This is another issue of Dirt Roads. Those are not recaps of the most recent news, nor investment advice, just deep reflections on the important stuff happening at the back end of banking. The time we are sharing through DR is precious to me, I won’t make abuse of it.
When I started Dirt Roads, 23 weeks ago, I didn’t have a clear idea of where that journey would have brought me. It had begun as a trick to give structure and order to my investment thinking process, but then quickly morphed into a tool to engage others on topics that were, to me, philosophically powerful and technologically urgent.
Today’s communities are communities made of written words. Of essays, like those in this newsletter, of powerful shots on Twitter, of momentous exchanges on Discord or Telegram. Most of those are not intermediated by anybody if not the writer and the community itself, and that’s what makes them so powerful. Over the long months of great isolation many more walked the same path I did. The dimension that joins us all at distance, the one that in the future might become an immersive sensorial experience, is today a dimension mainly built by written words.
I had planned to draft this week’s edition of DR while crossing the Atlantic through the night, and I intend somehow to keep such promise. The thing is that, however, I don’t know what I should write about, and not due to a lack of relevant topics to dissect. On the contrary, recently I’ve felt as my mind was continuously on the verge of exploding. Everything around me seems accelerating, and trying to make sense of it all consumes an incredible amount of energy. I dine with friends, buy something at the supermarket, and I feel as the world outside of the screen was strolling in unbearable slow motion. This sensation creates a vacuum between myself and the so-called reality that on the other hand reinforces the relationship I have with the virtual communities I belong to. I am sure many of you have had the same bittersweet feeling.
The world of human thoughts functions at multiple speeds. Never before it has been so evident, to me. Controlled descent vs. maximum acceleration. While I am sitting on a plane there are people out there busy at recreating entire virtual financial services hubs, or designing liquidity black holes able to ingest enough carbon credits to reshape the narrative around sustainable industrialisation, or simply trying to outbid everyone and buy a copy of the American constitution. This might well be the most exciting time of our adult lives. It is also a phase of immaturity and excessive enthusiasm I am sure, but being part of it feels inebriating and overwhelming at the same time.
For what concerns my life beyond DR, a lot has been going on. Roughly a month ago I was offered a grant by one of MakerDAO’s Core Units (the Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling Core Unit) to help redesign how Maker interacts with large institutional borrowers operating in the so-called real world. As backer of the $DAI stablecoin, Maker is the closest thing there is to the (de)central bank of Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. By creating the appropriate rails to bring off-chain collaterals en masse in the world of smart contracts, Maker could also become the most powerful and seamless ramp for the access of institutional capital into the DeFi metaverse. A first draft of a study we called Real-World Sandbox will be released to the wider community early next week, and will constitute the backbone of DR’s next issue.
Everything moves. Fast. Land approaches, the plane is starting its descent, and in the twelve-or-so hours I’ve been logged off somebody somewhere has started to work on some insanely ambitious project that will take my brain weeks to process. Reflection and rest are a luxury that can’t be neither underestimated nor overused. I will gift it to myself this week, just this week.
So long.