Like many of you, we were surprised to see the rapid collapse of FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. The complete details of what happened will take a while to unravel. We already know it’s not good. But we also know that crypto is bigger than any single company, no matter how large. And given what we’re discovering, it’s better this collapse happened now, and not years from now.
Read moreGyroscope Thesis
Nearly four years after releasing our MakerDAO thesis, we believe another stablecoin, this one powered by Gyroscope, has the potential to complement Maker & DAI’s formidable achievements. With the US government proposing to ban “endogenously collateralized stablecoins,” crypto would do well to get more serious about resilient, decentralized stablecoin designs, if it doesn’t want to eventually rely on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) or centralized stablecoins for stable value transfer. Everything in the Gyroscope protocol has been designed with long-term stability in mind, from the resilience and liquidity of its decentralized stablecoins, to the forms of governance that are implemented to sustain the system.
Read moreMiddlemachines
To understand Web3, one needs to recognize not only how it aims to differ from the previous generation of web-based services, but also the functional equivalence between traditional and digital bureaucratization, or manual vs. automated bureaucracies. Both are based on formal rules of procedure (protocol) but whereas the former relies on human intermediaries (‘middlemen’) to perform administrative functions such as keeping information records and facilitating transactions in reference to these records, the latter pushes humans to the edges by replacing manual administration with computers and software. This results in more technological intermediation or, as I’ve come to call it, middlemachines.
Read more