[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Ryan Weeks, formerly with Dow Jones and AltFi, covering fintech. This is...
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This week, we look at:
PwC estimating that $900 billion has been wasted on digital transformation projects for enterprise, meaning finance is vulnerable
Chime is worth $15 billion in the latest round of valuation, same as $200B+ depository bank Fifth Third, which is quite the achievement
Decentralized exchange Uniswap distributing 60% of its token to the community, flipping the ownership and value accrual model
As a thought experiment -- today, if you want to save for a house, you may create a financial plan in Betterment and wait for the portfolio to accrue. Tomorrow, you may bring cashflows to a housing protocol which intermediates property markets, and build your portfolio directly into your desired goal of buying a house. Your stated selection and articulation of that goal, by choosing the housing protocol, generates value on its own through rewards, participation, governance, and various interest rate products.
At $13 billion of revenue and 800 million users in 2016, Office 365 roughly generated $20 per user. That's like Monzo, but with the user foot print of Ant Financial.
You might think the comparison is daft. But let's dig a bit deeper. Excel, and spreadsheets more generally, are the default behavior for managing personal finances. Even for financial advisors, who are supposed to be the precise niche leveraging financial planning software, Excel is the default "do nothing" option. If you are not paying for digital wealth software as an advisor, you are doing it in Excel.
[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Ryan Weeks, formerly with Dow Jones and AltFi, covering fintech. This is...
The question of consciousness goes to the root of why we build, what we create, and how we decide what is valuable and what is not. And if we can control our self-conception and the modeling we do of the world, the texture of life becomes better. A recurrent theme in our writing is that systems don’t care about their agents per se. There are many game theoretical equilibria where agents suffer, but systems perpetuate. So figuring out how an agent within a system reflects on happiness is paramount.
This week, we look at:
PayPal and Square being larger than Bank of America and Goldman Sachs
The SoftBank $4 billion in tech oligopoly call options, and why people feel uneasy
Uniswap vs. SushiSwap, and Bitcoin vs. Litecoin, and why these forks felt wrong
How understanding signalling can help make better decisions
The main driver of today's entry is the news -- which has largely percolated -- that ConsenSys acquired Quorum from J.P. Morgan, as well as received an investment from the bank in the company. There is a lot of jargon in the blockchain industry, and I want to try to pull this news apart to explain why it is interesting both to incumbent financial services players, as well as meaningful to the developing decentralized finance industry.
In this conversation, we talk with Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo and expert technologist about custody, prime brokerage, and the evolution of the institutional digital asset industry.
I often mention that crypto is still all about capital markets trading (i.e., manufacturing) and not about wealth management (i.e., distribution). This conversation touches on where we are in the maturity of market infrastructure, the role of fiduciaries, and the path forward. If you are sitting in a RIA, investment fund, or other asset manager, pay attention!
This week, we get philosophical and look at:
Embedded finance and how it will be woven into the fabric of the Internet
Applying the philosophies of existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism to Finance
Parsing symptoms in decentralized finance (Based Protocol) as artistic protest
Finding Dadaist beauty in chaos
In this conversation, we go through the essentials of Decentralized Finance with Kerman Kohli, who is a serial entrepreneur and the writer of the DeFi Weekly newsletter. We discuss the mechanics of issuing stablecoins, decentralized lending, decentralized exchange, automated market makers, and the increasing complexity of synthetic assets that have grown the sector to nearly $7 billion in August of 2020.