Finance Redefined: Where does DeFi go from here? Nov. 4-11

There's good reason to be optimistic for DeFi bulls too, as the market posted a decent recovery since my last newsletter.

There is indeed a pretty sizable bump for DeFi searches around summer.

At the same time I think this DeFi rally just encapsulates the worst aspects of 2016 and 2017 into one.

The CEO of FTX is now saying that even Ethereum 2.0 wouldn't be enough to deal with any load even approaching mainstream popularity, which is reasonable given the much higher processing requirements of DeFi smart contracts.

A pretty cool item I covered this week is the birth of Boson Protocol, a DeFi primitive for purchasing physical goods with blockchain.

As a side note, I know some of the aforementioned companies try to position themselves as DeFi or "Not banks." Problem is that the difference between DeFi and banks is not "Crypto or no crypto" - it's "Custody or no custody." Centralized crypto lenders fail that crucial litmus test.

Some go as far as saying that DeFi can prevent a repeat of the 2008 crash because everything is over-collateralized and transparent.

I can almost feel a DeFi financial crisis eventually coming up because people over-leveraged themselves on some weird Uniswap token backed by Curve-Aave-Compound Dai, which is backed by a staking derivative of Ether.

On an individual level, cases like Cred are just an ad for DeFi - not your keys, not your coins.

DeFi excels at pushing the principle of self-custody to new frontiers, and that's really what it should be appreciated for.