Ryan Selkis is co-founder and CEO of Messari, an open, trusted source of cryptoasset data. Prior to founding Messari, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys, and was on the founding teams of Digital Currency Group, where he managed the firm’s seed investing activity, and CoinDesk, where he led the company’s restructuring and annual Consensus conferences. He has been an investor and prolific writer in the crypto industry since 2013. Messari is building an open-source data library for the cryptoasset community. The library contains financial information, issuer disclosures, and blockchain analytics for thousands of tokens, as well as general information regarding the teams, advisors, and investors affiliated with a given project. Messari is also creating a “whitelist” of cryptoasset projects that abide by community-dictated transparency standards, via its token curated registry. The company also runs one of the industry’s most popular newsfeeds and email newsletters. Twitter @twobitidiot Medium @twobitidiot
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Episode 55
Ryan Selkis
Ryan Selkis | Will Token-Curated Registries Become the Database for a New Financial System?
Ryan Selkis is co-founder and CEO of Messari, an open, trusted source of cryptoasset data. Prior to founding Messari, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys, and was on the founding teams of Digital Currency Group, where he managed the firm’s seed investing activity, and CoinDesk, where he led the company’s restructuring and annual Consensus conferences. He has been an investor and prolific writer in the crypto industry since 2013. Messari is building an open-source data library for the cryptoasset community. The library contains financial information, issuer disclosures, and blockchain analytics for thousands of tokens, as well as general information regarding the teams, advisors, and investors affiliated with a given project. Messari is also creating a “whitelist” of cryptoasset projects that abide by community-dictated transparency standards, via its token curated registry. The company also runs one of the industry’s most popular newsfeeds and email newsletters. Twitter @twobitidiot Medium @twobitidiot
Information has become, quite literally, the currency of the digital age. Yet, even before the advent of cryptocurrencies, investors have always understood information to be a valuable asset. “The most valuable commodity I know of is information,” said the iconic Wall Street villain Gordon Gekko. However, information is a commodity, only in so far as it derives its value from the computational efforts of those who seek to process it. In a world of informational abundance, the quality of our computations, not their quantity, determine the scale of our harvest.
Ryan Selkis believes that harvesting, processing, and storing data about the crypto economy can be done better. His team at Messari is building an open data library, as well as a set of curation tools that will help researchers, investors, and regulators make sense of the industry. Ryan has stated outrightthat the “Bloomberg of crypto will be a network, not a centralized company.” This is where his work on token-curated registries factors in.
“Token-curated registries are decentrally-curated lists with intrinsic economic incentives for token holders to curate the list’s contents judiciously,” wrote Mike Goldin, in a 2017 article titled “Token-Curated Registries 1.0.” You could say that if Wikipedia and Bitcoin had a baby, the child would be a TCR. Such databases could theoretically replace all commercially curated, owned, and operated, libraries on earth, by offering a new set of economic incentives that harness the networks and expertise of the planet’s seven-and-a-half billion people.
In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Ryan Selkis joins Demetri Kofinas for a conversation about information, cryptocurrency, and how Messari is working to build the database for a new financial system.
Ryan Selkis is co-founder and CEO of Messari, an open, trusted source of cryptoasset data. Prior to founding Messari, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys, and was on the founding teams of Digital Currency Group, where he managed the firm’s seed investing activity, and CoinDesk, where he led the company’s restructuring and annual Consensus conferences. He has been an investor and prolific writer in the crypto industry since 2013.
Messari is building an open-source data library for the cryptoasset community. The library contains financial information, issuer disclosures, and blockchain analytics for thousands of tokens, as well as general information regarding the teams, advisors, and investors affiliated with a given project. Messari is also creating a “whitelist” of cryptoasset projects that abide by community-dictated transparency standards, via its token curated registry. The company also runs one of the industry’s most popular newsfeeds and email newsletters.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
