A systematic look at the DeFi insurance landscape, its structural constraints, and the design trade-offs shaping on-chain risk markets.
DeFi’s missing primitive: Insurance
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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...
Stablecoins are rails, not tokens
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After several years publishing as Fintech Ruminations, I am introducing a new name: Lombard Notes. The change reflects a broader focus, extending beyond fintech to the wider architecture of financial systems — from historical innovations to emerging digital markets. The content remains consistent in spirit, with only the name evolving. A few months ago, in my post Stablecoins 2.0, I suggested...
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.
Circle S-1 and the future of money
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Circle’s S-1 filing offers a window into the economics of the stablecoin industry.
The post dig deeper into Circle’s current success and explore if the same model can survive a changing financial topology.
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...
RWA#5 – All you need is Bond – Pt2
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The microcosm of DeFi has been highly successful in the last few years in creating a set of new financial rails based on a new paradigm. These financial rails have been extensively used by a niche of power users who played with them in many different ways, with the clear goal of speculating. So far, a very limited intersection exists between the new DeFi rails and off-chain economic...
RWA#3 – All You need is Bond
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Over the last few weeks different DeFi projects have emerged, offering customers the opportunity to get exposure to the most common traditional securities on the market: US Treasury Bills. The bridging of traditional securities on-chain is the clearest ongoing DeFi trend and this post aims to analyze the main projects and their impact on the evolution of the DeFi space. Convergence of on...
Against the hype: the story of Pix
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The post analyses PIX the new Instant Payment schemes launched in Brasil: its main characteristics, success factors, and the impact that a widely adopted centralized instant payment scheme will have on the Brazilian financial ecosystem.