About Us
Who we are, why we started, what we write about
We’re tired of the noise in crypto, and we bet you are too.
What we care about is how this all matters in the long run; when what is new-fangled today becomes a mere fact of daily life tomorrow.
The short run is always characterized by volatility and noise. Both booms and busts fill media headlines with shouty, emotionally-charged narratives that rarely reflect the nuanced middle of the spectrum.
The blind bravado of bull runs, and the melodramatic hand-wringing that accompanies each crash are distractions. There is precious little headspace for thinking about hard problems, and building the solutions that solve them.
“We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady…”, wrote the English economist, Keynes, in his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
This pattern of human socioeconomic and technological progress is regularly forgotten — and rediscovered again — by each new generation. Human progress leaps forward, one boom and bust cycle at a time.
It was true of the capital markets for railroads in the 1800s, and during the telco and dotcom bubble in the nineties. Each of those bubbles resulted in a tremendous amount of capital being invested in laying the infrastructure, and developing pools of skilled labour. Two critical ingredients for each new industrial revolution.
The British Railway Mania bubble, and the railroads constructed from it, created the infrastructure that would enable the Industrial Revolution. The mileage of rail schemes authorised in the bubble years came to represent 90 percent of the total route mileage on Britain’s rail system.
The incredulous amounts of money poured into tech companies in the dotcom bubble built out the infrastructure — physical and economic — for the Internet Revolution to happen. By 2004, the cost of bandwidth had fallen by more than 90 percent, giving “killer apps” like social media or video streaming platforms plenty of cheap capacity to gain mass adoption. The tracks, as it were, had already been laid, thanks to the bubble.
We think this is also true today of crypto. The talent coming into the space building new and exciting technologies, is laying the foundations of a new financial system.
At the Long Thesis, we believe in the promise of crypto and its primitives like NFTs, smart contracts, and stablecoins. They are becoming the building blocks of a new financial system that is much more efficient, inclusive, and transparent.
We started the Long Thesis to be a space for rational reflection, and collective problem solving by thinkers, innovators and builders. We want to talk frankly about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing various use cases for blockchain technologies.
Bull or bear, if you share our desire to keep our feet planted firmly on rational ground, we welcome you to build alongside us for the long-run.
About the co-authors
Sherry Jiang — Sherry has spent the vast majority of her professional life working on the intersection between cutting edge technologies and social impact. She is the CEO and co-founder of Bluejay Finance, a stablecoin protocol focused on Asian currencies, with a mission to accelerate financial inclusion and make DeFi accessible to everyone. Previously, she worked at Google, where she led growth for Google Pay (originally Tez) in India, growing the product from 13M to 120M+ monthly active users.
Ivan Hong — A development economist by education, Ivan discovered crypto in 2017 when commissioned to write a book on the possible macroeconomic implications of Bitcoin. Since then, Ivan has have been writing white papers, industry reports, and other content for regulators, protocols, and dApps. Today, he works with Request Finance, helping more than 2,000 companies and DAOs manage over $200m in crypto payroll, billing, invoices, and more.
