Thoughts on the State of DeFi
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 of what happened here. This […]
Regulatory arbitrage in crypto
Almost six years ago Marc Andreessen spelled out the playbook for creating the next Silicon Valley: Don’t copy the Valley but “figure out what domain is (or could be) specific to a specific region—and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain”. Unfortunately for the Valley (and North America in general), a few regions […]
The four waves of crypto disruption: where are they today?
Nearly two years ago, I published a post exploring four key opportunities in crypto. In it, I outlined four crypto waves, ranked from furthest to least developed: Store of value Disruption of financial markets Disruption of every other information market Disruption of what a firm means Looking back, I see that we’ve have good progress […]
Announcing our participation in Nexus Mutual, a people-powered alternative to insurance
We are very excited to announce our participation in Nexus, an Ethereum-based insurance mutual. The concept of a mutual insurance (an insurance company that is owned entirely by its policyholders) is one of the earliest insurance organizations and goes all the way back to England in the late 17th century to cover losses due to […]
Announcing Flow, a new blockchain for entertainment applications
Our portfolio company Dapper Labs, the creators of CryptoKitties and the Dapper Wallet, today announced Flow, a new blockchain for entertainment applications. Why do we need another blockchain, you ask? And wasn’t CryptoKitties built on Ethereum? And aren’t there already many other blockchains that are trying to do what Ethereum cannot do (or cannot do […]