What do you do when all your arguments against Bitcoin have been proven bunk and every one of your predictions of its demise has fallen flat on its face? You try a new angle of attack, of course: one that harnesses your knee-jerk antipathy to…

The issuance of native tokens within a platform, such as a distributed ledger, is one of the most common ways of financing its maintenance and development. In this note, we discuss how a platform economy works, whether a fixed supply of tokens is optimal and…

Professors and practitioners of geopolitics have long been debating which civilisation will replace the West as the world’s hegemon. But if you told these scholars that the challenge to the West would come from what we patronisingly used to call the Third World, they would…

“China is a sleeping giant,” said Napoleon, “When she awakes she will astonish the world.” But what of India? Napoleon wasn’t the only one to discount this great nation, including some of today’s most seasoned world-watchers who eyeball China while ignoring the similarly meteoric rise…

This article investigates the relationship between market efficiency and liquidity in cryptoasset markets. The empirical evidence is currently scarce, with most existing studies focusing on a small cross section of the most liquid cryptoassets. This, however, offers a limited picture. Therefore, we extend our analysis…

No one enjoys paying sales tax, but it is at least one of the more transparent ways for the state to raise revenue, especially when compared to printing money. But there’s a payment that’s arguably as pernicious as any government levy, and which most of…

The notion of efficient markets (Fama 1970) suggests that a lack of return predictability is the key criteria for efficiency. The market microstructure literature emphasises a separate measure of financial market quality, namely, the amount of private information reflected in prices. As Kyle (1985) points…

Stop the Game Masters All’s fair in love and war, but even the stock market has rules. So, when the Masters of the Universe can so easily change those rules to squash a Peasant’s Revolt, we know that something is going very badly wrong with…

Trust, but verify From Britain’s no-nonsense, matter-of-fact John Bull to Missourians’ self-image as the “Show-Me State”, healthy scepticism is a matter of pride, identity and national mythos. But what happens when the truth you’re asked to believe is beyond your ability to verify — like…