Ari Paul on Valuing Bitcoin, Ethereum Killers and Metaverse Bubbles

Ari Paul is co-founder and CIO of BlockTower Capital. BlockTower is a crypto and blockchain investment firm, applying professional trading, investing and portfolio management to this digital asset class. It is funded by well-known investors such as A16z and Union Square Ventures.

Before BlockTower, Ari was a portfolio manager for the University of Chicago's $8 billion endowment, and a derivatives market maker and proprietary trader for Susquehanna International Group (SIG). In this podcast we discuss:

1. How to value bitcoin
2. Understanding drivers of crypto markets
3. What flows have driven crypto in recent years?
4. Business for exchanges like UniSwap
5. The real benefit of crypto is co-ordination power
6. Trends in layer one protocols like Ethereum and Solana
7. Will switch to Proof of Stake make a difference?
8. What stage of hype cycle are Metaverse and DeFi tokens?
9. Risk is about sizing positions
10. Books/articles that influenced Ari: Money, blockchains, and social scalability (Nick Szabo), Shelling Out: The Origin Of Money (Szabo), Debt: The First 5000 Years (Graeber)