What is all the fuss about Telegram?
by Zain Jaffer Note: I have no investments in TON and Telegram. This is merely for information purposes and is not financial advice. Before I ended up in real estate investing, I found my success with a mobile advertising startup called Vungle that was acquired by private equity firm Blackstone in 2019 [https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/blackstone-closes-acquisition-of-vungle-a-leading-mobile-performance-marketing-platform/]. This is […]
Bitcoin ETF adoption accelerates
by Zain Jaffer Sometimes a major strategic shift happens in the world which makes conventional wisdom obsolete, or at least open to question. One of those major shifts is on the way Bitcoin adoption in fund and corporate balance sheets has started to accelerate, especially with the introduction of its Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). One […]
What are distributed ledgers?
by Zain Jaffer It has been sixteen years since Satoshi Nakamoto published his Bitcoin white paper [https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper]. Yet most people still do not understand what blockchains and crypto are. I do not blame them. The space is too filled up with geeks and nerds spewing out lots of jargon that befuddle ordinary folks. Instead let […]
The coming AI shock
by Zain Jaffer Unless you have been hiding under a rock, most likely you have heard of or even played around with the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications like Chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and other AI applications that have sprouted up. News reports, talk shows, opinion makers now talk about Large Language Models […]
The evolution and potential of Web 3.0
One of the buzzwords that has come out of the crypto and blockchain world is Web 3. To understand what Web 3 is, it is perhaps better to discuss the history of the World Wide Web briefly. Web 1.0: The dawn of the World Wide Web Web 1.0 was the original World Wide Web developed […]
The end of the Crypto Genesis era
Sometimes when you have been involved in something for a long time, you tend to notice when something major has changed or happened in that sector. As someone who has been in crypto for quite a while now, perhaps not in the very beginning in 2008, but long enough this year is perhaps the year […]
Why Bitcoin fixed supply matters
Recently an October 2023 US treasury bond auction for 30-year bonds did not do as well as hoped [see https://finance.yahoo.com/news/treasury-bond-auction-runs-weak-034418412.html]. Many traditional buyers are hesitant for several reasons. One is a long-term but remote credit default risk where the US debt is too large for it to pay off. As fewer buyers show interest, the […]
The FTX crashed more than a year ago
by Zain Jaffer It was more than one year ago in early November 2022 that the crypto exchange FTX crashed, losing most of their investors money in the process. The crash was precipitated by a Coindesk report that stated that the exchange balance sheet was propped up mostly by their own FTT trading token. Subsequent […]
Coinbase releases their Base L2 for Ethereum
by Zain Jaffer In early August 2023, US crypto trading giant Coinbase released their Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum called Base. A Layer 2 scaling solution basically allows users to transact their NFTs, crypto swaps, and other Web 3 applications on a different chain which is faster and cheaper from the users perspective than […]
Relying too much on the tech economy
by Zain Jaffer Recent headlines in late August and early September 2023 were about the price of Nvidia stock, the woes of Apple related to China and US market relative to its iPhone 15 launch, and the much awaited Initial Public Offering (IPO) of ARM, the chip design firm that does much of the chip […]
Grayscale wins Spot Bitcoin ETF case at DC Federal Court of Appeals
by Zain Jaffer A three judge panel of the DC Federal Court of Appeals ruled in late August 2023 that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) did not have a legal basis to reject Grayscale’s proposed spot Bitcoin ETF. Grayscale runs the $16B Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) which they hope to convert it into […]
NY Federal Court decides that Ripple XRP is not a security
Companies and individuals who have been considering the use of cryptotokens for funding, marketing, or even customer rewards programs have been following the SEC vs. Ripple XRP case for some time. Finally last mid-July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York Federal Court released her decision on the case. Basically the […]