First, I think companies that don’t like certain laws should still comply with them while campaigning for change. That said, one interpretation of the government’s suit and the resulting mammoth settlement is that by refusing to implement compliance schemes like AML & CFT, Binance failed to stop money laundering and…

Sam Bankman-Fried’s recent conviction inspired many front page stories, most of which read like obituaries. Not just of his time as a free man but also the broader dreams of crypto. It all makes me laugh because none of this will matter in the long run. The afroed and acronymed…

Stablecoins aren’t usually funny, but this tale might make you laugh out loud. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine recently noted that he feels like Tether will someday be an incredibly interesting story, but he’s not sure what it is. Here’s one plotline: Tether is the most successful product and company in…

PayPal issuing its own stablecoin is big, marking a major milestone in the continuing evolution of crypto. It legitimizes the notion of payments moving on chain more than any blog or book (however well-written) ever could and is another step towards mass adoption. For years, skeptics of the very idea…

Central Bank Digital Currencies have receded from the headlines after their post-Libra peak, but research continues in the background in many jurisdictions, particularly Europe. The headline discussion often has a political bent to it, but this was always going to happen. …

The following is an excerpt from Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets and Platforms. One of the most important services that commercial banks provide is the practice of maturity transformation, otherwise known as borrowing short term and lending long term. Although we don’t…

I spent the weekend at the ETH Denver crypto developer conference and left feeling rejuvenated. Thousands of energetic young people, fueled by the desire to build something new and better, converging in one place to learn, code, debate and innovate. Attendance was twice last year’s event, and there was little…

If you’ve never seen the movie “There Will Be Blood” starring Daniel Day Lewis, then now might be a good time. Based loosely on an Upton Sinclair novel that satirizes the early days of the oil industry, it portrays the life of an independent oil man who rises to great…

Markets are like children. They can only learn the most important lessons the hard way, by making mistakes and suffering the consequences. One of my earliest memories is of a visit to a local park with my father and my sister. This park had a big fountain full of fish…