Money used to be issued and enabled by single entities: your bank creates money by lending against fractional reserves, it controls your experience with it, and facilitates its use. With stablecoins, this whole stack is getting unbundled. The problem is that version 1 of stablecoins had everything bundled together, and so that – and our acquired instinct for how banks work – has shaped how we think about stablecoins. This gives us a set of intuitions about stablecoins and the

(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

First we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. Money is one of those tools, and one that is in the process of being reshaped by tokenisation. This process was precipitated by the creation of bitcoin, and has now spread to other forms of tokenised money on blockchains, and to other assets of value. With many different types of value represented on blockchains, and with efficient exchange between them, the way that money and value integrate with our lives will cha

This is the final article in a commitment device /  series  that I proposed a while ago, "How to think about blockchains". The first five articles covered firstly how we think about change generally, then bitcoin and what it means, the developing nature of money, tokenising everything, and blockchain based identity. Each of these is just an introduction to its subject. Writing an article about the future is almost by definition an introduction, but is also asking for trouble:

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