(boring pie chart) When my father dropped me off at college, just before he left for the drive home, he said to me “I wish I was where you are now, knowing what I know now”. I am sure it is a sentiment that anyone over a certain age has experienced, but it occurred to me that this is a pattern in everything, not just personal experience. Take finance. It is obvious now that financial services will be tokenised. Consumers may not see it, or even know it, but the financial prod

Tokenisation of financial assets provides a new transaction layer on top of the nation state stack layers of governance, regulation, and financial infrastructure. These layers underpin our financial and economic systems, and the implications of this technology will be felt all the way down. The Nation State Stack Paul McCartney once said that when he came up with the tune for Yesterday, he wandered round for a month wondering where he had stolen it from. I have been using the

I am fascinated by the adoption of new technologies, especially in financial services, which is where I have spent the vast majority of my working life. There are a thousand versions of the picture above, from washing machines to the numbers of users on new blockchains. The curves always get steeper. We can imagine paths to future scenarios But I don't think the adoption process can miss out steps. If you want to get to a point where something has happened, e.g. we are all us

“ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets; step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial...

Chapter 4 in a series "How to Think About Blockchains". This is the fourth chapter in an ongoing series. The first was about how we think...

Chapter 3 in a series " How to Think About Blockchains ". The first thing blockchains disrupted was money. Understanding what money is and how blockchain based money works is a great way of understanding some of the impacts of blockchains. This article digs into some details of where money came from, the types and forms of money, and its functions, all from a blockchain perspective. History It is easy to succumb to what CS Lewis called "the snobbery of chronology", and assume

Chapter 2 in a series "How to Think About Blockchains" On 31st October, 2008, a pseudonymous person calling themself Satoshi Nakamoto...

One of the common questions about crypto and digital assets relates to the regulation and legality thereof. This is absolutely right - if...

Crypto and DeFi are changing the financial system, but it's a very complicated system, so it's hard to predict how this change will...

I have written before about the process of adoption of blockchain technology, and how it needs a combination of domain, or commercial,...

When Europeans and Americans talk about financial services in Africa, the enlightened ones are increasingly coming to realise that they,...