Attraction of uncertainty?

Since 2013 I am reading FinTech news on a – more or less-  daily basis and tweet about it. Twitter was a good way to find new interesting articles but also discuss them with a diverse audience. The interest in FinTech started at the end of my studies when I was wondering if joining a bank is actually the only option with my background. Thanks to an internship at a VC & SumUp, an innovation / entrepreneurship focused MSc degree and finally joining figo – all of this has deepen my consumption of FinTech news.

When I was going through the news of the last weeks to find a topic to write a blog post about I couldn’t really find a relevant one. When I finally went to my tweets of this week I came to realisation: most of my reading activity during the last weeks was much more about Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies than “traditional FinTech” – which was usually the case. Blockchain has been part of my reading since a few years but was always just one topic of many and other topics such as Open Banking and APIs has been dominating. In the past weeks this has changed, which is why I have deleted a few FinTech sources in my Feedly and replaced them with Blockchain focused ones.

The reason for this development is probably not so much related to the recent ICOs or price development of Cryptocurrencies prices in general – although I have to admit the number of friends asking me about these things that do not have any background in finance or technology is not making it easier – but rather a few specific stories that I am personally seeing super interesting such as:

Messaging provider Kik is starting Kin: Whitepaper & comment from AVC

Angellist steps into ICOs: Coinlist & SAFT

And others see potential for a more “regulated ICOs” as well: Neufund

Two startups tackling / targeting the Hedge Funds market: Numerai & Santiment

More and more cryptocurrencies for very speficic use cases: Local pound(s)

And last but not least, the overview of decentralisation: Mapping the decentralized world of tomorrow

I am wondering if this is just a short term thing and if my full interest will jump back to Open Banking at one point. Probably it will even out as both topics will have massive impact on many lives and the uncertainty is fascinating. The latter is definitely much bigger for Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies so I am curious to see how this will impact my reading behaviour in the future.