Last year, I wrote a post defining the most important component of a banking stack. This post is the complement to that one, and i describes the core elements of a modern lending stack, adding some new DeFi pieces to the architecture.
Compound, the DeFi money market
Compound is a money market protocol that allows users to lend and borrow crypto-assets in a global, permission-less, transparent and very rapid way, without a middleman.
The post presents an analysis of the protocol's main logics and its position in the DeFi Space.
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.
Core Banking 101
The deck presents the main elements of a core banking solution, its history and some guidance on the make vs buy choice of this solution.
A tale of two ecosystems: Square 10K
Starting from latest Square 10K, I investigate the dual nature of this business, analysing the 2 ecosystems that Square built: merchant and consumer.
How tokens could revolutionise the creators economy
A post on the impact on artists' financial life of a new token-based economy.
My thesis is that the sector’s structure and dynamics will be completely reshaped by the tokenization of the creators' revenue stream and their sale to a plethora of investors/fans. And that this model will be potentially applicable to other categories
The Apple moment for financial services
The argument of this post is that the Apple moment for financial services is coming and a new generation of fintech startups, built on engagement and coolness factor, is emerging very rapidly.
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...
The Amazonization of retail payments
The phenomenon of “Amazonization” refers to the wholesale disruption occurring across retail and eCommerce thanks to the leviathan-like presence of Amazon.com. Considering the platform shift happening in the retail payment space, I believe the same phenomenon of ‘Amazonization’ that happened to eCommerce will eventually happen to the retail Payments space. In this post you will find an...
A neobank stack
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time building lending and banking stacks. What used to require vast resources only 10 years ago, is today a much simpler and more inexpensive job, thanks to the enormous number of financial infrastructure businesses born in the last decade. The goals of the following 2 posts are: to highlight which are the key functional components of these stacks, to...