Apr 21, 2022

Disclaimer: I own a bunch of Ripple common stock thanks to being an employee there for nearly five years, so I’m absolutely talking my book with this article. Ripple’s common stock has always traded at a significant discount to the value of the company’s assets. In this article, I’m gonna break down how to value Ripple’s stock; what it might be worth on a sum-of-parts basis; and what it might be worth in various scenarios once the SEC lawsuit is resolved.

Aug 11, 2019

Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi[see me—ed] nickname, Zimbabwe was having its own economic meltdown despite being pretty much cut off from the rest of the world’s economies. Zimbabwe’s problem was hyperinflation—the second-fastest episode of hyperinflation in history, as it turned out.

Jan 3, 2019

I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I’m wrong), crypto lending markets are not big. You can borrow bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies for shorting or market-making purposes, but the rates are stiff (8-10% on cash-collateralised loans) and volumes are small.

May 22, 2018

Step n+1 in the process of moving josh.sg to a static site (steps 0 through n are right here) was to enable TLS encryption. Gone are the days when you had to fork out squillions of dollars for an SSL certificate if you wanted that fancy padlock in the address bar; these days, Amazon Certificate Manager hands them out for free. If you’re not wedded to the AWS ecosystem, the good folks at Let’s Encrypt hand out free certs as well, with their Clarkes-Third-Law-level magic configuration software.

May 20, 2018

Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML.