This week, we consider the impact of financial infrastructure collapse and who really gets hurt through the lens of Wirecard, Enron, and Lehman Brothers. Yes, there are investors in the entity that will lose value. But there are also clients and counterparties of Wirecard, like Curve, Revolut, and Crypto.com. In the case of Lehman, there was a $40 trillion derivatives notional amount that took twenty years to wind down. We also consider the most recent $500,000 hacking in DeFi of an automated market maker to see if there are common threads to be drawn between the two worlds.
Let me introduce you to MMM. While decentralized finance and digital asset companies bend over backwards to be customer centric and reform financial services (each in their own way), MMM is a pretender. It is a pretender that has stolen the language of the crypto economy to create a cancer in its body.
Cryptodecentralized financedigital lendingenterprise blockchainentrepreneurshipfixed incomeneobankroboadvisor
·Mike Cagney is the Co-Founder and CEO of Figure, a full stack financial services blockchain company with consumer offerings in market or on the way in lending, banking and more. In late-2019, Figure raised $103 million at a $1.2 billion valuation and continues to grow.
Prior to starting Figure, Mike co-founded and ran SoFi, one of the most successful consumer fintech companies ever.
In this conversation, we discuss Figure’s routes to asset origination and capital markets disruption, Figure’s previously unannounced consumer banking and payments offering, lessons learned building and scaling multiple billion dollar companies and more.
Looking into the statistics of gambling is illuminating and depressing. The UK, where gambling is more widely accepted than in the US, sees rates of 40-60% across all adults according to 2016 research. Revenues for casinos are over $100 billion annually, and global gambling revenues, including sports betting and the national lotteries, amount to over $400 billion. That's like the equivalent of the entire software cloud industry. And it asymmetrically addicts and disadvantages the already disadvantaged (see academic research here, here, and here).
Welcome back to the Fintech Blueprint podcast. Today we share a panel recording that Lex moderated with Steven Becker, President and COO of MakerDAO, and Lucas Vogelsang, CEO and Co-Founder of Centrifuge.
The session was hosted at LendIt Fintech Digital, a vibrant community of Fintech and banking leaders.
This week, we look at:
The 10% collapse in GDP across the US & Eurozone, and how it compares with China's second quarter
The geopolitical battle over TikTok, its alleged spying, and understanding the winners and losers of the Microsoft deal
A framework for how to win in open source competition, explaining both Shenzhen manufacturing success and decentralized finance growth to $4 billion
In this conversation, we go through the essentials of Decentralized Finance with Kerman Kohli, who is a serial entrepreneur and the writer of the DeFi Weekly newsletter. We discuss the mechanics of issuing stablecoins, decentralized lending, decentralized exchange, automated market makers, and the increasing complexity of synthetic assets that have grown the sector to nearly $7 billion in August of 2020.
This week, we get philosophical and look at:
Embedded finance and how it will be woven into the fabric of the Internet
Applying the philosophies of existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism to Finance
Parsing symptoms in decentralized finance (Based Protocol) as artistic protest
Finding Dadaist beauty in chaos
In this conversation, we talk with Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo and expert technologist about custody, prime brokerage, and the evolution of the institutional digital asset industry.
I often mention that crypto is still all about capital markets trading (i.e., manufacturing) and not about wealth management (i.e., distribution). This conversation touches on where we are in the maturity of market infrastructure, the role of fiduciaries, and the path forward. If you are sitting in a RIA, investment fund, or other asset manager, pay attention!
The main driver of today's entry is the news -- which has largely percolated -- that ConsenSys acquired Quorum from J.P. Morgan, as well as received an investment from the bank in the company. There is a lot of jargon in the blockchain industry, and I want to try to pull this news apart to explain why it is interesting both to incumbent financial services players, as well as meaningful to the developing decentralized finance industry.