Today we hear from Ted Livingston, who founded Kik interactive in 2009 to address the problem of chat between blackberry, android and iPhone. Since then their chat app, Kik, has exploded in popularity, experiencing use by up to 40% of US teenagers. In 2015 Tencent, the builder of Chinese chat giant Wechat, purchased a 5% […]
In todayâs long overdue, landmark episode we are joined by an international panel of leaders in fin-tech and blockchain law: Claire Wivell, Hannah Glass (Australia), Alex Simms (New Zealand), Peter van Valkenburgh (USA), and James Duchenne (USA/Mauritius) The theme for the discussion was regulatory sandboxesâââframeworks for enabling businesses to operate in a deregulated environment. The goal is to allow legislative bodies to […]
Lee Weiss of the US law firm BernsWeiss discusses the Coinbase/IRS dispute. The dispute began in November 2016, when the IRS summoned Coinbase to hand over data about all users who were active on the exchange from 2013 to 2015, with a view to investigating the tax compliance of individuals who have transacted in cryptocurrencies. On behalf […]
David Bailey, CEO of BTC Media, discusses the recent shutdown of BTC-eand its mysterious connection to the MtGox hack which led to the exchangeâs demise in 2014. He also introduces Po.et, a revolutionary proof-of-existence blockchain platform. The arrest of Alexander Vinnik and seizure of the BTC-e website by the FBI in late July shed some long-awaited light on […]
Luka MĂźller and Dianne Schepers of MMEâââthe Swiss law firm famous for running the Ethereum crowdsaleâââdiscuss jurisdictional constraints, Crypto Valley, novel crypto-asset classes and the âsecond waveâ of tokenization. With 25 previous âtoken generating eventsâ and 60 pending projects, MME is a clear leader in the crypto law realm. The firm is now welcoming a âsecond […]
Juan Benet and Jesse Clayburgh of Protocol Labs, and Ryan Zurrer of Polychain Capital, discuss the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT). Inspired by Y Combinatorâs âSimple Agreement for Future Equityâ, the SAFT standardizes the legal framework surrounding token issuance and governs the nature of the transactions involved (i.e. the deployment of capital and distribution […]
David Sønstebø, co-founder of IOTA, discusses this next-generation post-blockchain platform designed to serve as the backbone for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). IOTA is a groundbreaking new open-source distributed ledger that does not use a blockchain. Its innovative new quantum-proof protocol, known as the Tangle, gives rise to unique new features like zero fees, infinite scalability, fast transactions, […]
Xander Dunn and Richard Craib discuss Numerai, a new kind of hedge fund built by a network of data scientists. The Numerai platform crowdsources machine learning by releasing encrypted data sets to data scientists, incentivising them to develop machine learning algorithms to analyse the data. Scientists then bid their predictions to the hedge fund by staking funds, and are […]