Ethereum has attracted the world’s largest decentralized applications ecosystem behind it, with an estimated number of participating developers in the range of 250,000–350,000. This growth has been nothing but spectacular from a global and diversified reach perspective, only five years after its launch.

The valuation of cryptocurrencies and tokens has been an ever challenging topic in the blockchain space. Numerous methods and formulas have been proposed. However, in my opinion, nothing has yet emerged as being generally accepted or a de-facto standard, in the same way the widely accepted “earnings-per-share” (EPS) is the common metric traditional financial markets adhere to.

Before jumping to devising models and equations, I think we need to have good visibility on the basic units of “input data” that could be used to then construct such formulas or later develop quantitative methods.

Last year, I enumerated a number of…

I often see entrepreneur pitches that want to attack a big problem from the get-go. Whether it’s via a pitch deck or a white paper (if coming from the blockchain industry side), the main intention is to disrupt an entire industry or supply chain, and take over something that is “not working well”.

So, they start with a grandiose strategy to conquer the world and assume that they will get there by going head-on with the incumbents. Just because they described the problem well doesn’t give them credibility nor does it give their investors assurances that they will succeed. …

One dilemma that startups and early stage companies/projects face is whether to hire a PR agency or to conduct media relations in-house.

The starting point assumption is that PR agencies are the conduits to getting stories published about what you are doing, because they already have the “relationships” with the media writers and editors.

So, the conventional wisdom calls for companies to go looking for a PR agency with budgets in the range of 10–25K per month to start with. Sometimes, the impetus to hire a PR agency is because you’re thinking “I don’t have time to do PR, so…

I hear a lot of talk from blockchain companies and projects saying that they want to replace intermediaries.

However, the dream of the blockchain is not just disintermediation. It is about creating new models and value chains where old intermediaries don’t even play in.

Why go head-to-head against established players, if you can completely circumvent them and not even have to deal with them. Let them become a footnote in your model.

Take DeFi (decentralized finance) as an example. It is a totally new system that is completely native to the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It has no existing equivalency in…

Continued global regulatory uncertainty and inconsistency are the biggest factors that are causing scams, thefts and lawsuits in the cryptocurrency sector.

The longer regulatory authorities drag their feet for crafting thoughtful, comprehensive and balanced regulation related to all crypto related activities, the more scams, thefts, frauds, illegal schemes, lawsuits and bad things in general will continue to happen across the world in this sector.

In the last few months, the number of cryptocurrency related scams, thefts, bankruptcies and lawsuits have increased. …

Two highly publicized Reg A+ token offerings have been recently approved by the SEC for Blockstack and YouNow’s Props, within 24 hours of each other.

Blockstack is a native decentralized applications infrastructure platform that anchors itself in Bitcoin beliefs, and YouNow was an existing YouTube-like app that backed itself into a token usage and relies on a proprietary assemblage of blockchain technology.

Soon after these 2 announcements in mid-July, the SEC issued a no-action letter to Pocketful of Quarters, Inc. for their gaming platform inter-operable token.

Those who rejoiced implied that the SEC now “gets” tokens and is loosening their…

If we’re going to stop complaining about tech companies exploiting our data to maximize their gains, then we need to stop giving them our information by leaving a multitude of digital breadcrumbs while using the usual social and web apps we depend on.

So far, we haven’t had too many good choices for “switching off data collection”, and even companies that give us those options aren’t completely letting users off the hook. An emerging choice will be to completely switch to using the products and services of a new breed of companies where user privacy is a key feature.

For…