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My Adventures in CryptoLand

I’ve been meaning to write about decentralised finance for a while. For those who don’t know, decentralised finance (or DeFi) is an emerging ecosystem of applications seeking to rebuild financial services from the ground up. Its roots lie in crypto, where it sits on top of Ethereum blockchain technology.

Truth is though, I’ve never really understood it.

All my career, I’ve been integrated into the centralised financial system. Straight from university I went to work at an investment bank where our job was to sit between buyers and sellers as middlemen in the stock market. After that I worked as a partner in a hedge fund for ten years. It wasn’t a central node in the financial system (although it was 20% owned by Morgan Stanley…