Musing on valuation frameworks and why the duration of cash flow matters 🧵
As the industry matures, the supply of stablecoins is kind of a big deal for crypto.
The market turns against you and interest rates drop as a result of the increased float of stablecoins in the market
As expected,
- Borrowers become more sensitive to interest rates
- Lenders become more sensitive to their rate of return
All of a sudden, risk management is kind of a big deal and we need to go back and rethink the fundamental values of the most dominant protocols
Liquidity begets liquidity
That's the reason why, as an industry, #DeFi needs a base layer for credit markets
This invisible layer is the largest derivates market (interest rates derivatives) in #TradFi and underpins the debt upon which a yield curve is constructed
But there is more to it.
These markets run 24/7 and are auditable and transparent.
There are many ways to skin a cat, but there is a series of tradeoffs that will make that instrument more or less useful, specially for the fixed income market participants
You can split yield-bearing assets into a principal and a yield portion and trade them on an AMM
You can also come up with a vAMM construct that will allow for fixed-takers and variable-takers to interact with each other
...
But what's the issue here?
Liquidity fragmentation and exposure to the actual interest rates that drive market forces
A base layer for credit markets cannot be built on isolation, hence the value of capturing a benchmark rate into a single metric, like the @ipor_io index
This single metric is a public good and, at the same time, the center piece of a puzzle built upon money legos
Credit is a catalyst for growth, but what's the value proposition for the next wave of innovation in #DeFi?
Composability and venues to exchange of cash flows
You can't expect institutions to enter the markets with "fugazzi" financial acrobatics
Fixed income players call for stability, predictability, and liquidity
And this is the triad that everyone is overlooking
Have a good Sunday!
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If Satoshi Nakamoto had designed a decentralized money market, it would likely resemble @ajnafi: a peer-to-peer borrow-lending platform where users do not have to trust external oracles or even care about protocol governance.
Forget about tedious governance forums, unreliable risk assessments, or exposure to oracle manipulation attacks.
From the protocol point of view, if anything can be automated, it will be automated
Once deployed, the protocol remains immutable forever
OG, IPFS and open source frontend, peak liquidity at $30B, credit delegation, flash loans... Aave has set an industry standard and a foundational layer for what a decentralized money market looks like, and there is a reason for that
Now that many people are being quick at riding the liquid staking narrative, maybe it is a good time to introduce the concept of "restaking" and explain why it is a relevant primitive for increasing the economic security of a network🧵
The potential of protocols like @eigenlayer lies on leveraging the rehypothetication of $ETH at the consensus layer.
This consists in aggregating and extending the validation use cases of staked $ETH across applications built on top of Ethereum to increase its economic security
Since the early days of #Bitcoin, many complex tradeoffs have been made to make the network robust against resource-intensive attacks
As you can guess, this is not a one-time task, and it requires an ongoing effort to maintain and scale its cryptoeconomic guarantees
As you can guess, mass adoption of DeFi is not likely to happen until a new wave of fresh capital enters the industry.
To unlock new sources of predictable returns and fixed income, there is no better combination than a borrow-lending optimizer and an interest rate swap