Understanding Cryptocurrency Basics

I'm pleased to share my academic paper, which explores a question increasingly relevant for central banks and policymakers: Does retail cryptocurrency adoption influence how quickly countries advance their CBDC initiatives? Retail cryptocurrency adoption is not just a trend; it is a policy signal. Key insights: - Higher crypto adoption is linked to faster CBDC development - A new DAU-based metric captures real user behavior - Results remain robust across multiple econometric approaches (IV, CMP, matching) - Regulation and tax disincentives weaken the response - Strong auditing and reporting frameworks strengthen it Takeaway: CBDCs are increasingly emerging as a strategic response to private digital money, a “competitive public option” dynamic. Read the full paper: https://lnkd.in/d5SmcdXA #CBDC #Cryptocurrency #CentralBanking #FinTech #DigitalCurrency #Research #Policy #Centralbanks

Discussions around blockchain are shaped more by myths than by a grounded understanding of its architecture and use cases. This is something I have encountered regularly, both in conversations with clients and while reading public commentary. There is a tendency to associate blockchain exclusively with cryptocurrencies, to expect immutability as an absolute guarantee, or to consider it inherently superior to traditional databases. These ideas spread easily but do not reflect how the technology actually works or how it should be applied. Blockchain is not a monolith. It is a flexible structure with strengths that emerge in particular contexts, especially where trust is limited or intermediaries are absent. Yet these strengths come with trade-offs that require thoughtful design, rigorous analysis, and realistic expectations. A deeper understanding of blockchain begins when we move beyond simplified claims and start evaluating each use case with precision. This includes not only the technical setup, but also the social, economic, and governance aspects that surround the system. Clarity, more than hype, helps to define the path forward. #Blockchain #DigitalTrust #Decentralization #DataIntegrity #Web3

Breaking Down the Crypto Growth Funnel ✅ Awareness / Lead Generation Like in any funnel, awareness is the starting point. You’ll measure reach and CAC, but the key challenge is filtering hype from genuine intent—are users curious, or ready to commit? ✅ KOLs & Influencers Not all influence converts. Paying a random KOL rarely drives authentic engagement, especially if their audience doesn’t trust the endorsement. Instead, partner with aligned micro-influencers or internal experts who naturally advocate for your project. ✅ Advertising Crypto ads face restrictions from Google, Meta, and others, plus community skepticism due to scammy ad formats. Yet, marketers find success on X, Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn, or even crypto-native platforms like Brave ads, Spindl (in Coinbase/Base), and Farcaster MiniApps. Some even optimize content for AI search visibility—a new acquisition frontier. ✅ Referrals Referral programs thrive in crypto because rewards are instant and onchain, creating transparent and aligned incentives. Projects like Blackbird turn referrals into lasting loyalty loops and community engagement. Word-of-mouth is a core driver—users evangelize products they genuinely enjoy. You can track this via Net Promoter Score (NPS) or signup surveys. In crypto, referrals form an inverted funnel: users bring in more users, powering compounding network effects. ✅ Tokens as a Growth Driver Tokens remain the most distinctive growth lever. They attract users, developers, and liquidity—helping projects overcome the cold-start problem. While speculation isn’t the goal, rising token prices can signal community strength and momentum, making ecosystems more attractive to builders. ✅ Consideration / Interest This stage is where education wins. Crypto decisions—buying tokens, staking, or using wallets—require trust and understanding. That’s why players like Coinbase Learn or Alchemy University invest heavily in educational content. Effective education goes beyond features; it explains security, governance, tokenomics, and usability. Interactive onboarding, tooltips, demo environments, and testnets help users explore safely before committing. Smart teams also optimize for LLM visibility, ensuring AI tools can reference their documentation. Qualified interest is shown not by clicks but actions of intent—joining a waitlist with a wallet or depositing test funds. ✅ Conversion Conversion means completing the intended action—downloading a wallet, buying a token, or deploying code. Define it precisely for your goals and track by channel to optimize ROI. Attribution is tougher in crypto, where users move from offchain to onchain. New tools like Addressable now link campaigns to wallet actions, offering a clearer view of performance. While web2 tracking faces privacy hurdles, onchain transparency (without exposing identity) provides an edge: crypto marketers can finally see how awareness turns into real, measurable adoption. Source: a16z

Very grateful to the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable for featuring our article on the treatment of digital assets in insolvency! 😊 The collapse of crypto-exchanges and the growing use of digital assets in many corporate transactions have sparked numerous discussions about their treatment in insolvency. While much of the academic literature in this area has focused on whether cryptocurrencies constitute property of the estate, in this piece, whose summary has been published on the Oxford Business Law Blog, Aurelio Gurrea-Martínez, Daniel Liu and I seek to provide a comprehensive analysis of the treatment of digital assets in insolvency, analyzing questions such as: 📌 The classification of cryptoassets from different angles, including law (particularly through the lens of property law and securities regulation), finance, and accounting, and how different jurisdictions around the world have dealt with similar legal questions, such as whether cryptoassets can be classified as ‘property’ or a ‘security’. 📌 Whether crypto-represented debt should count for the purpose of assessing whether debtors and creditors can initiate insolvency proceedings. 📌 The role and rights of the holders of digital assets in insolvency proceedings, and how the answer to this question may affect key aspects of the procedure, including the fate of the insolvent firm. 📌 Valuation of cryptoassets in insolvency proceedings, distinguishing situations in which the debtor has cryptoassets that represent an asset, a liability, or both. 📌 The custody, recovery and realisation of digital assets. 📌 How cryptocurrencies can be used to engineer creative restructuring solutions, as shown by certain cases in the United States and Singapore. The summary of our paper can be found here 👇 https://lnkd.in/dRexkWpA   And here (for an extended summary published on the Oxford Business Law Blog) 👇   https://lnkd.in/dzdA5gyZ For those potentially interested, our full paper can be found here 👇 https://lnkd.in/dmZ_tb_a Our sincere gratitude to the editorial team of the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable for the opportunity to share our research and receive comments and feedback from anyone interested in this fascinating area at the intersection of law, finance and technology! https://lnkd.in/dRexkWpA Singapore Management University SMU Yong Pung How School of Law SMU Centre for Commercial Law in Asia (CCLA) SMU Centre for Digital Law WongPartnership LLP #law #finance #technology #crypto #insolvency #valuation #innovation #entrepreneurship #bankruptcy #fintech  

Every major academic framework for analyzing Bitcoin has a blind spot. Yermack (2015) argued it fails as a currency. Böhme et al. (2015) framed it as a financial risk vector. De Vries (2018) reduced the entire protocol to an energy consumption problem. Catalini and Gans (2020) analyzed it through the lens of transaction cost economics. Each lens captured a fragment. None captured the pattern because the pattern is not monetary. It is strategic. Consider what happened in the last three years alone: The United States established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by executive order. Bhutan had been quietly mining Bitcoin with hydroelectric power, accumulating over $1 billion without ever making a public announcement. More than 145 publicly traded companies now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets, collectively exceeding one million BTC. No mainstream academic model predicted any of this. Not one. One framework did. In 2023, Jason Lowery submitted a thesis to MIT System Design and Management program, supervised by Joan Rubin, Bryan Moser. His argument was simple and radical: Bitcoin is not money. It is a power projection technology rooted in thermodynamic proof of work. He called it Softwar. https://lnkd.in/eT6EbdZr The thesis generated debate. It also generated a gap. Plenty of opinions. Almost no empirical testing. This paper fills that gap. I derived nine falsifiable predictions from the Softwar framework and tested each one against observed data: 5 confirmed. 1 partially realized. 3 still unfolding. All within three years of publication. The result is striking. The phenomena that Yermack, Böhme, De Vries, and Catalini never accounted for (strategic reserves, sovereign mining, geopolitical competition for hash rate) are precisely what the power projection framework predicts. And the timing of this work is not incidental. We are less than 10 days from the 20 millionth Bitcoin being mined. The final millionth has begun. From this point forward, every unit becomes exponentially more costly to produce while nation states, institutions, and corporations converge on the same finite supply. If the power projection thesis is correct, the asymmetry between current valuation and strategic significance may never be this wide again. The pre-print paper is open access (CC-BY 4.0). It is built to be challenged. https://lnkd.in/eU-hikvt #Bitcoin #Softwar #PowerProjection #ProofOfWork #Geopolitics #StrategicReserves #DigitalSovereignty

I think we’re watching a quiet shift in real time: LinkedIn is starting to replace Crypto Twitter (CT) for serious crypto conversations. X is still the fastest place to catch narratives, but it’s increasingly dominated by bot activity, low-effort engagement loops, and hype cycles that drown out the people actually building. Even when you share real analysis or education, reach can feel unpredictable. LinkedIn is doing the opposite. It rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility. It’s where founders meet partners, where teams hire, where investors and operators pay attention, and where regulation and real-world adoption are discussed without needing to “perform” for the algorithm. To be clear: this isn’t about being anti-X. It’s about the industry growing up. If crypto is going to be taken seriously at scale, we need stronger public spaces for: -education and market literacy -real product updates -thoughtful debate -professional networking LinkedIn can become that lane for Web3. Curious: Do you still find CT useful for signals, or are you shifting your attention to LinkedIn for higher-quality crypto conversations?

None of us in blockchain were surprised over the holidays when friends and family started asking, “How do I get involved in crypto?” It’s a conversation shift we’ve been watching unfold. In the past, the questions were about what is it or is it a scam. Today, the focus is far more practical: • How do I manage wealth in digital assets? • Who can guide me if my bank doesn’t offer digital asset strategies? This marks a pivotal moment — not just for individuals, but for institutions. A recent survey by Sygnum Bank found that 57% of institutional investors are bullish on crypto, and over half plan to increase their cryptocurrency allocations. The dialogue is no longer about the basics; it’s about how blockchain and DeFi can play a key role in wealth management. Structured products are emerging as the next evolution — organized, sophisticated tools that integrate digital assets into broader financial strategies. These innovations are positioning blockchain not only as a technology, but as a critical component of long-term wealth management. Opportunities for financial inclusion are what initially drew me to blockchain. This shift in conversations — from “Why should I care?” to “How do I start?” — is one I’m truly excited to embrace.