The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 53 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
McKeon: 99% of all crypto assets could be NFTs long-term
“We think there's a very plausible scenario where 99% of all crypto assets are NFTs in the longer run, especially as minting costs come down into the few cents or perhaps fraction of a cent.”
McKeon: Yuga Labs could become the Web3 version of Disney
“You could see Yuga basically becoming a web three version of Disney, and all of it is going to trace back to these holders of the original board eight pictures.”
McKeon: Investment DAOs will displace a portion of traditional VC over time
“The ones we've been talking about are investment DAOs, and those really mimic a venture capital fund, and in fact, we think will displace a portion of venture capital over time.”
McKeon: Digital wallets will become as ubiquitous as email addresses
“I don't know if it's five years or nine years or 13 years, but I do know that our north star at the fund is that everybody is going to have a digital wallet. They are going to be as ubiquitous as email addresses. It's gonna be the way you receive your paycheck…”
Digital wallets will eventually hold stocks, bonds, and real estate
“That really is the big innovation, is this idea that digital wallets will be able to hold all different kinds of assets. You'll be able to hold shares of stock and bonds and pieces of real estate, maybe the mortgage to your home, like all these different sorts…”
Top VC funds could monetize future access rights via tokenization
“Well, all of a sudden, to raise a dollar of capital, somebody might pay a dollar 25, because not only are they putting the dollar into this current fund, they're also buying the access right to the next fund.
It actually would allow benchmark to raise more cap…”
McKeon: Token-gated access might be the next generation of site authentication
“We know we're going to move past this, and we think that
Tokens and token gated access control might be one of the mechanisms which would be the next generation of authenticating into sites.”
McKeon: Profile picture NFTs are placeholders to bootstrap communities
“Board Apes and a lot of the other what we call PFP projects, so profile picture projects, I think the right way to think about them is that they are effectively placeholders. To be able to bootstrap a community, and in the long run, will be much more than a pi…”
McKeon: Crypto's biggest use cases will map the social graph, not finance
“We think that actually the biggest use cases in crypto are not going to be purely financial in nature. They're actually going to be things that map the social graph.”
McKeon: Vast Majority of NFT Items Will Probably Go to Zero
“The vast majority of collections don't trade, and the vast majority of items are probably going to go to zero.”
McKeon: DAOs collapse governance and voting coordination costs to near zero
“The coordination around governance and voting mechanisms Has been collapsed to almost nothing when you're using these digital environments with provable ownership.”
McKeon: Web3 founders often prefer DAO capital over traditional venture firms
“When you talk to founders, many times they prefer to take capital from DAOs as opposed to traditional venture firms.”
McKeon: Metaverse will evolve into infinite plots rather than fixed maps
“This is probably the way the metaverse looks because a fixed map is very skeuomorphic, as they say. It's kind of like if we were to imagine regular real estate in a digital environment, it would look like a fixed map. But this is cyberspace. There's no reason …”
McKeon: Web3 asset ownership enables cross-game reuse for first time
“The interesting thing about Axie is it started out as a singular game, but because people own the characters and because people own the board, you can repurpose these assets into new games. This has really never been possible in gaming before.”
McKeon: Trust-minimized ledgers represent an irreversible technological shift
“Now that we have these trust-minimized ledgers, we're not going back to siloed databases. It's just not happening. Just like once we had the personal computer, we're not going back to typewriters. This has been a technological state change.”
McKeon: NFTs are probably crypto's least correlated asset to the S&P
“Out of all the things in crypto, NFTs are probably the most uncorrelated with things like the S&P, because they're really more like a consumer product.”
McKeon: NFTs shifted crypto's focus from speculative trading to utility
“The big difference over the last 12 to 18 months, NFTs are the ones that caused this paradigm shift. The mentality went from trading to using. That's a really important shift that probably most people who are outside the industry haven't fully grasped. The rea…”
Tokenization offers secondary liquidity for locked-up fund capital
“And so that I think is one of the promises of tokens is this idea that funds or various types of assets can raise capital and the capital is locked up, yet the investor can achieve some degree of liquidity through a secondary market transaction and not through…”
Smart securities could allow investors to unbundle and sell voting rights
“So to the extent we could unbundle the voting rights from the cash flow rights, you could actually sell off the voting rights
Separately, while retaining the cash flow rights.”
Crypto security token issuances are not cheaper than traditional IPOs
“Today, I'm not sure it is cheaper. Because if you look at the costs around an IPO, yeah, there's some legal costs, there's some accounting costs, like there's some things you could probably automate, but the really big costs are the bankers that are selling it…”
Programmable securities will embed regulatory compliance directly into assets
“We're not doing compliance at the exchange level anymore, we're now doing it at the level of the security, which is actually a fascinating concept, and I think, like, one of the major sort of innovations we're gonna see with programmable securities.”
McKeon: Crypto Innovation Has Materialized in NFTs and Tokens, Not Regulated Securities
“There's still lots of people working on bringing regulated assets on chain, but it's really been the fungible tokens, the network tokens, the NFTs, where we've actually seen most of the innovation and most of these features come to life.”
McKeon: Token Investing Forced Collab+Currency Spin-Out Over VC Exemption Rules
“By late 2019, early 20 20, it was clear that we were going to trip up something called the venture exemption. Because as a crypto fund, we invested both in equity and in tokens, as opposed to traditional venture funds, which are obviously primarily equity. So …”
McKeon: Collab+Currency invests in NFT platforms rather than direct NFT assets
“Our fund historically has not taken a lot of direct NFT exposure in terms of the underlying, but we are perhaps the most active investor in the world in NFT related platforms.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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, …”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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 …”