Every week, millions of people who describe themselves as unable to save any money manage to find a few dollars for a lottery ticket. This is not a contradiction so much as a clue. Traditional saving asks a person to give up a small pleasure now in exchange for a larger, delayed, and frankly boring…
Read MoreDecentralized finance arrived with a promise that was, in its purest form, radically open: anyone with an internet connection and a digital wallet could lend, borrow, trade, and earn yield without asking permission from a bank, a broker, or a government. No account application, no credit check, no gatekeeper deciding who was allowed in. For…
Read MoreDecentralized finance promises a financial system that anyone can access without banks, brokers, or gatekeepers standing between a person and their money, allowing a newcomer to swap one token for another, lend out savings for interest, or supply liquidity to a trading pool using nothing more than a crypto wallet and an internet connection. Yet…
Read MoreThe world of decentralized finance, often shortened to DeFi, offers people the ability to trade, lend, borrow, and earn returns on their cryptocurrency without relying on banks or other traditional intermediaries, putting them in direct control of their own assets through software applications that run on blockchains. This control is the great appeal of DeFi,…
Read MoreLong before banks, credit scores, and digital payment apps, communities around the world developed an ingenious way to save money and access credit together, a practice in which a group of people agree to contribute a fixed sum at regular intervals into a common pot, and in each round one member takes the entire pot,…
Read MoreFor most of its short history, decentralized finance grew up in a curious legal vacuum, an experimental world of lending pools, automated exchanges, and yield strategies built almost entirely on top of a kind of digital dollar that governments had barely begun to define. That digital dollar is the stablecoin, a cryptocurrency designed to hold…
Read MoreFor most of the short history of cryptocurrency, the stablecoin occupied a curious and somewhat thankless position, a digital token designed to hold a steady value of one dollar and to serve as a reliable medium of exchange within a volatile market, yet one that paid its holder nothing at all for the privilege of…
Read MoreFor most people, the place where idle cash sits is not something they think about very deeply, since money that is not being spent or invested tends to rest quietly in a checking account, a savings account, or perhaps a money market fund offered by a brokerage, earning a modest return and waiting to be…
Read MoreBitcoin, the first and largest cryptocurrency, has long been understood primarily as a store of value, a kind of digital gold that people buy and hold in the expectation that it will preserve or grow their wealth, and for most of its history that is essentially all it has been used for. While other blockchains,…
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