Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Monday, July 31st, and today we are closing out the month with a

defy exploit. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go

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breakdown pod. All right, friends, today we are diving into the world of Defy. Now, Defy is not

necessarily something that we cover that much on this show. That's not because I don't think it's

interesting or important. It kind of falls in one of those categories

like so many things in the crypto space do that are what we might call contenders for a big

picture power shift versus something that is very clearly a big picture power shift right now.

And what I mean by that is that decentralized finance, both in idea and in application, could have

massively disruptive potential for the financial system. One of the things that was really

interesting about the rise of defy in the wake of the 2017 ICO boom was that in many ways

it represented a return to routes for Ethereum and smart contracts more broadly. A lot of the ICO excitement of

2017 had been the tokenized the world, used tokens as a way to incentivize network participation

kind of model, whereas Defy really got back to financial primitives and how composable financial

applications could layer on top of one another to do some really interesting things,

or at least be one of the most sophisticated casinos we've ever seen. Of course, which of those better

explains Defi to you is kind of in the eye of the beholder? Now, of course, DeFi Summer in 2020

was really the first gasp of the last bull market. And one of the things that was interesting

...