Crypto

Why Crypto? What Sceptics Are Missing

Photo by David McBee from Pexels

It’s natural to be sceptical about crypto. Crypto sounds nefarious – its reputation has been coloured by its association with extreme price volatility, scams and bad actors. So tarnished is crypto that there’s an effort to rebrand it “digital asset”.

It wasn’t always like this; crypto started with noble intentions. Bitcoin, the OG cryptocurrency, was born out of the cypherpunk movement and libertarian ideology. The core ideas are:

  1. The control of money should be decentralised.
  2. Individuals should have financial sovereignty.
  3. Money should empower, not enslave us.

To understand crypto, we need to deep dive into what money is and how its form has evolved over time.

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Bitcoin-denominated Life Insurance: Exclusive Interview with Zachary Townsend

Bitcoin under an umbrella symbolising protection
BTC-denominated life protection, created using Bing Image Creator

When I first heard of Bitcoin, I dismissed it like most people. I mean, what is this “magic internet money” that needs to be “mined” using electricity? It was not an intuitive concept to wrap my head around. Reading the Bitcoin white paper was an eye-opener. It turns out there’s no magic or witchcraft; Bitcoin is the first application of blockchain – a distributed, decentralised ledger. I’ve since gone deep down the rabbit hole and have written and spoken about the use cases of blockchain.

Bitcoin has come a long way since its genesis block on 3 January 2009. Bitcoin’s longevity and resilience has reinforced the belief that it will probably persist for years to come. One of Bitcoin’s most prominent proponents, Balaji Srinivasan, believes that Bitcoin is a viable escape hatch from a collapsing fiat system.

Time will tell whether Balaji is right.

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What You Need to Know About Web3

Digital art NFTs

I spent the last several weekends working on Buildspace projects. These projects are free learn-by-doing tutorials on building fully functional web3 applications – from writing smart contracts, deploying them onto the blockchain, to building the user interface that interacts with the smart contract.

The applications I learnt to build include a decentralised version of Twitter, a non-fungible token (NFT) generator (see the collection on OpenSea), and a simple game that uses NFTs to represent the game characters. Doing these projects have helped me connect the dots.

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Speeding Up Decentralised Finance (DeFi)

Photo by Edvin Richardson from Pexels

This is the third of a multi-part series on decentralised finance (DeFi). DeFi is a blockchain use case that is potentially disruptive to the traditional finance industry. The first part of the series explains what it is and the philosophy behind the movement. The second part of the series delves into the state of the DeFi ecosystem as of October 2020. A primer on blockchain (including examples of insurance use cases) is available in this paper I co-authored.

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Coinbase: Dino in a DeFi World?

Photo by Keenan Constance from Pexels

Coinbase’s imminent stock market debut has been a long time coming. It’s a fortuitous time for a crypto exchange to go public; at US$2 trillion (at time of writing), crypto-assets’ total market capitalisation is at an all-time high. The frothy market makes people trade with abandon, bestowing lucrative transaction revenue and custody fees (c. US$1.8 billion in Q1 2021) to Coinbase. In good times, it’s easy to overlook the risk factors listed on Coinbase’s S-1 filing. “No risk, no reward” is the mantra of the day.

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Decentralised Finance (DeFi): The Current State

London, the hub of traditional finance

This is the second of a multi-part series on decentralised finance (DeFi). DeFi is a blockchain use case that is potentially disruptive to the traditional finance industry. The first part of the series explains what it is and the philosophy behind the movement. A primer on blockchain (including examples of insurance use cases) is available in this paper I co-authored.

Continue reading →