Good morning,

Apologies for delays this week. SIM swap took the wind out of my sails at the start of the week. I’m all good now thanks to everybody who checked in.

Crazy week of news between Binance US (and geofencing everywhere else), tokens on lightning network, and GlobalCoin murmurs. Will be focusing on GlobalCoin today but will probably touch on the other two next week.

Cheers, Tony

■■■■■

GlobalCoin

While I try to maintain a strong sense of epistemic humility, I’ve managed to maintain a strong and consistent view on a couple things in crypto:

  1. Everybody has an incentive to be the issuer of a token (and many will)
  2. The critical questions to ask about tokens are “who has power” and “where does value accrue.”

In March, I wrote:

For anybody who wants power (everybody), there’s clear incentive to issue a coin. And anybody in the position to instantly get users of their coin probably should (that is, its in their interest to, not that its the best thing for them to contribute to the universe). Money is a network effect thing–it needs users and believers to work. Anybody with a captive audience they can use to bootstrap a network squanders an opportunity by not issuing a coin.

This followed some thinking about JPM Coin and Gemini Coin. USDC shortly thereafter and Binance Chain more recently.

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If you aren’t already familiar with my work, I write long-form analyses on building and investing in crypto, and the impact of crypto on society.

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Member updates

June 27, 2019

Pricing vs valuing cryptoassets (plus EdgeWare ROI model)

June 20, 2019

Libra versus the state and lessons from the Algorand auction

June 14, 2019

Who has power over Facebook's GlobalCoin?