I’ve spent the majority of the last decade working in two fields: solar energy and cryptocurrency. At first blush, these may seem pretty different. In my mind, however, they have a lot in common and are converging by the day. Both are based on principles of decentralization. Both are disrupting…
It’s been exciting to see so much renewed investor interest in climate tech and clean energy startups. As Peter Thiel documented in detail, the last wave of late 2000s cleantech VC excitement ended in a trough of despair as many of the more well-funded companies went bust (with the notable…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of education lately. It’s clear that our current model is beyond broken. The very young are taught to grin and bear twelve years of compulsory passive absorption. Upon graduation, they’re then incentivized to take on >$30k in debt to study random subjects…
I recently shared some thoughts about DeFi in light of recent market turmoil. While I remain extremely bullish on p2p finance in the long run, I believe there are at least 3 major questions to answer in the short term: 1) what blockchain/layer is most appropriate for DeFi scalability, 2)…
The last couple of weeks have been quite a test for cryptocurrency markets in general and DeFi in particular. On Black Thursday (March 12), BTC/ETH prices declined by ~50% and DeFi’s flagship project, MakerDAO, ended up with ~$5 million USD in unbacked DAI. You can read Tom Schmidt’s excellent postmortem…
