The shortcomings of ICO funding

Initial coin offerings are a phenomenally successful way of raising money. Through ICOs, startups have raised a record $1.27 billion in the first half of 2017. When I wrote the post “Will Initial Coin Offerings Fund the Future?” back in May, the total tally was around $100m. In the few months since then since then […]

Organization in a decentralized world – how will decentralized platforms be managed?

There’s a lot of excitement surrounding the decentralized Internet and cryptocurrencies. Technological advancements plus tokens are shaking up traditional business models, enabling organizations to emerge outside the form of traditional companies that we know of today. There’s great promise to build large scale platforms to run open source projects among other things. But how exactly […]

Blockchain’s impact on marketplaces: what’s the future for decentralized marketplaces?

Nearly two years ago, we published our first ebook, A Guide to Marketplaces. Towards the end, we touched briefly on emerging marketplace types and included decentralized marketplaces in the mix. At the time, OpenBazaar was still in beta. Since then, we’ve been closely following the evolution of blockchain technology and looking at the potential impact […]

Please respect outstanding entrepreneurial achievements

Blue Apron went public today. It was not the easiest road for them as they had to cut the originally proposed price range of $15-17 to $10 and closed the first day just around that at $10.01. As one can imagine, the media commentary was not pretty, calling the IPO a disappointment, the stock stale out […]

In cryptocurrencies, is it winner takes all?

The original thesis for cryptocurrencies was that it would be a winner-takes-all game due to the strong network effects around mining. And Bitcoin’s first few years seemed to prove this thesis true. Its share of the total market cap for cryptocurrencies was as high as 90% and was still holding at 80% at the beginning […]