Iowa capital pools, venture funds, and venture-funded businesses are everywhere. Ten years ago, a friend once said something like, if you blew up the room Dwolla launched in 2010, it would set the ecosystem back 20 years. That might have been true then, but it's certainly no longer valid. Searching available capital in the state… Continue reading Who is investing in Iowa?
Category: written-words
Traditional Ledgering and Blockchains
At Money 20/20 last week, a topic that came up over and over in discussions was blockchain performance compared to traditional databases used to ledger transactions. One must be excellent at double-entry bookkeeping and performant state machines to use a traditional database to ledger transactions. The overwhelming majority of banks and FinTechs use this approach… Continue reading Traditional Ledgering and Blockchains
What if you don’t have to choose?
The old saying goes something like, "fast, cheap, and good. pick two ". There are even lovely Venn diagrams all over. Like this one 🙂 This idea tends to fall into conventional wisdom and applies very well to most things. It has often come up in the context of Transfer Types and various payment providers.… Continue reading What if you don’t have to choose?
Mono-rail to no rails
Sharing observations and findings after spending more time in the DeFi world has been a fun part of the journey. It helps communicate to people inside of traditional finance environments and those outside them.Talking about moving money in a traditional environment very quickly focuses on transfer types and funds flows. Transfer types are typically mono-rail-type… Continue reading Mono-rail to no rails
Payment regulations and the evolving value stack
It has been surprising how much discussion has been about creating new regulatory frameworks, particularly for fiat-backed stablecoins. Surprising because the current framework works well for fiat-backed stablecoins, something that is pretty boring if done correctly. The regulation is unclear when applying current regulation to other forms of stablecoins, like algo-stables. The current regulatory structure in the… Continue reading Payment regulations and the evolving value stack
Verticals to Ecosystems
Matt Harris did this fantastic talk about the verticalization of FinTech a few year ago. The TL/DR for me is that a lot of high-value technology will be built and scaled across several customer verticals. If you have some time, I suggest watching the video below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVrQW3jwCjU These horizontal technologies are compelling. I am biased… Continue reading Verticals to Ecosystems
Infrequent Hiring
The team at Brale hires infrequently but did post a few new roles today. This quarter we have two open roles; brief descriptions are below. Brale is distributed, though we keep an office for private working sessions. Everyone on the team has 10+ years of experience in their respective field, and everyone is in the work. For some personalities,… Continue reading Infrequent Hiring
Exploring Computer Generated Art
Harper was posting random things about Midjourney last night and it got me thinking about this entry. What led me to Midjourney was an internal project at Brale intended to understand some different blockchains and functionality that could be supported in NFTs. The result of the project was a NFT series called Gone Missing and… Continue reading Exploring Computer Generated Art
Boring Stablecoins
Over the last few months, the team at Brale has been diving deep into DeFi and it's impossible to avoid the stablecoin discussion. If you google "what is a stablecoin," the first answer you get is: Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies. The value of which is pegged, or tied, to that of another currency, commodity or financial instrument. -… Continue reading Boring Stablecoins
Operating During a Downturn
I'm not sure how this entered my feed, but it was left open on a browser tab. I hit play while doing some other work and eventually stopped whatever I was doing to listen to it. It's excellent and worth your time if you're building a company right now for the first or fifth time.… Continue reading Operating During a Downturn