Niall Ferguson, one of the most prominent living historian of finance, has called decentralized finance (defi) a genuine revolution.
“DeFi looks like a bona fide financial revolution, taking advantage of new technological possibilities to reduce transaction costs in exciting ways,” Ferguson said.
He wasn’t referring to plain transaction costs, more to new capabilities to finance commerce, citing as an example the invention of the bill of exchange in the 1300s which he describes as “a simple piece of paper which extended credit from one merchant to another, typically for a period of several months, corresponding to the time it took for an item to be transported from port A to port B: in effect, an IOU.”
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