1/ It’s pretty frustrating to hear people mock crypto like “it’s been 10 years and it's still just speculation. Where's the value?"

When in reality it's still basically illegal to use crypto for the meaningful stuff. I want to yell at regulators "let us try!"

Some examples…. 2/ Instant stock trade settlement plus eliminating the clearing house fees, except it’s illegal to list securities natively onchain.

/1 The upcoming Merge has revealed that USDC has veto power over any breaking changes to ETH

The problem isn't just USDC. Anything that touches the real world can't support forks. This breaks a core power of crypto

I don’t think ppl appreciate the importance of this. A 🧵... 2/ First the context: On Sept. 15th, the Merge is scheduled, and there will likely be a hard fork of Ethereum to keep Proof of Work (PoW).

1/ I’m often asked:

“If you’re doing real world lending, why use crypto at all?”

I get it. For a single app, blockchains just look like an expensive, slow database.

But the value is in the network…🧵

Here’s 3 reasons why. 2/ A crypto network, rather than any single app, will collectively improve upon traditional finance through better *access* and *liquidity*,

both of which will lower the cost of capital.

It's like a flywheel: more people ➡️ more liquidity ➡️ more people ➡️ more liquidity…

/1 Want DeFi to grow 100x from here? The answer is to be boring!
That means DeFi needs to move away from speculation and into boring, everyday financial activity.
Not NFT’s, gaming, or web3 social. Those are all great for crypto. But they won’t help DeFi. Here’s why 🧵 2/ Let’s just look at market sizes for a sec:
-Global e-commerce companies made $2.27T in revenue last year
-The US alone issued $1.3T of bonds + made $8.5T of salary payments last year
-Equity funds have seen ~$1T of funding in the last decade
We need all of that action on DeFi.

The label “undercollateralized lending” in crypto drives me batty 🦇
It’s factually incorrect (@goldfinch_fi loans = overcollateralized!), misleading, +sounds like extra risk when there isn’t.
But there’s a better term in use: it’s time the industry moves to “credit protocols” 🧵 2/Outside of DeFi, no one segregates lending by “overcollateralized” and “undercollateralized.” There’s many types of lending (asset-backed, consumer, SME, security lending, money markets, mortgages, etc). In all of these, the level of collateralization is just a per-deal detail.