How can founders build meaningful resilience into both their dApps and user communities—beyond audits, bug bounties and OpSec—by intentionally designing for “failure” i.e. assuming that systems will break, exploit attempts will occur, and users will inevitably make mistakes or fall into traps?
1)What are the main challenges—and opportunities—for bridging traditional and on-chain insurance?
2)What types of real-world assets are most likely to be tokenized first—and why?
3) Why do people say that Bitcoin is decentralized given the crypto exchanges?
How do we imagine wider blockchain/DeFi adoption happening from here? Individuals and businesses self-onboarding like most folks in the space today or through existing/new products which will provide blockchain/DeFi connectivity e.g. (neo)banks.
For me, the biggest question is how will DeFi and blockchain technology gain widespread adoption when the learning curve required to navigate various protocols and platforms is immense. Part of the reason that the internet finally gained ground was due to a common set of protocols that all agreed to adhere to. I want to see how protocols can maintain their decentralized nature, while making the user experience seamless across chains.
I thought I’d ask a one related to the industry I work in. Additionally, as the industry has grown so rapidly over the last few years it’s important to consider whether educational institutions are making sure that blockchain and decentralisation has been added to curriculums!
1.How might DeFi reshape auditing processes, given the transparency of blockchain transactions?
2.In what ways can universities integrate DeFi and blockchain technology into accounting curricula to prepare students for future developments?
As a former bank underwriter earlier in my career, I’m very interested in how digital assets / cryptography can improve fraud prevention / risk management. As with all things in life, there are trade offs. Smart contracts have the potential to signficantly increase security / transparency and efficiency in many financial transactions, but with the innovation also comes expanded risk-vector landscapes - ByBit hack being a recent example of a smart contract exploit.
What is the intersection between risk, insurance (transfer of risk to a 3rd party), vs. cryptography (risk mitigation / elimination)?
Where will cryptography via blockchain, L1s and L2s make some legacy insurance obsolete (I.e. title insurance as one example)?
On a broader, macro level, my thesis on this space is that the FTX implosion era was akin to the dot com bust of early 2000… pre-bust… just about anyone issuing a token would get VC money, even if the business model was unproven. Post bust, the strong survive and as we get another 5-10 years down the road, most projects will die (just like most dot coms did), but a handful of projects / protocols will completely change how we function (no different than most of the mag 7 emerged from the ash-heap of the dot com bust… but went on to fundamentaly change society and how we interact). The internet era, was the digitization and decentralization of information. The crypto era to me, is the digitization and decentralization of finance. As an insurance professional, Insurnace is part of the oil that lubricates the financial system… so it will be necessary for insurance products to be built to support this new system… and there will be some products on the insurance side made obsolete via Web3 technologies.
I’m fascinated by the concept of decentralized captial pools like Nexus and how they will shape the future of risk management… it makes sense and the transparency it provides has the potential to significantly expand how risk is shared across the financial ecosystem. It has similar themes of mitigation credit risk across loan portfolios via the Mortgaged Backed Security markets.
technical risk both web2 and web3. Notably, when are / what risk is associated with protocols transitioning to quantum resistant algorithms? including for bitcoin?
people risk including social engineering
privacy. How to provide insurance to someone regardless of their full identity proven by kyc using eg zk proofs?
simplicity for end user. How to abstract complexity linked to decentralized technology? this includes subscribing to an onchain insurance without even being aware of it. Thinking of e.g. sorare
In which bucket would a project put the risk of what happened to Mantra (OM), an RWA L1 whose token tanked 90% in a few hours (seemingly) because of anomalies in the per market rather selling pressure on the spot market? Certainly a very complex risk to protect against. Here’s the best thread I found about the incident.
Required Reading
Optional, but recommended
What to do