BREAKDOWN: Are Banks Getting Nervous About Competition From DeFi?
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A new research paper from ING suggests that, at the very least, they’re paying more attention.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io, NEAR.org and Genesis Trading.
Today on the Brief:
- MercadoLibre has added bitcoin to its balance sheet
- Galaxy Digital buys BitGo
- Debates around the new, improved, real economy
Our main discussion:
While the last year has seen a massive amount of growth in decentralized finance, it has been mostly driven by enfranchised insiders and builders. In this bull market, that is starting to change. In today’s episode, NLW looks at a recent paper by the $1.1 trillion bank ING around where DeFi fits in the context of traditional finance.
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Click here to read the Genesis Q1 2021 Digital Asset Market report. To learn more about Genesis, click here. To learn more about Genesis Prime, their prime brokerage offering, click here. The information provided in this communication does not constitute investment advice. Please see this link for important disclosures.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The real gist of this is that decentralized finance would do better if plugged into centralized |
| 0:04.7 | financial rails. It seems to me that one of the central categories of inquiry and debate going |
| 0:10.4 | forward is going to be around co-option of crypto finance ecosystems by traditional finance. |
| 0:15.7 | How much adoption, i.e. assimilation by banks in traditional finance, is good. How much, if any, undermines the |
| 0:21.8 | enterprise? I have a feeling this won't be the last report like this, this cycle, and so |
| 0:26.3 | understanding where different projects and people stand on those questions is going to become |
| 0:30.8 | increasingly important. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:42.8 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:49.4 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexus.io, neared.org, and Genesis Trading, and produced and distributed by CoinDess. |
| 0:57.2 | What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, May 6th, and today we are asking whether banks are getting nervous about competition from D5. First up, however, let's do the brief. First on the brief today, |
| 1:04.0 | Mercado Libre is the latest company to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet. This is a massive |
| 1:09.6 | Latin American e-commerce and fintech company. |
| 1:12.5 | You may remember them from being one of the founding members of the Libra Association and then |
| 1:16.7 | leaving that association a few months later. It's a company that is based in Argentina, but listed |
| 1:21.4 | on NASDAQ. They announced as part of their Q1 reporting that they had added $7.8 million |
| 1:27.4 | worth of Bitcoin to their balance sheet. |
| 1:30.0 | Now, in some ways, this isn't that surprising. |
| 1:32.4 | Mercado Libre has a long history of interaction with Bitcoin. |
| 1:36.1 | In 2015, they integrated Bitcoin as a payment option on their Mercado Pago platform. |
| 1:40.9 | Just last week, the company announced a real estate platform exclusively for properties |
| 1:44.9 | available for sale in Bitcoin, launching with 75 initial properties. Some on Twitter pointed out |
| 1:50.6 | that a Latin American company investing in Bitcoin to protect itself from currency devaluation |
... |
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