Every few years, crypto gets a rude awakening about the importance of the ethos at its heart: decentralization and self-custody. We all know the mantra “Not your keys, not your coins”, but in “good times” short memory, greed, or a combination of both make some forget and think “This time it’s different”.

I love clichés. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been looking for rules that can explain “everything”. Clichés are clichés because they are universal. They are (mostly) timeless and (mostly) true everywhere (across cultures). They are so self-evident and obviously true, that “everyone” keeps repeating them, even centuries after they were first articulated.

Better questions help us think more deeply, critically and creatively, expanding our perspective and leading to more innovative and effective solutions. Additionally, better questions can help us to engage more fully with the problem at hand, clarify our thinking and focus our efforts. Asking the right questions results in fully aligned project goals, values and vision.

The past year has illustrated just how important decentralization is. Canada’s authorities froze bank accounts, Ukraine's authorities limited the withdrawal limit to $3K per civilian, and Russians around the world were removed from the international SWIFT system. All of these actions were carried out with a click of a button. 

Convergence of Exponentials: In 1965, Gordon Earle Moore, then director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, discovered a wondrous phenomenon. Moore observed that the number of components (transistors, resistors, diodes, or capacitors) in a dense integrated circuit had doubled approximately every 18 months. He speculated that it would continue to do so for the next ten years.

Choice. Like fish oblivious to their surrounding water, choice is another modern ”thing” we often take for granted. Free will, and the facility to do as we please and govern our own life, is what separates us, humans, from animals, trees, and rocks.

PREVIOUSLY ON TOKENOMICS… In our first post, we explained what Tokenomics is, explored some common misconceptions around Tokenomics (and Tokenmetrics), and discussed why it's such an important concept to master. If you haven't yet read it, it’s a good place to start.

What is Tokenomics? Like many concepts in the crypto world, Tokenomics is an ambiguous concept with different interpretations, depending on whom you ask. In this series of “essays”, we will try to demystify, explain and present (as simply as possible) a framework for understanding and designing an optimal tokenomic model. We’ll examine the many filters we use, when assessing a project’s prospect, to better understand what are the building blocks. Finally, we will show how we bring together these blocks, to build and optimize an ecosystem’s Tokenomics.

NFTs will be the new ad inventory of the internet. That's a hypothesis we’ve had at Node for a while. But how will it play out? Is the timing right? What's the most relevant business/protocol? ‍We’ve realized that marketing in the metaverse is all about brands building web3 communities. ‍While exploring this hypothesis, we’ve been waiting to see two important milestones:

Who Has the Biggest Brain? was a brain training social video game by Playfish, published on Facebook in early 2009. It was played 500 million times by over 15 million Facebook users, which was, at that time, a massive success. The game consisted of 4 minigames focused on memory, math and spatial games to get a “brain score”. Once completed, a leaderboard showed both the player's Facebook photo plus core, and that of their nearest competitors and friends.

For many people, money and finance are loaded terms. Leading thinkers in both the financial and education fields have raised the interesting, yet perplexing query of why we still don’t offer financial education as part of everyone’s 12-year journey throughout the school system. Though it’s hard to imagine, not so long ago in the human evolution timeline, only the selected few knew how to read, write or use basic arithmetic.

Follow your passion. Such a cliché, right? If you watched some motivational videos in the past decade you must have encountered Steve Jobs’s commencement speech for Stanford’s graduating class of 2005. It was not long after Jobs had recovered from cancer, which gave the speech an even more epic effect. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle”. Mic-drop.

Over the past month I’ve taken a deep dive into the LootVerse, as a developer/gamer/investor, and here’s what I found in a three min read.

Morning. Your phone’s snooze function failed you (again). You frantically get ready for work, haphazardly throwing yesterday’s leftovers over the stove while you complete the rest of your rushed morning routine.

Data has been, is, and will continue to be the linchpin resource. It’s the element separating the good from the great. the Alpha(bet) and the Omega. You get the point. But, as data keeps growing exponentially, we are drowning in data - but starving for wisdom.

The crypto industry is built upon a new, decentralized foundation whereby the code is the law. This allows innovation, in the form of new types of contracts, to replace the old, centralized system with its friction-prone, single point of failure. Code (compared to traditional agreements), enables much more creativity and flexibility to generate value. At the same time it’s open, which means the best talents in the world can take advantage, with tangible and immediate rewards for anyone who can identify a vulnerability.

Our story begins with the Satoshi White Paper. In 2012 we saw the banks collapse in Cyprus; we saw lines of people - unable to withdraw their own money - waiting to withdraw just 50 Euros as their daily budget. We realized that, while we understand how today’s financial industry works, it’s a whole different thing to be personally impacted by it.