A common pattern of innovation in technology is to carve out a piece of infrastructure present in a big number of companies, specialise on it, productize it and turn it into a service. This is what Amazon did with AWS in the computing space. But many other companies are trying to apply the same playbook to several other segments. For example, two years ago I presented Credix, which is...
The most successful narrative in the crypto space in 2024 is with very little doubt the one about memecoins (source: Dune dashboard by @cryptokoryo_research). Memecoins’ performance has clearly outpaced RWAs and L2s narratives, achieving an aggregated market cap of almost $50B (as of July 30, 2024), with an all-time high of almost $70B. This number is stunning considering that these tokens...
Bitcoin, undeniably the poster child of the cryptocurrency movement and the most important coin by market cap size, is often viewed within the crypto ecosystem as a stable yet unexciting platform with few new developments. Although Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, real innovation has been occurring elsewhere, notably on Ethereum. Thus, the narrative that has developed around Bitcoin portrays...
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...
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...