Tokenpr

On-chain data has a seductive property: it is complete and verifiable, which makes it feel objective. The data is objective. The metrics built on it embed assumptions, and most of those assumptions are wrong in the same few ways.

Addresses are not users

The most common error and the foundation of several widely-cited metrics.

One person can control thousands of ...

Comparisons between the two largest networks usually focus on throughput, consensus mechanism or programmability. Those are downstream of something more fundamental: each has a different theory of how a protocol should change, and almost every technical difference follows from it.

Bitcoin: change is a risk to be minimised

Bitcoin’s development culture treats the protoc...

Few processes generate as much rumour and as little documentation as an exchange listing. The result is a market for intermediaries who claim influence they mostly do not have, and a great deal of money spent by teams with no way to evaluate what they bought.

What an exchange is deciding

A listing is primarily a risk decision. The exchange is deciding whether adding th...

Market makers quote continuously on both sides of an order book so that someone wanting to trade can do so without waiting for a matching counterparty. That is the function. The economics and the contracts are where it becomes interesting, and where projects most often make expensive decisions without understanding them.

Why projects encounter them at all

Most teams me...

After a sequence of large failures, proof of reserves became an expected disclosure. It is a genuine improvement over nothing. It is also routinely presented as demonstrating something considerably stronger than it does.

Where the practice came from

The disclosure became an expectation because a sequence of custodial failures revealed that customers had no way to disti...