Chapter 3. The Tools of DeFi

Hopefully, the importance of DeFi is clear, even at this extremely early stage of development. If the entire blockchain industry is still an infant, DeFi is a newborn (once you have a child, you learn that’s actually a distinction).

Think about the internet. It was developed in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 1998 that we figured out that (1) buying things (2) from home with (3) (very) easy returns was going to be the winning function. None of those things were accepted as either good practice or even possible in 1995. But those three years changed the business models of most industries, and gave birth to two of our most powerful industries: social media and software as a service (SaaS).

Internet platforms couldn’t talk to each other until 1983, but we’re just 15 years out from blockchain’s “Hello World,” in 2008, and we’re already talking about interoperability. Blockchain is moving so much faster than the development of the modern internet. So when you think about what DeFi looks like now, remember that in three to five years, all this will look fairly quaint.

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