Stake's Not Decentralized (Yet?) There’s a lot of excitement in the staking economy these days. Existing staking networks are starting to attract developers and users. Staking networks continue launching at a fast pace. Staking token prices continue soaring in this current bull run. Yet this enthusiasm washes over an important weakness. Stake in these networks…

Last year, my team and I set out to create a  marketplace that leveraged crypto to give creators a direct stake in the rising value of their work.  Going into it, we knew it would be a challenge to build a platform that was easily accessible to a non-crypto audience. Most creators—and the audiences who…

At one point I was down as much as $300 on the 71 AMC shares I bought on Wednesday at the hyper-inflated price of $14.07 each. These hands are adamantium. I’m never selling, at least not until my future grandchildren can go watch Avengers 28 at the newest AMC theater on the moon.  Let me be…

A Token Doesn’t Make You Decentralized. So What Does? On Sept 17th, 2020, Uniswap air dropped 150M tokens — worth ~$450M at the time — to anyone who’d ever interacted with the protocol. Many viewed this as a move towards decentralization. In fact, The Defiant, perhaps my favorite publication in the space, wrote that day,…

A Creator’s Perspective: Music & Distributed Ledger Tech Tokenizing music is still in experimental stages but my long-term vision is that digital collectibles will evolve into true fractional ownership in a song’s master recording rights, allowing artists to disintermediate the music industry and fans to gain from their success.  After brainstorming for months on a…

Rebase Tokens and Elastic Finance: They’re Not What You Think Elastic finance (EeFi) offers an exciting monetary and technological innovation, the likes of which has not been seen in the cryptocurrency market in many years. The emerging elastic finance sub-sector – led by Ampleforth – features tokens that experience dynamic supply adjustments called rebases. The…

Ripple said Monday that the SEC is planning to file a lawsuit against the company on claims that it sold unregistered securities. And while the initial reaction of many crypto enthusiasts was to side with the US regulator, the tide has begun to change. The most notabe about-face came from Messari CEO Ryan Selkis, who…

The week-long Shanghai International Blockchain Week attracted top projects and investors to Shanghai to seek crypto money and fame in its 6th year.  The two main events in the week were the Blockchain Summit organized Wanxiang, one of the earliest backers of Ethereum,  and the Web3 Forum organized by the Web3 foundation. Ethereum founder Vitalik…

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is exploding in popularity. Concentrated in the Ethereum ecosystem, it offers the types of services hitherto dominated by the legacy financial system such as lending, borrowing, and savings. But like the ICO craze of a few years ago, the growing mania around it has raised eyebrows from those with a deep…