Tag: Crypto
-
Premium-to-NAV, the Evolution of the Bitcoin Treasury Model, and the Case of LQWD
In what scenario would you spend $100 to acquire a freshly minted $50 bill? … there probably aren’t many. How about with a slight twist: In what scenario would you spend $100 to acquire $57 worth of Bitcoin? … in the open market, you likely won’t find this situation. But for the shareholders of MicroStrategy…
-
The MicroStrategy of Solana? Sol Strategies and the ‘Copy + Paste + Improve’ Formula
The beautiful thing about the crypto industry is its compounding nature. New ideas build upon old ideas thanks to the open-source ethos that is omnipresent in the space. Copy + Paste + Improve. That’s true for protocols themselves, where new assets improve upon old assets, new virtual machines (VMs) improve upon old VMs, and new…
-
Musings on Meme Coins: A Candy-Coated Version of Fintech Innovation
A few weeks ago, Fartcoin officially crossed the $1 billion market cap threshold. That either means the world has lost its mind, or something very interesting is going on under the hood in the innovation lab of Finance. Before meme stocks burst onto the scene with the Gamestop short squeeze in January 2021, there were…
-
The Perfect Speculative Product
Crypto is the perfect speculative product. It is always on, always liquid, and incredibly in your face. But imagine if other asset classes were this engaging. What if you could watch the market value of your home tick-by-tick, fluctuating tens of thousands of dollars every day? What if it was so easy to buy/sell homes…
-
Web3 Gateways: The App Store for Ownership
Question: where did the phrase “going down the rabbit hole” come from? Answer: It goes all the way back to Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” In the novel, Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a fantastical and surreal place filled with peculiar characters, magical creatures,…
-
David vs Goliath: When Advantage Tilts Toward Retail Investors
Retail or institutional, every market participant is unique. Renaissance Technologies is comprised of a cocktail of capabilities, expertise, and patient capital that others simply cannot match. Those characteristics are very different from a Millennial retail investor who stays active on investment forums, an insurance company that has to match assets to its liabilities, or a…
-
The Optionality Strategy: Microsoft, Fidelity and the Pursuit of Corporate Learning
Strategy is very rarely linear. We seldom start at Point A, aim at Point B, and call it a day. In fact, strategy is filled with randomness. Companies are complex adaptive systems sitting inside industries which behave in the same way. The arenas in which companies compete are always changing. They are occasionally reflexive and…
-
Open Beats Closed: Why Crypto Deserves Our Attention
What do someone from a large money center bank, a small local credit union, a mid-sized RIA, a fixed-income trading desk, and a payment services provider have in common? Well, it is the same thing everyone in finance has in common: they should be paying attention to crypto. Perhaps it is not at the top…
-
Financialization and the Edge of Financial Advice: Keeping Pace in a Fintech-forward World
We’ve all come across a similar story: one day Bob was fumbling around Twitter and bought an esoteric NFT. The next thing you know, Bob is a millionaire. If you’ve spent any time on crypto twitter, you know that a number of crypto millionaires have been minted since digital assets broke onto the scene over…
-
The Speculation Game: Industries at the Intersection of Risk and Culture
I do not count myself as a college basketball fan. In fact, I probably could not name a single player on a men’s NCAA team today. Yet, like approximately 80 million other people, I completed a bracket before the March Madness tournament kicked off last Thursday. The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament forms a…
Paper & Blocks 