Farming is a business with a peculiar and unforgiving financial rhythm, in which money flows out of an operation long before it flows back in. A farmer must buy seeds, fertilizer, and other supplies at the start of a season, and pay for labor and equipment throughout the growing period, yet receives no income until…
Read MoreDecentralized finance is built from a set of basic financial building blocks, including lending markets, exchanges, and other protocols, that each perform a single, well-defined function and that can be freely combined in countless ways to create far more complex financial products. Earning the best possible returns from these building blocks, however, is a genuinely…
Read MoreIn financial markets, the same asset can trade at different prices in different forms at the same moment, and the gap between those prices can be a source of profit for those who know how to capture it. A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin trades at one price for immediate delivery, called the spot price, and at…
Read MoreIn the ordinary digital world that most people inhabit, forgetting a password is a minor inconvenience, since almost every service offers a way to reset it, typically by sending a link to an email address or a code to a phone, restoring access within minutes. This convenience rests on a foundation of central authorities, the…
Read MoreThe idea that data and algorithms could help prevent crime before it happens has long held a powerful appeal, promising to make policing more efficient, more objective, and more effective by directing limited resources to where they are most needed. Beginning in the early years of the last decade, police departments across the United States…
Read MoreAlmost everyone holds a scattered collection of loyalty rewards they will likely never fully use, points accumulated in airline programs, stars in coffee apps, store credits, and miles in credit card schemes that all sit locked inside the closed systems of the various companies that issued them. These rewards all share a common and deeply…
Read MoreFor a small business, the single most dangerous moment of all is not when it happens to be unprofitable but when it actually runs out of cash. A business can be perfectly profitable on paper, with more sales than expenses over the course of a year, and still fail outright because at some particular moment…
Read MoreDecentralized finance protocols face a problem that would be instantly familiar to almost any consumer business but that takes a particularly acute and unforgiving form in their world, the persistent challenge of keeping users around once they have first arrived. In traditional finance, customers tend to be quite sticky, since switching banks or brokerages is…
Read MoreIn the world of blockchains that secure themselves through staking, a powerful and deeply controversial idea has taken firm hold, the seductive idea that the very same staked assets used to secure one network could simultaneously be put to work securing many others at the same time. This concept, known as restaking, promises to make…
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