leading crypto would be revolutionary for Argentinian banking, commerce, and financial systems. In fact, Draper was so confident about his beloved Bitcoin that while he was talking about the devaluation of the Peso, he made a bet. If the Peso would be valued more than Bitcoin, then he would double the investment that he has in the country. But if Bitcoin gained a higher rate than the Peso, Argentina would have to declare Bitcoin as a national currency. Now that's confidence in Bitcoin. However, it is unclear whether the bet was ever taken up. Draper may have found kindred spirits in the country whose main two exports are soybean oil and Lionel Messi. Argentina is becoming increasingly pro-crypto, recently agreeing to co-invest in several black-chained projects, backed by Binance Labs and Latin American crypto exchange, Latamex. CZ even hinted at the launch of a new fiat to crypto exchange in Argentina. Last month, Argentina took a big step when it settled an export deal with Paraguay and Bitcoin, which was worth around $7,000. Although Argentina is nowhere near the economic turmoil going on in Venezuela, the Peso is very volatile and the uptick in interest in crypto is consistent with the unpredictable economy. Late last year, weekly trading volumes on localbitcoins.com hit an all-time high of nearly $9.5 million, but more recently, trading volumes have been around $8 million each week. Russian giant Norah Nicol plans to launch a blockchain-based platform to trade palladium. As reported by Bloomberg, Norah Nicol's CEO and major shareholder, Vladimir Putin, is talking with Swiss regulators about plans to launch tokens through a Switzerland-based palladium fund. Putin, one of the richest men in Russia, is also planning to expand the idea to other materials. Norah Nicol is the world's top producer of palladium and nickel, and its interest in blockchain may pave the way for mass adoption of the technology in the commodities industry. According to Petanin, transactions in tokens are simpler and more convenient, and he is also talking with Russian lawmakers to try speeding up implementation of a regulatory bill for digital assets in his home country. In case the bill, wanted by President Vladimir Putin himself, will pass in the summer, then Petanin may launch the platform by the end of the year. Norah Nicol is also working on a second blockchain-based platform, this one designed for internal transactions. As Petanin pointed out, this will help Russia's central bank to test, on one company, the efficacy of blockchain-based systems, without affecting the whole economy. Distributed ledger technology has attracted the attention of many big players in the commodities industry, given their potential to reduce costs and administration times. According to the Financial Times' unnamed sources, the London Metal Exchange is endorsing a consortium of metal traders and banks in the launching of a blockchain-based system to track physical metals. The new system will provide a better picture of the flow of metals around the globe, mainly in response to environmental groups demanding more transparency. While declining to comment on this specific initiative, Matt Chamberlain, the CEO of London Metal Exchange, said the metals industry needs a tracking system based on blockchain, as a centralized database would give too much private information to the hands of its owner. If you are still dealing with ICOs in 2019, you're either crazy, stupid, or next level genius. I'll let you decide which type this next guy is. Ivan Komar is the creator of an ICO that never actually launched, attempting to sell his failed venture on eBay for the very reasonable price of $60,000. Sponsy, which to me sounds more like a shoplifter from London than the name of an ICO, is a decentralized platform that connects brands and events wishing to conduct sponsorship deals. Sponsy points out that it is listed on the ICO bench, a notable ICO tracker. We went to the site and Sponsy is ranked 2.9 out of 5, and just one expert evaluation. According to Komar, his lawyer advised him to develop a project before launching an ICO. And in hindsight, Komar admits this would have been a good idea. The listing ended on Friday, with one bid, but I'm pretty sure if you asked nicely, Sponsy could still be yours. We spoke to Komar about the project. So how is it going with the sale? So far we have received one bid, officially, but we are receiving many offers out of the auction, because some people want to communicate with us out of this system. The auction is a fact that Sponsy got covered and the press all around the world helped us to reach to many potential clients. We received so many requests from different countries, from North America and Europe and Asia. It just couldn't be possible without this media information that spread about us. How did you manage to build a product without an ICO? It was some sort of bootstrapping. It wasn't very easy for us. It would be much easier if we had raised some money, but it still was possible. We will have developed a product with more sophisticated functionality if we did raise some money, but given that we have not, we are trying our best to do it with our limited resources. Many ICOs that launched without a solid product behind them resulted in investors losing millions of dollars. So do you think everything worked out for the best? It was right from the perspective of the user, because it just wasn't a good type of thing to raise money from people without actually having a real product for them to show. But if we did end up raising some money before building a product, in our case we would have developed a perfect product and the fact that we have developed a product today actually proves it. Now that the ICO era is over, what can a buyer do with such a project? We have developed a great tech, it works and it allows businesses and users to collaborate within our platform. It can be used with both blockchain component and without blockchain component. Both things will work and it's up to the buyer to decide how to use the platform the best way. The sponsorship industry is a very popular one and the market size is growing and actually growing at a faster pace than a traditional advertising industry. This episode is sponsored by V-Systems. V-Systems is a general purpose blockchain database cloud platform. If you struggle to understand what that means, think of the Amazon cloud of blockchain with the next generation blockchain database, smart contracts, crypto assets, sidechain systems and a decentralized apps platform. The core architect of the project is Sonny King, the creator of the proof of state consensus mechanism. For V-Systems, he developed a new, more advanced performance-oriented mechanism called Supernode Proof of Stake, which has a scalable and sustainable infrastructure. Recently, V-Systems launched its coin sale on the joint launch pad of the three leading crypto exchanges, ZB, ZBG and BW, which have a combined trading volume of $2 billion. Check out V-Systems, the link is in the description below. And remember, always do your own research. So, Sponsy, crazy, stupid or next level genius? Let us know in the comments below. Plus, if you have a better idea for an ICO on eBay, post it and we'll get our experts to evaluate it and give you a minimum bid price.