Picture Anya, a gifted fabric-maker hailing from a remote rural community in Cambodia. Her elaborate creations are stunning, but getting to customers outside her brick and mortar store? Almost impossible. It’s the fees, the intermediaries, the gaudy bureaucracy of traditional finance that continues to hold her back, and millions of...
I’ll never forget Nandar though, an incredibly smart young woman from Yangon. Chloe survived on a diet of instant noodles for several months as she bootstrapped her first Web3 hackathon. Her enthusiasm for empowering her compatriots, other Burmese coders, with blockchain skills was infectious. The painful underlying scarcity of resources...
Digital India. It’s a favorite buzzword of the administration, which euphorically invokes it at every opportunity while heralding the nation’s technologically enlightened future. Aadhaar, UPI – these are undeniable successes. What if we’re radically misunderstanding this real digital revolution and it’s not happening from the top down, but rather, it’s...
Let's be real. We’re all familiar with these “Top 10” lists, promising insights on the hottest new Web3 projects. But only 22% of these initiatives include metrics to assess innovative impacts on transforming the land of emerging markets. In particular, I’m referring to Southeast Asia, a part of the world...
Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology promise great things, along with great danger, especially for developing countries. Proponents laud its promise to expand financial inclusion and spur innovation. On the other side is a darker, twisted version that could further exacerbate inequities and erode the agency of countries in the Global South....
With no globally agreed upon international unified regulatory body, the current state cryptocurrency is leaving a distinctly divided landscape. This bifurcation would further entrench the Global North/South economic divides. Not everyone is convinced—a few stakeholders have been advocating for a more global regulatory structure. There is increasing worry that this...
Is the future of Web3 being constructed in sleepy Silicon Valley, or in the vibrant, underappreciated neighborhoods of Southeast Asia? Prolific pipelines of innovation attracting our attention are the much ballyhooed established tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. At the same time, emerging markets promise enormous...
The regulatory capture debate on crypto has become a bit of a dog whistle. It continues to loop in an endless feedback loop in the echo chambers of Washington D.C. and Brussels. We already read about the revolving door between the regulatory agencies and large crypto companies. With the first...
They are doing so by finally raising the alarm that cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) are likely to exacerbate wealth inequality. Perhaps most importantly, the report notes that the structure of the crypto market and its speculative nature are likely to heavily benefit larger investors. This state of affairs would...
We've all heard the siren song: crypto is going to democratize finance, tear down the ivory towers of Wall Street, and put the power back in the hands of the people. Let’s take a step back and look behind the curtain to see what’s really going on. The reality is,...
