Wall Street backed EDX Markets launched two weeks ago making a critical shift in TradFi's approach to crypto. Will this change DeFi?
artificial intelligenceaugmented realityCryptodecentralized financeenterprise blockchainMetaverse / xRnarrative zeitgeistNFTs and digital objectsregulation & complianceventure capital
·In this conversation, we talk with Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures. This is a fascinating and educational conversation that covers frontier technology companies and protocols in blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence, and the convergence of these themes in the future. Jamie walks us through the core investment thesis, as well as the commercial model behind shifting from incubation to acceleration of 30+ companies. We pick up on wisdom about marketing timing and fund structure along the way.
A few delicious morsels for us today, connecting ideas between the automation of the institutional art world, and the rise of non-fungible token art. We are surprised by how things are clicking.
We caught up recently with Lori Hotz of Lobus. Lori used to work in the wealth and investment management businesses of Wall Street (Lehman, Lazard) and comes to art with a background of asset allocation and investment assets. One core narrative in wealth management has of course been roboadvisors and digital wealth, and the automation of the financial advisor process. Whether you are doing client experience, CRM, financial planning, trading, or performance reporting, there are now lots of platforms for everyone from mass-retail to ultra-high-net-worth and family office advisors.
Feelings and emotions at industry events matter. The narrative at the more traditional conferences is that Fintech innovation is just incremental improvement, and that blockchain has struggled to bring production-level quality software and stand up new networks. This isn't strictly true -- see komgo, SIX, or any of the public chains themselves -- but the overall observation does stand. Much of Fintech has been channeled into corporate venture arms, and much of blockchain has been trapped in the proof-of-concept stage, disallowed from causing economic damage to existing business.
In the long take this week, I revisit decentralized finance, providing both an overview and 2019 update. The meat of the writing is the following long-range predictions for the space in the next decade -- (1) the role of Fintech champions like Revolut and Robinhood as it relates to DeFi, (2) increasing systemic correlation and self-reference in the space, which requires emerging metrics for risk and transparency, and (3) the potential for national services like Social Security and student lending to run on DeFi infrastucture, (4) the promise of pulling real assets into DeFi smart contracts and earning staking rewards, and (5) continued importance of trying to bridge into Bitcoin. Here's to an outlandish 2020!
This week, we cover these ideas:
The nature of digital identity, and the difference between a representation at some moment of time vs. a record of your being
The launch of the DeFi Passport by Arcx and how it can be useful for underwriting
The European Digital Wallet, and the implication of such a development for CBDCs and government services
China’s CBDC, Sweden’s BankID, and other existential crises
If you want to go deeper on this topic, we strongly recommend our conversation with Michael Cena of the Ceramic Network here. Whereas Michael started working on the identity problem by trying to add labels to people, where he ended up is creating a protocol that tracks historic software activity and interactions between actors. In thinking about the Ship of Theseus, this is the solution that says — your identity is your journey through the river of time itself, and not any particular stop you make along the way.
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This week, we look at:
How banks and financial advisors have failed to deliver on $1 trillion in capital appreciation for their clients over the last 12 years
The role of bank regulators in the United States, and the tensions between state and federal agencies
How the OCC is laying the groundwork for national banks to custody crypto assets, bank stablecoin reserves, run blockchain nodes, and use crypto payment networks
And instead of financial advisors or other CFAs guiding the retail market in good decision making, a newsfeed of *what’s popular* has driven Apple, Google, Tesla and the other John Galt hallucinations to the stratosphere. Don’t get us wrong. We love the robot as much as the next Fintech commentator. But it is clear to us that “the masses” are not being “advised”. And that the capital appreciation that matters — cementing the next trillion dollar networks for global future generations in work yet to emerge — is misunderstood and misrepresented by most financial professionals to their clients.
Looking into the statistics of gambling is illuminating and depressing. The UK, where gambling is more widely accepted than in the US, sees rates of 40-60% across all adults according to 2016 research. Revenues for casinos are over $100 billion annually, and global gambling revenues, including sports betting and the national lotteries, amount to over $400 billion. That's like the equivalent of the entire software cloud industry. And it asymmetrically addicts and disadvantages the already disadvantaged (see academic research here, here, and here).
We are syndicating a deep conversation across roboadvice, high tech and payments, and fintech bundling that we had with Craig Iskowitz of Ezra Group Consulting.
Check out Ezra Group Consulting here to learn more about digital wealth and Craig’s consulting practice. He is one of the sharpest software consultants in the RIA space, and his firm works with wealth management firms and fintech vendors to provide technology strategy and market research.
We had a lot of fun in this conversation and cover TD & Schwab, Wealthsimple, M1 Finance, Ant & Tencent, and Robinhood, among others. The full transcript is provided along with the recording — worth a read for the illustrations alone.
This week, we look at:
Lending Club, the peer-to-peer lending innovator, turning off peer-to-peer lending after having a bank in its pocket
Consolidation of the UK's largest crowdfunders, CrowdCube and Seedrs, and their limited economics
The scale of the Morgan Stanley and Eaton Vance deal, creating a $1.2 trillion asset manager
The struggle of peer-to-peer models more generally, and whether the blockchain movement can overcome the Prisoner's Dilemma