BREAKDOWN: DeFi Degens Are Crypto’s Suicide Squad
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
A look at the subculture and ethos driving the white-hot DeFi space, which has grown from $2 billion to $9 billion in total value locked in just two months.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Nexo.io.
Today on the Brief:
- Traditional markets falter, led by tech stocks
- Bitcoin falls under $11,000 for the first time since July
- Stablecoins mint $100 million daily since mid-July
Our main discussion is about DeFi’s “degens.” NLW talks about:
- The numbers behind DeFi’s recent run-up
- What “degen” means in this context
- Why degen is, in part, a reaction to previous bitcoiner critiques of Ethereum
- Why degen is (in even bigger part) a reaction to a no-yield, artificially low interest world
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I see this interesting sort of rejection where people who have been on the other side of those |
| 0:04.8 | attacks who maybe were involved in other parts of the space besides Bitcoin are effectively |
| 0:10.0 | saying, look, if we're not pure and we never can be, we're going to go all in on complete degeneracy. |
| 0:16.7 | We see your accusation of shikcoin and raise you total absurdity. |
| 0:23.6 | This is shitcoin X absurdo, basically. |
| 0:28.4 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:34.2 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:40.8 | The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, Bitstamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, September 3rd, and today we are |
| 0:48.7 | talking Defi, but not all of Defi. Instead, we're going to dig into a specific subculture movement, |
| 0:56.6 | the DGens. First, however, let's do the brief. First up on the brief today, it is a bad, |
| 1:03.0 | bad day for markets. Bloomberg's headline is Tech leads U.S. stock's biggest route since March. |
| 1:10.0 | The S&P is down 2.87%, and the NASDAQ is more than |
| 1:14.4 | 5% off the high. Now, interestingly, these are the three sub-bullet sub-articles that Bloomberg |
| 1:21.8 | connected to the news. The first was about jobless claims giving mixed signals, and what that had to do with is the fact |
| 1:28.6 | that while continuing claims and initial claims both were down slightly, the change in methodology |
| 1:34.8 | this week made it really hard to compare, and in some ways it seems like jobless claims are actually |
| 1:39.4 | up. The second sub-bullet was trade deficit swells to biggest since 2008, and I think that one's |
| 1:46.2 | pretty self-explanatory. The third one is again about jobs and has to do with tomorrow's |
| 1:51.1 | jobs report for August, where it says, jobs gains seen hanging on in August with tougher road ahead. |
| 1:58.7 | You take this all together, and what you have is a story where the markets |
| 2:02.4 | actually seem a lot more fragile than perhaps we've been pretending. The net result of this |
| 2:08.7 | can only be more action from the Fed and Treasury because God forbid there would be a reset |
... |
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