9 lessons
What Happens When You Send Bitcoin
No bank, no clearing house, no settlement day. Instead: a waiting room, a lottery, and ten minutes of cryptographic ceremony.
Who Actually Holds Your Crypto
FTX customers thought they owned coins. They owned IOUs from a company that had spent them. Custody is everything.
Stablecoins: The Three Ways to Stay Worth a Dollar
All three promised you a steady $1. One holds Treasury bills in a vault, one locks up $1.50 of crypto for every coin, and one tried to do it with pure math. Only the math one is gone.
AMMs: the Vending Machine That Reprices Itself
There is no order book and no market maker quoting prices. A trade against a Uniswap pool is just a withdrawal from a jar of two tokens, and the jar raises its own price the more you take.
DeFi Lending: Overcollateralization and Liquidation Bots
There is no credit check, no loan officer, and no recovery agent. To borrow on Aave you must already own more than you take, and the moment your buffer thins, a bot you will never meet repays your debt and walks off with a slice of your collateral.
Wrapped Assets and Bridges: How Value Crosses Chains
Your Bitcoin never actually moves to Ethereum. It gets locked in a vault while an IOU is minted on the other side, and that vault is exactly why bridges keep getting drained for hundreds of millions.
Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins
On the blockchain there is no "account in your name". There is only a balance sitting at an address, and whoever holds the private key can move it. So the real question is never "do I own crypto?" but "who holds the key?"
Tokenization of Real Assets: Putting a T-bill on a Blockchain
A blockchain token cannot earn interest. So how does a "tokenized US Treasury" pay you 4%? The token is just a receipt, the real T-bill is sitting in a custody account, and a regulated transfer agent is quietly keeping the two in sync.
CBDCs vs Stablecoins vs Deposits: Three Kinds of Digital Money
The "£100" in your banking app, in a stablecoin wallet, and in a future digital pound all read the same. But each is a promise from a different issuer, and when that issuer fails, the three promises are not worth the same at all.