Grant programs in the defi and blockchain space should take some lessons from existing real-world competitive and entrepreneurial grant programs. Darcy WE Allen and Chris Berg The blockchain and defi sector should understand more about how real world grant giving bodies function. …

Darcy Allen, Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Trent MacDonald and Jason Potts are from the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the world’s first social science research centre into the economics, politics, sociology, and law of blockchain technology. Blockchains are institutional technologies made of rules (e.g. consensus mechanisms, issuance schedules). Different rule combinations…

By Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts We’re thrilled to be working with Tracer DAO and its community in building out the vision detailed in the Tracer whitepapers that we co-authored with the Lion’s Mane team. We’ve proposed a new blockchain-based protocol for spinning up fundamental financial contracts that…

By Darcy Allen The blockchain world is currently obsessed with defi. In the past few months, billions in digital value have been staked, swapped and farmed in radical experiments using liquidity pools, automatic market makers and decentralised exchanges. Defi is easily belittled as a collection of scam-riddled projects powered by…

By the team at the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub The financial sector exists solely to smooth economic activity and trade. It is the network of organisations, markets, rules, and services that move capital around the global economy so it can be deployed to the most profitable use. It has evolved…

By Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts Since 2017 we (along with our colleague Joe Clark) have been working with Agoric, an innovative and exciting smart contract team, who are about to launch a token economy model we helped design. At the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub we’ve long…

By Chris Berg and Jason Potts Let’s take a birds’ eye view of the Australian economy. What do we produce? In order: iron ore, coal, and credentials. Tertiary education is Australia’s third-largest export industry. And Australia is the third-largest education exporter in the world, behind the US and UK. The…

By Darcy WE Allen, Chris Berg, and Aaron M Lane The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison wants to make deregulation and cutting red tape the centrepiece of the COVID-19 economic recovery. This focus is not just welcome, but essential. Entrepreneurs need room to experiment with new business models without being…

By Chris Berg Everybody, whatever side of politics they are on, generally agrees that the media is one of the reasons that politics is so polarised right now. Agreeing on why the media has driven this is a little harder. Yes, the newspaper and print industry has been disrupted, thanks…