Joan’s Index

I write a bi-weekly newsletter, featuring essays on tech, humans and economics.

Founder / Writer

MODA DAO

Advisor

Flare

Director Of Communications

Fishburners

Head Of Marketing

Joan Westenberg is a seasoned writer focused on tech and economics. She was honoured as one of the top 100 innovators by the Australian. Joan has written for Wired, The Australian Financial Review, the SF Chronicle, The Saturday Paper, Chainsaw, Yahoo,  TIME, Inc, the ABC, Crikey and others. Beyond her writing, Joan is an advisor to Culture Vault and MODA DAO, fusing her technological expertise with her passion for cultural innovation. Joan has spoken at SXSW, NFTfest, Microsoft Ignite, Web Summit etc.

Joan Westenberg

CEO at Margin Syndicate

I specialise in systematic derivatives execution across three primary strategy categories: flow-governed systematic futures, complex options strategies and cross-exchange arbitrage solutions. 

With 5+ years developing proprietary flow monitoring systems, I identify liquidity vacuums, market maker footprints and execution inflection points to deliver institutional-grade performance. 

My live trading platform has achieved 265% cumulative returns (401.7% CAGR) with exceptional risk metrics: Sharpe 6.73, Sortino 8.79 and maximum drawdown limited to -16.6%. 

I build fully autonomous trading engines that capture flow-driven junctures whilst maintaining -0.21 correlation to Bitcoin — precision execution built for real-world volatility.

Steven Paterson

Most crypto tokens do nothing.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room.

XRP doesn't do anything. 

RippleNet — the actual product — works fine without it. Banks using Ripple's cross-border payment rails don't need XRP to settle. The token exists because Ripple premined 100 billion of them, holds a massive chunk and sells into every rally. XRP isn't infrastructure. It's a liquidity source for the company.

This was the playbook for an entire generation of crypto:

ADA / Cardano — years of academic papers, peer-reviewed research and a blockchain that does functionally nothing. Smart contracts arrived years late. Nobody builds on it. The token trades on narrative, not utility.

EOS — raised $4 billion in the largest ICO in history. The blockchain is a ghost town. Block.one settled with the SEC, kept most of the money and moved on. Totally useless.

These tokens were sold as a kind of equity — "buy the token, own the upside of the network." But there's rarely any value capture. The companies behind them extract value. The token holders provide exit liquidity.

The next generation thought they could run the same playbook.

They got destroyed.

The market figured it out. You can't launch a token with no product, no users and no value capture mechanism and expect retail to carry your bags forever. The 2021 cycle was the last time that worked at scale.

Here's what frustrates me: some of these projects have genuinely interesting technical ideas. But there is an enormous amount of Peter Pan wishful thinking in this industry. "If we build it, they will come." "The technology will speak for itself." "We just need adoption."

No. You need a product people use, a token with a reason to exist and economics that don't depend on the next buyer being dumber than the last one.
Most of crypto doesn't have that. And until the industry is honest about it, the industry will keep bleeding to zero.

Quantitative Derivatives Trader, Private DeFi Infrastructure

I have said most crypto tokens do nothing.
Here are the ones that do.

USDT — $140B market cap. Every exchange runs on it. Every derivatives trade settles in it. It's not exciting. It just works. The most important token in crypto and nobody talks about it because there's nothing to speculate on.

PAXG / XAUT — tokenised gold. One troy ounce per token, backed by physical bars in LBMA-approved vaults.

The difference:

PAXG is issued by Paxos, regulated by NYDFS, monthly third-party attestations and you can look up the serial number of your specific gold bar. Institutional-grade. Think of it as the Comex good delivery standard brought on-chain.

XAUT is issued by Tether, stored in Swiss vaults, quarterly attestations via BDO. Bigger market cap, more liquidity, but Tether's regulatory posture is not Paxos. Crypto-native traders prefer it. Compliance teams prefer PAXG.
Both track spot gold. Both are redeemable for physical bars. Neither needs a narrative to justify its price.

Now here's where it gets interesting.

Hold PAXG and USDT on a platform like Nexo. Borrow against them. No taxable event. No selling. You keep your gold exposure, you keep your dollar position and you access liquidity at 2.9% APR while getting paid 6% for holding PAXG and even more for USDT. Can be a net positive carry.

It's a Lombard loan — the same structure private banks have offered wealthy clients for decades. Except now you don't need a relationship manager or a $5M minimum. You need a Nexo account and some tokens.

That's the crypto that works. Boring, functional, solves real problems.
No whitepaper required.

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