Work
Publi-kale-tions
The Disruption Thesis — What the P2P Lending Era Already Proved
The Experiment That Already RanBefore DeFi promised to democratize lending through code, another movement promised to democratize lending through crowds. The peer-to-peer lending era — launched by Prosper in 2005 and LendingClub in 2006 — represented the most significant challenge to institutional credit intermediation since the savings and loan movement of the early twentieth century. The thesis was compelling: individual investors, armed with borrower data and market discipline, could price credit risk at least as effectively as banks, while eliminating the overhead of branches, compliance departments, and executive compensation. Returns to investors would be higher. Borrowing costs for consumers would be lower. The middleman would be disintermediated.What happened instead is the single
The Mechanics of Algorithmic Credit
How DeFi Lending Actually WorksThe simplest version of decentralized lending eliminates the hardest problem in finance. Traditional banks must answer the question: will this borrower repay? DeFi protocols answer a different question entirely: does this borrower have enough collateral locked in a smart contract that, if liquidated, will cover the debt? The distinction is not semantic. It is architectural. And it determines everything that follows.In Aave — the dominant DeFi lending protocol, controlling between 50% and 62% of all decentralized lending with over $60 billion in total value locked across fourteen blockchains — the mechanics operate as follows. A depositor supplies assets (ETH, USDC, WBTC) to a lending pool and receives interest-bearing aTokens that accumulate yield continuousl
The Architecture of Decentralized Liquidity
The Formula That Replaced the Trading FloorThe story begins with a mathematical identity so simple that its revolutionary implications were not immediately obvious. In 2017, Vitalik Buterin published a blog post titled "On Path Independence" that proposed a mechanism for creating continuous liquidity on a blockchain without the infrastructure of a traditional exchange — no order books, no market makers, no clearing houses. The mechanism was a formula: x × y = k. Two tokens in a pool. Their product held constant. Price determined not by bids and offers but by the ratio of assets in the pool after each trade. A trader who wanted to swap Token A for Token B would deposit A into the pool and withdraw B, with the output quantity calculated by the invariant. The larger the trade relative to the
The Valve Thesis
Why This Case Changes Everything — and What the Probable Outcome Means for a $50 Billion IndustryThe New York Attorney General's case against Valve Corporation is not, despite appearances, a case about video games. It is a case about whether the legal fiction that virtual items have no real-world value can survive the existence of a marketplace where those items trade for hundreds of thousands of real-world dollars. The answer to that question will determine the regulatory trajectory of the entire gaming industry for a generation.The Theory of the CaseThe complaint is built on New York Penal Law Article 225 and Article I, Section 9 of the New York State Constitution. The legal theory has three components, corresponding to the three elements of the gambling test.Thanks for reading The New W
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SEC oddly greenlights payment stablecoin 2% haircuts, while the Federal Reserve provides the math showing that ISDA initial margin calculations need to be (considerably) higher for unpegged crypto.
Masking the true purpose of the state's attempted restraint on competition (the "2 billion in taxes" collected annually from gaming and the "unfair competitive advantage ... [as] Kalshi does not need to pay licensing fees") behind...
If we are banning "casino-style" constructs, then I guess we turn the stock market's lights off as well. A politically motivated, state tax-incentivized effort to shield incumbent players—one that disregards the legitimate risk-management...
A historic step for crypto with the crypto market structure bill coming out of the Senate Ag Committee, while OFAC shows it's not messing around with crypto exchanges, Hawaii attempts to outright ban prediction markets, and Nevada tries desperately t...
Senate Banking and Senate Ag both have postponed their respective crypto market structure markup hearings until the end of January - but Chairman Selig at the CFTC is making all of the right moves early on:
Expected move from Tennessee (if you have ever taken a glance at the massive fees collected by the state for gaming licenses & the blanket tax imposed based on betting volume, rather then profits) and following the state’s death blow to sweepstak...
After its IPO in September, Gemini was approved today by the CFTC to enter the prediction markets as a DCM (competing with Polymarket, Kalshi, and Crypto.com). Gemini's application took 5 years to approve, so getting in line at the CFTC is the name o...
The States continue to fight a losing battle: The State of Connecticut Fires Legal Volley Against Sports Event Contracts. On Dec. 3, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection issued cease-and-desist orders to Robinhood, Kalshi, and Crypto.co...
President Trump is moving into the prediction markets (along with everyone else).
Publications, projects, and ventures.