SBF

Chapter 17DeFi One Billion

In May 2018, the team behind the aspiring crypto lending company Dharma organized a party in San Francisco that might have been the progenitor of the term “DeFi” for “decentralized finance.” At the time, Dharma was working on making a protocol that would provide loans on Ethereum.

They weren't alone in envisioning ways to bring traditional finance online. Other future stalwarts of the nascent industry would join them at that gathering, companies such as the Maker Foundation, Compound Labs, 0x, dYdX, and Wyre. These were the companies building the new robots on the internet I wrote about in Chapter 9.

Not our future AI overlords, but maybe our future AI savings and loans.

Brendan Forster, a cofounder of Dharma, told me once that these groups were starting to realize that they fit into a distinct portion of the blockchain industry. Crypto was becoming big enough that it wasn't one thing. It was breaking up into specialties, and DeFi was one.

But it took a while for others who didn't come to that shindig to see it.

A year after Dharma's party, in New York City, the founder of crypto data firm Messari, Ryan Selkis, was on stage at a conference called Ethereal, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with Joe Lubin, founder of a weird crypto conglomerate called ConsenSys. Lubin was also one of the many founders of Ethereum. Folks in the know believe he's the largest holder of ether in the world.

Selkis pressed Lubin, asking him whether Ethereum wasn't trying to be too ...