I can’t believe it’s March already – it’s been a fast start to 2019!
Since my last post I haven’t come across any real technical inspiration for a new, in-depth technical article but I read this post by Fred Wilson yesterday and liked the idea of recording my thoughts as a timeline for the future.
It’s not that my interest in crypto has dissipated or that I haven’t been busy. Jan/Feb was busy with the day job and in my spare time I was focused on my entry to the 0x Hackathon. I did learn some of the details of 0x protocol but I was mainly using skills I picked up during my work on other Dapps. I didn’t feel like there was anything worth writing a detailed post about. It was fun though.
I’ve spent a lot of time digging into the world of Decentralised Finance, or DeFi. To be honest I’m still digesting the information but there seems to be a real fit with DeFi and Ethereum:
- Programmable and transparent – organisations can unleash code on Ethereum that just runs and does what it’s meant to do. No one controls it and anyone can educated themselves about it.
- Unregulated (So far) – If you do educate yourself then you can access it, nobody can tell you you’re not suitable to use it if you want.
- Efficiency – Cutting out middle men and rent takers, making things cheaper and opening up new opportunities.
It’s a whole new interesting world! I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the MakerDAO system figuring out how it works and what the opportunities are. I could probably write multiple posts about all that! Some of the areas I’ve found exciting so far:
- Earning value on crypto assets – this is becoming the latest trend. There’s a lot of people HODLing a decent amount but at the moment it’s doing nothing. There seems to be more and more ways coming out to earn value on this.
- Uniswap – A decentralised exchange where there is no token, no centralization, and no fees going to any of the founders. You can provide liquidity and 0.3% of all trade volume is distributed proportionally to all liquidity providers.
- Borrowing/Lending – Dharma/Compound/MakerDAO all provide opportunities to lend assets for a fee.
- Combining DeFi with Predicition Markets such as Augur:
- Loaning yourself – A super interesting post about using MakerDAO and existing collateral to loan yourself $ to pay off a house at a lower interest rate than your mortgage. Kind of mind blowing BUT you do need collateral to start. Is this something that only the people who got in early can afford? SO INTERESTING!!!