Concordia 25_cover section.indd

Concordia Winter 2022

(or the fallback of a well-functioning legal system). A lot of examples where such a use case is most compelling tend to be economic or financial in nature as blockchains allow users to generate self-enforcing contracts (or programmes) on the internet – an obvious case of where this may be useful is for creating financial contracts, for example. The prevalence of scams within the industry is a function of the permissionless nature of the technology, wherein anyone can interact with a blockchain without being stopped (in a similar way to how one can easily post on the internet without being stopped). Strong and smart regulation will help weed out a lot of the issues within the digital asset industry whilst also promoting productive use cases, such as using blockchains as the financial rails for derivative settlement (or more esoteric asset classes like fine art) or even to help facilitate the economic layer of virtual worlds and online games (experiences vaguely characterised by the mysterious word “Metaverse’). Working inside an industry should ideally help one be able to separate the signal from the noise – my role is exactly that in fact. It’s undoubted that the digital asset industry has its issues but, from the inside, it’s also clear that there are a number of extremely talented people working on interesting problems, a combination of which is bound to add tangible value to our world. It may just take some time. I truly believe that having a holistic and open education where one is supported in exploring niche interests from Brahms to “Blockchain” has helped me substantially in my career and I hope it still does the same for the many boys who arrive at Merchant Taylors’ each morning. If you would like to contact Lanre, his e-mail address is ige.lanre.jonathan@gmail.com

formulate investment ideas. My current role is that of Senior Researcher at a digital asset trading and asset management firm. At a very high level the firm market-makes and provides liquidity on a variety of trading venues which offer digital assets (on a proprietary basis i.e., with the firm’s own money). In addition, the firm runs investment funds which accept external capital which we use to offer our investors exposure to the digital asset market. My job sits squarely within the second half of my firm’s function and my day job generally involves staying on top of the digital asset market, conducting research deep dives into particular digital assets, and carrying out more involved data analyses on various aspects of the market. This is quite similar to the role of a hedge fund analyst at an investment firm which may trade equities or commodities, the primary difference being the many idiosyncrasies in the digital asset market compared to others. Reflections on crypto At this point, I will assume that most readers (and most people) are at least familiar, on a general level, with the concepts of “Bitcoin”, “Cryptocurrencies” or my preferred term, “Digital Assets”. Most, however, are less familiar with what exactly the point of digital assets is or what value they may bring to society, especially given the number of frauds and scams there are. Even for someone impartial towards the industry, it is easy to dismiss digital assets as pure financialization for the sake of financialization. Although it’s hard to articulate this in a few words (and even my own opinion changes), I see digital assets and blockchain technology as a way to allow individuals to coordinate over the internet more effectively and with greater scalability without necessarily having to rely on or trust on the goodwill of a single intermediary

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