TetraMesa

Web3 / DeFi Trust Deep Dive

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We should understand the nature of trust in some of our newer evolving financial systems, especially as they merge or outright collide with traditional systems. Part of the whole sell for DeFi is about being able to securely transact in so-called – and unfortunately labeled – trustless environments. What “trustless” really means and enables here is permissionless execution without dependence on discretionary gatekeepers. Or rather, trust comes from sources other than the default historical authoritative nature of traditional centralized institutions within traditional finance, as enabled and regulated by government. Regardless of whatever more self-sovereign dreams of DeFi may have been or remain, this realm does not eliminate the influence of law, regulation, or government, especially once assets touch the real world. Still, DeFi reduces reliance on operational discretion of institutions, and provides a variety of new values from Global, always-on settlement to programmable money, interoperability, inclusion, and so on.

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Tech Driven Financial Systemic Risks to Watch

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Note… Nothing here are predictions. Only what I believe are plausible issues worth attention. Nothing is intended as doom and gloom. The point of identifying risks is to consider ways to mitigate or eliminate them. With that in mind, there’s some things I’ve been getting concerned with lately.

Crypto, DeFi, and AI, seem to have things in common besides being disruptive and interesting, and that’s risk beyond their spheres of influence. I’m optimistic about long-term outcomes, at the same time success usually isn’t a straight line. Risks include how individual sectors can impact wider markets. Some technologies don’t just succeed or fail internally, but reshape industry plumbing, incentives, and reflexes in the larger scale marketplaces, often faster than institutions can adapt.

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Identity Phonership – You, Yourcellf

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First off, apologies for the bad puns in the headline. I am a dad though. So bad dad puns just come with the territory. Here, I saw a chance for a double, so had to take it.

Today it’s time to discuss some pros, cons, risks, and mitigations for the reality that our cellphones have accidentally become our gatekeepers to all manner of things digital. And often physical as well. You likely already know how integrated, (and dependent), a lot of digital activities have become on our mobile devices. But how? And what might this mean? Smartphones as identity gatekeepers has been discussed before. However, what we’re experiencing now in the mid 2020s is arguably a new level.

How did our cell phone companies become the gatekeepers of our identities?

How many things now push for multi-factor authentication via our smartphones? There’s products where it seems if you don’t have a smartphone, you’re simply not going to be able to participate. How might this play out? Do phone companies know about this? Of course. Will they try to exploit this role to just extract more fees given they’re arguably in strategically poor commodity businesses with competitive margin pressure?

Phones are no longer just credentials; they’re becoming identity custodians. Security is often thought of as three things: What you have, (such as debit card), what you know, (PIN code), and what you are, (biometrics.) With our phones we seem to have shifted from just something you have to the thing that vouches for everything else.

Recovery, coercion, or loss were not first-class design considerations.

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Child Digital Threat Surface Area Roundup 2025

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Not long ago I wrote about GenAI and kids and what we do in my own family to try to make them useful and avoid the pitfalls. It feels weak now, even just a short time later. As I’ve looked into this more, the numbers and trends are disturbing. More kids are dying or having other bad things happen. It’s not just the usual “if it bleeds it leads” news cycle impinging on my personal awareness. More incidents are happening. And what we’re facing as parents is getting worse fast across multiple venues.

Any of us building digital products, (parents or not), should have some awareness of what’s going on regarding the widening and deepening digital threats faced by kids and do what we can do to deal with it, though this writeup is targeted more at parents. Yes, it might be true that we all have digital and online risks, but of course, kids are all the more vulnerable. I’m writing this because I’ve been having more conversations about this lately with other parents, especially some that don’t work in digital.

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Product Managers as AI Ethics Officers

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You’ve probably read about AI ethics. I want to go beyond the basics and sell you on the ROI of AI Ethics. We’re talking basic consumer and B2B issues here and more accuracy, not wider scale issues like battlefield autonomy or similar use case issues. I’ve worked on a few AI projects over the past year: one more retrieval-based (prompt/response) and another more generative (content creation with human oversight), plus some testing work. With today’s tools and vendors, you can often kick something out that seems solid pretty quickly, whether it’s a generative product or something using more traditional tools like predictive analytics. Doing it truly well, though, is sometimes orders of magnitude harder. It can be tough to justify the resources to do it right.

Here’s a cynical thought about AI ethics. Often, companies don’t really care. Actually, that’s too cynical. People may care, however, if you look at where pressure and resourcing usually go, it’s often more towards speed to market and growth, with maybe a thin layer of regulatory compliance. A few companies differentiate on quality. But most seem to be more in the feature race. “Non-functional” requirements? We’ll get to them. At some point.

This doesn’t mean everything needs to be perfect. If we waited for 100% certainty, nothing would launch. We make tradeoffs: a light/dark mode toggle is not an emergency cardiac-alert system. People get that. Especially AI, which is harder to understand and harder to control. How can we deal with these realities?

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Your Outage Risk Feels Less Black Swanny

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I’ve spent some time the past year on an important project, potentially life-saving for many. But if the site went down for a few hours or even a day, no one would die immediately. Maybe some revenue loss, but nothing catastrophic. What about yours? Is it mission or safety critical? Or doing so much business that a half a day is millions in loss? Not to mention the customer service issues?

Major digital outages keep happening. The Internet was designed to survive nuclear war, yet we’ve layered on centralization that increases failure risk. And it seems to be getting worse as new inflection points pile up.

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Product Lessons from DeFi’s Rise

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If you follow crypto, you’ve likely noticed the rise in DeFi activity the past several months. As Traditional Finance (TradFi) evolves and co-opts parts of crypto, we’re seeing emergence of a hybrid model called Centralized Finance (CeFi) and watching what may be an inflection year. Every year seems like “the year of SOMEthing,” but with trillions finding new pathways, it seems a fair statement now. Growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) despite easier Central Exchange (CEX) options is telling. DeFi remains difficult and risky. Yet it’s growing as percentage of crypto activity. Some of this may be episodic, but it reveals a deeper signal about marketplace pain points: users will endure hardship just to escape worse systems. It’s a story of value over comfort, like drivers taking a pothole-filled detour to avoid a toll road they no longer trust, but there’s someplace they’ve just got to go.

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Cryptocurrency and Fiat: Independence, Interdependence

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This article is a follow-up to “How Does Fiat Currency Become Cryptocurrency?“

Crypto’s original goal: self-sovereign, independent finance. Some see it as the dream; others impossible. Reality: separate system, yet as a practical matter, is often coupled to TradFi.

It’s a key nuance from the discussion of the on-ramping processes, liquidity provision, and reserve management. Crypto intertwines with fiat for access, valuation, and compliance, but this isn’t essential. Cryptocurrencies were designed as standalone assets, valuing from scarcity, decentralization, and network effects, not fiat backing. In practice, fiat bridges to tokenized economies for adoption/integration. It’s useful to further unpack this distinction, drawing on foundational principles of blockchain technology, economic theory, and legal frameworks.

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How Does Fiat Become Cryptocurrency?

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A common disconnect I’ve heard about is how dollars seem to “magically” become crypto. If you already know financial rails, skip this article. The focus is more for retail investors or digital product managers who find themselves working more with crypto interfaces.

Spoiler Alert: There’s no magic. A fiat-to-crypto on-ramp swaps your cash for crypto; value “appears” when the crypto hits your wallet. It’s sort of like trading dollars for euros at an airport, except there’s no government backing or guaranteed redemption/liquidity. That’s it. All done. Deep dive below for a lot more!

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The Composable Everything Future

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Something is happening across technology sectors creating one of those paradigm-shift moments. It’s not a single breakthrough but a convergence of pieces that have struggled to be the “next thing” on their own. Their larger use cases are emerging as they interact. Look across our shiny new tools: blockchain, crypto, and of course AI and more agentic systems. Together they’re forming connective tissue among themselves. Like generalized microprocessors once enabled hardware to be more useful and economical with flexible software, this new phase of composability could again transform speed, flexibility, and cost.

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