Two years ago, app developers faced a fairly simple choice when determining where they wanted to deploy their application: Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, or maybe a few additional layer-1 chains. Rollups weren’t yet operational, and few had ever heard the phrase “modular stack.” The differences between the L1s (throughput, fees, etc.) were stark and relatively easy to grasp.

Recently, I started building a habit of reading at least one Wikipedia page a day. It’s been a great way to learn about many random things — from bodegas, to Visa, to Wimbledon, to Dunkin Donuts, to where the term “chair” comes from, and much much more.

One of my new favorite products is from a company called Blackbird, a next-gen loyalty and payments platform for the hospitality industry aiming to enhance the connectivity between restaurants and their guests. Admittedly, I’m somewhat biased here, since Blackbird is one of Variant’s portfolio companies. But the thesis is that restaurants should have the tools to better understand their customers, while the most loyal guests should be rewarded as such - and to me, that makes a lot of sense.

This piece was originally published on Frontier Tech.

I’m a big fan of the idea that cities have several, distinct versions of themselves throughout the day, and that a city at 8am may feel completely different than one at 5pm. My favorite is the 1am-6am city, which I call the “secret city.”

In 2022, crypto infrastructure advanced significantly. Blockspace is now cheaper, more abundant, and more connected than ever. Zero knowledge technology continues to improve scalability, transaction security, and user privacy. The Ethereum Merge exemplified how strong economic incentives can successfully coordinate major technical upgrades, conducted mid-flight without any negative impact to the end user experience.

I love spending my time trying to generate ideas.

Tokens are an exciting new primitive that facilitate user ownership; they’re a novel tool founders can deploy to create healthier, more sustainable networks. But that newness also means there’s not a well-worn path for founders to follow. Launching a token too early risks skewing product-market fit, yet releasing a token too late might result in it not meshing well with the product or leave the project chasing its peers.

I’ve long struggled with the notion of liquid governance tokens. My mental model for protocols is to think of them as quasi-nation states, and thus I tend to view each governance vote as akin to voting in an election. Under this framing, the idea that you can buy votes by buying liquid tokens seems absurd – buying votes in elections is illegal, so why should it be the main method of acquiring influence in web3?