Banks and Brokerages Should Be Mining The Blockchain
The biggest new trend I am seeing in bitcoin/blockchain is the emergence of a number of companies building systems on the blockchain (including the NASDAQ) to handle the backoffice issues that banks...
View ArticleFeature Friday: Instant Exchange
Our portfolio company Coinbase launched a new feature this week, that when combined with their local currency wallets, basically creates a global Venmo or Mpesa. It is called Instant Exchange and here...
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Greece And Bitcoin
There are some who suggest the mini run in the price of Bitcoin this month is related to the crisis in Greece. I wouldn’t know about those sorts of things. But one thing is clear to me. Photos like...
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Resilience
One of the things about Bitcoin that I’ve always been amazed by is its resilience. It goes up, it gets knocked down, but it hangs in there, and then it goes up again. It’s happening again now. It is...
View ArticleThe Bitcoin XT Fork
There has been a long standing debate in the past year over the need (or not) to increase the bitcoin block size. The debate has raged most intensely inside the small group of developers who have...
View ArticleDiversity In The Bitcoin Community
There’s a sense that the bitcoin community is a fairly homogenous group, mainly white and mainly male. And the MIT Media Lab and Coindesk are doing something to try to change that. They are providing...
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CircleUp Rights+
Our portfolio company CircleUp is a marketplace where consumer goods companies raise equity capital from accredited investors. CircleUp is a registered broker dealer and does all of this in full...
View ArticleVideo Of The Week: Jerry Brito of Coin Center Talking About Bitcoin
One of Bitcoin’s strongest voices is Jerry Brito, the Executive Director of Coin Center. This short (~6 min) interview he did with Foreign Affairs is a good example of his balanced and clear and crisp...
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Fun Friday: Mapping The Bitcoin Market
AVC community member William Mougayar published a Bitcoin market map yesterday. Putting together something like this is a major pain in the butt, but it is incredibly useful for people (like VCs and...
View ArticleVideo Of The Week: Why Marketplace Lending Is Better
Samir Desai, founder and CEO of our portfolio company Funding Circle, which is the global leader in small business lending marketplaces, gave a great talk at Lendit this past week. It starts with a bit...
View ArticleAre Bitcoin and the Blockchain Joined At The Hip?
I saw this statement in the Economist piece on Blockchains: Bitcoin itself may never be more than a curiosity. However blockchains have a host of other uses because they meet the need for a trustworthy...
View ArticleNew York FinTech Innovation Lab 2016
I’ve written about New York Fintech Innovation Lab here at AVC a bunch of times. It’s a great three month long program where entrepreneurs get mentoring on their businesses from executives at 25 large...
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What Didn’t Happen
Last year, I ended 2014 with What Just Happened and started 2015 with What Is Going To Happen. I’ll do the same tomorrow and friday, but today I’d like to talk about What Didn’t Happen, specifically...
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What Happened In 2015
Last year in my What Just Happened post, I said: the social media phase of the Internet ended I think we can go further than that now and say that sometime in the past year or two the consumer...
View ArticleBitcoin: Democracy and Debate
Brian Armstrong, founder and CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase, published two back to back posts yesterday on the dual topics of Bitcoin governance and the scaling Bitcoin debate. Article 1: How...
View ArticleBitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin
I’ve been writing about the Bitcoin blocksize debate here at AVC (the only place I write and I’m hard core about that) for the past year. It’s a big deal. At the core of the debate is whether the...
View ArticleBitcoin Is Having An Election
Brian Armstrong, CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase, published this deck on Friday. Bitcoin is not splitting in two, it is upgrading from Brian Armstrong In the deck, Brian argues that the current...
View ArticleFeature Friday: Paying With Your Phone
The other day I went to Whole Foods on the way home from yoga. It was around 7pm and the store was packed. I bought a whole bunch of stuff and when I got to checkout, I realized I did not have my...
View ArticleMIT Digital Currency Initiative
My alma mater is doing some really good work in the area of digital currencies. MIT, via its Media Lab, has built something called the Digital Currency Initiative. The basic idea of the DCI is to bring...
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The Business Blockchain
I’ve been reading The Business Blockchain this weekend. It was written by AVC community member William Mougayar. This book started out as a Kickstarter project which I blogged about at the time. If you...
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