We are extremely early in the age of asset management in decentralised finance (DeFi). However, we still sorely lack universally recognized, broad market indices that can be used as information aggregates, benchmarks for financial instruments and reference values for the health of the crypto market. Here's why it's important.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is, at its core, a simple concept. While it faces plenty of political and economic challenges in the real world, blockchain technology allows us to create digital UBI experiments. GoodDollar is one such experiment. This article explores how you can support the project through staking.

When it comes to centralised systems that require fixing, the financial system is perhaps the lowest hanging fruit there is. What most people are unaware of is that the movement to decentralise financial services, moving them onto a public blockchain has been underway for the last couple of years. In fact, plenty of traditional financial services have been replicated in crypto.

Most of the things in the world are centralised. This concentrates control in the hands of a few. The few make the rules harder for everyone else so they can keep the power. This is bad and is one of the main reasons we have inequality. Decentralisation attempts to fix this problem by distributing control and creating trust in the system through cryptography and mathematical problem-solving.

We benefited tremendously from the first two industrial revolutions. We muddled through the third one, going back just as much as we surged forward. Every year, we leave ever more people behind as we shatter norms and structures we used to rely on. Industry 4.0, this age of “cyber-physical systems”, is only going to accelerate the deterioration of the social fabric. It's happening already.

There is a general agreement that to date, our society has experienced three transformational innovations. More recently, the World Economic Forum coined a term “Industry 4.0” to describe the fourth industrial revolution. While we successfully adapted to the previous industrial revolutions, there are several arguments for why Industry 4.0 is unlike any of them.

First and foremost, let me start by saying that AI will augment, not replace human labour. This is important. If managed appropriately, from the policy perspective, AI will create unlimited opportunities for us to live more fulfilling lives. Its transformational power, however, can go both ways.

Technological disruption is not new. After two industrial revolutions, the third one was about technology and digitization of society. And we are entering the fourth one, inspired by the arrival of “cyber-physical systems” according to the World Economic Forum.

In early 2019 I wrote about state surveillance and how different countries approach it. This subject is an ethical and constitutional minefield that we will have to grapple with for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, observing how countries respond to COVID-19 provides interesting insights into their surveillance capabilities.