This holiday season, we’re betting on the power of crypto to provide real value to mainstream shoppers — We announced Public Market earlier this year with a very big mission: to end the era of extractive eCommerce monopolies. Since then, we’ve shared our beliefs around decentralized network effects and why many of today’s tech giants are more vulnerable to disruption than they seem. At the end of the…

At the heart of the Public Market protocol lies a concept that runs directly counter to today’s eCommerce marketplace models: open inventory information. In closed ecosystems like Amazon and eBay, inventory data is proprietary and leveraged to extract rent and exert price control. In Public Market’s open ecosystem, inventory data…

“Decentralization” is one of the most important and, at the same time, most abused concepts in the crypto space. On the one hand, decentralization is shorthand for a variety of properties that stand in stark contrast to the monopolies that central banks have on our money and that the tech…

Today, Public Market takes an important step in its journey to build a global open protocol for eCommerce. This morning we opened up access to our flagship storefront for the first cohort of users and influencers in our early access program. This marks a key moment for us. In addition…

8 Risk Factors Determining Internet Giants’ Vulnerability to Decentralization — Crypto is caught today between two opposite — and, in my view, equally wrong — narratives about the prospects of decentralization to transform the business landscape. On the one hand, the dreamers believe in the inevitable decentralization of everything. On the other, the cynics argue that consumers don’t care about…

How businesses built around network effects are about to undergo a radical transformation that will impact us all In the first of this two part series, I argue that the network effects of tomorrow will often be built around decentralized tokenized ecosystems in which there is no distinction between network…

Last week, I shared a number of interesting stats about the eCommerce industry as a whole and Amazon’s dominance in particular. One of the conclusions of the post was that the industry features a monopolized middleman (Amazon) whose core growth is driven by a “bunch of unhappy sellers.” This week…

Public Market is motivated by a relatively simple belief set: First, we believe that fair and open commercial exchange is a bedrock of human society. Second, we believe that the “e” in eCommerce fundamentally downplays the size of the market opportunity: online commerce is increasingly eating offline commerce and is…

New products, platforms and protocols break into the consumer mainstream when the average user engages based on the benefit of the service (i.e. faster, cheaper, better) without being forced to care about the enabling technology. To date, the users of decentralized blockchain applications have been primarily those with a pre-existing…