The Breakdown

Tom Shaughnessy is a co-founder at Delphi Digital as well as the host of the Chain Reaction podcast. Jordan Clifford is managing director of Scalar Capital. In this end of year interview for The Breakdown, Tom argues that the big story of 2019 was actually the fact that it was all about quiet building. When it comes to 2020, however, watch out for fireworks. Tom predicts we’ll see a major increase in the layer 1 smart contract platform wars, as well as an increased in the perceived importance of token economic design. Jordan meanwhile argues that we’re likely to see a shift back to development at the application layer.

Katherine Wu was a founding team member at Messari before moving into a VC role at Notation Capital, but is perhaps best known in crypto for her epic annotations of key regulatory enforcement actions. In this end of year interview with The Breakdown, Katherine argues that decentralized finance is the narrative of 2019, but also that when it comes to 2020, the emergence of a Chinese digital yuan is likely to have a huge impact on the crypto space.

Sometimes things are clear, and to both Camila Russo (write of The Defiant newsletter) and David Hoffman (co-host of the Crypto POV podcast), it couldn’t be clearer that the essential narrative of 2019 was the rise of DeFi as a true market force. In individual interviews as part of The Breakdown’s end of year coverage, each also makes a 2020 DeFi prediction. For David, it’s all about increased attention on the space and the power of composability, while for Camila, it’s a bet that we’ll start to see the first under-collateralized DeFi loans.

Marty Bent is the author of one of the most popular daily Bitcoin newsletters and co-host of Tales From The Crypt. In this end of year interview with The Breakdown, he talks about the macro context - from trade wars to pressure on the fed to continue and expand the QE experiment to global instability - and how it is painting in stark colors the need for tools like bitcoin. 

Rob Paone, aka Crypto Bobby, got his start as a popular crypto YouTuber and has gone on to help build a number of crypto companies before launching his own technical recruitment firm. Preethi Kasireddy is the founder of the TruStory debate platform. In two individual interviews as part of The Breakdown’s end of year extra, both argue that a big part of the 2019 story was the slow, steady slog of building, and that, in some ways, 2020 may be poised for more of the same.