Author: Dan Liebau

My recent working paper, conducted in collaboration with Singapore Management University, reveals that over 40% of surveyed experts expect high or very high adoption of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) by 2034, marking a notable shift from today’s environment where there is no adoption beyond limited experimentation. To understand DeFi’s future impact, I surveyed 109 experts, including traditional finance professionals, DeFi industry practitioners, and DeFi-focused academic researchers. The findings suggest that the most likely scenario is a collaborative future where financial institutions embrace DeFi rather than completely disrupting traditional finance. According to the findings, 66% of experts believe traditional finance will integrate DeFi.…

In 2017/18, the total market capitalization of cryptocurrency markets reached all-time highs. At the same time, certain projects like BitConnect made their name as one of the most prominent ICO scams. Therefore, a stain remains on the digital asset industry from the accumulation of failed projects and subpar investment returns since the peak of the Bitcoin bubble just over two years ago. While we take issue with those specific findings, as “pracademics” operating at the intersection of practice and academia, we hope to contribute to a solution of this systemic problem in the emerging digital asset industry. To further investigate…

I can’t believe how fast this year went by. 2020 is knocking on our doors shortly. As we are about to enter the last month of 2019 we want to share the Lightbulb Capital reading list based on books Derek and I read over the past few months. All of them have some angle to Innovation in Finance, as usual, even if it is not immediately obvious. The list below does not come in any particular order. We hope you can use some of the time off work in December to pick up one or two of the books that…

So here we go – it has been another six months and even though I thought I would not have time to read books anymore… … I just slept less I guess… Over the last 6 months there were also countless academic papers that I had the pleasure of going through. Not sure if that is also something worth compiling here, for now I just stick to the more digestible book format and hope you enjoy looking through the list and perhaps pick up one or the other book yourself. Without further due here is the list in no particular…

If there is one thing that most of us can agree on it probably is that cryptocurrency markets are very dynamic, ever-changing and fast-moving. In this monthly publication Lightbulb Capital reviews of some of the key data points. We highlight key changes in market dynamics but do not seek to explain them. While we have opinions on the forces driving markets, we do not impose them and leave it to the reader to interpret the data. We welcome debate. Over time we will create a time series of data points which we hope will become increasingly useful. Today’s review covers…

In the previous post we talked about how one can think about the amount to be invested in Innovation by comparing the investment to the premium of a call option. This post is about how to deploy capital, possibly in a cleverer way. Let’s start with describing the status quo in most Financial Services companies briefly: – There is an annual budgeting process (and still multi year initiatives) The budgeting process sometimes is so slow that projects cannot even spend enough in the time given which in turn results in management pulling the funds and stopping potentially good projects (bizarre…

For corporate executives and decision makers this is where the journey starts, they ask themselves: How much of my investment budget do I have to allocate to “Innovation”? And luckily many firms in the Financial Services industry have already found their answers and kickstarted their journeys. But many have not. So I thought we’d put together a few lines on a way to approach this question. Why do many struggle first of all? Because of the high levels of uncertainty. Because interest rates are low in 2016. Because yield is hard to find. Because ROE is already low – industry…