Decentralized finance (DeFi) has always been strange, but it’s becoming mind-bending.It’s following the course the internet took as a publishing platform. First, it recreated things from the analog world. Then it invented new things. Then new things were built on top of the new things. Finally, the internet colonized the analog world. We’re at phase 3 in DeFi: new things built on new things.“It’s a snake-eating-its-own-tail element to DeFi right now,” Tom Schmidt, a general partner at Dragonfly Capital, said in a phone call.The pre-blockchain internet did this in a lot of ways, but drop-shippers are a great example. First there were shops online that worked much like shops on the street. Then there were shops like Etsy that combined shops like a mall. Finally, there were drop-shippers: websites that never touched inventory, instead instructing wholesalers, such as Asian e-commerce megasite Alibaba, where to ship sales the drop-shipping website made.DeFi is starting to get similarly reflexive. Entrepreneurs are creating products that could only exist in DeFi, products that take advantage of its strange qualities such as on-chain transparency and distribution of useful new tokens to drive loyalty.This builds on a theme we’ve touched on before.
source