At Cherry Crypto we work at the earliest stages with founders and often come to the discussion of how to structure their first financing round. I wanted to share our thoughts with the hope that others find it helpful and to help sharpen our own thinking. The main and obvious…
The synthesis of NFTs and DeFi promises to unlock utility for all types of NFTs by enabling their use in a host of financial services. A segment within this space that we’re excited about is NFT-backed lending. Most loans in DeFi today are either overcollateralized with fungible tokens or…
Lending markets are a core financial primitive with one of the highest adoption rates across DeFi today. The top 3 lending protocols, Aave, Compound, and MakerDAO currently have around $10B in outstanding loans. While loan volume is one lens through which to look at these lending protocols, another is to…
Lending markets were one of the first decentralized finance (DeFi) primitives to show product-market fit and have consistently ranked amongst the applications with the most traction. A quick glance at total value locked (TVL) across DeFi protocols today reveals that 4 of the top 5 are lending protocols, holding over…
One of the most impactful innovations of the 19th century was the creation of the Limited Liability Company (LLC). The LLC is a business structure which defines that investors can only lose as much money as they have committed. Prior to the establishment of the LLC, businesses had unlimited liability,…
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” - Nassim Taleb Ben Thompson wrote an interesting post recently on the topic of Substack [https://stratechery.com/2021/substack-and-the-media-the-substack-opportunity-substacks-business-challenges/] , highlighting its opportunity and challenges. I highly recommend that you read it. Beyond being a good take on…
Hiring a developer advocate is a challenge every developer-first company faces. With the rise of developer-first companies, developer advocates are increasingly in high demand. Yet, there still remains a lot of variance in the practices of hiring and building developer relations teams across companies. Community management is one of the…
One of the most interesting breakthroughs in crypto is the strong degree of composability the technology lends to software development. Composability is the ability to combine various components of a software stack in different ways. To keep things simple, we’ll split the stack into two parts: front-end and back-end.…