This post describes why blockchain governance design is one of the most important problems out there, its critical components, current approaches, potential future approaches, and concludes with suggestions for the community. Why Blockchain Governance Matters As with organisms, the most successful blockchains will be those that can best adapt to their environments. Assuming these…

Decentralized exchange is early today but feels like it will be essential in a few years. First, the difference between a decentralized exchange and a decentralized exchange protocol: A decentralized exchange has some combination of decentralized properties. At the moment this most likely means some mix of 1) on-blockchain trade…

In a prior post I proposed funding protocol development through inflation as a powerful tool to evolve blockchains. Forking is a second critical evolutionary mechanism for blockchains. Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where…

Blockchains are digital organisms. As organisms evolve through changes in their DNA, blockchain protocols evolve through changes in their code. And like biological organisms, the most adaptive blockchains will be the ones that survive and thrive. So what makes for a strong evolutionary process in a blockchain? Forking is an…

Tokens are selling at valuations which imply they’ll have millions of users. But can the blockchain support it? If not, how far away are we? Requirements to building scaled decentralized applications (dApps) There are two requirements to building scaled dApps: Having all of the necessary parts of the dApp developer stack. …

I currently look at the development of the blockchain ecosystem through the lens of creating a new decentralized application development stack. A good barometer is asking the question: “do we have all the parts of the stack we need to create a fully decentralized app”? When the answer to that…

Sam Altman recently wrote that we are entering an era of hyperscale technology companies. These companies own massive troves of data with strong network effects around them and they are only getting stronger. Google and Facebook now own almost 70% of internet ad revenue and rising, growing a combined 103%…

I spent a weekend with 10 execs of some of the largest companies working on VR to talk about how to responsibly create the “Metaverse” — the name for an immersive virtual reality world taken from Neil Stevenson’s 1992 VR novel Snow Crash. The idea is pretty simple: if people…

I’ll be stepping back from my day to day responsibilities at Coinbase at the end of January. I’ll continue to be involved with the company as a board member. I plan to take my first real time off in 7 years and then start tinkering again. This experience has been…