Werd I/O

My plan for my mother’s Christmas present this year was to write her a novel. Despite her failing eyesight, she devoured books: I bought her a Kindle, which allowed her to increase the font size to an almost comical level, and an iPad, which she used to listen to audiobooks. The one year I finished NaNoWriMo, she followed along every day. It wasn’t a particularly great piece of writing, but she read it with a mother’s pride. So I wanted to do that again.

Yesterday marked three weeks since her passing. Processing this new reality is going to be a long journey. I’m not okay, but I’m okay-presenting: I can emulate a fully-functional human when I need to. I don’t want to perform that emulation for loved ones, but nobody else needs to know that I pull over to the side of the road to ugly cry or can barely manage to sleep through the night. I miss her terribly, and I will always miss her terribly.

I’m still planning on writing that novel.

Writing has always been the thing I love to do most. It’s not that I’m necessarily good at it, although I also don’t think I’m bad; it’s more that it puts me into a kind of meditative state that gives me the tools to process the world. Some people are really great social thinkers. I need to put my ideas down in words.

My grandfather, Sidney Monas, translated Crime and Punishment into English. My cousin, Sarah Dessen, is a famous and talented young adult author whose novel Along for the Ride is being adapted by Netflix. Another cousin, Jonathan Neale, has written beautiful novels and progressive non-fiction histories. I’m not looking for the literary impact or success of any of them; I just want to have the mental stillness to sit down and tell a story, and to develop the skills to do that well.

Still, the startup side of me is interested in how people get to do this full-time. The indie author DC Kalbach makes a solid salary from self-publishing on Kindle Unlimited. Elle Griffin is going to serialize her novel behind a Substack subscription. My friend Yoko Oji Kikuchi makes her living through supporters of her art on Patreon. These seem like idyllic existences to me, but also difficult: each requires a rhythm of sustained creativity to maintain.

For now, I’m lucky to be able to think about making stuff without having to worry about its financial sustainability - or even if it’s good. (To be clear, I hope that it’s good.) I’ve got my draft going in Ulysses, and I’m making solid progress. Who knows what will happen next - and in lots of ways, it doesn’t matter, as long as I keep working on it. This will be the last you hear about it until you read it.

The one thing that does matter, if I’m truly honest with myself, is this: I just wish its intended audience was here to read it.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I’m convinced that one reason Americans embrace the cryptocurrency ideal of “programmable money” is that the domestic banking system is such an unmitigated disaster. Some of the features crypto enables - near-instant cross-institutional transfers with low fees, for example, or comprehensive API access to banking features like balances and transactions - are enjoyed by traditional banking customers elsewhere in the world.

When I first moved to California and needed to pay rent for the first time, I did what I’d always done: set up an automatic scheduled transfer with my bank. When the bank printed out a check and mailed it to my landlady, a week late no less, I couldn’t believe it. Surely checks were obsolete? Why wouldn’t they just transfer the money?

This year, a full decade later, I moved a balance from one retirement account to another: perhaps not a huge amount by Peter Thiel standards, but still, a non-trivial sum. And yes, the same thing happened: the original institution printed out a check and mailed it to me. Then I needed to mail that check, with a cover letter with written instructions, to the receiving institution. It’s a broken, stupid process that doesn’t appear to have meaningfully changed since the seventies.

America’s federated approach creates lots of these kinds of inefficiencies. My assumption is that there are now so many companies and business models that have grown up to take advantage of the gaps and inconsistencies that it’s now grievously hard to smooth them over. This same underlying business pattern has been repeated over and over here: for example, while citizens of other countries can often file taxes without having to submit a return or paying for a processor, the US tax system is famously kept complicated and expensive through lobbying by Intuit, the owner of TurboTax.

Similarly, while open banking has been a fantastic innovation elsewhere - regulations now force banks to share data and interoperate across the UK and Europe, for example - it hasn’t yet gained a foothold in the US. As The Financial Brand reports, the way financial applications are forced to work in the United States is genuinely jaw-dropping:

Screen scraping technology has been around since the early days of the internet (and of online banking) and remains in active use, but comes with a number of problems. Most important of these, from financial institutions’ perspective, is giving login credentials to a third party without setting strict limits on that access, which is neither elegant nor ideal. But even companies known for their use of APIs, such as Plaid, have resorted to screen scraping when API connections were not possible.

Programmable money can be seen as a great way to force the issue. Suddenly banks are no longer competing just with each other, but with an internet-native, cross-border set of currencies that allow a new generation of connected applications to be built without asking for anyone’s permission. DeFi platforms have lower fees because they can operate on the protocol level; more importantly, anyone can build and launch one. There’s no need to ask for permission. There’s also no incentive to keep the workings of their platforms private, so they’re typically fully open source and auditable by any third party who cares to check.

That’s going to create serious competitive pressure for traditional banks. As DeFi adoption continues to grow, they’ll need to do more and more to compete: on the fee and flexibility level for end-user customers, but also on the platform level for partners. Banks have real competitive advantages too, like FDIC insurance and real humans who sit in regional branches or answer the phones, but this will need to be combined with a newfound openness. Because cryptocurrencies can be thought of as protocols that you can build on top of, the traditional banking system needs to move in that direction too; because crypto is permissionless and transparent, banks will need to find ways to lower barriers to partnering with them. Today’s situation, where APIs are hard to find or restricted to high-paying partners, will become a thing of the past. Alternatively, the banks will.

If I was working for a bank (which I’m not), I’d be finding ways to build open banking protocols with others in my industry, using open source principles. I’d be creating a non-profit technology custodian to create a neutral territory for the various institutions to collaborate: a W3C for banking. I’d be hiring fantastic technologists, technology advocates, and communicators to develop protocols, build libraries, and drive adoption. And I’d be doing it yesterday.

None of this is to say that crypto is going away. Even if the banks innovate appropriately in the face of this new-found competition (best case) or crypto becomes subject to Intuit-style regulatory lobbying to hinder the competition (realistic case), the horse has bolted from the stable. Trillions of dollars are invested in cryptocurrencies. A new generation of financial applications is absolutely inevitable: it’s already here. And crucially, I think consumers - real people with average incomes, who have long been underserved by the rigidity and biases of the traditional banking system - will benefit.

Disclosure: I work for ForUsAll, a retirement provider that allows participants to invest in crypto in participating plans, but this post was written independently and does not represent my employer.

Photo by Tim Evans on Unsplash

While I’ve been away from work, we’ve made some big announcements about something I’ve been helping to work on for a while as Head of Engineering.

Over in Fortune:

The platform, called Alt 401(k), will allow workers in participating companies to transfer up to 5% of their [401(k)] account balances into a Coinbase-traded cryptocurrency window. They will have over 50 cryptocurrencies to choose from as investment vehicles. ForUsAll says it also plans to monitor allocations, alerting employees when their overall cryptocurrency allocation exceeds 5% of their portfolio.

In the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Ramirez said participants who invest in cryptocurrency must acknowledge having read disclosures explaining it is a volatile asset. “Our guidance is not to be day trading anything, whether a stock or crypto,” he added.

‌[...] ForUsAll said it plans to eventually add small allocations to other alternative investments, including private equity, venture capital, and real estate.

In Barron’s:

Crypto may provide an incentive for people to put more money into their retirement plans, says Paul Selker, president of Spark Street Digital, a webcast production company.

“If the opportunity to put this tiny little slice of crypto into the portfolio makes them increase their contribution overall, they win. It almost doesn’t matter what happens to crypto,” said Selker. ForUsAll is the 401(k) plan provider for Spark Street’s 14 employees.

In The Motley Fool:

Now it is worth reiterating that ForUsAll only plans to let plan participants put up to 5% of their money into cryptocurrency. And that alone speaks to its speculative nature. It's also a responsible way to introduce cryptocurrency investing to people who may be excited to dabble in it, but don't really know much about it other than it's in the news a lot.

In USA Today:

Crypto investing is virtually nowhere to be found in 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts at the moment. But while financial advisers remain cautious about cryptocurrencies, they may be ready to embrace them due to client demand, according to the 2021 Trends in Investing Survey, conducted by the Journal of Financial Planning and the Financial Planning Association.

In the delightfully-named Benzinga:

“For too long, too many Americans haven’t had the same access to alternative investments that wealthy and professional investors have had. Our mission is to provide every American with the tools necessary to build a brighter financial future, and making these alternatives more readily available is a key step towards that,” said Jeff Schulte, CEO of ForUsAll.

Brett Tejpaul, Head of Institutional Coverage at Coinbase, added to this, “When we created our institutional platform, our initial focus was making cryptocurrency accessible to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals.”

“The next evolution is to broaden our reach and we are thrilled to be working with ForUsAll, the leading 401k technology platform, to expand access to cryptocurrency through 401ks,” Tejpaul added.

To learn more, head over to the ForUsAll site.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash