The Fintech Blueprint

Hi Fintech Futurists, Welcome back to our podcast series! For those that want to subscribe in your app of choice, you can now find us at Apple, Spotify, or on RSS. In this conversation, we talk with Rune Christensen of Maker Foundation about how he became one of the most influential builders in the DeFi ecosystem. Additionally, we explore the creation, experiences, and evolution of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the nuances of stablecoins, the interaction between Maker and DeFi with traditional finance and traditional economies, and Maker’s approach to leveraging layer 2 solutions to aiding scalability and transaction throughput. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

Hi Fintech Futurists, In this conversation, we talk with Anil Aggarwal of Clarity Payment Solutions (acquired by TSYS) and TxVia (acquired by Google) about how he “stumbled” upon the payment space at the right time. Anil is an absolute FinTech icon as the founder of renowned FinTech conferences – Money20/20 and FinTech Meetup. Additionally, we explore the various concepts of payment network utlity, the market timing large platform shifts, as well as, how social capital and community formation can serve as drivers towards the monetization of our attention even further. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

Hi Fintech Futurists, In this conversation, we talk with Jon Helgi Egilsson about his incredible journey to becoming Chairman and a co-founder of Monerium. Jon is a former chairman and vice-chairman of the supervisory board of the Icelandic Central Bank, a former adjunct professor in financial engineering and MBA lecturer at Reykjavik University, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and co-founder of four software companies. Additionally, we explore the various concepts of digital money in the framework creating a competitive yet unified environment between fiat money, banking based on fractional-reserve, and the token economy. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

Hi Fintech Futurists, In this conversation, we talk with Camila Russo of The Defiant and author of The Infinite Machine, about her journey as a successful financial journalist was derailed by the Crypto boom and subsequent winter of 2017. Additionally, we explore the success behind her first book, the nuances of the NFT craze, and how The Defiant became one of the most popular crypto media brands to date. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

Hi Fintech Futurists, In this exciting conversation, we talk with none other than Joe Lubin of ConsenSys and Ethereum, about his journey from being exposed to advances in artificial intelligence at Princeton to becoming the household name in programmable blockchain. Additionally, we get an insider look into his founding of Ethereum and ConsenSys, and how the technology and individuals behind these two companies are transforming the very fabric of financial institutions that exist today and how new products/services are started for the betterment of humanity. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

Hi Fintech Futurists, In this conversation, we talk with Tyler Mulvihill of Treum and EulerBeats, about how he became involved in the very first non-financial production grade blockchain use case, tracking & tracing tuna from Fiji to New York using Treum. Additionally, we explore the nuances of NFTs and how EulerBeats is using bonding curve economics to price the future of NFT use rather than mere collection. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

In this conversation, we talk with Patrick Berarducci of ConsenSys, about the valuations and multiples of capital markets protocols in Decentralized Finance on Ethereum, now making up over $60B in token value. Additionally, we explore the nuances of scaling Ethereum and its solutions, such as Metamask and the emerging Layer 2 protocols. We also discuss law and regulation, including a fascinating story about Bernie Madoff from when Pat was a practicing attorney. This leads into a conversation about the embedded compliance nature of blockchain and crypto technology, the early days of ConsenSys, the path of crypto brokerages like Coinbase, and Metamask exhibiting emerging qualities of a neobank. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

M1 Finance bundles together roboadvisory, neobanking and lending into a single “super app”, allowing for combined pricing power (i.e., charging nothing on asset allocation). The firm currently has $3 billion in AUM, a growth of 50% in the past four months and tripling their total in just over a year. Notably, the company has its own broker/dealer and offers fractional shares, and partners with Lincoln Savings bank on the deposit accounts. That makes for a compelling business model from securities lending, interchange, and order flow.For more analysis parsing 12 frontier technology developments every week, a podcast conversation on operating fintechs, and novel food-for-thought essays, become a Blueprint member below.Subscribe nowHope you enjoy, and do not hesitate to reach out here! Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.

Hi Fintech Futurists,Thinking about how to connect these worlds and different available journeys? Or the timeless risks developing in tranched DeFi that look like mortgage-backed securities? We even touch on hegelian dialectics! Check out our great conversation.For premium subscribers, a full transcript is provided along with the recording.Hope you enjoy, and do not hesitate to reach out here!ExcerptLex Sokolin:And then, when we look at DeFi, and what we see is, globally, lots and lots of hackers from scratch, building capital markets machinery, which is like the Linux of capital markets machinery. You can make any exposure you want and package it however you want. I feel like people just have to take a much more forgiving lens here. Ajit Tripathi:Lex, this is a fascinating topic because I come from the other side, so everything, capital markets, from pricing and risking, to some of the most exotic derivatives the world has ever seen in Tokyo. I come from the other side and for me, it was really frustrating that everyone in fintech were either doing payments or doing some kind of mobile app, not really changing much, if you ask me and I know you'll disagree with this, but it has always been very frustrating for me that the core capital markets infrastructure has remained unimpacted, more or less, by this whole fintech revolution and nobody has tried in the traditional, and I'm already saying traditional because it has been 10 years, nobody has even tried to revive the backend infrastructure. People are building it, yeah people are building apps, people haven't really tried to see how capital is distributed? How is wealth created?How do we allocate capital to applications far more efficiently? How do we make capital more efficient? How do we take the assets for the real world, whether gaming or art or whatever and how do we capture this? Finance doesn't exist in isolation. Capital markets make value, enable value to be monetized, distributed at scale and directed to relatively more efficient uses, and I think Joe Lubin saw this coming along ahead of most of us. Back in 2016, he was saying things like, Ethereum will help capital be directed to much more efficient uses, analog capital and so on. I didn't see that coming and for me, what DeFi really does is it starts to compliment fintech, it starts to build this whole backend infrastructure, the back office, the financial instrument creation, the lending, the market makers, the risk taking through derivative exchanges. Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.