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MEMO W49 DEC 2024

Families, tribes and states are the three main collective structures in which humans organize as social groups. I was wondering how to formulate those relationships and found it interesting that the concept of the family and the concept of the tribe are evolutionary ingredients to the well being of many different forms of social animals. There is a very strong case to be made for the biological component of the family and the tribe as a tool for survival. We as humans separated from the animal k

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MEMO W48 DEC 2024

Somebody said the other day that religion was once so very important for basically everyone alive, and that religion as a concept has lost so much of its influence today. Let's get just one thing out of the way first. More than 80% of the world's population is still estimated to be religious in one form or another. That is the vast majority of everyone alive today. A thousand years ago that nunmber was roughly 100%. Looking at the trends all around the world, it is true that more and more people

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MEMO W47 NOV 2024

Based on my own estimation we are about 60% through the crypto cycle right now. There are maybe another 6 to 12 months of insane price action left ahead of us. I am writing this down to emphasize that there are many overlapping cycles on a sector basis, which all have their own triggers and rhythms. While crypto as an asset class was historically guided by Bitcoin liquidity, every sector within crypto may start to show signs of their own micro-economy, and with it their own cycles. Various L1 an

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MEMO W46 NOV 2024

We are once again entering a cyclical phase in which people outside of this crypto industry reach out to more accustomed insiders, only to ask what coins to buy, or whether they should sell their "Bitcoin" now. Why now? Because prices are up and with it, attention is high. Every other quarter, every other year, rising crypto prices make it into the news cycle of ordinary people, sparking curiosity, again, meaning greed, over and over and over. People never come to ask mid season, how they can en

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MEMO W45 NOV 2024

A regulatory sea change will be unfolding over the next 4 years for the crypto industry, and we cannot understate how big its effects are going to be. For at least the next 4 years we are going to win so hard that you will get tired of winning. One day you will say that you are so tired of winning and that you can't keep winning, and then we will win some more. Winning here means simply being treated in a fair and competitive way by the powers that be. There is zero reason for rogue regulators t

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MEMO W44 NOV 2024

"America's Class Politics Have Turned Upside Down", "The Worst of Crypto Is Yet to Come", "A Bogus New Rationale for Trump's Economic Agenda", "The Most Opinionated Man in America", these are the headlines everyday people are confronted with when reading The Atlantic today, one of America's most renowned newspapers. Long gone are the days in which we found balanced fact based news in those traditional media outlets. What you and me are bombarded with today is rarely rooted in facts. Traditional

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MEMO W43 OCT 2024

We can still hear people complain that crypto has no apps. Meanwhile the city of Buenos Aires has rolled out digital identities using zero-knowledge proof technology to all of its roughly 3.6 million citizens. This is a huge deal for two reasons. For one those digital identities are secured by Ethereum, since the underlying infrastructure is provided by an app on top of ZKsync, an Ethereum L2 rollup. And two, these credentials are the cryptographic property of individuals, who can now reveal onl

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MEMO W42 OCT 2024

What are we doing here? I mean here in this, our industry, the world of blockchains. What is this crypto thing all about? When you ask that question, then there will very likely be silence for a moment, followed by, a lot of words. This question, what crypto is about, is so hard to answer, and I thought about why that is the case. Imagine you were talking to some farmer in the 15th century, and imagine you would tell them about DNA. You would go like "here mate, look at that, that is DNA". And l

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MEMO W41 OCT 2024

Onchain onboarding is solved, technically. And with that claim I want to make the case that we already have all the tools that we need for users to just get started on any decentralized application. What that implies is that users to not have to worry about blockchains, gas tokens, transactions or even wallets anymore. As far users are concerned, the future is already here, it is just not evenly implemented. Back in the day, people needed a wallet in order to use any dApp. And even if you had...

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MEMO W40 OCT 2024

Markets are some of the most powerful concepts in human history. Our ability to leverage markets has enabled trade and wellbeing on a global scale across the centuries like we have never seen before. We can get lost amidst the marvellous progress that we accomplished in aggregate as all of mankind, thinking we have figured it all out. The thing is, we haven't. There are so many questions left to answer and there is so much progress yet to be made, to everyone's benefit. I have spent the past ...