Why You Need To Learn About Decentralized Finance
Blue Collar Blockchain #1
Why Blue Collar Blockchain?
Money and Financial Infrastructure
Money is a strange thing. Endlessly complicated. A problem or a tool making people’s lives miserable or easy. I believe every individual has opportunities to improve their financial life through education and personal action. That’s exciting but always up to each individual.
100x more exciting is the idea of building and rebuilding global financial infrastructure and improving life through mass accessibility, efficient function, unbiased opportunities, and meaningful borderless connections.
A small number of teams can achieve this and the underlying technological advancement is only accelerating.
Function and user experience will be endlessly iterated and the crypto world has a long way to go before calling anything finished. Build, criticize, improve, repeat.
Unbiased opportunities and accessibility will come from decentralizing highly-functional networks. Financial networks are ripe for disruption.
Here’s a quick, far-from-exhaustive reminder of why:
Governments print themselves out of debt, debasing their citizens’ currency and degrading their quality of life.
Governments freeze citizens’ financial assets at their convenience.
Banks freeze citizens’ financial assets at their convenience.
Banks prevent access through their own reasoning and at their convenience.
1.4 billion adults remain unbanked in 2022.
Do you think the poorest people in the world could benefit from access to payment systems, stores of value, and sustainable income from investment at any level?
All this can be made available through mobile-native, democratized, and decentralized networks.
Why I’m Excited About Decentralized Finance
My reality has been one where nobody is excited to deny me access to much of anything and of course that’s been nice. When I curse the credit union it’s because their online system doesn’t integrate well with some 3rd party trying to lend me money. When I blame the bank it’s for a $36 overdraft fee that doesn’t ruin anything for me. All that’s true and I still can’t stand these clowns.
Banks’ function in society was supposed to be empowering and securing people’s futures. Today they’re unaccountable profit lords stealing money from taxpayers and customers all while stealing fair opportunity from the entire political process. If that doesn’t get you excited then you are not going to have the fortitude for crypto rabbit holes and that’s cool, more reason for the nerds to build an accessible, functional, and seamless system for all.
Decentralized finance is an out-sized opportunity for individuals to participate in opportune investments and secure and control their financial life.
I’m here to learn, organize my thoughts around the topic, empower the defi industry as a whole and attempt to include my finances in the best possible future of financial infrastructure.
TL:DR
I believe traditional financial infrastructure is far from optimized for fairness, accessibility, efficiency, sustainability, and meaningful connection.
I believe decentralized finance offers out-sized financial opportunities for any size individual.
I’m here to get rich.
What Will Blue Collar Blockchain Look Like?
The newsletter will publish twice a week Monday and Friday
4 sections will make for a 5-10 minute read.
DeFi Takes Over
Projects and protocols representing the best of decentralized finance.
NFTs
Useful and interesting NFTs - far beyond just a jpeg.
Nullifying Nonsense
An opinionated debunking of a trending event or narrative.
Recommended Resources
Excellent publications to further one’s knowledge and wisdom!
Welcome to the first edition of Blue Collar Blockchain and if it brings you value please be sure to share and subscribe!
DeFi Takes Over
Thorchain - Any-Chain to Any-Chain Trading of Native Assets
Images from thorchain.org
Images from thorchain.org
Thorchain founder on the recent Trustwallet integration. Liquidity and trade volume are quickly rising.
TrustWallet
TrustWallet is a popular multi-chain wallet supporting transactions across 70 blockchains and 8 million tokens.
LandX - Bringing commodities on-chain
Image from twitter.com/landxfinance
Image from testnet.landx.fi/
Other LandX looks:
NFTs
Cryptolink.Tech Cosmonauts
Continuing the multi chain theme we have Cryptolink.Tech and their Cosmonauts NFTs. Cosmonaut owners enjoy discounts of 20%, 40% and 80% off swap fees through CryptoLink.Tech’s Any Chain - Any Chain decentralized exchange.
Discounts depend on the level of NFT. Different levels mint randomly.
NFTs and discounts can be stacked.
NFTs and their discount privileges can be rented, this creates an income opportunity for Cosmonaut owners who are betting on this type of infrastructure.
Here is CryptoLink.Tech’s Any-Any DEX offering Native-Native swaps. No need for wrapped assets.
This means one can trade $FTM on the Fantom blockchain for $ETH on the Ethereum blockchain, unlike the traditional bridging and wrapping solutions where one ends up bridging $WFTM to $WFTM, adding another factor of trust and token they didn’t really want.
Nullifying Nonsense
Binance, FTX and Kevin O’Leary
Last week, Kevin O’leary testified to the U.S. Senate that he thinks Binance put FTX out of business.
The reality points to other reasons for FTX going under such as:
Using Quickbooks to preside over $15+ billion across dozens of companies making up their conglomerate
Sam Bankman Fried using the company as his personal piggy bank
Wire fraud
Fraud in general
Directly stealing customer funds
Alameda’s leveraged trading with no accountability (effectively gambling with customer funds)
Endless irresponsibility and arrogance
Kevin was a paid spokesperson for FTX but that time has passed.
He’s also a significant investor in WonderFi, a large regulated exchange that competes with Binance for users and investors. Still, this does not seem like enough reason to outright lie to congress.
Although we know that SBF, Caroline, Alameda and their little circle brought FTX down, the question remains, what are you up to Mr. Wonderful?
Other takes on this:
Recommended Resources
What is Defi?
Image and article at Ethereum.org
What are experts excited about in 2023?
What is possible with Web3 and why is it important?
Disclaimer: Opinions here are my own. None of this is financial or investment advice. You should always do your own research, form your own opinions and make your own decisions.