Alex Wittenberg

The two big ones are Rari and Market. And if you know where to look, you can sometimes find much higher stablecoin yields on these platforms than you get on AAVE and Compound. 

The easiest way to create conditions of stillness is to talk very little. It also helps to have the candidate you’re trying to see clearly ask you questions. Questions have very high signal value compared to most anything else you can get from a candidate. This is harder to do in practice than you might think—you need to make the candidate feel... See more

The above discussion may make it seem like only traders should care about liquidity. In Web3, this couldn’t be further from the truth. All users interact with liquidity, as all users need to move in and out of the tokens required to interact with a token-based economy. Similarly, all protocols need to interact with liquidity as they buy/sell and... See more

It’s a harmony of vibes: BAYC NFTs are literally valuable, so its new derivative currency feels like it should also be valuable, even though they are not explicitly financially linked. It’s like the way a simple Gucci T-shirt is expensive because the rest of Gucci’s products are expensive. The brand imparts an aura, no matter what the specific item... See more

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support... See more

You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of “persuasive design”—an umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior. One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps... See more

A good way to test this for most tokenized communities today is to ask: if their primary communications tool (e.g. Discord) disappeared, would this community still exist?

Each micro-startup gets to leverage the technical infrastructure, distribution engine, and existing customer base of a large company. But the GM model requires complex coordination of resources across the company – new product leaders need to push the marketing team to highlight their capabilities, train the sales team on selling their product, and... See more

Understanding the centrality of the desire for recognition is quite helpful in understanding the power and ubiquity of social media. We have developed a technology that can create a synthetic version of our most fundamental desire. Why did the Russian couple post those wedding photos? Why do any of us post anything? Because we want other humans to... See more