So what’s the story behind Decentralized Finance? How has all of this started? What happened in DeFi in 2020? And where are we going in the future? You’ll find answers to these questions in this video.
Although there is no one agreed-upon date when decentralized finance was born, there were a few important events that made DeFi possible.
The first of them was the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Despite whether Bitcoin should be classified as DeFi or not, its inception was the key enabler for the whole cryptocurrency industry which decentralized finance is part of.
Although sending Bitcoin around the world is cool – finance doesn’t stop there. Every robust financial system needs a set of other important services such as lending, borrowing, trading, funding or derivatives.
Ethereum, with its Turing-complete programming language Solidity and the ERC20 standard for creating new tokens, quickly became a go-to smart contract platform to build on.
So what’s the future of finance? Is decentralized finance better than the current financial system? What problems does it solve? And does it have a chance to improve or completely replace traditional finance? You’ll find answers to these questions in this video.
Instead of relying on old and inefficient infrastructure, Decentralized finance, or DeFi, leverages the power of cryptography, decentralization and blockchain to build a new financial system.
A system that can provide access to well-known financial services such as payments, lending, borrowing and trading in a more efficient, fair and open way.
Co-founder & CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong started Coinbase in 2012 when bitcoin was $2 and almost no one knew what it was, let alone believed in it. Today, it is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the USA that just went public at a nearly $100B market cap.
Decentralization is going to be the major theme of the next several years when it comes to organizing human society and taking power back from established institutions.
Especially when it comes to self-sufficiency. And it’s going to apply in many areas.
The concept of centralization from the perspective of a 70 year old Chinese Dama – “Centralization is that the money you think belongs to you, is actually in somebody else’s pockets.”
The initial vision for The Internet was meant to be free and decentralised. But things didn’t really go as planned. So, what went wrong? who’s to blame? and where are we heading? Let’s figure out.
0:00 Intro – hello, Internet 1:35 A free tool for humanity? 2:34 Tim’s vision for the Internet 3:09 The early 90s: Microsoft, Netscape 4:30 Antitrust legislation and the rise of big players 6:18 But there is hope 7:08 It’s all up to you
Blockchain technology has the power to not only decentralize currency and art but also almost every aspect of our lives. The same way that currency is centralized, so are our social media platforms and blockchain technology has the potential to change that.
Twitter accounts of several influential figures in the crypto community were suspended Tuesday. “The Hash” panel discusses a decentralized future for social media.
Does America need a Reality Czar? That was New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose’s suggestion for how the Biden administration could help solve the so-called “reality crisis” facing the country.
The chaotic events of the January 6 Capitol riots marked the beginning of a new era of online content moderation. Not only did every major social media company kick Trump off their platforms, but Amazon Web Services, which owns about a third of the global cloud storage market, evicted the Twitter competitor Parler, and Apple and Google removed it from their app stores. Parler, which had signed on more than 13 million users, announced its relaunch on February 16.
Both Democrats and Republicans want Washington to have more influence over how big tech companies operate. There is a bi-partisan push to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, known as the internet’s First Amendment, which would give the government more power to hold social media companies liable for the content that appears on their platforms.
President Biden has gone on the record in support of repealing Section 230. When, during an interview with then candidate Biden, the New York Times’s editorial board called the regulation foundational to the modern internet, Biden responded, “That’s right. Exactly right. And it should be revoked.”
But the great deplatforming of 2021 has also energized the movement to build a new, radically decentralized internet that would allow users to escape whatever form the Reality Czar takes. Many of the projects in this space are trying different approaches to solving the same set of problems, such as how to give individuals control over their own digital identities, and how to store data in the cloud so that it can’t be controlled or accessed by a large company subject to political pressure from the state.
Muneeb Ali is the CEO of Stacks, which has garnered some major backing for its effort to build a new computing platform that could become the foundation for a new decentralized internet.
“Regardless of which side of the debate you’re on with certain political figures getting banned on social media platforms that is not the point,” said Ali. “The point is no one should have that type of power.”
A project called Filecoin is building a decentralized cloud storage system that allows computers all over the world to contribute space on their hard drives, which can be accessed through the InterPlanetary File System, an alternative protocol to the “http” that underpins today’s web. In exchange, they get paid with a digital token. If Parler ran on IPFS and Filecoin, it would be difficult for a government or any third-party actor, like Amazon, to shut down their service.
“In a world in which you can truly take your data with you and take the app with you and everything, you have so much more control” said Molly Mackinlay, a project lead for IPFS.
“We just address the problem at its root. It’s like, all right, well, may as well just rewrite it.” said Gaken Wolfe-Pauly, co-founder of Urbit.
Urbit is an entirely new operating system that Wolfe-Pauly envisions becoming as all purpose as WeChat is in China, which allows users to make social media posts, send direct messages, make calls, play games, hail taxis and pay bills online and in-person. Except with Urbit, the user owns all the data, as opposed to a Chinese company that shares it with the government to monitor the activities of its citizens.
