Design thinking and prototyping

Building in today’s high paced, mobile first mode of communication – we have seen evolution in UX. At the start of the millennium we had simple emails (asynchronous communication), we then moved to cellular devices (relatively synchronous) and now with social media (2d immersive synchronous).

But where do go from here?

The next paradigm shift in social is Metaverse – a shared ledger layer where all the applications communicate with each other in a permissionless way. With Facebook rebranding as “META” and Microsoft acquiring Activision (biggest game studio – creator of CoD) as the largest deal ever – is a clear testament to the product market fit that blockchains and metaverse have. Lot has been talked about the metaverse of late, but if you think about it, the metaverse has been set in existence since the genesis block of Bitcoin/Ethereum, since that day we are living in a shared state. Since that day, every transaction, every DeFi protocol, every NFT has assimilated into one shared state(metaverse), chained block by block everyday, every second. However, over the course of this journey, most of us spent time on telegram, discord, twitter, reddit, 4chan. Till now there has been no native way of accessing, interacting with this shared state.

With web2.0 we don’t own our data, our tweets/pics/metadata is in siloed databases owned by Silicon Valley giants. The smartest brains of our generation are sucked into these firms to optimize selling “advertisements” instead of solving real-hard problems. But the future is going to be different. Web 3.0 is going to all about ownership and custody of your assets (financial, NFTs and more). These properties of ownership have only amplified in need with the global pandemic which has resulted in all-time high inflation and lack of trust in institutions.

Building products in this decade, I strongly believe properties of ownership and the complete experience of custody will be a killer feature to natively support in your projects.

2021 first week in Crypto

Recap of what happened

First week of 2021 was an extension of the bull market -> BTC soared from below 30k to almost 35k. Losing some steam in the middle with liquidations from Asia and almost 1.2B USD BTC withdrawn from Coinbase. Major reasons below

1. Lot of futures positions liquidated both from Asia and US. Lots of BTC transfer (>2B USD) from exchanges to hardware wallets meaning easing of the BTC fueled bull run
2. Bullshit price predictions by Banks ($146k JPM) followed by others. This is unnecessary and a replication of 2017 bull and crash when everyone was giving predictions and smart money started shorting the fuck out of the market initiated by CME futures (more on this later).
3. FINcen ruling – Steve Mnuchin and co in the Trump administration passed an act to allow Stablecoins and L1 layers – meaning products and trading legal in the US. This was a huge validation as pointed by Circle CEO (also USDC). I dont truly understand the implications but as far as crypto twitter is concerned it was big.
4. Altcoin dominance very very high – When something goes up it must come down. And Bitcoin is no exception. The crypto market consists of 2 major players – BTC and Altcoins (Not BTC). Altcoin dominance measures alpha generated by alts as compared to BTC. Alts have been relatively quite since Defi summer giving in way for the king to fuel the run. But gas gotta run out sometime. Alts rocketed up from 2nd Jan and are continuing to show good double digit alpha. More on this later.

Altcoin season

On 31st Dec NYE, I liquidated all by BTC holdings and converted to ETH. I had held by satoshis for more than 2 years – thru the dark days of $3k BTC and wanted to take in profits more than anything. We are all in for the money, sorry Nakamoto. Every bull market’s protagonist is BTC -> ETH -> Alts -> DeFi -> crash (bears). This year saw BTC go from below 5k (black Thursday March) to above 35k (time of writing). So selling at 30k wasn’t a bad idea seeing ETH still underpriced at $750 almost 50% below all-time-high (ATH). 1st Dec finally welcomed the Alt-season with open arms. ETH went from $750 to $1100 in one day with volumes soaring to 80% in USDT pairs, followed by the DEFI bluechips (SNX, UNI, SUSHI) and L2 solutions like LRC rocketing to more than 200% in 3 days. This is the most exciting front of cryptocurrencies – Decentralized Finance or De-Fi. In simple words – DeFi allows a token holder to take positions in a variety of digital-currencies as well as real-world assets like Crude-oil, Japanese Yen, Gold among a variety of commodities and forex assets. All this can happen on an exchange using swapping mechanisms in 15 minutes. No T+2 trading settlement bullshit of traditional finance and calling inefficient human processes in between because in “code we trust”. To give you an understanding of just how many smart engineers and token designers are in this space, I want to detail a major hack (and un-hack) that occurred with a top insurance token in De-Fi.
$COVER protocol is a De-Fi insurance token that is designed to de-risk your investments in top tokens like AAVE, COMP, SNX or C.R.E.A.M. It is also part of the YEARN ecosystem and advised upon by legend of the space – Andre Cronje (coder who tests in prod). On 28th December $COVER protocol’s tokenomics went out of the window when a hacker found a bug in smart contracts, attacked the system and minted 4 quintillion tokens out of thin air. Any currency is valuable only if their is a supply cap which the price reflects via demand-supply. Followed by the hack and an infinite supply, price of $COVER plummeted and lost 95% in value. This was the longest 10 minutes of my life as I had a small share of my portfolio here. The official Telegram channel was exploding (10 new members every second), users posting all kinds of shit comments, scam claims and even porn !! This hack was a second attack on a top insurance coin. Nexus Mutual’s founder’s wallet was also compromised and funds were stolen worth over $8 M. This was a smart-contract bug which led to loss of $3.2 M in both $COVER and $ETH. Suddenly, news surfaced that the funds were returned by the hacker. This was unheard of yet in crypto. A white-hat hacking group targeted the original hacker and claimed back the stolen funds, returning it to the COVER team with a sweet message – “Next time, take care of your own shit!!”. During this 30-40 minutes of a roller-coaster crazy ride, price plummeted from $800 to $5 and went back up to $300 (when white-hat hack news surfaced) but fell down to $9 as the COVER team’s official tweet came up announcing not to buy the token.

Qiao Wang – a leading crypto angel investor – tweeted the following day .

” White hat hacker created an infinite amount of $COVER, sold some for ~$3M worth of $ETH, burned the rest, returned the ETH back to COVER, with a message “Next time, take care of your own shit”.If you are not in DeFi what the fuck are you even doing? “

The BEARS

I feel the bears are around the corner by February, we will witness a spectacular crash. CME futures. This scares me the most.
CME (Chicago mercantile exchange) is the world’s largest and most diversified derivatives exchange. On Jan 5, CME Bitcoin futures reached an ATH with daily volume hitting $2.7 B during the correction from $33k to below $28k. More than the volume, CME has some history. In 2017, the first major bull run saw BTC top at 20k when CME launched BTC futures. BTC was trading at $19.7k on 17th Dec 2017, when CME futures were announced, when whales started selling BTC (or CME retail investors started shorting). BTC had gone 5x then and need a correction, similar is the time now. Bulls want to push BTC to sweet number of 40k, when I am assuming bears enter the market head-on. To add another dimension, CME is also listing Ethereum (#2 crypto) futures on Feb 8. ETH currently at $1100 will soar above its ATH $1400, but from there we need to be cautious as smart money will seek every opportunity to short the fuck out of maximalists and noobs. We are all in for alpha, so staying cautious and doing due-diligence is need of the hour. Especially when 5 of your friends ping you and ask “BTC kaise khareede?” when BTC is at all-time-high !! I don’t want anyone to make the same mistake I made in 2017 (holding thru ATH).

Closing remarks

Crypto is definitely the most intellectually stimulating and challenging fields in the world today. And real world use cases like derivatives and insurance have just entered the space. There is a huge dearth of skilled smart-contract engineers, incentive designers and computer scientists in this space. We are in the 90s of the Internet era, where you had to move fast and rake in the equity big bucks – most perished but some like Google, AMZN survived and redesigned the consumer internet landscape. Similar, if not more tectonic shift is disrupting the traditional finance space making it more democratic and universally accessible to anyone with a mobile phone (replacing a bank account). Because in code we trust !!Needless to say, this article is not financial advice at all. Crypto is a very fast paced field, targeted by hackers and manipulated by whales (large holders). It is a very risky investment opportunity, but it is once in a lifetime paradigm shift and if you want to understand the space – not just from a financial standpoint but from a more fundamental shift of computing to decentralized versions. I would highly encourage you to go down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin, Ethereum and De-Fi whitepapers. Happy to chat with anyone interested in this field, let me know in the comments below or a DM.

RISK hai, to ISHQ hai !!

Inevitable yet scary

Before I begin, I hope you and your families are safe and indoors. It’s a tough time, this too shall pass. As this anime meme puts it aptly –

Courtesy – @Ashar

Have been wrapping my head around some of the developments across the world. Had to write something to get the flow back and just yesterday a monumental development in tech and Indian market took place. Facebook (your friendly messaging app!!) just bought ~10% stake in India’s largest telecom provider “Jio” by investing a sweet $5.8 billion. Coming in at a time of global turmoil and crisis, makes it even more interesting to unravel.

I woke up this afternoon (new morning..haha) and checked my Twitter feeds for news and updates as part of my morning ritual. Filled with entrepreneurs and investors covering and lauding the investment as a huge boost to digital India – both Indian and International. Honestly, anyone with interest in tech and consumer internet in India could see this coming from a mile away. India is the largest market for the social media behemoth (400M Whatsapp users and ~300M FB) by a huge margin (~40%). “India is in the midst of one of the most dynamic social and economic transformations the world has ever seen, driven by the rapid adoption of digital technologies.”, said Facebook in a press release covering this investment. But all this is out in the public. What’s the fuss then?

The problem can be entailed back to Facebook and it’s burgeoning attempts to seek into India, the largest untapped Internet market thru Whatsapp. Back in 2016, FB came out with its freebies in the form of “Free Basics“, “it provided only limited access to the Internet through a suite of websites and services that, unsurprisingly, included Facebook”. We as a literate and conscious society rejected the offer and TRAI with online activists fought to uphold “Net Neutrality” and our rights to equal access to content. We fought back then. Soon after this, Jio rolled out the biggest disruptive product of our lifetimes (possibly) – free internet thru it’s SIM. Jio has added more than 200M internet users till date. In developing economies infrastructure (affordability, hardware, maintenance) is the issue and Jio solved just that. In a recent podcast of a16z, Marc Andreesen (father of modern Internet and SV legend) touched on this topic. When asked what’s the next digital frontier or landmark, he said Jio in India did the job of connecting 300M people. A first of it’s kind. ”Jio has done a fantastic job bringing the last mile connectivity”. So according to the SV guys, the challenge was more infrastructural rather than technological. High tech products are in abundance in developed economies but for them to trickle down to the next billion, infrastructure was the hurdle. Jio filled the gap perfectly.

Facebook failed in this pursuit of owning the Indian digital pipeline and Jio succeeded. Any logical person can connect the dots..so what? The timing is to be applauded. While the global economy is in turmoil and markets crashing, but in a post-Corona world where all the traditional sectors will digitise even more, the incumbents Alphabet, AMZN, Facebook, Netflix, MSFT all are perfectly positioned to grow even bigger. In this case Facebook might have timed this bet to boost it’s stock, image and diversify across markets. US economy is still uncertain, but Indian market with a huge consumer base with “excessive” content consumption is fool-proof. Online advertising rising as a result. All this does not look like a good sign for the Indian Tech ecosystem.
I read in a recent corporate report that Jio was working on a blockchain product on their network to give users control of their data. This is possible only if the software layer (FB, Whtsp) and the network layer (Jio, Airtel) are owned by one entity. With so much digitisation, user interaction is captured and analyzed in a very minute way on the software layer. If Jio can build a product on top of their network that’s truly Indian, even vernacular. It could be a game changer. Although very likely and rumours have it that Jio and FB are working to launch a vernacular focused social platform. Something like Sharechat and Lokal. With the software prowess plus last-mile reach this deal can be immensely disruptive. The biggest market potential in commerce is yet to be untapped with Whatsapp payments. Total UPI users across all platforms are ~120M, adding to this figure digital wallets, user numbers is poised to hit 300M this year. And when this happens payment analytics flows out of the country to SV like never before. GPay has ~65M users with almost 0 revenue and yet Google is betting hard on it. Imagine what happens when Whatsapp goes on guns blazing on payments and commerce. Last year in November a “Personal Data Protection Act” was introduced in Lok Sabha to ensure a privacy framework for 600M strong Indian users. Intended to restrict data outflows to consumer apps like TikTok, Facebook ecosystem and Google. This investment by Facebook just gave them much needed muscle to tackle policy issues.

Details of the deal aren’t made public, but this “Series A investment” is definitely FB’s largest investment ever. All according to plan to make India a digital colony (sorry). I was a little surprised only one article by FT raised data privacy infringement threats posed by this partnership. Big US tech companies have positioned themselves as champions of free-internet for all and calling China’s tech firms like ByteDance and Tencent as the “looming Big Brother”.We just curbed Chinese investments but none on these US ones. Its a double edged sword right now.

Upbeat 2020

We are living in one of the greatest periods of human history. Men have cried wolf when they see a recession in the making. Same happened for this one too. Big investors were all sceptical of the prevailing economic conditions since 2018. I remember listening to Howard Marks of OakTree Capital and reading one of his famous memos. The fear or apprehension was clear. Over-valued stocks, piled-up student loans and then the Trade war. The world has gone several cyclical periods of trailblazing bull markets followed by bear conditions. And for every cycle the causes are unlike the last one. Following its predecessors the Corona Crash came to the scene like a classic “black swan” event. In Dec’ 19 Corona was limited to China with a few hundred cases, fast forward to March’ 20, the world was staring at the fastest bear market (16 days vs 30 days – 1929 Great Depr.) Biological causes for a recession was new for everyone. I guess the definition will change for the word “recession” after the dust settles. “Economic contraction due to social distancing which was the pragmatic approach to curb a global pandemic” – The Corona Recession of 2020.

But humanity is a beautiful thing made by God. Humans when at their lowest point always have chosen fight over flight. The most developed species on the planet are adaptive, creative and resourceful when cornered. This crisis will only act as a catalyst to our progress as a civilisation. Some of the great companies formed around ’08 saw the slowdown as an opportunity. In a recent tweet Paul Graham – Founder YCombinator (biggest startup incubator) said Airbnb was founded a year after the crisis. Staring at an early death, the founders decided to resuscitate themselves when everyone else was hiding for cover. Being resourceful as they could, they started capitalizing on the fact that most people were behind on their mortgages. If you could build a network that ensures safety of both tenents and owners, you had a business model. Of course hindsight vision is 20:20, but timing and changing consumer trends helped them a lot. PG also mentioned that starting up in the next few months is “disproportionately likely to succeed”. Tough times don’t last, tough people do. Airbnb is not the only case that made the most of a global crisis. Whatsapp, Venmo, Groupon all got their shot between 2008 to 2010. It’s simple. You gotta be lean and mean during a slowdown. And that’s where startups have an immense advantage over the incumbents. You need a wartime CEO, and that’s what startups are all in for.

For the past few months I’ve been working remote for a some companies on contract. Did sales for dad’s company in first half and coding thru the night. Met some amazing people here in Riyadh. Got a lot of much needed perspective meeting all sorts of people by teaching SAT, GRE and GMAT students here. Math syllabus is same. 😛
One thing is for sure, the world as we know it is not gonna be the same. Technology for remote work and it’s circumstantial adoption could drive a new consumer behaviour trend. Before the lockdown started I was discussing this with my CEO. A veteran of the semiconductor industry, he gave an interesting anecdote. At the turn of the millennium, the Y2K bug was projected to create havoc in computer systems across the world. US Government spent billions of dollars building fault-tolerant systems. When 2000 happened the impact was not tantamount to the chaos it had created. Since this was post-facto from the warning, engineers and scientists built excellent systems to hedge against the damage. Similarly, the world had not seen a global pandemic of this scale for a while. Healthcare systems will emerge more resilient aided by AI. Remote healthcare will soon be a thing. Social distancing is not going to die anytime soon. Ed-tech is going to boom for sure. Traditional models of classroom teaching won’t get eroded soon, but as the pie increases ed-tech will eat away the incumbent share.

In these bizarre times of lockdown, conversations and community are the need more than ever. Only the medium has changed. Physical displaced by digital. Trying to stay productive, I am dabbling in some web-dev projects in addition to the Data Engineering required for my job. I believe this is the time for India to jump aboard and build solutions/services “India first”. Because the world is not going to be the same. 🙂

You can leave a comment below and share how you’re staying productive, learning in this lockdown.