This week, we look at:
The 10% collapse in GDP across the US & Eurozone, and how it compares with China's second quarter
The geopolitical battle over TikTok, its alleged spying, and understanding the winners and losers of the Microsoft deal
A framework for how to win in open source competition, explaining both Shenzhen manufacturing success and decentralized finance growth to $4 billion
This week, we look at:
The spectacular price increase in crypto assets, hitting new records for Bitcoin, as well as the comparable statistical situation around Covid cases
An explanation of the $1.5 trilion income effect in 2020, and how it has led to both capital acumulation and inequity (thanks NY Times!)
A discussion of all-time-highs and all-time-lows, why we need them, and their connections to the macro-economy, computer code, music, and the universe itself
One wonderful takeaway from Watts, which of course is not his, but beautifully plagiarized into the English language, is the duality of experience. The need for polar opposites, in a clock-like cycle. To have black, you must have white. To have the top of the wave, you need the bottom of the wave. To have a melody, you need equally the presence of the notes, and their absence in silence. To breathe in, you need to breath out. It is meaningless to have a data point without the context in which it exists.
If you are in finance and only looking at banks, you are missing out on the real change agents. Here's some cross-industry action that we will unpack this week.
Amazon selected Goldman Sachs to be the lender of choice for small business loans. TikTok maker ByteDance is working with a Singaporean business family to get a financial license. And small business bank Starling is integrating Slack, energy switching service Bionic, and health insurance provider Equipsme into their marketplace. And we might as well talk about the Plaid Exchange launch, and end on the computational economy of Ethereum.
In this conversation, we talk with Rune Christensen of Maker Foundation about how he became one of the most influential builders in the DeFi ecosystem. Additionally, we explore the creation, experiences, and evolution of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the nuances of stablecoins, the interaction between Maker and DeFi with traditional finance and traditional economies, and Maker’s approach to leveraging layer 2 solutions to aiding scalability and transaction throughput.
In this exciting conversation, we talk with none other than Joe Lubin of ConsenSys and Ethereum, about his journey from being exposed to advances in artificial intelligence at Princeton to becoming the household name in programmable blockchain. Additionally, we get an insider look into his founding of Ethereum and ConsenSys, and how the technology and individuals behind these two companies are transforming the very fabric of financial institutions that exist today and how new products/services are started for the betterment of humanity.
This week, we cover these ideas:
That absurd Paul Krugman article about Bitcoin. Also Jim Cramer has things to say about financial regulation.
If all the prices are down, which they are, does that mean that everything is bad and wrong?
How timing is a personal financial planning problem, not a market value problem
The macro and crypto economic thesis for 2021, building out the linkages between “Risk-On” assets, flows into and valuation of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the interplay between value locked, the growth of decentralized application revenue, and the volumes around digital objects. We bring it all together.
This week, we look at:
The Bitcoin money supply being worth as much as the M1 of several countries
The Visa/Plaid deal DOJ anti-trust filing and the PayPal integration of Bitcoin
Understanding Central Bank Digital Currencies in the context of card networks, payment processors, and digital economies
Chinese CBDC and how it could relate to stopping the $34B Ant Financial IPO
How a CBDC ecosystem is like an operating system, rather than a payment rail
This week, we dive into the social, economic, and financial implications of data in a post-COVID world. As Apple and Google work to build out the government's contact tracing apps to combat pandemic, what Pandora's box are we opening without consideration? As Plaid reaches into payroll data to accelerate small business bailouts, what power do we hand to aggregators? Will dignity-preserving solutions come to market in time? The opportunity for decentralized identity and data storage is clearer than ever. Or will fear drive us to make permanent compromises?
