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In Episode 55 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Ryan Selkis about how his company, Messari, is bringing a new level of data gathering and analysis to the crypto space by building what are known as token-curated registries.

Information has become, quite literally, the currency of the digital age. Yet, even before the advent of cryptocurrencies, investors have always understood information to be a valuable asset. \\u201cThe most valuable commodity I know of is information,\\u201d said the iconic Wall Street villain Gordon Gekko. However, information is a commodity, only in so far as it derives its value from the computational efforts of those who seek to process it. In a world of informational abundance, the quality of our computations, not their quantity, determine the scale of our harvest.

Ryan Selkis believes that harvesting, processing, and storing data about the crypto economy can be done better. His team at Messari is building an open data library, as well as a set of curation tools that will help researchers, investors, and regulators make sense of the industry.

Ryan has stated outright that the \\u201cBloomberg of crypto will be a network, not a centralized company.\\u201d This is where his work on token-curated registries factors in.

\\u201cToken-curated registries are decentrally-curated lists with intrinsic economic incentives for token holders to curate the list\'s contents judiciously,\\u201d wrote Mike Goldin, in a 2017 article titled \\u201cToken-Curated Registries 1.0.\\u201d You could say that if Wikipedia and Bitcoin had a baby, the child would be a TCR. Such databases could theoretically replace all commercially curated, owned, and operated, libraries on earth, by offering a new set of economic incentives that harness the networks and expertise of the planet\\u2019s seven-and-a-half billion people.

In this week\\u2019s episode of Hidden Forces, Ryan Selkis joins Demetri Kofinas for a conversation about information, cryptocurrency, and how Messari is working to build the database for a new financial system.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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