Welcome back to the Fintech Blueprint podcast. Today we share a panel recording that Lex moderated with Steven Becker, President and COO of MakerDAO, and Lucas Vogelsang, CEO and Co-Founder of Centrifuge.
The session was hosted at LendIt Fintech Digital, a vibrant community of Fintech and banking leaders.
In this exciting conversation, we talk with none other than Joe Lubin of ConsenSys and Ethereum, about his journey from being exposed to advances in artificial intelligence at Princeton to becoming the household name in programmable blockchain. Additionally, we get an insider look into his founding of Ethereum and ConsenSys, and how the technology and individuals behind these two companies are transforming the very fabric of financial institutions that exist today and how new products/services are started for the betterment of humanity.
In this conversation, we talk Ajit Tripathi, currently the Head of Institutional Business at Aave and a former colleague of mine at ConsenSys, about the path from traditional finance, to enterprise blockchain and “DLT” consulting, to full-on decentralized finance.
Thinking about how to connect these worlds and different available journeys? Or the timeless risks developing in tranched DeFi that look like mortgage-backed securities? We even touch on hegelian dialectics! Check out our great conversation.
This week, we consider the impact of financial infrastructure collapse and who really gets hurt through the lens of Wirecard, Enron, and Lehman Brothers. Yes, there are investors in the entity that will lose value. But there are also clients and counterparties of Wirecard, like Curve, Revolut, and Crypto.com. In the case of Lehman, there was a $40 trillion derivatives notional amount that took twenty years to wind down. We also consider the most recent $500,000 hacking in DeFi of an automated market maker to see if there are common threads to be drawn between the two worlds.
In this video conversation we feature a roundtable by The Defiant exploring how and if the gap between Fintech and DeFi will be bridged.
DeFi Panelists
Lex Sokolin, head economist at ConsenSys
Santiago Roel Santos, angel investor
Spencer Noon, Investor at Variant
Vance Spencer, co founder at Framework Ventures
Fintech Panelists
Keith Grose, head of Plaid international
Nik Milanovi?, founder of This Week in Fintech
Simon Taylor, co-founder of 11:FS
Bruno Werneck, Business & Corporate Development at Plaid
Moderator
Camila Russo, Founder of The Defiant
This week, we cover these ideas:
Crypto prices show increasing correlation in market swings, which hides the large substantive differences between projects
The core narrative of Bitcoin, and its fundamental indicators
The core narrative of Ethereum and Web3, and its fundamental indicators
A sanity check on potential market caps relative to gold, equities, and other assets
I've got a gentle, data-backed story this week inspired by a great distinction made in this Techonomy article by the Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric. The thesis tracks three key lessons from attempting to bring large companies into the 21st century: (1) transform the core of your business instead of fumbling around at the edges, (2) digitize your processes and separately figure out a distinct digital model, and (3) catalyze a digital ecosystem from the new model. You can think about the distinction as either taking the existing business and slowly swapping out parts from human to machine (e.g., like RoboCop), or building the robot from scratch utilizing the latest platforms, markets, and artificial intelligence (e.g., like Terminator).
In this conversation, we talk with Rune Christensen of Maker Foundation about how he became one of the most influential builders in the DeFi ecosystem. Additionally, we explore the creation, experiences, and evolution of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the nuances of stablecoins, the interaction between Maker and DeFi with traditional finance and traditional economies, and Maker’s approach to leveraging layer 2 solutions to aiding scalability and transaction throughput.
Feelings and emotions at industry events matter. The narrative at the more traditional conferences is that Fintech innovation is just incremental improvement, and that blockchain has struggled to bring production-level quality software and stand up new networks. This isn't strictly true -- see komgo, SIX, or any of the public chains themselves -- but the overall observation does stand. Much of Fintech has been channeled into corporate venture arms, and much of blockchain has been trapped in the proof-of-concept stage, disallowed from causing economic damage to existing business.
This week, we look at:
How the music industry needed The Pirate Bay and Napster
Why J.P.Morgan is paying $1B in fines for allegedly manipulating the precious metals market
Whether DeFi is flirting with self-dealing and veering towards apathy
Why QAnon and 8chan are a bad example for global governance
And how the European Commission’s proposed crypto-market rules are highly productive for blockchain-based capital markets infrastructure
