Some of you may remember that about a year ago I moved this blog onchain from WordPress to a platform called Paragraph. I've been happy with the move, though I know that my daily emails have been ending up in many of your junk boxes since then. Sorry. Hopefully that gets better over time. Given my enthusiasm for crypto, it just made sense to make the switch. I'm trying to move as much as I can onchain.

This blog is now also featured on Paragraph's homepage:

At the same time, things still feel very early. Paragraph, for example, has been experimenting with ways for writers to monetize their work. I don't care about that for this blog, but I am interested in seeing how the business models may evolve.

Up until recently, the way to make money on Paragraph was to have readers collect your posts: Writer publishes something, readers mint it as an NFT, and then writer receives small payments in their crypto wallet. I've had a few people collect my posts over the past year, but it has not been anything of significance.

Now Paragraph is testing something new called writer coins. Instead of collecting individual posts, readers can now buy a writer's coin and support them more broadly. I just set this up on my publication and so there is now a brand-new coin in existence called $BRANDON.

One of the interesting things that I was able to do was automatically distribute this new coin to anyone who has collected one of my posts in the past and who is subscribed to my blog (with a connected wallet). If you are one of these people, you should have received something.

In theory, $BRANDON coin should increase in value as this blog develops incredible international notoriety, but in practice, who the hell knows? These experimentations are all part of the journey onchain. Some stuff will work, but many other things won't. Already though, I think you can feel product-market fit for things like stablecoins. Maybe one day the same will be true of $BRANDON.

If you'd like to try out this new feature and support the blog, click here.

Back when Canadians used to travel to the US, it was common for a situation like this to arise: "Hey, I'll send you money. Do you have Venmo?" And then, as a Canadian, you'd say, "sorry, we don't have Venmo in Canada. We use our own proprietary system called Interac e-Transfer. Do you have PayPal? I think I still have an account. Let's try." Once this exchange was over, both parties would then sit there and wonder why the hell it's still so expensive and awkward to move money around.

As another example, take global remittances. These are payments sent by a person back to their country of origin, usually to a family member. And in 2024, it was estimated that some $905 billion was sent around the world for this reason, with about $685 billion of it being sent to low and middle-income countries. But it was also estimated that the average cost of doing this was around 6.62%, which is double the UN's target of 3%.

For anyone who has used crypto before, this feels painfully archaic. Sending a wire transfer can cost over $50 and it can take time to clear, assuming that you got in before the bank's cut-off time. Sending things via a blockchain is cheap (it's pennies now) and it happens instantly and securely — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This was always one of the promises of crypto, but now we're seeing it play out very clearly with stablecoins. Here's an example.

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that have their value pegged to another asset, such as gold or a fiat currency. And at the time of writing this post, something like 99% of stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar. The benefits of this are twofold. Firstly, it creates price stability. You're effectively holding US dollars. But now you have a US dollar on a blockchain (or a tokenized US dollar), meaning you can do crypto things with it, like send it around the world instantly and for free.

The other benefit of this is that it can serve as a hedge against a problematic local currency. Would you rather hold the Argentine Peso or the US dollar? The use cases are powerful. So it's not surprising that, by some estimates, a quarter of all global remittances now involve some form of cryptocurrency. Argentina also happens to be the leading crypto market in Latin America. Between July 2023 and June 2024, the country recorded about $91 billion in crypto transactions.

It's fascinating to think about how all of this will reshape the global financial landscape. Already stablecoin transactions are threatening Visa in terms of overall transactions. All someone needs is a mobile phone and a crypto wallet. And by the way, as soon as you link a wallet to a human, you can also quickly determine how much money they've been sending/receiving, figure out tax liabilities, and so on.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the (vast?) majority of stablecoin transactions settle on Ethereum. It is the substrate powering this market, as well as many others. I don't know what that exactly means for Ethereum as a crypto asset. But I do believe it means something meaningful. And in this instance, it stems from a fairly simple want: "I would like to send you money cheaply and securely, and I don't want inflation to then kill my purchasing power."

Cover photo by Alistair MacRobert on Unsplash

Some of you may remember that about a year ago I moved this blog onchain from WordPress to a platform called Paragraph. I've been happy with the move, though I know that my daily emails have been ending up in many of your junk boxes since then. Sorry. Hopefully that gets better over time. Given my enthusiasm for crypto, it just made sense to make the switch. I'm trying to move as much as I can onchain.

This blog is now also featured on Paragraph's homepage:

At the same time, things still feel very early. Paragraph, for example, has been experimenting with ways for writers to monetize their work. I don't care about that for this blog, but I am interested in seeing how the business models may evolve.

Up until recently, the way to make money on Paragraph was to have readers collect your posts: Writer publishes something, readers mint it as an NFT, and then writer receives small payments in their crypto wallet. I've had a few people collect my posts over the past year, but it has not been anything of significance.

Now Paragraph is testing something new called writer coins. Instead of collecting individual posts, readers can now buy a writer's coin and support them more broadly. I just set this up on my publication and so there is now a brand-new coin in existence called $BRANDON.

One of the interesting things that I was able to do was automatically distribute this new coin to anyone who has collected one of my posts in the past and who is subscribed to my blog (with a connected wallet). If you are one of these people, you should have received something.

In theory, $BRANDON coin should increase in value as this blog develops incredible international notoriety, but in practice, who the hell knows? These experimentations are all part of the journey onchain. Some stuff will work, but many other things won't. Already though, I think you can feel product-market fit for things like stablecoins. Maybe one day the same will be true of $BRANDON.

If you'd like to try out this new feature and support the blog, click here.

Back when Canadians used to travel to the US, it was common for a situation like this to arise: "Hey, I'll send you money. Do you have Venmo?" And then, as a Canadian, you'd say, "sorry, we don't have Venmo in Canada. We use our own proprietary system called Interac e-Transfer. Do you have PayPal? I think I still have an account. Let's try." Once this exchange was over, both parties would then sit there and wonder why the hell it's still so expensive and awkward to move money around.

As another example, take global remittances. These are payments sent by a person back to their country of origin, usually to a family member. And in 2024, it was estimated that some $905 billion was sent around the world for this reason, with about $685 billion of it being sent to low and middle-income countries. But it was also estimated that the average cost of doing this was around 6.62%, which is double the UN's target of 3%.

For anyone who has used crypto before, this feels painfully archaic. Sending a wire transfer can cost over $50 and it can take time to clear, assuming that you got in before the bank's cut-off time. Sending things via a blockchain is cheap (it's pennies now) and it happens instantly and securely — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This was always one of the promises of crypto, but now we're seeing it play out very clearly with stablecoins. Here's an example.

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that have their value pegged to another asset, such as gold or a fiat currency. And at the time of writing this post, something like 99% of stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar. The benefits of this are twofold. Firstly, it creates price stability. You're effectively holding US dollars. But now you have a US dollar on a blockchain (or a tokenized US dollar), meaning you can do crypto things with it, like send it around the world instantly and for free.

The other benefit of this is that it can serve as a hedge against a problematic local currency. Would you rather hold the Argentine Peso or the US dollar? The use cases are powerful. So it's not surprising that, by some estimates, a quarter of all global remittances now involve some form of cryptocurrency. Argentina also happens to be the leading crypto market in Latin America. Between July 2023 and June 2024, the country recorded about $91 billion in crypto transactions.

It's fascinating to think about how all of this will reshape the global financial landscape. Already stablecoin transactions are threatening Visa in terms of overall transactions. All someone needs is a mobile phone and a crypto wallet. And by the way, as soon as you link a wallet to a human, you can also quickly determine how much money they've been sending/receiving, figure out tax liabilities, and so on.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the (vast?) majority of stablecoin transactions settle on Ethereum. It is the substrate powering this market, as well as many others. I don't know what that exactly means for Ethereum as a crypto asset. But I do believe it means something meaningful. And in this instance, it stems from a fairly simple want: "I would like to send you money cheaply and securely, and I don't want inflation to then kill my purchasing power."

Cover photo by Alistair MacRobert on Unsplash