I am a newbie in to the world of Blockchain and Web 3.0 . I am blown away by the rapid developments that are happening in the Web 3.0 world. There is a healthy dose of skepticism towards Web 3.0 technologies by incumbents, while there is whole hearted enthusiasm from many of the newer players, FinTechs, startups . The recently concluded Singapore FinTech Festival was all about Web 3.0 . Being a newbie, I did not understand most of the terms that were being used by the speakers. For some reason, I was living in a shell and did not pay attention at all to what was happening in the external world. Coming out the shell after 5 years, I see that there are whole communities of people who are working on Blockchain and Web 3.0 technology. It is high time I understand this piece of technology and see if I can make any sense of this exciting field, that is set to revolutionize the field of financial services. Being a newbie, I looked around and found this book as a guide to my first step towards understanding Blockchain.

This post summarizes the main points from the book titled, “The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains” written by Antony Lewis.

Singapore FinTech Festival 2021 was a great event where there was a chance to listen to all the wonderful speakers across the world on a variety of topics relating to Web3.0. This blog post will summarize some of the talks during the festival. The festival is a great learning experience for anyone, as it brings together some of the best people and the best companies in the world.

TAS - Trade at Settlement Order type is an interesting order type that was introduced for majority of the agricultural futures contracts in 2015. How is TAS different from other order types ? CBOE gives a good primer on this order type Trading at Settlement (TAS) is an order type that allows a market participant to buy or sell futures contracts during the trading day equal to the yet-to-be determined settlement price, or at a price up to 4 ticks above or below that price.

In the last few years, the projects that I have managed to work on, are really squiggly in nature. Last Christmas(2020), while the world was celebrating year end holidays, I was slogging away and writing code that would help a bank incorporate Risk free rates in to their products. It was exciting to be working on something where the big boys of the enterprise software were not flexible enough to support the new requirements. Also many aspects were yet evolving and hence there was a need to “figure” out what needs to be done, instead of coding something that was available as a spec. I had to write the spec taking in to consideration that not everything is black and white, and subsequently implement the spec. In any case, the project that I worked on, turned out to be a success and subsequently there have been interesting offshoots to the work that others have put in place. One of the offshoots is in the “Fallback” world. The basic idea of “fallback rates” is that the risk free rates are credit adjusted and made available to market participants, so that they can start changing the interest rate derivative contracts. The “fallback” as the name suggests creates a safety net in the contracts, while an active transition plan is put in place.

Stumbled on to a concise writeup by KPMG that talks about all the relevant aspects of this transition. This blogpost will list down some of the main points mentioned in the writeup

This blog post summarizes the book titled “Visual Guide to ETFs”, by David J. Abner