Token Dispatch

If I call a plumber, I pay when the leak stops. If a company hires ten scientists to build a better battery, it pays them every month whether or not the battery ever shows up. It is what you do when you cannot tell in advance if an answer exists, and when the only people able to judge the work are others who do the same work. The oldest alternative is the prize. In 1714 the British Parliament offered up to £20,000 to anyone who could find a ship’s longitude at sea.

Hello, When we buy $1,000 of Nvidia stock tokens on the Robinhood app, Robinhood’s entity keeps $8. Meanwhile, 0x - the company whose software does the RFQ (request-for-quote) price finding, earns only 50 cents. When you buy the same tokens through KyberSwap, a rival price-finder, then the Robinhood app ideally shouldn’t get involved. Yet, Robinhood gets paid. Here, the trade settles on Robinhood Chain, in a token that Robinhood’s subsidiary alone can create.

Rye and the fight between marketplaces, merchants and AI assistants I have a strange amount of faith in strangers when I shop online. If I am buying something, I usually check three or four marketplaces first. Then I read every review, especially the ones with photos, because those tend to make or break the decision for me. If I still like it, I might look for a YouTube review, check Reddit, compare the price elsewhere, and eventually go wherever I have a coupon.

Hello, The value of tokenised stocks has grown five times in the past year to roughly $3 billion. As more players offer a once-rare product, it stops being rare, and the prize up for grabs gets split into smaller pieces. So the money in tokenised stocks no longer goes to whoever puts the most shares on-chain. It gets captured by whoever controls different layers of the stack: when new tokenised shares can be issued, which network they trade on, and which app people use to buy them.

Hello, In 2017, a company called Kiwi started rolling out delivery robots on the UC Berkeley campus. You could order a burrito through the app, and a small bot would navigate the sidewalk to drop it at your door, all on its own. Students loved it, and Kiwi called it “parallel autonomy” because the whole setup genuinely felt like a glimpse of the future.

Hello, Over two years ago, in the first week of September 2024, I published my first piece for the Token Dispatch. Bitcoin was trading just under $60,000, and the only question our readers wanted answered was whether it would cross the $100,000-mark and how much further above the mark it could go. I spent my first few months answering such questions: technical analysis, charts, and expected price action for the upcoming weeks.

Hello, Welcome to Edition 18 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading. Most people hear about a promising startup the day it announces its funding. By then, the investors who backed it have known about it for months. How did they get there first?

We seem to have built civilisation around the fact that evidence and acceptance are not quite the same thing. A researcher is expected to use real, direct sources. A designer is expected to understand that “clean” does not mean submitting a blank page. A developer asked to build a working checkout is also expected not to make it take four minutes to load. Humans are surprisingly good at carrying all of this unstated context because we share a basic sense of what reasonable work looks like.

Hello, There’s a problem with how dividends accrue for tokenised stocks. When you tokenise a share of Pfizer on Robinhood Chain, its dividend doesn’t accrue as cash. Instead, the dividend is reinvested into more of the stock. A multiplier attached to the token ticks up, so each token now represents slightly more of a share. Your token balance doesn’t change; the dividend shows up as each token being worth more. There’s no separate dividend you can point to and trade.

Hello, For the first time in modern history, central banks around the world hold more gold than US Treasuries. Long-dated Treasuries have lost over 40% of their value since 2020, and the countries that used to absorb new issuance ( China, Japan, Europe) are now net sellers. The US government needs someone to keep buying its paper, and over the past couple of years it has gone from trying to shut down stablecoin issuers to writing laws that turn them into Treasury buyers.