Gristle Crüe Call — Álvaro @ Borderless

The Crüe got a 1 hour primer on how a VC econ­o­mist in the cryp­to space views the world. Álvaro Gra­cia from Bor­der­less Cap­i­tal walked us through a deck that laid out the pro­gres­sion of web2 to web3 and why that’s hap­pen­ing. We zoomed way out to glob­al macro­eco­nom­ics, talked about Bit­coin, sil­ver, and gold, cov­ered many of the projects Bor­der­less has invest­ed in, and dis­cussed what BC is expect­ing to hap­pen (and how soon) in the world of blockchain + meat­space. Anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing call!

Álvaro Gra­cia

Tweets by alvarogracia

Last 3 tweets/retweets
-@Watcher.Guru Aver­age 30-year fixed mort­gage rate increas­es to 7.06%.

-Mes­sari report show­ing dis­tort­ed web3 adop­tion based on revenue 

File­coin & Pock­et down, those two account for 91% of revenue

-Char­lie Bilel­lo: The 16% decline over the last 26 months is now the longest and largest draw­down in his­to­ry for the US bond market.

Name, where you’re from, background

Big­ger pic­ture of glob­al econ­o­my and Amer­i­can dollar

Web3 invest­ment trends

Edge­Fi Fund

Ideas

• Crowd­sourc­ing infrastructure
• Large vol­ume, low mar­gin­al costs
• Need the right unit economics

Edg­Fi — 

• map­ping
• wire­less
• vpn
• cloud stor­age
• graph­ics ren­der­ing (Ren­der Network)
• weath­er & pollution

Quotes

• Heli­um can not be replicated
• Token incen­tives are pow­er­ful but also complex.
• Heli­um LoRaWAN will final­ly make IoT take off. 
• Capex is the main con­straint that blockchain + meat­space removes.
• Bear mar­kets are a cleans­ing for the ecosys­tem that dri­ve more effi­cient net­work growth.

Ques­tions

• From the Boot­strap­ping Advan­tage slide, it sounds like HNT will con­tin­ue to drop in val­ue.  Is that right? Short term, yes. Long term, unknown, but prob­a­bly not.
• Bets on IoT vs 5G. Nope, equal weights.
• What are the big obsta­cles to web3?
  • Reg­u­la­to­ry clarity
  • Time to shift, maybe a gen­er­a­tional replacement
  • We might be at 1995 lev­els in terms of the internet
• The acci­den­tal invest­ment of the US in cryp­to through small biz loans
• Can we get this deck for review?
• Devel­op­ing worlds — LATAM & Africa?
• Max at WIS­Pa­palooza as a “Tele­com Cow­boy”, build­ing net­works using parts of the “lega­cy way” 
• What are the star­tups you think will grow in this space? — inter­op­er­abil­i­ty?  Com­pa­nies don’t want to inter­act with tokens.
  • “P1 lay­er, for project lay­er 1”