Presentation in which I explore stablecoins beyond narrow banking - and what it would take to reconnect money and credit onchain
Stablecoins beyond narrow banking
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DeFi’s missing primitive: Insurance
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A systematic look at the DeFi insurance landscape, its structural constraints, and the design trade-offs shaping on-chain risk markets.
Fractional Reserve Banking onchain
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Stablecoins are, in essence, the first large-scale experiment in narrow banking. Every USDC or USDT is (or supposed to be) fully backed by reserves – cash or short-term Treasuries – sitting safely off-chain. This architecture is what makes these tokens stable, but it also sterilizes capital: every dollar deposited creates no new credit, no new economic activity. In contrast, the...
Commodities onchain: gold and beyond
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Gold is going on-chain. Paxos and Tether lead today, but new platforms are building the rails that could turn commodities into the next generation of DeFi collateral.
Not All Tokens Are Equal: The Legal Wrappers Behind Tokenization
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Tokenization promises “stocks on-chain,” but the legal wrapper decides what you actually hold. This post compares Robinhood, Securitize, and Backed to show how different wrappers translate into very different rights for investors.
The mechanics of a Tokenization Engine
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This post outlines the core components of a tokenization engine and highlights the legal and ecosystem factors that will shape its real-world viability, especially as traditional assets like US equities begin to move onchain.
Stablecoins 2.0
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Stablecoins, led by Tether (USDT) and USDC, now total $180 billion, with new entrants like yield-bearing stablecoins, PayPal's PYUSD, Agora and M0 trying to disrupt the market.
While USDT and USDC dominate, blockchain’s true potential could lead to disruptive changes in the future of money.
The legal Operative System of DeFi: Tau Finance
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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...
Memecoins: something more than speculation?
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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
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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...