When looking back at 2021, North America’s crypto equity markets representation (asides from Coinbase’s blockbuster direct listing) was dominated by Bitcoin (and other cryptoasset) mining companies. Raising capital through SPACs, these firms tapped into equity markets in order to finance their capital-intensive mining equipment purchases (i.e. from Bitmain) as well…

Emerging from a deep read of Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (specifically Part I), I couldn’t help but draw connections to what might be one of the timeliest combinations of long-term trends: the ending stretch of the long-term U.S. debt cycle and the rise of…

In August of 2020, Ali Yahya authored a great thread on what he termed the “network flywheel”. Given that blockchains are open and permissionless, they cannot really create defensibility the way traditional companies do (via the privileged access to some resource or the pseudo-ownership over one side of the network…

The figure above captivated me while reading The Dao of Capital, a poignant name for a reader in the crypto space (and no, it is not about DAOs). The image is inspired by one shown in the book, which is subsequently devised from the original ideas of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk…

The lego stack / tower has been a captivating framework amongst those in DeFi. The basic notion is that several DeFi protocols can be combined in the form of a stack to provide different financial services. At the center of these combinations is the principle of composability, which dictates that…

As I tweeted a while back, it is very rare to find technologies that completely alter first principles. These technologies are pure innovation, and while they may be composed of concepts familiar to society, their packaging of these concepts is unique. In my opinion, Arweave is one of these technologies…

In late 2008, an anonymous figure by the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto published the first Bitcoin whitepaper.[i] While it would take some years for this paper, and its subject Bitcoin, to become mainstream, the seeds of a workable digital currency were sown. In Bitcoin, the world finally had a trustless…

A couple of developments that set up some context for this post: The FeiRari merger was successfully passed by both DAO voting processes — on to the new path of building value and unlocking synergies Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and StarkWare have all been making solid progress in terms of L2…

Liquity is a project that has been fascinating me for a while — its product is simple, works well, and its use in DeFi is evolving in an interesting manner. Before getting into this post, two things need to be mentioned. 1) Liquity’s smart contracts are immutable and CANNOT be…