"America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates." A snappy phrase or snap judgement? This erroneous (in my opinion) claim ultimately served
Thoughts on building businesses, shaping innovation, and making crypto practical.
"America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates." A snappy phrase or snap judgement? This erroneous (in my opinion) claim ultimately served as the unofficial thesis of Mario Draghi's 2024 report on European competitiveness. While memorable enough for a presentation slide, its appeal lies in holding just enough truth to resonate. Draghi's analysis concludes that Europe genuinely […]
Seeing Tal Cohen, the President of Nasdaq articulate the future of markets using the exact terminology I have championed for years is a reassuring sign. It's a signal that the idea is no longer a fringe position, and that institutions operating the underlying infrastructure are now taking it seriously. Nasdaq recently announced its equity token […]
Ask most people what makes a stablecoin stable and they will point straight to the peg, yet a recent BIS bulletin suggests the more revealing attribute is how holders are actually being paid, and it separates the ways that yield is generated into two very different models. In the first model the return simply passes […]
McKinsey’s "AI assembly line" article poses a model in which artificial intelligence moves beyond isolated tasks and begins to run the workflow itself, making routine business decisions more quickly and more consistently than humans may be able to. What I am starting to question, however, is the single word sitting at the center of this […]
In November 2025, Mark Mobius, one of the most decorated emerging markets investors of the past half century, alongside Cornell University faculty and a McKinsey consultant, published The Digital Currency Revolution: Central Bank Digital Currencies, Crypto, and the Future of Global Finance. The book maps the global race between CBDCs, stablecoins, and digital payment systems […]
The definition of money, like most foundational ideas in economics, has not changed much since William Stanley Jevons codified it in 1875. The six characteristics of money —durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability— have served as the standard ever since, a framework so durable that it survived the shift from gold to paper, […]
We tend to judge payment systems by the metrics we can immediately see and feel, namely speed, fees, convenience and user experience. But according to Joshua Tate, co-founder and CEO of ForumPay, those metrics only reveal part of the story. Beneath every transaction sits an economic structure, which, for decades, has shaped how money moves, […]
Joshua Tate isn’t one to romanticize entrepreneurship. For the ForumPay co-founder and CEO, building a company was never about startup mythology or chasing the glossy image that often surrounds Silicon Valley success stories. If anything, Tate believes most people misunderstand what building a company actually feels like once you’re inside it. “Any entrepreneur basically comes […]
The cultural shorthand for entrepreneurship is a story of clean lines and grand successes. In the popular imagination, founders are often cast as visionaries of the digital age trailing multibillion-dollar valuations, while consumers are conditioned to look at the architecture of the finished product rather than the structural failures that almost brought it crashing down […]
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