I saw this project as I was browsing Kickstarter this morning and I watched the video and thought “I need to get one of those.”

If you would like to display a favorite photograph in holograph form you can back this project and get one for yourself here.

I have written about stablecoins a bunch here at AVC. I believe cryptocurrencies that are not highly volatile are important for use cases like e-commerce. I explained why here.

So we need crypto assets that are price stabilized and one of the best ways to do that is to peg a crypto asset to a fiat currency like the dollar. You do that by fully reserving the asset with dollars.

The two most popular digital dollars are USDT (Tether) and USDC. There is almost $20bn of circulating supply of USDT and just over $3bn of USDC.

There has always been some concern that USDT is not fully reserved. I share that concern. I am more confident that USDC is fully reserved and it is the digital dollar that I hold and use.

We got some big news yesterday about USDC which is that the VISA card network is going to “help select Visa credit card issuers start integrating the USDC software into their platforms and send and receive USDC payments.”

I think this is going to give more payment networks and financial services platforms the confidence to also integrate USDC. I could imagine USDC having a circulating supply of the current size of Tether by this time next year. We will see.

There are concerns for those, like me, who are big fans of digital dollars. A few members of Congress yesterday proposed a bill requiring stablecoin issuers to be banks. I appreciate that our elected officials want to provide for consumer safety and confidence. But forcing all of this innovation into the banking system is the surest way to kill it that I have ever heard of. Maybe that is what they want to do. We cannot allow that. The crypto sector and innovative financial services companies like VISA will need to spend time on the Hill educating our elected officials on what good regulation looks like and what bad regulation looks like. All we seem to be getting out of DC right now is on the bad side.

Finally, I should mention that while we are debating the role of digital dollars here in the US, China is rolling out its own digital Yuan. Goldman Sachs estimates that over a billion people will be using the Digital Yuan within a decade. I think that is way too pessimistic.

I think everyone who uses fiat currency right now will be using digital/crypto versions of these fiat currencies within a decade. The only question is which ones we will use the most. If we want the Digital Dollar to be in the top two or three, we had better get behind the ones that are out there and support the issuances of new ones too.

It is very typical that options and RSUs that are issued to new employees upon joining a company will have “one year cliff vesting.” This means that the first year of vesting into your options or RSUs will not happen until you have completed one entire year. After that vesting usually happens quarterly or monthly.

I am a fan of cliff vesting because if either the employee or the company made a mistake and the employment ends quickly, no equity has been spent on it.

But there are a couple of caveats that come with cliff vesting that I think should be understood by everyone.

The first is that while the letter of the agreement will say that the first year of vesting is not earned until the anniversary of the grant, if employment is terminated by the employer for anything other than cause within a few weeks or even months of the first anniversary, some accommodation should be made for the vesting upon termination. It is hard to put this in writing for a whole host of reasons, but best practice is for the employer to make some adjustment if the termination is close to the cliff vesting date.

The second point is that many companies include a cliff vesting provision in retention grants. These are grants that existing employees get to supplement the sign-on grant and help with longer-term retention. I do not believe it is appropriate to put cliff vesting into retention grants. The very fact that an employee is getting a retention grant suggests that the match has been a good one for both the employee and the employer and that the cliff provision is not necessary.

Many companies, particularly younger companies without experienced and sophisticated HR organizations, don’t understand these nuances and don’t factor them into their equity compensation programs. That is a mistake and it harms both the employees and the employer because a fair and equitable equity compensation program is of great value to a company.

I’m not much for the shopping mania that happens on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but I do like the idea of taking a day at this time of year to give back. Today is that day.

This year is a particularly hard year for so many and so giving back, if you can, is even more important. The Giving Tuesday website suggests things like offering help to your neighbors, supporting a virtual classroom, reaching out to the elderly, and many more ideas that don’t require a financial donation.

If you do want to make a financial gift, there are many places to go online, including our portfolio company GoFundMe.

For those of us who have even more to give, I strongly encourage creating a family foundation and making giving back something you institutionalize in your life. Many of us in tech, startups, and venture capital find ourselves with large stock positions with very low cost basis. One of the very best things one can do with highly appreciated stock is to donate it to a family foundation and use those funds to support causes that matter to you and your family. We were encouraged to do that over twenty years ago and we did it and it has been a source of great joy and discovery and learning for us.

So no matter what level of giving you are able to do today, I encourage you to do something. It will help others and it will also do some good for you too. We are in a very difficult moment and giving back is a great way to lighten your load just a little bit.

We learned last week that the US Treasury wants to regulate crypto wallets like bank accounts. On the surface, one can understand that temptation. If people store, send, receive, and sell crypto assets in crypto wallets, then surely they should be regulated like bank accounts.

Except that is only one use case for a crypto wallet. It happens to be the primary use of crypto wallets right now but it is not likely to be the primary use of crypto wallets in a decade.

Regulators need to think of crypto wallets like web browsers. They are software applications that open up access to the decentralized internet and over time they will reduce our reliance on applications like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. But only if they are allowed to exist without crushing regulation, like we treated the web broswer when it came out in the mid 90s.

Brian Armstrong, the founder and CEO of Coinbase, pointed this out in a series of tweets last week and these two are particularly good examples of ways that crypto wallets are used that are not like bank accounts:

These are just early use cases for crypto wallets that don’t resemble bank accounts. There will be many many more soon if we don’t strangle crypto wallets with suffocating regulation.

Crypto will eventually lead to a decentralized internet but the first industry it is decentralizing is finance. It reminds me of the web browser that started in media. The issue with decentralizing finance first is that regulators are tempted to regulate crypto like it is just finance and that could not be more wrong. And it will take everything the industry has to push back on this temptation.

I learned yesterday of the passing of Arnold Waldstein. Arnold was as regular a reader of this blog as there ever was or ever will be. His warmth is what I will remember most. He cared about people.

Arnold was a born and bred NYer who went to Silicon Valley and built a career in marketing. He was an early employee at a number of well-known tech companies. Sometime in the 2000s, he relocated back to NYC and found his way to this blog where he became a regular commenter on tech, NYC, and pretty much everything else.

I met Arnold a few times and found him to be a lovely human being, everything he was online and more.

Online relationships, like the one I (and many AVC readers) had with Arnold, are very real relationships. Though I did not know Arnold well in person, I knew him well. And I will miss him a lot.

I’ve been biking several times a week in NYC this fall and every mask I’ve worn has caused me problems with fogging my glasses and making it harder to breath. I’ve tried a bunch of different masks and nothing works great.

So when I saw this project to make something better for working out on Kickstarter, I backed it right away.

As years go, 2020 is not one that generates a lot of gratitude in my mind. Global pandemic, racial struggles, millions without jobs, local merchants closing up, a surreal election here in the US, and that is just what comes to mind in the time it takes me to write this.

And yet, I am hopeful and thankful as I sit here thinking about this Thanksgiving that is upon us. I see the light at the end of the tunnel with the pandemic some time next year, I see new leadership in the US that is long on empathy and short on drama, I see proof that science continues to be up to the challenge of solving huge problems for humanity, and I see a resilience in the human spirit on the streets of NYC.

We are going to need everything we can get from science and the human spirit because we are facing enormous challenges that will not end with the pandemic. Racial inequity, climate change, ongoing job losses (and gains) being driven by technological change, massive budget deficits in local governments. The list goes on and on.

I am an optimist in a business that requires it. I think we can and will rise to meet these challenges and I am thankful that I can play a small role in doing that.

I have New York State’s exposure alerting app on my phone and check it every day. It gives me great statistics about what is going on in my location. You can download it here for iOS and Android.

It will also notify me if anyone who is using the app and has been with me gets Covid. I have not gotten any alerts in the month or two since I have had it on my phone. That’s great news and I have been healthy and that is good too.

But there is an issue with the uptake of this app in NYS. The last numbers I have heard suggest that less than 10% of NYS residents have installed this app on their phones. That compares with closer to 20% and rising in some other states.

Part of the reason other states are doing better getting their residents to install an exposure alerting app is they are promoting both their own app (like the NYS app) and also the “native” exposure alerting that became available in iOS 13.7 and soon will be available in Android.

This “native” exposure alerting is called Exposure Notification Express and this Lifehacker piece explains how to turn it on in iOS.

I like having the full NYS app on my phone. But for those who would rather just flip a switch on their mobile phone, Express is the better option.

Because all of these apps and native operating system features run on top of Apple and Google’s Exposure Notification system (GAEN), all of these systems are interoperable with each other and you will be alerted if someone using any one of these services who you have been in contact with becomes infected.

Fighting this pandemic is hard. But we can make it a bit easier by doing a bunch of simple things, like wearing a mask, social distancing, getting tested regularly, and using an exposure alerting app or service.