July 27, 2021: DigitizEd FInance 🏦💱
DeFi offers IB's Fixed Forex, TradFi rebuts with a phone-y ETF
Battles are popping up everywhere across the crypto world!
Today we present a case study covering innovation “DeFi” versus innovation in “CeFi”/“TradFi.” Who will control the future of France, finance, and freedom itself?
DeFi Innovation: Fixed Forex
On the DeFi side, innovation is perpetual. Every team looking to make a splash needs to compete against a thousand scam, rug, dog and trash coins competing for attention. A lot of money moves around, a lot more money gets stolen, and at the end of the chaos the good projects bubble up to the top. This absurd process ensures that most of the good stuff that survives is actually really good.
By way of example, yesterday Andre Cronje launched Fixed Forex on Yearn/Iron Bank.
The problem they’re solving is the overly crooked path money need to take for transactions that should be straightforward. As they write in their announcement:
“So let’s consider you want to make a payment from the US to Korea, from USD to KRW, a “simple” path, would be deposit USD for USDT, transfer USDT to Upbit, swap USDT for KRW, withdraw KRW.”
Fixed Forex intends to solve this by building on the infrastructure of Iron Bank, Yearn, Sushi, and Curve. They first launched ibEUR as proof of concept, are launched ibKRW, and plan to expand to any of USD, EUR, ZAR, JPY, CNY, AUD, AED, CAD, INR allowing seamless trading. Like much other DeFi, LPs can also lock liquidity to earn rewards for any of these assets, with larger rewards for longer locks.
The seamless trading will be handled using Curve’s hypothetical factory for v2 style pools. TriCrypto launched as proof of concept just over a month ago and is already proving so robust that Cronje feels comfortable architecting an entire Forex architecture on its yet-to-be-released backbone.
It’s risky, unaudited, and highly experimental. So how do users react?
The yet unfinished product is off to a strong start, earning €21K fees after one day on several million in volume.
Impressive speed and traction and a cool new concept! Pretty cool watching DeFi evolve in real time.
TradFi Innovation: Goldman ETF
OK TradFi, it’s your turn. What’s the equivalent innovation coming out of the traditional finance world?
Oh wow! People have been talking about this for years, and now it’s finally happening. Not just “blockchain”, but “DeFi” as well? Ape Time? Let’s also read their fine print.
The top company in their ETF is… Nokia? Wut?
IT’S A TRAP! This is a plate of leftovers microwaved until lukewarm, served as a five star dinner.
As far as scams go, this is not even terribly sophisticated. They’re just trying to squeeze marketing juice from a trendy buzzword.
In fact, it’s unclear if the team even knows what DeFi stands for. Their prospectus refers only to something called the “Digitalization of Finance.” I’d heard “Decentralized” and “Degenerate”, but it never occurred to be me the second letter of DeFi is short for an ‘i’.
Perhaps we’re giving Goldman too little credit though. Poorly spelled get rich quick schemes are the backbone of DeFi. Perhaps they do get it!
This is the absolute state of things. Competitor one is building a fully incentivized and decentralized Forex system. The other is peddling Nokia Phones (aka “NeFi”) in 2021. Place your bets…
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice, or even coding advice. Author is a $CRV maximalist and just remembered he has a few shares of $GS still lying around.