“minimal advancements in FinTech” is being generous – I think we should be appalled by the pace of innovation in FinTech

enough with the shiny apps that help me split a dinner bill or pay for my pizza in installments.

How many times can we put lipstick on a pig and call it innovation? We should expect more

Finance = digital last
Fintech = digital first
Crypto = digital native

Case in point: All of the innovations in fintech from the past 15 years can be broken down into just 5 (underwhelming) categories

👇 1: Fractional shares – so I can buy half a share of TSLA instead of a full share. This is Robinhood.
2: APIs – the realization that maybe instead of a bunch of ‘dumb’ siloes, my fintech application should have some connectivity to my bank account. This is Plaid.
3: Overcollateralized lending to startups. That’s a mouthful. This is Brex though – and the major financial innocation that spawned a deca-corn is the realization that they could provide credit cards to startups sitting on a $20M Series A.
4: BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) – so that I can pay for my pizza in 5 installments. This is Affirm, Klarna and others.
5: Payments – various new(ish) forms of payments (Stripe for digital payments; Transferwise/revolut/remitly for cross-border payments)

🔥Fired up🔥 to see friends and colleagues that I’ve worked with over the past 6 years jump back into the startup grind to execute against a compelling opportunity

We’re co-leading their Seed financing at Rio Network as they set out to lead the development of the coordination layer for restaking

blockchaincapital.com/blog/rio-netwo… For us, this opportunity began to emerge soon after leading EigenLayer’s Series A financing as we recognized that most restakers would prefer to restake without sacrificing the liquidity and utility of their assets – much in the same way that most ETH stakers have expressed a strong preference to do so via Liquid Staking providers

Lido has capitalized on that opportunity and become the dominant LST provider with >70% market share

I thought Worldcoin was some dystopian Orwellian nightmare, then our team invested hundreds of hours evaluating what the project’s contributors have actually built and I completely changed my mind - why we led the latest financing
1/
blockchain.capital/worldcoin-proo… 2/ Worldcoin is quite likely the single most misunderstood project in all of crypto (and that’s saying something). At first glance, it appears to be a noxious combination of hardware, biometrics, crypto and AI.

1/ Sharing new data highlighting how Bitcoin is (still) a demographic mega-trend.

This is our third data update and it effectively highlights how the American population is progressing through the adoption funnel.

medium.com/blockchain-cap… 2/ Background – the survey was conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Blockchain Capital from Oct 7-9, 2020. More than 2,000 individuals participated in the survey which was an augmented version of a similar survey we ran in Spring 2019 and Fall 2017.

Sharing a presentation we sent to @blockchaincap LPs and strategic partners covering the impact of the Covid response on crypto markets

blockchain.capital/crypto-covid19/

A few highlights below: 2/ Bitcoin fundamentals (e.g. tx value, hash rate) certainly took a hit around Black Thursday but relative to longer-histories these are but mere ‘blips’. The Bitcoin network adjusted to the shock and didn’t miss a beat.

Sharing a comment letter I wrote to the SEC regarding questions and concerns around Bitcoin’s Value.

“Examining Bitcoin’s Valued Attributes”

The content is on Medium here: medium.com/@Bitcom21/exam…

The letter can also be viewed directly: sec.gov/comments/sr-ny…

Summarized below 2/ Before diving into Bitcoin’s valued attributes, I offered a quantification of the market for store-of-value assets (beyond gold)

Gold: $9T
High-end art & collectibles: ~$4T
Real Estate: $175T (of which *at least* $9T is attributable to utility as store-of-value)

1/ I just published ‘Bitcoin is a Demographic Mega-Trend: Data Analysis’

Which features results from a survey of American adults regarding Bitcoin awareness, familiarity, perception, conviction, propensity to purchase, and actual ownership

medium.com/@Bitcom21/bitc… 2/ Background: The survey was conducted by Harris Poll, on behalf of Blockchain Capital, from April 23-25 2019. A representative sample of 2,052 American adults participated in the survey which was an augmented version of a similar survey we ran in October 2017

1/ I just published Lightning is only the Beginning: The Emerging Bitcoin Stack

Thread summary below

link.medium.com/1KyYsfw5aW 2/ Lightning is likely an important building block in the emerging Bitcoin stack BUT...

i) expectations for Lightning’s impact in the immediate short-term are excessively high

ii) Lightning will likely be one (important) layer among many in the emerging Bitcoin stack

Just published

“Coming Soon: The Biggest Crypto On-Ramps Ever”

tl;dr in thread below

medium.com/@Bitcom21/comi… 1/ We tend to think that the biggest potential catalysts will have three primary ingredients:
- A link between crypto and where capital resides today

- A familiar form factor to minimize adoption friction

- A highly engaged international user-base

1/ We dug in to Maker / $MKR and, in the spirit of the industry, wanted to open-source some questions and concerns that surfaced. Thread below... First, worth noting that Maker’s traction is impressive, it’s a fascinating experiment and I’m glad that they’re pushing the boundaries of innovation. Most of that is well-covered, so I’ll use this thread to instead surface concerns (and hopefully answers!)

1/ New post: A crypto acquisition spree: The Rise of CFBLs (Cash-Flush Business-Light). Linked here and summarized in the thread below medium.com/@Bitcom21/a-cr… 2/ First, CFBLs are entities whose primary cash flow generation has been from the sale of an inventory of tokens.

1/ Just published a new post on how Highly Decentralized Networks like Bitcoin are driving the Internet’s Magna Carta moment…

Blog post here (& summarized below)
medium.com/@Bitcom21/the-… 2/ Symbolically, the Magna Carta marked a long-standing movement toward broad-based rule-of-law, and people’s rights. Now, highly decentralized networks like Bitcoin are picking up where our political institutions left off.

1/ Tell me why I’m wrong: “Platform-grade” censorship resistance isn’t a real thing.

The “platform-grade” narrative is new and in vogue—and should be heavily scrutinized.

Blog post here (& summarized below): medium.com/@Bitcom21/the-…

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2/ First, some background: this narrative starts from a reasonable premise that not all use cases require the same level of security and therefore some chains (e.g. EOS) can compromise on decentralization to offer greater throughput and/or functionality. That’s reasonable.

1/ Another such innovation is Scriptless Scripts—a way to execute smart contracts off-chain using Schnorr Signatures.

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2/ By moving smart contract processing off-chain, Scriptless Scripts could improve Bitcoin’s functionality, privacy, and efficiency.

1/ People waiting to see Bitcoin inside of big banks as an “add-on” are missing the point: Crypto is building a parallel financial system.

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2/ Thousands of developers are flocking to the crypto industry to build out the infrastructure and applications