Decentralized

I’ve been involved with blockchain since around 2018, with a tilt towards TradFi and enterprise use cases. In all that time, the thing that drew me in was never the price. Back in 2021 I wrote a post with the deliberately unhelpful title Don’t use blockchain. The argument was that blockchain is a bad database and a worse computer: slow, expensive, single-threaded by design. It has exactly one job worth paying that cost for: removing third-party risk. You stop having to trust that some operator keeps running the right software and doesn’t abuse their access. That’s it. Everything else you should minimize. ...

I’ve wanted to write a post on decentralized delta neutral yield strategies for a while, and with the Shapella fork behind us, it finally compelled me to get going. If you don’t know, the Shapella fork enable staking withdrawals on Ethereum mainnet, and it makes the case for LSDs more compelling as their market dynamics have now been greatly improved. What are LSDs? It’s short for Liquid Staking Derivatives and is a way to create derivatives on top of staked Ether. Hence, if you take Ether, stake it, you’re not just participating in the running of the Ethereum network, at the cost of capital lockups, but you’re also able to leverage this capital indirectly through LSDs in the broader DeFi ecosystem. ...

It’s obvious isn’t it? That we’re heading towards a decentralized future? It might be that it’s just obvious to me, since I’m so deeply involved in this, but the signs are everywhere. From Meta and Twitter collapsing, to oil being replaced by renewables. This shift is aligning us for a new mega trend, one which has been underway in many areas for many years, but now, with improvements in technology, finally enable us to take it all the way. ...