Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 90

The word " speculation " usually has negative connotations, especially in the world of finance. That's why you'll hear people deride "condo speculators" and talk about things like crypto as being rat poison. Buying something with the sole hope that someone will pay more for it later is viewed as a negative act.

But is this a fair characterization?

Speculation is fundamental to how markets work. It happens when people bet on some unknowable future rather than on present fundamentals. This is an important feature because it's how new technologies and new business models get funded. Without it, we'd only ever fund what is knowable and what already exists.

This doesn't mean that speculation won't lead to failures — by definition it has to. It's uncharted territory. But consider what speculation has advanced along the way: railway networks, utility infrastructure, the internet, crypto, and AI, among many other things. And in the case of condo speculators, the result was that more, rather than less, housing got built.

That's a good thing.

So I think there's an argument to be made that we actually need more speculation in Canada. We need more risk taking and we need people betting on the future, even in the face of uncertainty. Because when you do that, eventually you end up creating it.

Some of you may remember that about a year ago I moved this blog onchain from WordPress to a platform called Paragraph. I've been happy with the move, though I know that my daily emails have been ending up in many of your junk boxes since then. Sorry. Hopefully that gets better over time. Given my enthusiasm for crypto, it just made sense to make the switch. I'm trying to move as much as I can onchain.

This blog is now also featured on Paragraph's homepage :

At the same time, things still feel very early. Paragraph, for example, has been experimenting with ways for writers to monetize their work. I don't care about that for this blog, but I am interested in seeing how the business models may evolve.

Up until recently, the way to make money on Paragraph was to have readers collect your posts: Writer publishes something, readers mint it as an NFT, and then writer receives small payments in their crypto wallet. I've had a few people collect my posts over the past year, but it has not been anything of significance.

Now Paragraph is testing something new called writer coins. Instead of collecting individual posts, readers can now buy a writer's coin and support them more broadly. I just set this up on my publication and so there is now a brand-new coin in existence called $BRANDON.

One of the interesting things that I was able to do was automatically distribute this new coin to anyone who has collected one of my posts in the past and who is subscribed to my blog (with a connected wallet). If you are one of these people, you should have received something.

In theory, $BRANDON coin should increase in value as this blog develops incredible international notoriety, but in practice, who the hell knows? These experimentations are all part of the journey onchain. Some stuff will work, but many other things won't. Already though, I think you can feel product-market fit for things like stablecoins . Maybe one day the same will be true of $BRANDON.

If you'd like to try out this new feature and support the blog, click here .

After Game 5's win, I was feeling confident that the Toronto Blue Jays would win the World Series. History placed us at roughly a 75% probability of success. Polymarket had even flipped in favor of the Jays for the first time. We were up 3–2 in the series and heading home.

But of course that didn't happen on Saturday. Toronto lost.

We Torontonians will always remember the 2025 Blue Jays and how fun of a season it was, but history doesn't care about second place. What history will remember is that the Los Angeles Dodgers went back-to-back and strengthened their baseball dynasty. This is to be expected.

But here's the thing, if you watched the series, you'll know that it could have gone either way. We lost in Game 7 in extra innings, after looking like the better team throughout most of the series.

What if Isiah Kiner-Falefa had taken a slightly bigger lead at third? What if that ball had never gotten improbably wedged under the outfield padding? What if Andy Pages had collided with Kiké Hernandez and not made the catch? The list goes on.

My point is not to be a sore loser — congratulations to Los Angeles — my point is that a few millimeters are all it takes to separate sadness from celebration. (Inches also work, but I prefer to use the international standard for weights and measures .)

It's a good lesson for life and business. Small, consistent changes can be all that it takes, especially because over time they compound.

It reminds me of something that chef Daniel Hadida says in this video when talking about Restaurant Pearl Morissette (in the Niagara Benchlands). He says, "I'm willing to go significantly harder to achieve slightly better." And that's because slightly is all it takes.