Beyond Speculation and Stablecoins: Crypto's Next Phase?

Variant had its annual investor meeting on Tuesday. I shared the below ideas in my keynote update on the market:Crypto is exiting what I would describe as a consolidation phase of the industry that has lasted the better part of the last 2 years. During this consolidation, there’s…Read More

The next ten years of smart contract blockchains

The first ten years of smart contract blockchains were born of bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: censorship resistance, open source, permissionlessness, and a new glimmer of building a democratic/equitable internet on top of a shared world computer. Today, those ideological values are meeting with market pressure, because the mainstream…Read More

All media onchain: crypto as a port of entry.

My crypto journey started with a startup in 2014 (Mediachain)—we wanted to put all the world's media onchain. What we believed then, I still believe now: onchain media allows media to simultaneously be abundant, distributed everywhere—and also valuable, with attribution for creators, provenance for collectors, and programmability for…Read More

Libraries vs. Networks

Library: a stateless code pattern/schema. The success of a library can be measured by the number of times it is copy/pasted, replicated, re-deployed, and custom tuned. This is the tested and true thing that open source does well. Examples: Linux, ERC721. But as the history of open source…Read More

“Web 2.0” vs. “Web3”

In 2006, Paul Graham wrote a great post wherein he concluded that Web 2.0 was a credible term because it meant “using the web the way it's meant to be used.” I think this is a good lens to interpret the term Web3, and why it is still a…Read More