Future of Money

Mar 07 2021

Searching deep: The quest for Bitcoin scalability through layer two protocols

As the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Bitcoin’s (BTC) effectiveness as a medium of exchange is still a matter for debate. Unlike fiat money that is inherently infinite in supply and must be managed by a central bank, Bitcoin is akin to gold in that it is commodity money with a finite supply of 21 million.

However, the supply cap is not the major stumbling block for BTC as a medium of exchange, but rather, the transaction throughput. While Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system capable of facilitating online payments without a central counterparty, seven transactions per second on average is hardly the standard for scalability.

Indeed, scalability is only one of three major metrics required for any currency system to succeed as a medium of exchange along with adoption and liquidity. There is an argument to be made of Bitcoin’s growing adoption around the world across several strata of the global economy.

Price volatility that has seen Bitcoin peak at $58,000 and then briefly fall below the $30,000 mark within the first two months of 2021 likely indicates lingering issues with liquidity. However, it’s important to note that the current period is being characterized by a bullish advance that began in October 2020. Ultimately, some analysts expect Bitcoin’s volatility to level out as more institutions take up positions in the market.

What do the critics say?

Bitcoin’s scalability problem is even older than the network itself. Indeed, upon first proposing the system back in 2008, James A. Donald replied to Satoshi Nakamoto with: “The way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.”

This astute observation has been at the heart of some of the more contentious and controversial debates within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Disagreements over how to solve the problem have even resulted in multiple hard forks.

These days, when Bitcoin critics cannot definitively dismiss BTC’s store of value proposition, scalability seems to be a low-hanging fruit with which to craft some anti-Bitcoin soundbite. Speaking during the 2021 Daily Journal annual shareholders meeting, Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman Charlie Munger remarked that Bitcoin will never become a global medium of exchange due to its price volatility.

The 97-year-old billionaire investor is no stranger to espousing anti-Bitcoin sentiments. Indeed, together with Warren Buffett, the two Berkshire Hathaway chiefs have been responsible for some of the more colorful negative remarks among Bitcoin. From being “rat poison squared” to “trading turds,” Munger once slammed BTC investors for celebrating the life and work of Judas Iscariot.

Munger, like Buffett, is among a class of Wall Street Bitcoin critics who have often claimed that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. However, with the price of BTC continuing its relentless upward advance over the past decade while attracting significant institutional interest, detractors now seem to be left with only the scalability argument.

Even among mainstream crypto adopters, Bitcoin’s inability to scale at the base protocol level also seems to be a significant issue. In an address during the Future of Money conference back in February, Mastercard executive vice chair Ann Cairns declared that BTC was not suited to its crypto payment plans.

According to Cairns: “Bitcoin does not behave like a payment instrument […] It’s too volatile and it takes too long to transact.” As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Mastercard recently announced plans to offer support for cryptocurrency payment on its network.

Lightning Network node count rises, but slowly

Together with the 10-minute block creation time, the one-megabyte block size acts as the actual transaction throughput constraint for the Bitcoin network. The block size debate of 2017 that ultimately led to the Bitcoin Cash hard fork proved the adamance of Bitcoin purists to the 1MB block size ethos.

With the “big blockers” now firmly on their own Bitcoin forks like BCH and Bitcoin SV, the question of how to get BTC to scale without changing a thing on the protocol level still lingers. From Bitcoin banks to sidechain protocols, and even deferred settlement infrastructure layers like the Lightning Network, several developmental projects are currently ongoing to make Bitcoin more suitable for microtransactions like paying for coffee.

At a high level, these scaling solutions involve the creation of trustless, centralized (pardon the oxymoron) entities or layer-two networks that maintain lightweight versions of the BTC ledger to handle the actual “coin” transfers without having to maintain the full Bitcoin ledger. These sidechain implementations then transmit the transaction data for final settlement on the actual Bitcoin network.

LN is one of the major Bitcoin scaling solutions under active development by several organizations including Blockstream and Elizabeth Stark’s Lightning Labs. The Lightning Network is perhaps the most popular of the “defer-reconcile” scaling implementations that allow users to create payment channels that offer instant coin transfers at minimal fees.

According to data from LN data aggregator 1ML, there are over 17,300 public Lightning Network nodes and more than 38,400 channels. LN capacity is currently north of 1,100 BTC.

While LN adoption is yet to attain significant heights, layer-two implementation might be about to get a boost with Zap — a Visa-backed Lightning Network payments startup. In February, the company launched Strike — a payments and remittance app that utilizes the Lightning Network for payments.

Strike has also partnered with crypto exchange platform Bittrex to deliver LN-powered payments to over 200 countries around the world. The company plans to issue Strike Visa cards to users in the United States as well as in Europe and the United Kingdom before the end of the year.

What about Statechains?

There is a school of thought that argues Bitcoin scalability is only possible via layer-two solutions. Ruben Somsen, Bitcoin developer, crypto podcaster and founder of the Seoul Bitcoin meetup, is one of the proponents of this argument.

Somsen is an advocate of Statechains, another layer-two implementation but with a twist — transaction participants send private keys instead of actual unspent transaction output, or UTXO. The process involves loading a Statechain-compatible wallet with the exact BTC sum required for the trade followed by the transfer of the private keys from the sender to the recipient.

Since transferring private keys across the blockchain is fee-less and instant, the Statechain idea seems to have gained some traction within the Bitcoin scalability discussion. However, revealing private keys comes with significant security implications.

Thus, in recent times, the Statechain concept has been modified to include a third entity that acts as an intermediary between the transacting parties. Detailing the workings of this counterparty federation within the Statechain matrix, Somsen told Cointelegraph:

“Statechains allow you to take your coins off-chain (meaning cheap transactions) in a way that puts a minimum amount of trust in others. You have to trust a federation, but the federation won’t know that they are getting partial control of your coins, and they can’t refuse peg-outs (moving back to the Bitcoin blockchain).”

Blockchain infrastructure firm CommerceBlock is one of the companies actively developing Statechains as a viable scalability solution for Bitcoin. The firm is credited with introducing the counterparty federation or “Statechain entity” to improve the security of the system. In a conversation with Cointelegraph, CommerceBlock CEO Nicholas Gregory outlined how Statechains operate:

“At a high level, Statechains are simply a way to transfer your private key to another user. To facilitate this, you have to cooperate with a Statechain entity. However, at all times, the user has full control of their funds; at any anytime, they can withdraw their Bitcoin to their own custody. Therefore, the transfer is instant and private.”

While Statechains is a scalability solution on its own, some proponents agree that the system could integrate with the Lightning Network. With Statechains operating on the UTXO level, it is theoretically possible for another layer-two protocol such as the Lightning Network to be implemented on top of Statechains.

Such a hybrid integration could solve the limited node capacity issue of Lightning Network while ensuring the ability to facilitate multiple microtransactions via Statechains. Since the exact transaction amount is loaded into Statechain wallets, it’s impossible to split UTXOs making Statechain in its present iteration unsuitable for microtransactions.

According to Somsen, the Statechains can operate independently as well as function together with the Lightning Network: “Statechains complement the Lightning Network perfectly because opening and closing channels can happen off-chain. This removes a lot of the friction that exists in the current Lightning Network design.”

For Gregory, integrating Statechains with the Lightning Network is among the future developmental plans for CommerceBlock: “Statechains are instant and do not require liquidity lock up; however, you are sending the private key, so you can’t do small or specific denominations. This is where LN excels.”

With these developments and more, the quest for a workable Bitcoin scalability solution is still ongoing. While critics, like Munger, who have been consistently wrong about BTC, continue to drop soundbites, developers are hard at work to solve one of the longest-running operability issues concerning Bitcoin.

Searching deep: The quest for Bitcoin scalability through layer two protocols

Source

Feb 27 2021

Moving beyond the crisis narrative: Crypto in a post-pandemic world

Everyone knows the story. When the first block of Bitcoin (BTC) was mined, the protocol itself entered a world of grave economic uncertainty. Not long before the market would hit its lowest point of the 2009 recession, Bitcoin was quietly created, dropped like a life raft alongside a then-sinking economy. The now infamous phrase “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” was cribbed from the headlines, immortalized in code in the origin story of one of the most compelling, innovative, best-performing assets of the last decade.

But Bitcoin did not immediately take root beyond a small community of true believers. Bitcoin and digital assets, in general, have been a lot of things in their relatively short histories, from purely speculative investments and “magical internet money” to a crisis-time safe haven and an attractive hedge against “the great monetary inflation.”

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, an associated market meltdown and huge amounts of central bank stimulus, cryptocurrencies have proved themselves to be remarkably resilient.

But as we watch vaccines being distributed around the country, cautiously optimistic that the end of the pandemic is within reach, where will crypto fit in a post-pandemic world? If its history of resilience shows us anything, we expect crypto to adapt to whatever the next few years will bring — crisis or not.

Crypto banks

Just three years ago, leaders of some of the largest banks in the world refused to even talk about Bitcoin in interviews, calling the asset itself a “fraud” and referring to those who would buy it as “stupid.”

Today, the general sentiment across banks is markedly different. On the heels of the United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s Interpretive Letter #1170, which made explicitly clear that federally chartered banks can provide banking services to legally operated companies in the digital asset space and custody digital assets on behalf of their clients, banks have been looking for the best way to get their clients the crypto exposure they demand. We anticipate legacy financial players’ interest in crypto to only grow in the coming years, with crypto becoming a mainstream requirement of financial services.

In the short term, banks will almost certainly rely on subcustody relationships with digital asset specialists to safely and effectively get crypto into their clients’ hands. And this is because the complexity is easier to address from the crypto-native side than the other way around.

We also anticipate some number of acquisitions to occur, with some crypto service providers being swallowed up by banks with pockets deep enough to buy them. As demand for crypto services grows, and as regulatory clarity comes, more and more institutions will enter.

Proliferation of decentralized apps

Just as Bitcoin was built in response to the failings of a legacy system, decentralized finance has emerged as crypto’s answer to financial intermediaries. Until recently, though, entire portions of this ecosystem have been unavailable to institutions, mostly for lack of a secure means to participate.

Slowly but surely, institutional-grade DeFi tools are coming to market, and we anticipate this trend to continue. Not only will we see a continued proliferation of DeFi growth, but institutional-grade tools will make institutional participation far more accessible.

Despite its significant growth, the DeFi space is still very much fragmented. Cross-chain interoperability — or lack thereof — is still a problem. Institutions want to be able to put their assets to use across the DeFi ecosystem. We anticipate significant growth in this area, with more and more layer-one protocols being bridged to DeFi and the broader Ethereum ecosystem — a development that also has the potential to improve liquidity along with market stability and efficiency.

Corporate treasuries and lowered barriers to entry

Against a backdrop of seemingly endless monetary stimulus, a significant number of private companies are treating digital assets as an inflation hedge. Some of these, like Square and MicroStrategy, have taken significant positions in recent months. We’ve seen MassMutual buy up $100 million in Bitcoin. And with Tesla’s $1.5-billion dollar Bitcoin purchase this month, the trend shows no signs of slowing. In the coming years, we expect digital assets to become an instrumental part of private-company balance sheets.

Another factor at play is the lowered barrier to entry on the retail front. With tools like Celo’s Valora coming to market, Diem expected to launch in 2021 and firms like PayPal making it easy for their clients to buy crypto, we expect to see more of crypto as a tool for banking the unbanked — for putting financial tools into the hands of the millions without access to traditional banking services.

Beyond the crisis narrative

By virtue of being built in response to one economic crisis, crypto seems to be locked into a crisis narrative. In reality, digital assets have more than proved to be resilient in even the most challenging economic times. Just this past year, crypto proved itself in the grips of a once-in-a-century global emergency, earning a place in the portfolios of institutional and retail investors alike.

As the pandemic (hopefully) fades into the rearview, it’s exciting to think about what crypto can do without being forced into a defensive posture — without being defined against legacy assets like gold. It would be naive to say that crypto will never face another crisis — it almost certainly will. But from here, at what feels like the tail end of the pandemic, it’s exciting to think about what crypto can do in whatever “new normal” comes next.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Diogo Monica is a co-founder and the president of Anchorage. Before co-founding Anchorage, Diogo was the security lead at Docker — an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications. He has a B.Sc., an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in computer science, has published several papers in peer-reviewed security conferences on the topic of distributed systems and information security, and is the author of several patents in secure communications, encrypted hardware and payment systems.

Moving beyond the crisis narrative: Crypto in a post-pandemic world

Source

Feb 05 2021

The year 2021 will bring DeFi into adolescence

Following the explosive growth of decentralized finance in the second half of 2020, we’re asking ourselves what the next chapter will look like. What would it take for DeFi to expand beyond crypto-native assets and communities and start eating financial services as we know it?

The second half of 2020 surpassed many of our expectations, and the market has only accelerated since then. Total value locked in DeFi rose from less than $1 billion at the start of June to $13 billion at the end of the year and over $27 billion since then. Catalyzed by Compound’s COMP token launch, we saw a wave of yield farming and a rapid inflow of assets.

Perhaps more excitingly, we’ve started to see the foundations of a new financial system taking shape — with applications that enable everything from self-custodial exchanges to lending and borrowing, payments, portfolio management and insurance. New forms of value are being created: not just the promise of yield in a low-rate environment but also access to financial services for crypto-exposed businesses and individuals and for the underbanked more generally.

Today, DeFi is the preserve of a small subset of crypto-native users and assets and is seen by its critics as the wild west. Will this change? Here are a few thoughts on what comes next.

New asset types — New sources of liquidity in DeFi

The first iterations of decentralized exchanges were fraught with liquidity issues. Early adopters faced a significant lag in order matching, and token pairs were limited. Automated market makers and liquidity pools have become a widespread solution to this, with daily trading volumes on decentralized exchanges currently on the order of $2 billion — and DeFi projects continue to find innovative ways to incentivize the provision of liquidity. This will continue. For borrowers, we believe there remains a clear need to bring down collateralization requirements and indeed to use alternative forms of collateral.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity lies outside the universe of crypto-native assets. There are trillions of dollars of potential collateral up for grabs in real-world assets: Users want to borrow money against the assets that they already have and often cannot access the liquidity they need by conventional means. Tokenization of real-world assets can dramatically increase the size of the DeFi universe.

Scaling issues addressed at layer one and/or layer two

Ethereum’s scalability constraints are often cited as a factor limiting the adoption of DeFi. High gas prices and indeed high Ether (ETH) prices can render lower-value transactions unviable. This limits the attractiveness of nonfungible token marketplaces and other retail-focused services. Meanwhile, high-frequency professional trading requires layer-two solutions due to limited on-chain transaction throughput.

It’s plausible that we’ll see this resolved in 2021, with at least three possible paths:

The successful rollout of Ethereum 2.0.
The emergence of dominant layer-two scaling solutions on Ethereum.
Widespread adoption of cross-chain interoperability solutions.

These three phenomena need not be mutually exclusive, and they collectively give us optimism that 2021 will be a year of significant progress on DeFi scalability.

Institutional demand — Convergence between CeFi and DeFi

We are beginning to see crypto-native institutional investors seek higher yields via stablecoins. Many of these investors use centralized exchanges, at least initially, but a handful of institutional-focused self-custodial products has emerged. Regulatory scrutiny on DeFi is likely to increase as these services gain traction.

Meanwhile, regulators around the world have enacted stricter rules for virtual account service providers, such as centralized crypto exchanges. The Financial Action Task Force’s travel rule and Europe’s 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive demonstrate the movement toward stricter Know Your Customer standards in cryptocurrency, and October’s BitMEX charges brought this into sharp relief. This will ultimately touch DeFi: In the near term, we expect to see institutional products implementing pseudonymous/zero-knowledge solutions for self-sovereign identity.

There are ideological and practical questions that need to be addressed. Is KYC fundamentally incompatible with DeFi? And which regulatory frameworks actually apply to DeFi today and in the future? Trustlessness will be defined subjectively, and we’ll see a spectrum from truly decentralized products — built and used by anonymous users outside the purview of the Bank Secrecy Act — to products with a database of verified counterparties.

Better UXs for retail participants: DeFi that doesn’t feel like DeFi

For many users, the on-ramp into DeFi is simply too steep. A certain degree of sophistication is needed simply to set up a MetaMask wallet, buy ERC-20 tokens, and start lending. Meanwhile, many centralized products have grown thanks to intuitive interfaces resembling traditional digital banking products. We are now starting to see this trend play out in DeFi where one could ultimately enjoy a faster, cleaner onboarding experience, given the lack of KYC. As a good example, Yearn.finance was a pioneer in this regard, focusing on usability and lowering the barriers to entry that existed before its launch.

Adjacently, other Ethereum-based applications — such as NFT marketplaces for collectibles and digital assets — will continue to innovate the user experience. In 2021, we expect to see a wider emergence of Ethereum-based applications where customers do not know they are transacting on a blockchain at all.

More exploits as more capital flows in: Potentially the biggest constraint to growth

Given the increasing amount of capital at stake, it’s unsurprising that we have seen a rise in exploits. In 2020, approximately $100 million was lost in hacks, notably flash loan attacks, and this trend is likely to continue. For institutional investors, exploits will inevitably alter the perception of DeFi’s risk-adjusted yield opportunities.

This will be a critical factor influencing the scale of adoption and will bring a rise in demand for smart contract auditing and insurance, both of which have seen limited investments to date. Greater collaboration between DeFi projects is also a potential response to the rise in exploits. Such partnerships will allow projects to pool and strengthen their talent, security and treasuries, helping to prevent and mitigate the impact of future exploits.

The rise of crypto in the last decade has transformed the way we think about stores of value. The rise of DeFi in 2020 transformed the way we think about the future of financial services and true innovation in a space that changes very slowly. As the dust settles on a remarkable 2020, we now expect to see a massive increase in scale and professionalization as DeFi captures more regulatory and institutional attention.

This article was co-authored by Toby Coppel and Chandar Lal.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Toby Coppel is a co-founder and partner of Mosaic Ventures, which invested in various projects across Europe. The Future of Money is one of their core investment themes. Toby was previously the chief strategy officer of Yahoo.

Chandar Lal is a research associate at Mosaic Ventures, where he conducts thematic research and due diligence. He previously worked at Sequoia in Silicon Valley as part of the corporate development team.

The year 2021 will bring DeFi into adolescence

Source

Sep 27 2020

Americans don’t want to give up their paper money, but they should

The recent health scare surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak seems to have accelerated the move toward a cashless society, with cashless payment spiking in concert with viral cases.

Yet, our findings in a Genesis Mining study called “Perceptions and Understanding of Money 2020” indicate that a significant majority of Americans are not psyched about parting with their paper money on a permanent basis.

To be more specific, we found that 60% of respondents are opposed to the idea of paper money being replaced with “digital-only money.” This could be a “devil-you-know” versus a “devil-you-don’t-know” situation where familiarity with paper money is the driving force behind the wariness of giving it up. This is understandable, but if resisting change were humans’ driving principle, then progress of any kind would be impossible.

It is possible that better acquaintance with the advantages of digital transactions could change the minds of those willing to have their minds changed.

It is also possible that the movement toward a cashless society is a non-Democratic issue — that is, it could be inevitable, depending on who wishes to see a cashless society emerge. Embracing the benefits of digital money could ease our transition into a new financial frontier.

COVID-19 has accelerated the cashless revolution

The U.S. news outlet Axios cites several figures and facts indicating that increased health-consciousness amid the global pandemic has accelerated the migration toward a cashless society. Its findings include that:

People in various nations are wary of physical money, which they see as a potential conduit for viral transmission.
63% of consumers report using cash less often than they did before the pandemic.
Payment for goods and services through apps and websites, rather than with physical money, has increased.

Of course, we must consider the fact that quarantine measures have prevented many from accessing ATMs, paying for goods and services in person, or engaging in activities where they might normally use cash. In some sense, the increase in cashless payments has not been completely reflective of voluntary consumer attitudes. It may, however, be habit-forming.

The idea that your dollars and coins are dirtier than you would like to consider is — unlike the coronavirus — not novel. A 2017 study found that a collection of bills circulating around New York City contained various bacteria and viruses.

Many people’s aversion to unnecessary risk has been illustrated by widespread willingness to wear masks, quarantine and take other health-conscious precautions. Foregoing physical money in favor of primarily-digital payments could be increasingly viewed as yet another way to protect oneself from possible viral infection.

The benefits of going cashless

Even before “COVID-19” became a universally-recognized term, advocates for digital payments were touting the perks of completely or largely-cashless societies. We’ve already touched on the potential health benefits of eschewing dirty cash for cleaner forms of payment.

In addition to health benefits, the advantages of cashlessness — among others — may include:

A greater difficulty for muggers and thieves to rob you of your physical money.
A greater ability to trace illegal activity that could be more easily perpetrated by laundering cash through businesses, banks and other means without a trace.
Commerce-related perks, which Visa notes include faster transactions (on average), less hassle for customers who would otherwise have to procure, store, count and dole out cash, and the fact that customers are statistically more likely to spend more at a business using a card rather than cash.
Ease of currency exchange.

Some forms of digital payments may also provide greater security. Security standards used to protect cryptocurrency wallets are being adopted for other purposes, as Big Four audit firm Deloitte noted, and the further adoption of such practices could further bolster asset protection in a cashless society.

The move toward cashlessness falls in line with the general shift toward global uniformity, for better or worse. Some note that uniformity itself is not necessarily a net positive — one of several critiques of emerging cashless societies.

Critiques of going cashless

It would be unfair to pose the prospective benefits of going cashless without mentioning known drawbacks and still-unfounded critiques of the cashless concept.

For one, there is the notion that moving all nations and individual cultures toward a universal standard of exchange is akin to whitewashing. There is something to be said about coming home from a vacation with a paper bill or coin that you had never before seen or held as a keepsake of your trip. Losing the uniqueness of different currencies is a fair concern, to be certain. But is it a greater loss than the potential benefits of cashlessness?

The answer to that question may vary, depending on your values and beliefs. Other critiques of taking societies cashless include:

The elimination of cash will be followed by the imposition of ubiquitous transaction fees for businesses and consumers, which, without the alternative option to pay with cash, may be unavoidable and costly over time.
Cashlessness represents a greater trend toward limited choice and autonomy.
A reduction in cash services will eliminate a substantial swath of jobs that revolve around cash processing, issuance and management.
Less cash and more easily-traceable digital transactions mean less privacy.

These are not illegitimate concerns, and there is a debate to be had. Alleviating these concerns with robust security measures and good faith will be necessary to make a fully cashless society work as it should.

Conclusion

With proper oversight and security, the move toward cashless payment mechanisms could provide numerous benefits, and cryptocurrency-level security may be an integral feature of the move toward cashlessness.

There are certainly kinks to be worked out and concerns to be addressed, but the age of COVID-19 has further reinforced that a shift toward all-cashless payments may be not only beneficial but more necessary than many previously realized.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Marco Streng is the CEO and a co-founder of Genesis Group and Genesis Mining — one of the largest crypto mining companies in the world. Prior to co-founding Genesis in 2013 and becoming an impassioned advocate for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, Marco studied mathematics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.

Americans don’t want to give up their paper money, but they should

Source

Sep 22 2020

The great unbanking: How DeFi is completing the job Bitcoin started

In a broad sense, 2020 has been the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As it charges toward 1 million deaths and over 30 million infections, governments have been found wanting. Our institutions have crumbled, leaders reacted too slowly, and all of the systems both in place and newly created to protect us — healthcare, aged care, testing, protective equipment supply chains, contact tracing, etc. — have collapsed. But 2020 has also very much been the year of decentralized finance, which has come to be known as DeFi.

DeFi is crypto

To understand why DeFi has captured the imagination of the entire crypto landscape is to understand that it is less about the outrageous returns offered to yield farmers and more about the future possibilities it presents.

Cryptocurrency, and the technology behind it, has always been about future possibilities.

When Bitcoin (BTC) was born to little fanfare in 2009, it was quickly recognized by those familiar with it as having the potential to be the future of money. 11 years on, Bitcoin, with its decentralized global system of nodes and miners keeping the network operational and secure, has met its promise and more.

Not only is it a reliable and fast way for people to permissionlessly send money to each other, it has also become a genuine enterprise-grade investment vehicle, and its investment worthiness appears to be growing. Large and enterprise owners are holding onto it in anticipation of capital growth.

“Bitcoin as an investment vehicle” aside, it remains, in essence, money — a new currency for a new, hyper-connected world.

Bitcoin and/or DeFi

“Bitcoin as money” still works like money insofar as it still relies on a financial ecosystem around it to keep it alive. But that ecosystem is somewhat limited; it consists of those that secure the network on which transactions are transmitted (miners and node operators), wallets, and exchanges where it can be exchanged for other digital and, increasingly, fiat assets.

But a financial services architecture as we know it incorporates a whole lot more in terms of functionality: lending, borrowing, earning interest, paying interest, investing, etc. Bitcoin was never intended to cater to all those mechanisms — but DeFi is.

The next logical step in the evolution of crypto’s gradual assumption of the roles played by traditional finance is being taken by the growing Ethereum-based decentralized finance ecosystem.

DeFi, in many ways, is Bitcoin 2.0. And for that reason, DeFi — although based on Ethereum’s composability and smart contract functionality — furthers the Bitcoin narrative into the future that Bitcoin first allowed us to believe in. With each new DeFi protocol, that future is closing in on us: a world without banks as we have come to know them.

DeFi demonstrates the complementary nature of Ethereum to Bitcoin. By recreating the financial system not from within but from the outside, Ethereum is hosting a movement that completes the circle Bitcoin started.

The vampires aren’t even that bad

Our banking system is as broken as our COVID-19 response was, but can DeFi actually replace it? The DeFi subsector’s most vocal critics would point to the emergence of food-meme protocols SushiSwap, Cream and Yam, along with many others, to suggest the movement resembles more of a circus than a legitimate threat to a giant financial services sector.

Those protocols are considered vampire forks, which are forks of existing protocols, designed to suck liquidity from them. If vampire forks are destructive — and there is no certainty they are — a seminal Rolling Stone article helps put them into perspective. When running through the central role Goldman Sachs played in virtually every financial collapse of the last century, Matt Taibbi called the behemoth:

“The great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

DeFi’s vampires probably serve to further the ecosystem by stress-testing it. Legacy finance’s vampires have had only one function: to take money from everyone else to strengthen themselves.

From the Great Depression, to the dot-com bubble and burst, to the housing crisis, the “great vampire squid” had self-serving financial destruction in mind and its tentacles on virtually every lever that produced those catastrophic episodes in our recent economic histories.

The sector as a whole has long since stopped serving most of our needs. Checking accounts no longer pay interest, accessing money costs money, and large enterprises find financing easy, while small and medium enterprises are left floundering. Try getting a mortgage as an independent contractor without benefits or job security.

Bitcoin democratized money by freeing us from it in its legacy form. Now, DeFi has captured the imagination of the crypto world as its natural extension — not just the democratization of money but the democratization of finance, promising a seismic shift in the way people bank in the future.

That seismic shift will confer benefits on society we could only have dreamed of a decade ago.

Enter the great unbanking.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Paul de Havilland is a fan of disruptive technology and an active investor in startups. He has experience covering both traditional and emerging asset classes and also pens columns on politics and the development sector. His passions include the violin and opera.

The great unbanking: How DeFi is completing the job Bitcoin started

Source