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What Is Liquidation Preference Overhang and How to Manage It
It is not uncommon for founders to walk away from a successful exit empty-handed. How does it happen? The payout of preference shares might simply exceed the exit value. Since the preference shares sit on top of common shares on the distribution table, the management team walks away with nothing. Imagine building a company…
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Different Types of Investors and Their Characteristics
Investors come in all shapes and sizes, just like startups. Angels are often the first to take a chance on a fledgling company, writing checks normally in the sub-one million range. If you’re in need of more funds, traditionally speaking, venture capitalists are the next on the line. They can provide a larger sums…
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Navigating fundraising in today’s investment climate
We are in a surging interest rate environment that is unfamiliar to the majority of participants in today’s economic activities. High interest rates translate to higher costs of both equity and debt. On top of that, we also have heightened geopolitical risk and the rise of generative AI. As uncertainty increases, many investors have…
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The Era of Institutional DeFi
For people who stand on the sideline, it seems that the turbulence in the crypto market never ends. Yet, unaffected by the market sentiment, the believers continue to build, including large traditional finance players. Matt Huang is not wrong. While crypto theatre continues to dominate media headlines, the serious players see the true value…
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Financial Instruments for Fighting Climate Change: A Guide
The viewpoints on climate financial instruments have always been mixed. For instance, some say carbon credits are useless. It is just another tool for financial players to reap profit. The real hope in achieving the net zero goal is to invest in the technologies and hardware that directly reduce the carbon emission. Yet, I…
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zkRollup and zkEVM – the Path to Ethereum’s Scalable Future
Despite the many FUD moments we experienced in the first 90 days of the year 2023, we saw a wave of zero-knowledge (zk) scaling solutions reaching mainnet stage. The latest development further strengthens Ethereum’s position as the go-to-chain for developers and make it increasingly difficult for the alternative chains to compete. Two type of…
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From Mastodon to Lens – Exploring the World of Decentralized Social
Decentralized social refers to a type of social network that operates on a decentralized infrastructure, rather than relying on a centralized authority or company to manage user data and content. A decentralized social network has two prominent characteristics. For one, it is censor-resistant. We are all (at some point) witnesses of censorship on popular…
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CDR technologies, what are they?
The integrity of nature-based carbon credits has been under constant scrutiny. It reached a new height with a recent publication on the Guardian. As a proponent of nature-based carbon credits, I disagree with extreme journalism that trash talks nature-based carbon credits. Meanwhile I also agree that planting trees alone won’t get us to net-zero…
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The Present DeFi Landscape
In 2020, I re-engaged with Blockchain industry because of a book called “How to DeFi”. Three years later, I thought it would be interesting to do a review to see how the DeFi landscapes have changed from then to now. The book went into depth to discuss eight different use cases of DeFi, they…
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The 5th Industrial Revolution: Sustainability And ClimateTech
As the second decade of the 21st century came to an end, a global pandemic swept human civilization and shook up the status quos of almost every single aspect of the existing system. Among which, climate change takes center stage as it is widely believed as a likely cause of the pandemic. All of…