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.
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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
The silver lining to the US starting a trade war with Canada and regularly threatening annexation is that it has forced this country out of complacency. Indeed, I'm hard pressed to think of a time, at least in my lifetime, when patriotism and nationalism has united so much of Canada.
According to a recent survey by Angus Reid, the percentage of Canadians expressing a "deep emotional attachment" to the country jumped from 49% in December 2024 to 59% in February 2025. And as further evidence of just how unifying this moment in time is, the province with the biggest increase in attachment to country was Québec.
What it means to be a Canadian is sometimes lazily defined according to who or what we are not. But this precarious moment in time is seemingly reminding us who we are. Of course, it also begs the questions: Where do we want to go from here? And do we have the leadership to take us there?
Let's start by looking at some, but of course not all, of the things that we have going for us as a country:
Second-largest country in the world by land mass.
World's longest coastline, with access to both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and increasingly the Arctic Ocean.
Third-largest proven oil reserves in the world (estimated at close to 300 billion barrels), behind Saudi Arabia.
World's largest producer and exporter of potash (which is a key component in fertilizers).
Energy independent and broadly rich in resources (see below diagram).
A fifth of the planet's surface freshwater.
Bilingual country — a quarter of the country reported using French at work in 2011 and, as of 2010, Canada had the 5th largest population of Francophones in the world (behind Morocco).
Multi-cultural country — over 20% of Canadians are foreign-born.
Robust immigration system that attracts top talent from around the world.
Highly-educated workforce with some of the world's best universities — over 60% of Canadian adults have a post-secondary education which is one of the highest rates globally.
Average life expectancy of 82.3 years (2023 data), which is about 5 years higher than that of the US.
Leader in AI, quantum computing, green tech, and space robotics — Canada produces more AI research papers per capita than almost any other country and the Stanford AI Index (2023) ranked Canada 4th behind only the US, China, and the UK.
Here's some of our bounty (via the Financial Times):
And yet, we are not a global superpower.
Worse, we are lagging behind our G7 peers in GDP growth, we are plagued by declining productivity levels, we are not investing enough in new business creation and entrepreneurship, and we have one of the worst affordable housing shortages in the developed world, among other things. We have been complacent for far too long, and a big part of this is because we have, or at least had, the world's largest economy next door demanding our goods.
As of 2024, 61% of all imported oil to the US came from Canada. And US refineries are specifically setup to refine our crude and viscous varietal. This is good for them. They buy our goopy oil at a discount, refine it, and then sell it for a profit. But now the US is clearly saying there's nothing they need or want from Canada. They've also demonstrated through their actions that, under the current administration, they can no longer be trusted as an ally and trading partner. So it behooves us to evolve. It behooves us to take matters into our own hands.
Here are some ideas:
Firstly, Canada should become a republic. For me, this is less about the monarchy being outdated (though it is) and more about the fact that a sovereign superpower like Canada should have its own head of state, and not a foreign King.
Canada needs to increase defense spending and exert much stronger sovereignty over its Arctic lands. For fiscal year 2024-2025, defense spending is projected to reach 1.37% of GDP. This obviously falls short of NATO's 2% target.
Remove red tape and unleash the Canadian economy. Last year, Canada exported more to the US than between its own provinces and territories. Huh? By some estimates, our economy could grow by up to $5,100 per capita simply by eliminating internal trade barriers.
Barriers also need to be removed from the delivery of new housing. Canadians have been over-indexing on housing because of eroding affordability. Our current market environment is an ideal time for market reforms. Here's just one recent post that offers a few concrete suggestions for how to do this.
Grow the Canadian population to 100 million people by 2100. Obviously there are two main ways to do this: We can help Canadians have more babies (more affordable housing certainly assists with this) and we can continue to attract the smartest and most ambitious people from around the world. As of 2022, Canada's fertility rate sat at 1.33, which is below the OECD average of 1.5 births per woman. (The above population target is the focus of a charitable organization called the "Century Initiative.")
Create a sovereign wealth fund akin to what Norway did. Today, Norway has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world (based on assets under management) and it translates to over US$325,000 per Norwegian citizen and one of the highest GDPs per capita on the planet. Canada also has abundant natural resources as we know. The revenues generated from these resources should (1) accrue to the Canadian population and future generations and (2) steer the global economy toward a more sustainable future.
Invest heavily in new infrastructure. This includes everything from high-speed rail to oil pipelines. In 2020, Canada exported 82% of the crude oil it produced, with most of it going to the US via pipeline from western provinces. If the US no longer wants this, then we ought to find some new customers.
At the same time, we cannot let our abundant natural resources become a curse (see "the paradox of plenty"). We need to be a leader in the new economy. As I've written about before, I find it shocking, for example, that Canada is not stepping up more when it comes to new technologies like crypto. Vitalik Buterin, who is one of the founders of Ethereum and its most prominent figurehead, grew up in Toronto. He went to the University of Waterloo. We should be leveraging this homegrown talent to become a capital of crypto. And this is just one specific example.
Do everything we can to spur more innovation, more risk-taking, and more private investment. It's one thing to have great Universities that publish a lot of research, but ultimately we need to turn this into thriving companies that employ Canadians and generate wealth for Canadians. Here's a post I published in 2023 called, "Canada has an existential productivity problem."
This is obviously not a comprehensive list of all the things that Canada should be doing as a country. And invariably, some or many of you will disagree with some or most of what I have put forward here. But hopefully we can all agree that now, more than ever, we need a strong Canada. We need to start thinking of ourselves as an emerging global superpower.
Cover photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash
For the last few weeks, I've been playing around with a new social platform called Rodeo. It runs on the Base blockchain (which is an Ethereum Layer 2 chain), but you don't really need to be aware of this or understand how it works behind the scenes. If you've ever used Instagram, then you will already know how to use this platform. You can upload photos, scroll through photos, and heart photos.
But what's unique is that you can also "collect" photos. This requires a very small amount of Ether (0.0001 ETH), which works out to somewhere around ~$0.33 today. But there's also the option of just buying credits with your credit card and bypassing the need for an external crypto wallet. Whichever option you choose, you are minting an NFT to your wallet every time you "collect" a post. This is whether you are aware of it or not.
What this then does is send the creator reward money. Every time someone collects/mints a post, the creator of that post earns 0.00005 ETH (~$0.16 today). And already, there are users on the platform who have collected thousands of dollars in rewards as a result of their posts. It is also possible to earn referral rewards. If I collect a post and someone sees that I did it and then collects it, I earn a percentage. I can also send direct referral links (similar to how people on IG share posts via DM).
So despite looking a lot like Instagram, this is a fundamentally different platform under the hood. There is an embedded economy where artists and creators can get paid directly by collectors. At the same time, the platform itself collects a fee from interactions and transactions and so, in theory, there's no need for them to turn to advertising and selling our personal information.
There's also no reason that any user needs to remain wed to Rodeo. When you collect a post, an NFT is minted and it goes directly into your crypto wallet (assuming you've connected your external wallet). That crypto wallet is yours and you can do whatever you want with its contents, including selling the NFTs on some other marketplace or gifting them to a friend or family member for Christmas.
So other than the fact that the biggest audiences are on platforms like Instagram and X, I'd much rather share my photos on a platform like Rodeo, where I have full control. This is also why I switched my blogging platform from Wordpress to Paragraph and why I've started using Warpcast alongside X. It's the same idea. This has always been the promise of blockchains, but it's amazing to see it playing out with all of these new platforms.
I have no idea if Rodeo will ever surpass Instagram as the dominant photo sharing platform. But I have a high degree of conviction that our online lives will eventually migrate onchain. It's for this reason that I largely don't care about the daily fluctuations of ETH or BTC; I'm far more interested in the software that is getting built out on top of these chains. That is what will generate the demand for these cryptocurrencies long-term.