Money 2.0 Stuff: What's the TAM?

Blockchains don’t naturally interoperate, and I guess some group of people finds this problematic? The Tower of Babel narrative in reverse, blockchains have begun their lives in a state of chaos and the goal, it seems, is to build the tower and return order and cross blockchain-induced chasms and all get along and, fingers crossed, god doesn’t intervene this time. Although, if I know one thing about god, it’s that he has never been a huge fan of interoperable blockchains.

Last week Keep Network and Summa, inaugural members of the Cross-Chain Group, announced tBTC, much to the delight of blockchain Babylonians. The cat is out the bag! As far as attempts at bringing Bitcoin onto Ethereum go, hey, tBTC seems like an obvious improvement. One way to think of Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), the legacy implementation of ‘Bitcoin-on-Ethereum’, is as a tourist that visits a foreign nation and interacts with locals directly through Google Translate. My high school self can attest that this technique works, some of the time, but it isn’t particularly elegant or natural and, well, requires placing a considerable amount of trust in Google. If you lose your phone, or Google falls apart over night, or you happen to find yourself interacting with a strict Frenchman, bad news.