Every May, the blockchain and crypto industry gets together for a week of announcements, hype, and lambo giveaways. In this live recording, Jill and Meltem provide a retrospective on years past and discuss how this year’s “Blockchain Week” differs. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, an ...…

You can’t talk about bitcoin for ten minutes without having someone bemoan the lack of a bitcoin ETF. In this live episode, we talk about the history of pooled investment vehicles, why they’ve grown exponentially over the last two decades, and why US firms are so fascinated by making bitcoin, which is friendly to retail, more friendly for insti ...…

Markets are the beating heart of the financial system. As new asset classes emerge and markets get built, the questions are often the same: who should be able to participate in markets? How should trades get executed? And what are the tradeoffs we make with each of these decisions? Small differences in architecture here are going to effect the ...…

Episode Description: What the heck is a tether and why is everyone always talking about it? This week, we untangle what’s going on with Tether, Bitfinex, and their affiliated banks, and why this topic keeps coming up. We also delve into collateralization, fractional reserve banking, and of course, market liquidity. ----- Since 2015, Consensus h ...…

Media about crypto has been at best confusing and at worst blatantly and deliberately wrong. It bounces back and forth between utopian, unrealistic hype which oversells the technology and grim, depressing tales of doom, destruction, terrorist financing, and tax evasion. So what's actually fact, and what is FUD? ----- Since 2015, Consensus has b ...…

How do you figure out if you’re any good at investing? How do you decide if you made the best choices possible in picking stocks, bonds, or crypto assets to buy? In the wild world of finänce, defining and measuring the performance of an investment is as much an art as it is a science. In this episode, we delve into some of the theory and practi ...…

Forks, or chain splits, are some of the most dramatic events in cryptocurrency. In this episode we untangle how we think about them. Are they like stock splits? Dividends? Or is it more like owning a cow that gives birth to a surprise and potentially unwanted baby? From great schisms to evolutionary theory, we’re covering everything you need to ...…

This week, we dive into liquidity, a word whose blatant abuse really grinds our gears! We break down what liquidity *actually* means in markets, for companies, and for individual assets, and the role of market participants and market structure in managing this flow. We then translate this over into crypto land, and examine some common misconcep ...…

This week we are talking about prediction markets. Tune in to hear about the history of prediction markets, their applications across governance and finance, and how they are getting implemented as decentralized marketplaces. From gambling to synthetic derivatives to assassination markets, we will be covering the good, the bad, and the ugly. -- ...…

This week, we delve into crypto seasons and how winter isn’t actually winter at all but the dawn of a new age. New species are emerging, and old species are on the verge of going extinct (well, bankrupt). We also do some soul searching and ask - what if the best use case for crypto today is replicating existing market structures? You can find o ...…

Innovation theater: a performance enacted by a big corporate incumbent to demonstrate it is still fresh, innovative, and on the cutting edge, often without any real value add to the firm. This week we are exploring enterprises and their experimentation with blockchain. We talk about where it’s gone wrong in the past and where it might be going ...…

This week, we're diving deep into the rise of surveillance capitalism, it’s slow and steady creep into the heart of the crypto community, and what that might mean for our cypherpunk dreams of privacy. You can find our extended show notes on Medium. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, an ...…

If you turned on CNBC at any point during 2018, you’ll know that lots of startups and entrepreneurs used initial coin offerings (ICOs) to raise funding. Well, it turns out that countries also got into the game. In this episode, we explore the use of “initial country offerings” or the issuance of tokens to raise debt for a country, on the blockc ...…

One of the key innovations of bitcoin is that it solves something called the double spend problem. This means that every bitcoin is provably scarce — it can’t exist in two peoples’ wallets at the same time. This is a big deal because it’s actually pretty hard to make sure digital files don’t get reproduced and propogated. Just think of what Nap ...…

In past episodes, hosts Meltem Demirors and Jill Carlson have touched on crypto business models, crypto asset classifications, and governance as both a function and a business. These topics are ultimately shaped by how a project chooses to raise capital. In this episode, we explore the various models that have been used by teams to fund develop ...…

In this episode, hosts Meltem Demirors and Jill Carlson cover the nebulous and thorny topic of crypto governance mechanisms and the merging of politics and finance in the form of on-chain governance via token voting and staking. We draw from the history of politics, going all the way back to the romans, and fast forward to the drama and intrigu ...…

One of crypto’s favorite narratives has always been that it can help people in places where their local currency is being debased. Venezuela, with its 1,000,000% inflation rate and political instability, has been a prime topic of conversation. As the situation in Venezuela unravels further, Jill and Meltem bring you up to speed on what’s going ...…

The story around crypto is broken. For many investors crypto has been about pattern matching, but the search for the “next Bitcoin” or the “next Ethereum” is not working as well as many would have hoped. In this episode we discuss some other frameworks for thinking about crypto assets and explore their old school financial equivalents, from gol ...…

Crypto revolution or evolution? Regulatory arbitrage, cat and mouse games, and decentralization theater are all core parts of how the cryptocurrency industry is currently run. But what happens over the long run? In this episode, we look at whether “revolutions need rules”, what the role of regulators is in crypto, and how institutions are and a ...…

What are all these cryptocurrencies actually worth? We break down a number of perspectives on how to unpack this issue. From balance sheet issues to legal rights of holders to liquidity matters, there is a lot to consider as the crypto world goes about trying to mark prices on its portfolios of private presales, ICOs, SAFTs, zombiecoins, and il ...…

We put the crypto bubble in the context of the broader markets. Are we entering a global macro unwind? Is the decline cryptocurrencies just the canary in the coal mine of a bigger risk-off market move and deleveraging? We unpack some of the dynamics going on from the psychological to the technical and analyze the fallout as all kinds of bubbles ...…