Assertion Supported
McKeon: Over 90% of OpenSea Collections Have Never Traded
“Something like 90% or maybe more than 90% of collections on OpenSea have never had a single trade.”
Insight
McKeon: NFTs Provide Provenance but No Inherent Value
“Taking an item and wrapping it in an NFT does not inherently make it value. There's nothing valuable about the file format inherently, other than you now can prove provenance, but of course it has to be something that people want.”
Insight
McKeon: DAOs' Biggest Issue Is Capital Gridlock, Not Theft
“So if anything, I would say the biggest challenges around DAOs today are not that People are absconding with the money, but in fact that the money is not being spent quickly enough.”
Insight
McKeon: Wallet-to-Wallet Messaging Remains Unsolved Due to Spam Vulnerabilities
“Wallet to wallet messaging is still one of the big unsolved things in crypto. The reason it's hard is because as soon as you open up wallet to wallet messaging, you get massive amounts of spam.”
Insight
McKeon: The Web3 metaverse differs fundamentally through participant asset ownership
“The big difference with the way most people in crypto think about the metaverse is that the digital environments we interact in today are wholly owned by corporations and by particular platforms. Whereas the metaverse that we envision in the future is more lik…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKeon: The Metaverse Will Act as a Base Layer for Digital Activities
“We think of a metaverse as a base layer, so it's a layer upon which many other things will be built. You can go into the metaverse and you can play a game. You'll probably be able to go into the metaverse and trade stocks. You'll probably be able to go into th…”
Insight
McKeon: Web3 gaming requires fast, low-fee environments to work
“All the activity is happening in these low fee environments because you need fast and cheap to make the game use case work.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKeon: Web3 interoperability will rely on transparent overlay networks
“We think something similar will happen in Web three. Where something like Axler is an overlay network on top of all of these sub-ecosystems, from the user's perspective, it's totally transparent.”
Insight
McKeon: NFTs represent the purest form of e-commerce ever conceived
“NFTs are the purest form of e-commerce ever conceived. My friend Kai Sheffield used that phrase, who's the head of crypto at Visa. There's no supply chain. There's no logistics. It's literally straight from the creator to the consumer.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKeon: Web3 mainstream adoption will be driven by utility over trading
“So if I say, how do we go from three hundred million to five billion? I think it's going to be more through these use cases that revolve around access and usage more than it's going to be trading.”
Opinion
McKeon: Decentralized trades without counterparties are revolutionary for market structure
“It's like, wow, I just executed a trade, and there was no counterparty on the other side. That's revolutionary relative to the way markets have worked for hundreds of years.”
Insight
McKeon: Risk-taking CEOs run firms with higher leverage and volatility
“So essentially the CEOs that had higher levels of risk taking in their private lives, we saw the same attributes in the firm. So everything from higher leverage, Higher prevalence of M&A activity, higher equity return volatility. It was almost like everything …”
Assertion Contradicted
McKeon: Later 2017 ICOs priced better, reducing day-one trading pops
“One of the things we saw is that as we moved through 2017, the projects got better at capturing more of that value. So we weren't seeing as large of sort of the pop On day one of trading.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McKeon: Early ICOs ignored securities laws before adopting compliance tools
“Initially, everybody was ignoring securities laws entirely, and then there was this idea, like, oh, maybe we need to comply with these things, and so then there were all these other mechanisms, like the SAFT that were invented, and so I'd say that was the othe…”
Insight
McKeon: Crypto network assets begin as securities; tokenized assets remain securities
“Most of the network assets at least start their life as securities before the network is active. And of course, all the traditional assets, real estate, equity, bonds that we might represent on chain are going to be deemed securities for their entire life cycl…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKeon: Tokenized assets will trade across a spectrum from 24/7 to restricted hours
“So I think what you're going to see is a spectrum. So some assets are going to trade 24 seven. I mean, many assets already do. Bitcoin is traded 24 seven. Ethereum is traded 24 seven. For traditional assets, maybe the larger issues will trade 24 seven, but you…”
Insight
McKeon: Shortening traditional asset settlement via automation is promising but complex
“And so one of the points I make in the paper is that I think there is a lot of promise in terms of really reducing settlement time, but these are more complicated transactions than just the way cryptocurrency works, right? Like you've got custodians involved, …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKeon: Initial security tokens will be plain-vanilla asset representations
“The initial versions of security tokens are going to be plain vanilla issuances. We're going to take, like, the simplest version of representing an ownership claim in one of these assets and represent it on chain, and those will be kind of the test cases, righ…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKeon: Opening private assets globally to accredited investors will compress trading spreads
“Even like setting retail aside for a minute, like if you could just open those assets up to all accredited investors all across the world, that's an enormous increase in market depth. And so you have to believe that that is going to impact liquidity. It's goin…”
Insight
Smart contracts could grant tenured voting rights based on holding time
“So you could program that into the security, you know, relatively easily with smart contracts where you look at the length of time that a particular asset has been hold by a particular wallet and allocate voting rights in that way.”
Insight
McKeon: For-profit corporations struggle to establish widely adopted industry standards
“It's very hard for sort of a for-profit corporation to create a standard that's gonna be widely adopted, because, of course, everyone knows that a lot of value is going to accrue to that corporation, and so you get all these sort of strategic forces that preve…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Tokenization will surge once traditional investors overcome intimidating crypto interfaces
“Many of the traditional investors are intimidated by the technology or just the interfaces, but I think as they start moving up that learning curve, that's when you're going to see more and more assets tokenized because there's going to be a larger and larger …”
Assertion Supported
McKeon: In 2018, Only One or Two Crypto Funds Exceeded $100M
“There was one or two funds over a hundred million dollars in the entire crypto space.”
Disclosure
McKeon: Collab+Currency invested in Axie Infinity at 15k to 20k users
“We invested in Axie when they had 15 or 20,000 users probably.”
