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...
The awakening of the sleeping giant: Bitcoin Defi
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...
Staking 101
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...
It’s all about liquidity
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...
2032: Financial Tales from planet Earth
The post imagines what the future of finance will be in 2032. It follows the life of a fictional character - John - and analyses how four major trends redefine his financial life.
The disintermediation of finance
Why (in italian perché) has always been my favorite word. Why, in my opinion, is the most powerful word we have, as it allows us to uncover the real essence of things. It is the key to understanding causality, one of the pillars of the scientific method. The goal of this post is to ignore buzzwords and a blind deterministic approach, which permeates crypto, and try and understand why DeFi...
What if a crypto currency becomes the mainstream payment method?
What if a crypto currency or a native digital currency becomes the mainstream payment method?
The post investigate the scenario of a digital currency becoming the main mean of payment and its implications on the wider financial ecosystem.
Beyonce and Monet: the first mass market app for DeFi
Over the last few months, the Decentralized Finance ecosystem has grown at an impressive pace: every single metric you can look at shows double digits growth on a month by month basis. DeFi Users over time – source: Dune Analytics This is a great achievement, but it is a fact that so far speculation or high risk financial incentives have been the main adoption drivers for Defi (and the...
Bitcoin and the hierarchy of money
Over this quarantine, I’ve decided to invest some time in a renowned Coursera course on Banking. The course is great and one of the core concepts of the class is the Hierarchy of Money. Being myself very interested in cryptocurrency, I’d like to explore in this post where Bitcoin sits in this hierarchy. First of all, what is the hierarchy of money? Even though every dollar looks the...