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The DeFi Stack

By Spencer Applebaum

| 20 minute read

Open Finance is one of Multicoin’s three Crypto Mega Theses, wherein Open Finance is a superset of DeFi. Over the past 12 months, there has been an explosion of activity in DeFi on Ethereum: there is $13.6 billion in capital participating in DeFi, up more than 20x over the last year.

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Writing

Writing

The DeFi Stack

By Spencer Applebaum

November 24, 2020 | 20 minute read

Open Finance is one of Multicoin’s three Crypto Mega Theses, wherein Open Finance is a superset of DeFi. Over the past 12 months, there has been an explosion of activity in DeFi on Ethereum: there is $13.6 billion in capital participating in DeFi, up more than 20x over the last year.

WritingFeatured

Our Investment in OXIO

By Matt Shapiro

November 17, 2020 | 14 minute read

I’m excited to announce Multicoin Capital’s investment in OXIO. We led OXIO’s $3.5M seed round last year, and now the company is emerging from stealth following a $12M Series A financing led by two of the top VCs in Latin America, monashees and Atlantico Capital.

WritingVideos

Watch Fireside Chats with Solana, Helium, Ribbit Capital from the Fall 2020 Multicoin Summit

By John Robert Reed

November 3, 2020 | 3 minute read

With another successful summit in the books, I’m delighted to share three of our most popular fireside chats from our fall summit. This year, we held our first virtual event, the first of hopefully many more to come. It was a great format that afforded us the opportunity to reach more people around the world and go deeper than we ever have before.

Writing

Trade-offs in the Decentralized BitMEX Space

By Tushar Jain

September 8, 2020 | 20 minute read

One of the greatest innovations of modern financial markets is that traders can gain financial exposure to an asset without having to physically settle that asset—aka synthetic exposure. This dramatically expands the universe of traders who can trade in a given market, especially for harder to deliver assets. This is desirable because increasing traders and capital in a given market can help reduce volatility and increase liquidity.

Writing

Exploring The Design Space of Liquidity Mining

By Tushar Jain

August 13, 2020 | 14 minute read

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has recently seen an explosion of activity and public interest. The primary driving factor has been the discovery of “liquidity mining” as a mechanism to bootstrap liquidity. Broadly defined, liquidity mining occurs when users of a DeFi protocol are compensated in that protocol’s native token for interacting with the protocol.

Writing

Open Audio

By Kyle Samani

July 30, 2020 | 4 minute read

The first Internet-enabled application I can remember enjoying was Napster. It was 1999, and I was downloading songs at a blazing fast 2.96 KB / second. On good days, it would tick up to 3.13 KB / second. Music has been—by far—the most censored content on the Western internet over the last 20 years. The waves of censorship have played out time and time again across venues.

FeaturedWriting

Huobi Token ($HT) Analysis and Valuation

By Mable Jiang

July 16, 2020 | 35 minute read

Exchange tokens are currently the most interesting sector in crypto because they sit at the intersection of where there is demand today and where there will be opportunities tomorrow. We have previously expressed a [thesis](https://multicoin.capital/2019/10/29/exchanges-are-open-finance/ "Exchanges are Open Finance") that exchange tokens are the best way to get exposure to open finance and that there is tremendous growth potential.

Writing

DeFi's Invisible Asymptotes

By Kyle Samani

June 4, 2020 | 9 minute read

With the growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem over the last 24 months, I’ve been thinking about protocol-level defensibility and market size. I wrote about the former recently. This essay focuses on the latter. My biggest concern for Ethereum’s current DeFi economy is that it is subject to one or possibly a few invisible asymptotes, as I’ll explain below.

Writing

Lightning 2020: A Toolkit for Heretical Web3 Developers

By Ryan Gentry

May 5, 2020 | 11 minute read

Many developers and investors interested in building Web3 gave up on building on top of Bitcoin years ago, assuming that its limited throughput, high latency, and conservative programmability made such development impossible. Indeed, this is precisely what led to the birth of Ethereum, and a plethora of Web3 platforms (e.g. Arweave, Cosmos, Polkadot, Solana, Near) that developers are leveraging today.

Writing

On Forking DeFi Protocols

By Kyle Samani

April 16, 2020 | 14 minute read

As a suite of new layer 1 blockchains are launching, I’ve been thinking about Ethereum’s network effects, and the defensibility of the DeFi protocols built on top of Ethereum. A couple of years ago, I wrote about the network effects of non-sovereign layer 1 monies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.