A person who opens a single decentralized finance position, depositing stablecoins into a lending protocol, providing liquidity to a trading pool, staking a token to earn rewards, generally has little trouble tracking that one position. The interface for the specific protocol they used shows the deposit, the current yield, and whatever collateral or risk metrics…
Read MoreEvery year, millions of travelers arrive at a foreign airport, tired from a long flight, and walk directly past a currency exchange kiosk glowing with a rate that looks almost reasonable until it is compared with what the money was actually worth an hour earlier. That gap between the rate a traveler is offered and…
Read MoreEvery 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…
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