Most projects are barely five years old. Eventually, different coins are meant to serve different functions. Today, they all more or less act as startup equity with the distinctive properties of having liquidity and price discovery from the start.

Crypto is a Young Industry

Price swings give important information to founders and investors, especially during the crucial adolescent stage of any startup.
Universal access, immediate price discovery, and greater transparency contribute to scams and shady behaviour in crypto. But with crypto, even the scams are transparent.
The crypto industry has a lot of growing to do and the current downturn clearly offers some hard lessons. Investors and entrepreneurs are learning not only what is possible in this new ecosystem, but also what isn’t.

Volatility Isn’t Always Bad

One of the leading arguments against crypto is its extreme volatility. Between April and June 2022, Bitcoin's value more than halved. Established companies like Coinbase, a popular crypto exchange, have announced layoffs. Crypto sceptics argue that the crash has revealed crypto as a Ponzi scheme. While some of the criticism is well deserved, the focus on price volatility isn't as strong an argument. Instead, it reveals a misunderstanding of what different crypto assets represent.

The Main Argument Against Crypto

<ul><li>Startup equity is a core concept in business. Every type of startup falls into this category. However, traditional startup equity has no liquidity - you don't invest and expect to flip your shares a month later.</li><li>Crypto is different because a token can start trading right away. But early liquidity has benefits and drawbacks.</li><li>Everyone from central banks to Wall Street is exploring blockchain technology because the features of cryptocurrency enable cheaper to operate and more dynamic markets. Yet, the downside to enhanced efficiency is extreme volatility.</li></ul>

Equity, Liquidity, and Volatility

With Cryptocurrency, everything is borderless and the total addressable market is huge. Success could mean significant value accrual to its token, but the project could also fail. The dilemma is increased because most digital assets can’t be pigeonholed into traditional categories, making valuation much harder. Crypto investors can't rely on established metrics such as a stock's price-to-earnings (PE) ratio. Most digital assets are a hybrid and change from one category to another throughout their lifecycle.

Everything Is Bigger on Blockchain

One of the leading arguments against crypto is its volatility. In the wake of the most recent downturn, critics have doubled down on this point. But the argument misses an important insight about how crypto assets differ from those in traditional finance. While different coins are meant to serve different functions, today they all more or less act as startup equity — and often serve as hybrid assets, treated as commodities, currency, store of value, and incentive for the validators that make a project function. Unlike traditional equity, crypto assets have liquidity and price discovery from the start. This does mean that crypto markets are more sensitive to signals and changes. The overlooked feature of this, however, is that price swings communicate important information to founders and investors, and builds previously unseen levels of transparency into the system.

crypto

Cryptocurrency

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

What Skeptics Get Wrong About Crypto’s Volatility

In the human conflict-resolution world, we tend to spend the vast majority of our time going deep into the analysis of our problems and very little time moving.Thinking about your needs and position and the needs and position of your negotiating partner is important, but people have a tendency to get stuck at this analysis stage. Literally getting up and taking a walk together helps break this impasse. Physical movement jogs mental movement. When our bodies are active, repetitive thinking patterns lose some of their grips and new solutions occur to us.

The best way to resolve conflicts

You can change how your brain works by how you move your body. And when you're looking to resolve a tricky conflict of any type, you're better off doing it while moving around. Research shows that locomotion increases both the motivation and the likelihood to resolve interpersonal conflict.

Physical movement spurs mental movement

The best way to resolve professional (and romantic) conflicts is on your feet. 

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Personal Development

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Marketing & Sales

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Problem Solving

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Communication

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Leadership & Management

The Best Way to End a Fight, According to Science: Take a Walk Together

Building in this category requires building trust and reducing friction in the onboarding. The product needs to be highly reliable and likely needs to be added on top of existing products at first. Setup cannot be overly complex, as this is what the buyer wants to avoid. To get to market, early design partners and product marketing are critical. Leadership across the company should find it easy to understand and get insights into the real-time financial health of the company.

Building principles

<ul><li>Payouts send money outside of the business, such as bank wires and ACH, paying vendor invoices, creating transaction logs, etc.</li><li>Payins bring money into the business by accepting various payment methods, optimising payment routes and authorisation rates, identifying fraud and failure, allowing for rewards, gift cards, payment splitting, etc.</li></ul> The payment acceptance methods - credit cards, e-wallets, crypto, gift cards, bank transfers - differ by company and geography and can take months to implement. For payouts, a bank transfer involves a series of manual approvals.

Payins and payouts are mostly manual

The tools that exist today for tracking and managing financial operations are outdated. Furthermore, payment complexity is increasing as businesses become global. Large companies try to keep up by creating homegrown solutions with many engineers and operations specialists. For example, companies like Airbnb and Uber have 200+ employees tracking their real-time financial health. Then there are the breakdowns in these payment operations, such as when Citibank accidentally wired $900M to a hedge fund.

Companies need better software to manage day-to-day finance

Financial Operations (FinOps) could be an emerging software category with a huge opportunity to rethink the way businesses manage their money. As a result, it is expected that a number of companies will build solutions. Both payins and payouts can organise workflows into layers on top of the existing primitive workflows. These layers are:<ul><li>Moving payments</li><li>Ledger/reconciliation to record payment entries and connect to the ERP.</li><li>Dashboard - the ability to see and search transactions</li><li>Intelligence - the ability to set alerts and catch errors.</li></ul>

The opportunity to build

As companies continue to expand globally and new payment methods are created, there is an increasing need for a new generation of  “financial operations” (FinOps) to help businesses manage their money.

“Financial operations” (FinOps) is an emerging software category with a massive opportunity to streamline, automate, and optimize how we move money, while giving the entire organization a real-time view of a business’s financial health.

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Economics

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Business

How to Move Money in the 21st Century

Credit cards were not always been made of plastic. Throughout history, there have been credit tokens made from metal coins, metal plates, and celluloid, metal, fiber, paper and now mostly plastic cards.

The Shape of Credit Cards

<ul><li>In 1950, the Diners Club issued their credit card in the United States. The Diners Club credit card was invented by Diners Club founder Frank McNamara as a way to pay restaurant bills (1950). A customer could eat without cash at any restaurant that would accept Diners Club credit cards. Diners Club would pay the restaurant and the credit card holder would repay Diners Club. </li><li>American Express issued their first credit card in 1958. </li><li>Bank of America issued the BankAmericard (now Visa) bank credit card later in 1958.</li></ul>

Diners Club Credit Card And American Express

<ul><li>Credit cards were first promoted to traveling salesmen for use on the road. By the early 1960s, more companies offered credit cards by advertising them as a time-saving device rather than a form of credit. American Express and MasterCard became huge successes overnight.</li><li>By the mid-70s, the U.S. Congress begin regulating the credit card industry by banning practices such as the mass mailing of active credit cards to those who had not requested them. </li></ul>

The Popularity of Credit Cards

<ul><li>The use of credit cards originated in the United States during the 1920s, when individual firms, such as oil companies and hotel chains, began issuing them to customers.</li><li>References to credit cards have been made as far back as 1890 in Europe. Early credit cards involved sales directly between the merchant offering the credit and credit card and that merchant's customer.</li><li> Around 1938, companies started to accept each other's cards. Today, credit cards allow you to make purchases with countless third parties.</li></ul>

Credit Cards: The Beginning

The inventor of the first bank-issued credit card was John Biggins of the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn in New York. In 1946, Biggins invented the "Charge-It" program between bank customers and local merchants. The way it worked was that merchants could deposit sales slips into the bank and the bank billed the customer who used the card.

First Bank Credit Card

When was the first credit card issues? Credit has been around a long time and has come in the form of metal coins, metal plates, celluloid and more.

What Skeptics Get Wrong About Crypto’s Volatility

The Best Way to End a Fight, According to Science: Take a Walk Together

How to Move Money in the 21st Century

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

Who Invented Credit Cards?

CURATED BY

What Skeptics Get Wrong About Crypto’s Volatility

The Best Way to End a Fight, According to Science: Take a Walk Together

How to Move Money in the 21st Century

It's time to Read like a Pro.

Who Invented Credit Cards?

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.