The MEV Supply Chain
Blog iconJosh
Dec 16
MEV as a topic has had a decently large following in crypto since last year when it really started to come out of the dark; however, of course, MEV has been around for a lot longer than that. There is its long history in crypto, but also, as an abstracted concept, its much longer history in traditional finance. Given that history, the intellectually stimulating discussions around MEV, and the alluring monetary rewards, there have been several thoughtful research papers, posts, podcasts, and t...

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Crypto equivalent for Proxy Advisory Services

Crypto equivalent for Proxy Advisory Services

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Clouds & Chains: Can we look to the evolution of cloud infrastructure as a guide to blockchain’s future?

DeFi Composability and Switching Costs

DeFi Composability and Switching Costs

Trees... and long-term investing

Trees... and long-term investing

On Long-term Debt Cycles and Crypto

On Long-term Debt Cycles and Crypto

Why Africa?

Why Africa?

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Blog iconJosh
Aug 19
Clouds & Chains: Can we look to the evolution of cloud infrastructure as a guide to blockchain’s future?
Two of the biggest tech buzzwords are in that title — cloud and blockchain. Apologies, I don’t mean to start the piece off with a lame hook, but while people have drawn comparisons between the two in the past, I am of the opinion that some potentially strong parallels have yet to be explored. Cloud infrastructure, as a simplistic concept that entails a lot of complexities beneath it, has been instrumental to taking software, technology, and the economy to where we are today. Even with the imm...
Letters from Jeff
Blog iconJosh
Jul 5
What can you learn from a person who built one of the largest, most innovative, and dominant companies in American history? Frankly, way too much to cover in one written piece like this; however, after spending the afternoon reading through each and every one of Jeff Bezos’ annual shareholder letters, I could not help but share some snippets (sentences, paragraphs, events) that stood out. Below, you’ll find pieces of wisdom and advice from each of his letters spanning the years 1997 to 2020 (...
Bullion to Bits: Can gold miners lend some financing structures to Bitcoin miners?
Blog iconJosh
Jul 4
Original Date of Writing - 06/30/22When looking back at 2021, North America’s crypto equity markets representation (asides from Coinbase’s blockbuster direct listing) was dominated by Bitcoin (and other cryptoasset) mining companies. Raising capital through SPACs, these firms tapped into equity markets in order to finance their capital-intensive mining equipment purchases (i.e. from Bitmain) as well as operationally heavy process set-ups (warehouse selection, layout design, electricity / wate...
On Long-term Debt Cycles and Crypto
Blog iconJosh
Jun 1
Emerging from a deep read of Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (specifically Part I), I couldn’t help but draw connections to what might be one of the timeliest combinations of long-term trends: the ending stretch of the long-term U.S. debt cycle and the rise of programmable store of value assets (namely Bitcoin and Ethereum *to date*). The rise of BTC / ETH in the coming years / decades has a strong probability of coinciding with the accelerating devaluation of...
Networks and Flywheels
Blog iconJosh
Apr 12
In August of 2020, Ali Yahya authored a great thread on what he termed the “network flywheel”. Given that blockchains are open and permissionless, they cannot really create defensibility the way traditional companies do (via the privileged access to some resource or the pseudo-ownership over one side of the network (Ben Thompson & super aggregators)). However, they can create defensibility through the proliferation of a vibrant community, set of miners / validators, contributors, and some inv...
Trees... and long-term investing
Blog iconJosh
Mar 24
Inspired by Böhm-Bawerk’s JahresringeThe figure above captivated me while reading The Dao of Capital, a poignant name for a reader in the crypto space (and no, it is not about DAOs). The image is inspired by one shown in the book, which is subsequently devised from the original ideas of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, a notable Austrian economist and later Minister of Finance. It is used to illustrate his metaphor of a tree’s growth as representative of an economy. A crosscut analysis of a large tree ...
DeFi Composability and Switching Costs
Blog iconJosh
Feb 15
Source: TokenBriceThe lego stack / tower has been a captivating framework amongst those in DeFi. The basic notion is that several DeFi protocols can be combined in the form of a stack to provide different financial services. At the center of these combinations is the principle of composability, which dictates that protocols’ interoperable nature allows them to combine seamlessly. With the ease of protocol composability, product innovation can materialize via the combination of lego blocks. Wh...
Taming the Stablecoin Beast: An analysis on stablecoins, their use cases and benefits, and potential avenues for regulation
Blog iconJosh
Dec 30
In late 2008, an anonymous figure by the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto published the first Bitcoin whitepaper.[i] While it would take some years for this paper, and its subject Bitcoin, to become mainstream, the seeds of a workable digital currency were sown. In Bitcoin, the world finally had a trustless, P2P, digital currency that worked. However, as the years passed by and activity on the Bitcoin blockchain grew, the thesis of Bitcoin fulfilling its intended destiny as a global online currency ...
Fei Protocol: the L2 Playbook
Blog iconJosh
Dec 27
A couple of developments that set up some context for this post:The FeiRari merger was successfully passed by both DAO voting processes — on to the new path of building value and unlocking synergiesPolygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and StarkWare have all been making solid progress in terms of L2 improvements, deployments, and functionalityUniswap’s successful governance proposal to commence Polygon deployment and likely conduct a liquidity mining campaign is the latest vote of L2 confidenceBottom ...
Brainstorming Liquity’s Growth Strategy
Blog iconJosh
Dec 20
Liquity is a project that has been fascinating me for a while — its product is simple, works well, and its use in DeFi is evolving in an interesting manner. Before getting into this post, two things need to be mentioned. 1) Liquity’s smart contracts are immutable and CANNOT be changed at the moment. The only way would be to create a set of v2 contracts and have those exist simultaneously. 2) Liquity’s LQTY is NOT a governance token. There is no governance; however, it does act as an instrumen...
Time to lever the DAO?
Blog iconJosh
Dec 7
Ever heard of the Modigliani-Miller Theorem (M&M)? As I was walking to grab dinner today, M&M suddenly popped into my head. A theory that every Finance major has heard of, but one probably not really remembered (given its lack of real life applicability), the M&M theory broadly states that “the market value of a company is correctly calculated as the present value of its future earnings and its underlying assets, and is independent of its capital structure”. Why do companies take on debt then...
Crypto equivalent for Proxy Advisory Services
Blog iconJosh
Nov 12
Some very interesting primitives are evolving in DeFi as it pertains to governance. Back in 2020 (or perhaps even earlier given MakerDAO), the concept of governance tokens was unleashed on the crypto ecosystem. This notion that a protocol should be decentralized and run by its community was in many ways revolutionary. When have we seen something like this occur in Web 2.0 -> JP Morgan letting users decide on product fees? Facebook giving users the right to reward key contributors? The basic i...