At the end of last year I wrote about three under-the-radar product trends for 2021. Let’s recap to see how well I did before making my three predictions for 2022. 1. Cryptoart Verdict: Correct. While so much has already been written about NFTs and cryptoart this year, this graph summarizes this space…

At the end of last year I wrote about three under-the-radar product trends for 2020. Let’s recap to see how well I did before making my three predictions for 2021. 1. Smart contract insurance Verdict: Correct. Active cover amount on Nexus Mutual grew from $1.1M insured to $56.4M insured in 2020, a 50x increase…

The most popular metric right now for DeFi adoption is total value locked (TVL), shown on trackers like DeFi Pulse. TVL is a good metric for projects that have just launched and are looking to bootstrap liquidity. After all, automated market makers like Uniswap and money market platforms like Compound…

Wallets are critical infrastructure for cryptocurrencies. Every crypto behavior — whether buying or selling crypto, hodling crypto, sending crypto, staking crypto, and more — relies on wallets in some fashion. Wallets are also the gateway to Web3 just like how web browsers are the gateway to the Web2 Internet. Given…

The two most notable cryptocurrency price trends of 2019 are 1) Bitcoin dominance increasing from ~50% to ~70% and 2) BTC price fluctuating from $3.5K in January to a peak of $13K in June down to $8K today. Bitcoin maximalists view #1 as validation that there are no important projects…

Much of the discussions around layer 1 chains so far have been about designing new consensus algorithms for better scalability. At the same time, very little has been written about the state growth problem that layer 1 chains face. Addressing state growth is an underexplored yet critical factor for the…

Decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, have emerged last year as a solution to crypto’s bloody history of centralized exchange hacks. The main innovation is allowing users to trade directly from their wallets without having to trust an exchange to custody funds and implement robust security practices. While self-custody is an important…

Wouldn’t the world be better off if we all shared the same currency? Having multiple currencies seems to create confusion. If currencies are like languages, then having fewer would presumably create more cooperation and unity among people. In the crypto space, Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and other maximalists all claim that…

History can be described as a power struggle between hierarchies and networks. Most history we learn about is hierarchical: it’s about kings, presidents, generals, and CEOs. It’s about states, armies, and corporations. It’s about orders from higher up. Yet networks have always been with us. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in…