#WeAreLendroid part II — We got ourselves new allies including Radar Relay, Amadeus and Keep. We wined and dined some friends, went to the crypto party of the year, and announced a bounty campaign.

Backstage at the Token Summit II. With some of the hottest new kids on the block.

Time flies. Less than two months ago, we felt like we were still at the beginning stages of this journey. Our whitepaper was out, website freshly pressed, and we’d charted an exciting future for fund management with Melonport at the M-0 conference in Zug.

Since then, it’s been a blitz of travel, new alliances, and some amazing conversations.

We need to take a moment to acknowledge what an exciting time this is to be part of the crypto community. On the one side, there’s an unprecedented (and growing) level of interest from the outside. Forums old and new are buzzing with new arrivals asking after tokens and projects. On the other, the community itself is dealing with challenges of perception, scale and decentralization.

And the ripples from each major development tends to affect everyone in the pond, subtly shift pace and priority. Phew. It’s been quite a rush. I thought I’d capture and share some of our highlights from this period. Good to have you on this journey.

Joining Forces for Better Liquidity and Experience

Bringing a new financial instrument like margin trading to the crypto space is challenging enough, btu when you’re out to reimagine trading itself, it takes allies with serious competence and imagination. Like Radar Relay, for instance. They get what we’re about, what we intend to bring to the table. In their press release about the Radar Relay + Lendroid alliance, a very quotable CEO Alan Curtis said, “Radar is proud to be one of the first relayers integrating with Lendroid. Working together allows our teams to significantly expand networked liquidity across the 0x ecosystem via open lending pools.”

Brazil-based Amadaeus decided to become relayers themselves after 0x burst onto the scene. The Lendroid + Amadaeus relationship is a step towards higher liquidity and a better trading experience. As Co-founder Eduardo Lima said, “Lendroid is bringing us one step closer to a fully functional decentralized trading platform. Combined with Amadeus and its willingness to collaborate on a better exchanging experience, trading will be much more sophisticated than what it is today.”

Not all our allies are relayers. Keep has been a welcome addition to our hall of fame. Lendroid has a long and warm relationship with Keep. For one, the Project Lead Matt Luogo is a dear friend of many years. As far as the Keep + Lendroid alliance itself is concerned, Keep fits a key requirement of our protocol like a glove. The smart contract acts ‘human’, one with notary powers, who signs the offer off-chain. Gas cost is thus saved, transaction turnaround time is reduced, and overall efficiency is increased.

Token Summit 2 — Not Just a ‘Token’ Crypto Event

The second edition of arguably the most important crypto event turned out to be a genuine melting pot of ideas and projects, which took the crypto conversation forward, both in breadth and in depth.

The timing of the event couldn’t have been better. The valuation of cryptocurrencies had begun to turn heads like never before. Cryptokitties made some go ‘awww’ and the network go ‘owww’. Olaf Carlson-Wee predicted Ethereum would surpass Bitcoin by the end of 2018. The stage was set for some incredible discussions, and the token summit did not disappoint.

There was the very essential panel on a decentralized ecosystem with Kyber, Omisego and 0x. There was one on Cryptokitties. Actually, it was about scaling, but the kitty was the elephant in the room! The series of presentations from projects old and new was fascinating too. Some good ones to watch out for. All those exciting updates captured here.

Some of the other aspect of the token summit included regulation. Sample this — ‘The SEC is going to label cryptocurrencies as securities’ was one of the predictions. At a time when the vulnerability of centralized exchanges is being exposed too often, fund custodianship was a major point of discussion. In fact, there is agreement on the fact that custody is one of the major issues that will need to be resolved in 2018.

Finally, there were the rockstars like Naval and Balaji. They put on quite a show — a staccato of quotable quotes lapped up by a delighted audience. Catch all of those snippets right here.

Important Miscellany

We hosted an informal do in a cosy wine restaurant in San Francisco. There were payment gateways, smart contract auditors, investors, scientist girlfriends, passers-by and even a couple of genuine party crashers to round things off. Eclectic — is that the word? The dinner was a barometer for us, to gauge the sort of welcome we could expect a few weeks on. The response was warm, and beautiful. We’ve got to that more often.

We also launched a bounty programme on December 21. From retweets to subscriptions to signature campaigns, the growth of a protocol is a collaborative effort, and we discovered there’s so much interest in bounty. and it seemed fair the response so far has been really encouraging. Should you so choose, you can jump in via our Telegram channel.

That’s about it for now. There’s a lot more going on, which I look forward to sharing with you really soon. There’s the TGE, more alliances, a bit of show and tell, and more.