If Bitcoin was about decentralization, the collapse of some of the biggest names in cryptocurrency tied to decentralized finance, risks pushing the sector ever closer towards centralization. — History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Decades after the end of the Cold War, ancient rivalries and perceived slights are being fought using modern(ish) weapons in Ukraine. The global monetary system and economy can’t seem to get past a constant cycle of booms and bust and efforts…

Since there have been markets, there have been people looking to manipulate them. So imagine an unregulated trillion-dollar market with hard-to-understand new-age assets — a manipulator’s paradise. — Since there have been markets, there has been manipulation. From the Mesopotamian merchant who had his thumb on the scale, to America’s first insider trade, markets will be manipulated simply because they’re there.

Whether you’re a believer or a cynic, the bigger question is not whether you’d want to have cryptocurrencies in your portfolio, but whether you’d rather have the dollar instead, twenty years from now. — When Chinese immigrant Ng Teng Fong first set out to make his fortune in the steaming tropical port city of Singapore, few would have predicted what the urban landscape would one day look like. Having barely any formal education, Ng finally raised enough capital to establish Far East Organization in…

While it may be tempting to see the collapse of TerraUSD as crypto’s Lehman Brothers moment, it’s actually its Bernie Madoff one. As long as the same macroeconomic conditions that led to the rise of LUNA, UST and Anchor Protocol exist, nothing much will change. — About a month before TerraUSD started to lose its peg with the dollar, a multi-family office manager sought my advice — more of his clients were looking at cryptocurrencies as an investable asset class, but being unfamiliar with the space, he felt ill-at-ease to opine.

While it may seem counterintuitive, cryptocurrencies could be the unexpected beneficiary of an increasingly challenging investment landscape. — Ask your average Mom-and-Pop investor as to the role that cryptocurrencies play in a standard investment portfolio and the likely answer is “none.” Given how complex and volatile cryptocurrencies are, it would be entirely expected if traditional investors were to shun the digital asset class as “uninvestable.”

While many observers are focused on challenges to dollar dominance from other rival national currencies, its true competitor will come from new forms of decentralized currency. — Predictions of the dollar’s demise have been so frequent that they can be compared to the proverbial boy who cried wolf. For all of the forecasts that the dollar was on its way out of the center of the global monetary stage, it has proved naysayers wrong time and time…

Globalization may have ended the minute the first Russian soldier crossed into Ukraine, and with it, the idea of a centralized global currency. — As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine for the “denazification” of the country, the veneer of global condemnation was pockmarked by its lack of a genuine, unified response. As Western nations rallied around Ukraine and condemned Russia, others took a far more restrained approach, from South Africa whose President Cyril Ramaphosa…

The United States of America exacts a tax from citizens everywhere in the world, it’s just not a visible one. But given that Washington has no desire to defend democracy, should the rest of the world desire to defend the dollar? — As I sat at the kitchen table of my brother’s home in San Francisco while he was sorting out his 1040 (the U.S. …