Cryptoassets

Burniske was at ARK at the time, Tatar is a longtime investment writer, and the book they wrote together is the closest thing the 2017 era produced to a Graham-and-Dodd for crypto: an attempt to import portfolio theory, valuation models, and historical analogies (especially to early-stage internet investing) into an asset class that mostly hadn't been thinking that way yet.

Who it's for

Investors and analysts who want a structured way to think about crypto allocation — not a "buy Bitcoin" pamphlet but an actual framework for taxonomy, due diligence, and portfolio construction. The book is also a useful corrective for crypto natives who have absorbed the technical and political worldview but never learned to think like a public-markets investor.

What it does well

The taxonomy chapter — splitting "cryptocurrencies," "crypto-commodities," and "crypto-tokens" — is dated in detail but still useful as a way to force yourself to articulate what an asset actually is before you buy it. The valuation chapter on the network value to transactions (NVT) ratio is a real contribution; you'll see it referenced in research notes years later. The due-diligence checklist for new projects is exactly the discipline most retail investors lacked in 2017 and still lack now.

The historical chapter comparing crypto to the early internet is the kind of thing that's been done to death since, but Burniske and Tatar do it carefully, and they're honest about where the analogy breaks.

Where it falls short

The book was published right as the ICO bubble peaked, and parts of it read in retrospect as overly generous to that wave of projects. The framework is sound; some of the examples used to populate it look very different in 2024 than they did in 2017.

It also predates almost everything that now dominates the crypto investment conversation: DeFi, NFTs, the L2 rollup ecosystem, the proof-of-stake transition, ETFs, stablecoin yield. You're getting the disciplined-investor toolkit, not an updated map of the asset class. Pair it with something more current and it remains one of the better books in its niche.