Crypto and Defi Explained
Crypto and Defi Explained
This post is targeted at more of a developer audience than my usual writings. Whatever technical jargon is here shouldn’t distract from the point too much if you just skim past it and keep reading. Whenever I see the too-often FUD about some country evicting miners, KYCing wallets, or suing some company or other I …
Prior to the beacon chain I expected that the borrow rates on money markets like Compound and Aave would normalize to something close to the staking reward rate APR. They clearly have not, and are still sitting under 1% most of the time. A surprising amount of capital has been just dumped there and left …
There’s a warning I give every newcomer to this space in my Rabbit Hole speech; this is the frontier. “There are no guard rails. There is no one you can sue to correct your mistake. There is no one the government can point a gun at to get your money back. There is no FDIC …
I have a speech I give to people I introduce to crypto. I feel it helps to prepare them for the dangers they are going to encounter when they dive deeper, to give them some guided skepticism while not deterring them from exploring, and to keep them optimistic in the face of the toxic vitriol. …
10/26/2021 Let’s start with this: why do so many platforms nowadays have Liquidity Mining programs? It wasn’t always done this way; most of the older tokens such as MKR and LINK have never done this. So why did this catch on? Let’s consider this from the perspective of a DAO. The basic answer is so …
Back in my Defi Governance Endgame post I talk about the need for a new Sybil resistance mechanism to reduce the super-linear influence of capital on governance. The first has to do with a different solution to Sybil resistance than money… In the long term I think we’ll see a bunch of Legos taking the …
Since long before NFT’s humans have been collecting silly things. We collect stamps, baseball cards, vinyl records, video games, art, and recently of course, NFT’s. I can easily enough imagine some caveman collecting rocks; heck I’ve seen it from penguins. It’s wired into us. We instinctually want to gather things, feel they belong to us, …
This is going to be a rant about the unfortunate end state of Defi if we continue along our current trajectory. The fundamental issue is that we’re using money for Sybil resistance. Simply using governance tokens as a vote count makes money correlate super-linearly to influence. Vitalk recently wrote about this problem and it has been bubbling on my …
Everyone everywhere is trying to get active yield from their passive assets. It’s one of the most beautiful things about Defi. The first platforms to offer this were straight lending platforms like Compound. They established the pattern of overcollateralization, liquidation mechanisms, and variable rates based on pool utilization. However, who was borrowing, what were they …
I have been a long time skeptic of game item NFT’s. This is coming from someone that has spent thousands of hours across almost every genre of game. I’ve heard arguments that sovereign ownership of items is going to revolutionize the industry but if a game client just decides to ignore a given NFT the …