The DeFi Decoded Podcast

Tucked away in the infrastructure bill before congress is a 'pay-for' provision that claims it will raise $28 billion in new revenue from the cryptocurrency industry by requiring brokers to provide information on their users. To be sure, traditional exchanges and brokers such as Gemini, Coinbase and others should be regulated and comply with any new tax laws approved by congress. However, as originally written, the provision would have potentially included virtually every kind of participant in the industry, from miners to software developers, lightning nodes (Bitcoin) and others. If passed in its original form, it would have a chilling effect on innovation in DeFi, and throw the whole industry into a state of confusion and uncertainty. This is a pivotal moment in this trajectory of digital assets, DeFi and blockchain. At the time of recording, there is a compromise amendment that would clarify these rules and would exempt many of those non-broker entities, still no vote has been cast one way or the other and anything could happen. Regardless of a positive outcome, this is no way to make policy and the whole event should serve as a cautionary tale in future debates on this issue. The fight itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how DeFi works. Governments are used to traditional custodial financial intermediaries, but DeFi is non-custodial. Regulators are used to overseeing companies and individuals whereas DeFi is built on clever code and math. By failing to understand how the technology works, governments could inadvertently de-rail one of the fastest growing and most promising sectors in the economy today. On this episode of DeFi decoded, Andrew and Alex will dig into this topic, discussing how we got here, what's at stake and what the future holds. You won't want to miss it!

Derivatives are the single largest asset class in the world, with an estimated notional value estimated to be over a quadrillion dollars. However, decentralized derivative platforms haven't yet taken off in constrast to the other high flying sectors of DeFi - why is that? These decentralized derivative platforms enable users to create their own derivatives and transact them with others, in a completely permissionless and decentralized fashion. On this episode of DeFi Decoded, Andrew and Alex dig into the decentralized derivatives space and discuss why derivative platforms have yet to experience the rapid growth that many are projecting. They compare the decentralized crypto derivative platforms like dYdX and Perpetual Protocol to their established centralized peers like BitMex and FTX.

On this episode of DeFi Decoded, Andrew and Alex dig into the lending boom and discuss how lending platforms have become the dominant hub of DeFi. They compare the decentralized crypto lending platforms like AAVE to their established centralized peers like BlockFi.

On this episode of DeFi Decoded, Andrew and Alex dig into the stablecoin boom and discuss how stablecoins have helped fueled the rise of DeFi. They discuss the the two kinds of stablecoins, centralized and decentralized. Centralized stablecoins such as USDC are issued by companies and backed by reserves.

On this edition of DeFi Decoded, Alex and Andrew start with a simple question; "What's a Decentralized Exchange anyway?" and from there discuss Uniswap and its significant role in reimagining financial services.