Sept. 4, 2024: Make DeFi Great Again 🔴🍑

What's next after World Liberty Financial embraces Aave?

A very good repo released by xtycoon shows off how to use the Curve Flashlender to perform liquidations of crvUSD! Since we’re still a few tutorials away from this one in our Llama Lend tutorial series, it’s worth a look now… my delay == your profits:

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Make DeFi Great Again

I’ve long resisted the argument that the near-term fate of crypto prices depends on the results of this election. Not so much for any partisan leaning, but more because of a naive hope that what we’re building in crypto is bigger and more permanent than any short-term nation state.

So we’ve basically sat on the sidelines and tried to tune out politics this cycle, even as it continued to encroach into crypto. But lately, the Trump brainchild “World Liberty Financial” project finally succeeded in capturing our attention.

We initially dismissed it as an outright joke. We assumed it would be a memecoin exchange, or some sort of onchain real estate project at best.

Then came the announcement that first got our attention:

If you’re unfamiliar, all you need to know is that Corey’s IQ stands out as exceptional even in an industry already teeming with gigabrains. The gentleman plays with financial topics the way Mozart handles a piano. To engage in conversation with Corey on crypto topics is be on the receiving end of an onslaught of wisdom, resembling a machine gun in both tempo and intensity. We’d never dare fade Caplan in any of his endeavors.

If you’re looking to instantly signal credibility for your project, what a perfect first hire.

One would have expected an unserious project to select from any variety of charlatans and grifters. Instead they reached deep into the battered front lines of DeFi innovation and plucked the heaviest talent out of the relative obscurity that is our unpopular niche. With ~5K followers on 𝕏, (c’mon fam, let’s pump those rookie numbers), it’s clear Caplan was tapped for his raw intellectual horsepower, not the sort of KOL influencer recruitment you might see from scuzzier projects.

At the end of the day, organizations are collections of people. From a talent acquisition perspective alone, World Liberty Financial is nailing it. The next names that trickled out happened to be the leading crypto legal scholars of MetaLeX in the form of Gabe Shapiro and Alex Golubitsky.

The US at present is scathingly hostile towards cryptocurrency. In the era of ascending political lawfare as campaign strategy, a partisan-tinged product like World Liberty Financial will inevitably run headfirst into a headwind of attorneys. Reassuring to see they are preparing by hiring the best.

Still, despite the A-list roster, we’d remained skeptical. We heard the aspersion and innuendo that the project was merely a hostile fork of Aave and continued to dismiss it.

To our surprise, we see World Liberty Financial asserts it is actually working with Aave.

Ladies and gentlemen, you had my curiosity. Now you have my attention. I’m tired of underestimating this project and getting fooled, so I’m reducing my skepticism and starting to kick the tires.

More importantly, if they are working with Aave, is there any reason they wouldn’t work with Curve next? Idle speculation, but imagine what if…