What is DeFi?

Episode: Lex Sokolin, a futurist and entrepreneur working on the next generation of financial services. He is the Global Fintech Co-Head at ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company building the infrastructure, applications, and practices that enable a decentralized world.

Insight: The entire financial infrastructure is being rebuilt from the ground up using decentralized finance (DeFi) technology. And it’s happening in two big buckets. First, financial assets themselves, the asset classes, are being reborn as digital assets. The most prominent example is Bitcoin. And second, the infrastructures and rails that support the buying, selling, lending, and storing of financial assets is being rebuilt as distributed, permissionless software in smart contracts. This is not sci-fi stuff. It’s here now. Ignore it at your own peril.

Watch the Conversation Below:

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3 Quotes from Lex Sokolin:

An RIA is a hundred times less valuable than a FinTech. An RIA is going to trade at one and a half to two and a half of your trailing 12, and a Robinhood is going to trade at a hundred X revenue, and that’s the market. So whatever sets of emotions people have about this, I would recommend they just kind of put them to the side because it’s just what the current price clears at.

I think it’s important to recognize that on a road you might have a horse and buggy, and then you might have a car with gasoline in it, and then you might also have a self-driving electric Tesla. All of those coexist. One is not worse than the other. For me, it’s the edge that’s interesting. And I think regardless of where you are in the industry, I think the edge should be interesting to you because it tells you the direction of travel, not just for the software you use, but for what your clients and their children are actually doing. Because we’re all stuck in our house on TikTok or Facebook or LinkedIn. And I promise you, people are crypto trading.

The distance between the world of the future and the world where we are today is really, really slim. We’re literally there. I would just ask people to be curious and understand that people are enjoying innovation and it’s available to everyone. There’s no barrier to participate in this innovation. It is not foreign. It is not scary. It’s just something that can be part of your life, if you choose.

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