One of the dominant narratives in DeFi is that regular people will be compelled to move their fiat into DeFi because of high yields. Empirically, this is true — lending rates for stablecoins on Compound today are >10% APY, and there are multiple “yield farming” opportunities with anywhere from 50%…

Every year, we get slightly more clarity into understanding what blockchains are actually useful for — from supporting new types of money to coordinating humans via blockchain-based programs. We have seen some applications explode in prominence and others fail, and we are gradually getting better at discerning real from fake…

In 1945, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote a seminal essay titled The Use of Knowledge in Society. In this essay, Hayek invites us to consider a world where all information is known to a single mind. In this world, the problem of allocating resources efficiently in society would simply be…

There has been a lot of discussion about the differences between Cosmos and Polkadot, two projects focused on blockchain interoperability. If you are unfamiliar with the two projects, this tweetstorm is a good high-level explanation of the two projects and resources to learn about them. Although there are many…

You may have heard the words Cosmos, Cosmos Hub, Tendermint, and Interchain being used interchangeably in some context or the other. Tendermint is a consensus algorithm which was invented by Jae Kwon and in 2014. Seeing the effectiveness of this consensus algorithm, he set out to build a more ambitious…

The advent of smart contracts have opened up an entirely new avenue of applications. Ethereum, the leading smart contract platform, has facilitated the creation of compelling decentralized applications such as decentralized exchanges, prediction markets, autonomous organizations, and Cryptokitties. However, the Ethereum blockchain is completely transparent and data from any of…

Since Cryptokitties, people have realized how dire Ethereum’s need for scale is. Ethereum in its current state is a functioning World Computer but it is very, very slow. A multitude of new projects have been birthed to become “Ethereum-killers” by using novel consensus algorithms to achieve blockchains that can process…