Visual Summary / DVFZ Books
The opportunity is a business, not a position
Selynna Payne’s case for entering crypto as a builder and a supplier, and her account of what it costs when it goes wrong.
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01 The premise
The book’s move is from investor to supplier
Most crypto books ask which coin you should hold. Payne asks a different question: what could your company sell to everyone who already holds one?
Her starting point is that the market is no longer small. She reports that over 18,000 businesses now accept cryptocurrencies, that Microsoft and PayPal both joined in 2014, and that the first recorded purchase was two pizzas paid for with 10,000 Bitcoin in 2010. A market of that size needs wallets, custody, accounting, teaching, audits and code. Those are businesses, and they get paid whether the market is rising or falling.
She is writing for a company, not a hobbyist. That changes the maths. A company has payroll, customers and a reputation, so it can afford neither a total loss nor a bad quarter of guessing.
Fully bringing cryptocurrencies and the blockchain into the business sector rather than resorting to individual investors. Selynna Payne, on why she wrote the book, Chapter 8
02 Where the revenue is
Payne’s list of ventures is mostly services, not tokens
Chapter 6 is the heart of the book, and it is a list of things a company can sell. Only the first few entries involve taking a market position at all.
On the position side she puts spot trading, then options, futures and margin trading, which run on borrowed money. She is blunt about that end: when the bear market arrived, she writes, over one billion dollars was liquidated in a single day, and margin and futures traders were the larger part of that figure. Staking and yield farming sit in the middle, earning a return in exchange for locking assets up and giving up access to them.
Then the list turns into ordinary business. Security hardware, in the manner of Ledger and Trezor. Tax filing and portfolio tracking, in the manner of ZenLedger. Content and teaching, in the manner of the Whiteboard Crypto channel. Coding, and auditing for firms that need a chartered accountant who understands the ledger. None of these require you to be right about a price.
Chapter 7 is where she says the customers are. She walks through healthcare records, manufacturing, supply chain tracking, insurance claims, logistics, aviation, education and banking, and names companies working in each. Read as a catalogue it is thin. Read as a list of industries that already have budgets for this, it is a prospect list.
Write down one thing your company already does well, then name the crypto-side customer who would pay for it. If you cannot name the customer, that is the gap to work on first.
03 Which money you risk
The source of the money decides what a crash costs you
Payne puts the loss scenario before the opportunity, and she does not soften it. The same fall in the market ends two different ways depending on which pot you took the money from.
Her rule is old and specific: never put in more than you can afford to lose, and never use funds your business needs for its day to day operation. A position can be worth a great deal one week and very little the next, and it may be years before it recovers, if it recovers. If your payroll is inside that position, the recovery arrives too late to matter.
She backs this with the failures of 2022 that were fresh when she wrote. The Terra LUNA collapse, when the UST stablecoin lost its peg to the dollar. The bankruptcy of the lending platform Celsius. She notes that people lost their life savings, and that some took their own lives. She calls crypto a highly speculative market and asks the reader to set a limit before entering, not after.
It is a highly speculative, risky, and thrilling sport that has cost many their life savings and ruined their relationships. Cryptocurrency Entrepreneurship, Chapter 3
Name the largest sum whose complete loss would not change next month’s payroll or supplier payments. That number is your ceiling, and the book says it is the only money that should go anywhere near this market.
04 The checklist
The same red flags become your build specification
Chapter 5 is a list of warning signs: a thin whitepaper, an anonymous team, followers who never comment, testimonials from nobody, a project no major exchange will list, promotion with no product behind it, promised returns that make no sense, a lock-up on early investors that runs for years.
Read as a buyer, it is a filter. Payne then turns it around in a single sentence and it becomes something more useful to a founder. If those are the things that make you walk away from someone else’s project, they are the things you have to get right in your own. Publish the team. Write the document properly. Build a community small enough to be real. Meet the listing standards of the exchanges and trackers before you need them.
She adds two habits that cost nothing. Check the contract address before you touch an unfamiliar project, because scam projects copy the names of real ones. Ignore airdrops you cannot trace, because free tokens have been used to reach into wallets.
If you plan on creating one, I trust you will ensure that it meets the standards that qualify it to get listed on reputable projects or be trackable on trusted trackers like CoinGecko and Coin Market Cap. Cryptocurrency Entrepreneurship, Chapter 5
Run the red flag list against your own venture instead of someone else’s. Every item you cannot answer cleanly is a piece of work, not an opinion.
05 Inside the company
The nearest use is in your own back office
Before you sell anything to the market, Payne says, look at what a shared, tamper-evident record would do to work you already pay for.
Her examples are unglamorous and that is the point. Settlement that clears in seconds instead of days. An audit trail that exists because the transactions wrote it, not because someone assembled it afterwards. Compliance records that do not have to be gathered again every year, against a global bill she puts at more than 430 billion dollars annually. Internal voting. A private chain for data you do not want competitors reading.
She also covers decentralized autonomous organizations, where rules written as code handle routine decisions. She lists real drawbacks alongside the benefits: a bug or a compromised contract pulls the whole organisation in, borderless operation runs into different legal regimes, and the technology is new enough that setting one up can be expensive and can fail. Her own case study has a company put the idea to staff rather than impose it, and only 55 per cent agree to be paid in a volatile asset.
Pick one record your company collects, files and then collects again every year. Work out what that repetition costs in hours. That number is the size of the problem the book is pointing at.
06 Tax and regulation
Payne treats regulation as the thing that lets a company enter
A lot of crypto writing treats rules as the enemy. This book does the opposite, and the reason is commercial: a regulated market is one an established business can actually operate in without risking its licence or its name.
The tax chapter is the practical half. Writing in the United States in 2022, she explains that the tax authority there treated crypto as property rather than as currency. Buying with dollars and holding is not itself an event. Moving assets between wallets you own is not an event. Swapping one coin for another, selling for cash, and paying for goods all are. Holding for more than a year was taxed differently from holding for less. She also notes that a business, unlike a hobbyist, could deduct costs such as hardware and conference travel.
Two cautions belong with this. Payne’s account describes one country’s rules at one moment, and the specifics have moved since publication. And she is candid that regulatory uncertainty is itself a cause of the volatility she warns about, with some countries having banned crypto use outright and made life hard for founders there.
I’m not an anarchist. I don’t believe human civilization is advanced enough to live in a world without rules. Changpeng Zhao, quoted at the head of Chapter 9
List every crypto movement your company made last quarter and mark which were swaps or sales. Those are the ones a tax authority is likely to care about, and the list is far easier to build now than a year from now.
07 Choosing a slice
Her advice on the future is to pick one narrow slice of it
The last chapter is about Web 3.0, tokenised assets, virtual worlds and self-governing organisations. Her instruction about all of it is unusually restrained: do not try to learn the whole thing.
Instead she asks what your company already knows how to do, and where that meets this market. Her own examples are that concrete. A company that builds audio hardware should look at audio hardware for virtual spaces. A finance company should look at what a financial service becomes when it is delivered virtually. A studio should compete on the quality of the experience and outsource the parts it cannot do well.
She keeps the caveat attached. Tokenised assets are illiquid, so what you buy today may not sell tomorrow, and their price comes from supply and demand rather than from anything intrinsic. Her closing note is honest about her own book too: take what is useful for your business and leave the rest.
The metaverse is a broad concept, so don’t waste time and resources trying to know absolutely everything it entails. Cryptocurrency Entrepreneurship, Chapter 10
The book ends its final chapter with a task. Write one business idea, in one sentence, in a niche you already understand. Not a plan, just the sentence, so you have something small enough to test.
08 The whole book
Serve the market, size the risk, pick one slice
Payne’s argument holds together because each part limits the next. The venture gives you revenue that does not depend on a price. The limit on capital keeps a bad quarter from reaching payroll. The narrow slice keeps you from spending a year learning instead of building.
Sell, do not only buy
Custody, tax tools, audit, code, teaching. The book’s longest list is of services this market needs, and none of them require you to call a price correctly.
Only money you can lose
Never operating cash, never funds the business needs to run. She names the 2022 failures, and she does not pretend the losses were small.
One slice, done properly
Start inside your own operations, meet the standards you would demand of anyone else, and build in the corner of this market you already understand.
The book asks for one honest answer before anything else: what could your company lose here and still open on Monday. Everything useful in it follows from that number.
Adapted from Cryptocurrency Entrepreneurship: Using Crypto to Accelerate Your Business Growth
Selynna Payne · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 190 cited sources in the source edition