Money To recap what we have learned in Part 1 — DeFi is the blockchain/crypto-verse’s attempt to replicate the traditional global financial system in a way that democratizes access to it, disintermediates it, and renders it non-custodial in nature. In other words, DeFi aims to perform the same functions (or more)…

Introduction to Series Decentralized Finance, or DeFi for short, is all the rage now. As people are starting to see the potential of non-custodial forms of value-transfer, many are diving headfirst into the space in one way or another. The DeFi ecosystem is one that moves at an incredibly fast pace, and is…

Preface You must have heard of the term Decentralized Finance (DeFi) before. It may have been your colleagues gushing to you about the magic of DeFi, or your cousin bragging to you about his yield farm gains. …

Read first: A Deep Dive into Futarchy: What National Governments and Private Organisations can learn from a Blockchain Governance Model (Part 1) How can Futarchy possibly ‘fix’ Democracy? Recall the 3 points (that I mentioned in Part 1) to be addressed in order for democracy to be improved as a political system: 1. Increased accountability for…

Foreword Throughout my life, I have always only concerned myself with the social side of things: of how societies function, of why people behave the way they do, of the roles of social institutions and governments, and of concepts of inequality, inequity and power imbalances. At some point however, I began…

What happened? On June 9 2021, El Salvador’s parliament passed President Nayib Bukele’s proposed legislation to make El Salvador the first nation to make Bitcoin legal tender. This was hailed as an epochal moment not only for El Salvador, but also for Bitcoin in general, as its proponents declared the bill to…

I was never a huge fan of Bitcoin. In fact, I actually disliked it. Although I really resonate with the values of decentralization and privacy that Bitcoin was created for in the first place, it has so far been unable to achieve them at all. The large amount of computational…

Fastly’s servers are distributed. Therefore, it’s decentralized…right? Wrong. A distributed system does not necessarily equate to a decentralized one. In fact, more often than not — it definitively doesn’t. After I published this article discussing the global Internet outage on June 8, there were a few people who argued that…

On Tuesday evening (8 June, 2021), the unthinkable happened. Internet users around the world found themselves unable to access major online platforms like Amazon, Hulu, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, Reddit, Spotify and Twitch, just to name a few, after a cloud computing network run by US-based tech…