I'm really curious about DeFi being your focus, it has seemed to be that pretty much everything other than core DeFi protocols are weird casinos but things like Aave and Curve are niche but highly functional infrastructure. Can you say more about your impressions?
Not very much, as I work in a high position in traditional finance now and would rather not go into detail, but your perspective seems to match mine very closely. It's not even casinos, that'd be 100x better still. I've seen extreme cases of market manipulation, money laundering, insider trading and fraud. As in, life-long federal prison extreme. And, to be honest, "I've seen" is a major understatement, because essentially it has become a reasonable, generalised expectation to apply to anything you see now.
A notable example here are the "pre-sale investment groups", which essentially consists of morally corrupt criminals buying tokens pre-release e.g. for 2 cents, which will then be listed on major exchanges for 50 cents initial price. You can probably imagine what happens to everyone buying the token for 50 cents on release. This has gone so far that these "investment" groups had to come up with "vesting schedules", which are essentially designed to keep them from dumping on *each other*, in addition to keeping them from selling too much too fast and dumping the price and "painting bad charts".
This is also not a niche venture that only happens with a few select tokens, it's become a completely normal procedure that happens with almost every single new token, and insanely enough even the people further down the food chain have accepted this procedure as a reasonable fact and don't even question it any more. "Of course bro, whales provide liquidity"
I totally agree that protocols like Aave, Curve and some others are extremely cool and useful technology, however, I've come to the preliminary conclusion that the degenerate disgrace that makes up 99% of the space now is permanently and irreversibly damaging reputation to a point where this technology might be ignored despite being useful and solid.
>I totally agree that protocols like Aave, Curve and some others are extremely cool and useful technology, however, I've come to the preliminary conclusion that the degenerate disgrace that makes up 99% of the space now is permanently and irreversibly damaging reputation to a point where this technology might be ignored despite being useful and solid.
It's interesting because I've come to the opposite conclusion from very similar experiences. I think the regulatory and legal enforcement haze allows the infinite scams to multiply but I found it refreshing/surprising to find there is a serious and useful core technology that all the scams are imitating in style (but not substance)
> It's interesting because I've come to the opposite conclusion from very similar experiences. I think the regulatory and legal enforcement haze allows the infinite scams to multiply but I found it refreshing/surprising to find there is a serious and useful core technology that all the scams are imitating in style (but not substance)
Well, why wouldn't there be? Cryptocurrency didn't start out the way it's being used now, and evangelists and nerds have been hard at work for over a decade in furthering the technology.
I can understand your perspective too, however, while we obviously appreciate and care for the underlying technology, almost no one else will. Most people have problems operating Metamask already, so there's no possible reality in which I can see cryptocurrency succeeding because of some awesome underlying technology that almost no one really understands. If cryptocurrency ever succeeds, it's because regulation has cracked down extremely hard, a lot of people are in jail, a lot of time has passed, the sentiment has recovered and real utility is commonplace.
The point at which APY rates for farming/staking are equal or almost equal to traditional treasury basis points, and the decision between investing in stocks or crypto is taken on the basis of fundamentals and utility, will be the time cryptocurrency has grown up and put on big boy pants.
I'm not trolling, but I really don't know what this real utility is. I've been extremely active in crypto for two years (as a user, not a trader) and I still don't know if there is any real utility, outside of gated access to communities and/or voting on DAO proposals. Whatever utility there is either very minor or refers to something in the future.
In two years, everything in crypto has largely been the same. Transactions on Metamask run the same way. Mobile experience is uniformly awful. Buying shitcoins is still using the same old crummy Uniswap interface. The only difference is that there are a bunch of new chains VCs can pump and dump on.
Most projects in crypto are deeply involved in navel gazing. All these bridge projects are a good example - they all hail it as "revolutionary" if you can transfer funds from Sol to ETH. Outside of crypto, people ask "but why?"
> Whatever utility there is either very minor or refers to something in the future.
That sums it up pretty nicely, at least for DeFi.
Layer 1 currencies do have utility as currency, albeit defined by adoption. I sometimes pay for my pizza in Bitcoin. Some banks use XRP as a SWIFT-style cross-border payment network.
Interestingly, AAVE, Curve, Maker, and Compound - all old school, plain vanilla DeFi projects - still have the highest value locked by a big margin.
Once you go beyond these functional but boring DeFi projects, you run into a ton of scams, wild "experiments for the sake of experiments", and projects that are just trying to extend the ponzis built on top of established protocols.
Take all the forks. One algostable becomes successful and suddenly there are hundreds of forks that collapse within days, sometimes hours (TOMB is an example).
Most of the promises of DeFi are absolutely nothing but pure ponzis that collapse once new money stops coming in. OHM chart is the best example. "Reserve currency" that dropped 99% because new money stopped coming in.
What it essentially boils down to is the simple question: what's the use of these projects besides making money? Don't get me wrong - speculation can be a use case. But I've never heard of speculators take the holier-than-thou, "we'll change the world" tone that crypto proponents seem to take.
It seems OK though to just ignore all the vaporware, other than maybe asking regulators to create a legal or regulatory framework to better distinguish between Aave (0.9% APY on USDC) and MonkeyBank (20,000% APY!)
The boring plain vanilla DeFi stuff seems great, especially for people who live in countries with unstable banking systems (e.g. Lebanon, Russia, &c)
