The first part of this year the crypto space has been characterized by a sudden and – in many cases – unexpected, bull market. Prices returned to all-time highs very quickly, and the most important narrative fuelling this phenomenon is staking, particularly through its most advanced evolution, which is restaking. The goal of this post is to explain to a non-crypto user what...
Artificial Intelligence is currently one of the most discussed technological trends and its impact on our society is expected to be significant. For this reason, we have decided to launch a monthly bulletin focused on key AI events within the financial sector. This bulletin will feature a curated selection of news, papers, and articles designed to keep you informed about AI developments without...
Alternative lenders are generally considered a low interest rate phenomenon: when interest rates are low, money is cheap, so alternative lenders can compete with banks because their cost of capital is comparable to the cost of capital of banks. Then, when the interest rates regime changes, things get much tougher: cost of capital for alternative lenders rises and it becomes increasingly difficult...
While its importance is often underestimated even by practitioners, liquidity – i.e. the ease of converting an asset into cash – is one of the most important concepts in finance. From my point of view, liquidity and, in particular, the ability to bootstrap and guarantee a qualitatively better liquidity is the most appealing characteristic of the blockchain-based markets. The...
The microcosm of DeFi has been highly successful in the last few years in creating a set of new financial rails based on a new paradigm. These financial rails have been extensively used by a niche of power users who played with them in many different ways, with the clear goal of speculating. So far, a very limited intersection exists between the new DeFi rails and off-chain economic...
In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings. He was depicted as having two faces looking in opposite directions, symbolizing his ability to look both to the future and the past. Janus offers the perfect metaphor to solve one of the most important pieces of crypto infrastructure: on/off-ramp. In the context of crypto, an on/off-ramp refers to the channels through...
Over the last few weeks different DeFi projects have emerged, offering customers the opportunity to get exposure to the most common traditional securities on the market: US Treasury Bills. The bridging of traditional securities on-chain is the clearest ongoing DeFi trend and this post aims to analyze the main projects and their impact on the evolution of the DeFi space. Convergence of on...
A blockchain is a fully deterministic system meaning that, given the history of the system, it can be replayed in another machine achieving the same results. Essentially it is a machine that, given the same inputs, will always provide the same outputs. This is a very powerful property, because it allows users to store information of different nature safely, with a very limited risk of data...
From my humble point of view, the most interesting piece of financial innovation in circulation today is what a small group of decentralized finance startups is doing: trying to bring real world assets on-chain. Roman style mosaic of robot lending money – DALL-E What these companies are doing is fascinating, and yet extremely challenging at the same time. They are trying to migrate...
The goal of this post is to provide a deep-dive in one of these decentralised credit marketplaces Credix, to analyze its capital-markets-as-a-service proposition and contextualize it in the wider lending space.