End of the Chain

End of the Chain


Finance is Interest Rates, Not Trading - Colin Platt

January 30, 2020

About this episode


In this episode, Colin riffs on banking, defi and how crypto wasn't really interesting until interest rates came along. Colin popped up in Sam's fees when he wrote a great article about the inherent risks from Libra. Colin's background in finance gives him a great viewpoint on how this industry will develop over the next decade.


Colin has worked in distributed ledger technology and cryptocurrencies since 2013, launching efforts at BNP Paribas Global Markets, where he sat on DLT focused industry steering committees, including R3, the Post-Trade Distributed Ledger working group (PTDL), and FIX cryptocurrency working group. He became a technology entrepreneur in early 2016, initially working with digital asset derivatives. He has been the co-host of the Blockchain Insider podcast since 2017 (1.2m+ downloads). Currently an independent consultant for DLT and cryptocurrency, Colin works with a wide range of companies from start-ups to UK and US blue-chip companies, as well as government and industry consortium. He recently led a 40+ digital asset working group of financial institutions in Europe and North America, in collaboration with R3. Colin is a regular cryptocurrency conference speaker and panellist, and has been featured in the Financial Times, BBC Radio, the Block Crypto, Coindesk; quoted in Reuters, the New York Times, Capital (France), Risk Magazine, and Banking Tech. Prior to his involvement in cryptocurrencies, Colin held roles in business transformation, and structured product marketing at BNP Paribas in Paris, London and New York. He holds a Masters in Finance from EDHEC Business School in France, and Bachelors in Business Administration from Jönköping International Business School in Sweden.


Colin's Links


Twitter | Linkedin | Medium


SHOW NOTES


Where to find the show


iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Youtube | RSS Feed


What to listen for



  • Why cryptocurrencies exist in a world of regulatory arbitrage and what is needed long term for institutional clients to move into the space.
  • What the best and middle case for Bitcoin is at the institutional level long term.
  • How middleware Fintech development in DeFi is about secondary markets and layers built on top.
  • Why we need to be able to identify/price certain fundamental aspects of value in cryptocurrency in order to create pricing models like every other one-dimensional asset class whether it be equities, FX or commodities.
  • Why Bitcoin’s price is a demand function; the supply is already hard-wired in.
  • How using interest rates to define the time value of Bitcoin or Ether would bring a lot more value into these networks, instead of developing new protocol features or making transactions cheaper.
  • Why DeFi 2nd, 3rd, and 4thorder products could start to look a lot like historical CDOs (Collateral Debt Obligations) and how eventually building more leverage will result in scary high-risk products being created that people do not understand.
  • Why people need to think about the fundamentals of the DeFi market, not the happy path which is what developers focus on, and what could go wrong in a stress-test scenario.
  • Why seemingly minor things can have huge butterfly effects on our interconnected financial system's design.

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