This is one reason why DeFi is important. TradFi/its regulators have access to skilled actuaries and a mountain of data, but insist upon using naive rules-of-thumb that require surveillance instead of evidence-based approaches that may be less intrusive

Sad to see this as a gamer and history enthusiast. For those unaware, Raw Power Games was co-founded & financed by Rune, & generally where I’ve assumed much of the substantial loans against his SKY have gone. If you hold stUSDS, you are financing those loans to Rune (and others)

Nothing is new in DeFi. The French did this with paper stablecoins called assignats - backed by lands seized during the revolution. They even were legal tender to encourage use as money. They didn’t trade at face value long, despite the vast illiquid portfolio of valuable land

What’s new in DeFi and CeFi that I might have missed? Can be a complete product or even just a feature. (Just… no announcements of a Uniswap hook that recreates Old Tech from more than half a decade ago 🤪) Shill me your interesting new projects, products, & features

I think it would be fun to have an account that just publishes a history of a currency every day. There’s also a ton of extinct ones I didn’t include in this chart (e.g. bezants in the Crusader States) that need to be added.

Interestingly, you can trace an unbroken lineage for USDC and USDT all the way back to the first coin struck in ancient Lydia 2600 years ago

Ever wonder where a crypto lies in the evolutionary tree of money? USD stablecoins are evolution’s favored child - the product of thousands of years of natural selection. And Bitcoin and ETH are the first new major currency families in 500 years. I mapped all currencies in use today back to their ancestors (and traced some extinct lineages). Nearly all descend from the first coin struck in Lydia ~630 BC. ~15 descend from India, through the rupee. The Siamese tical and (rebooted) Cambodian riel each have a single descendant. The US dollar - originally 371.25 grains of silver - hangs off a long, proud lineage Aside from Cambodia, BTC and ETH are the only currencies that start from nothing - no conversion, no peg, no metal, no commodities behind them. To avoid survivorship bias, this tree also shows major families that died out: the Mesopotamian shekel, the Egyptian deben, Chinese cash, cowries, Aztec cacao, Ethiopian salt bars, Inca cloth and Yap's stone money. DM for a better resolution picture or the bibliography

The Future of France 🇫🇷 It’s a tongue-in-cheek saying about outsized French influence in DeFi since at least ETH Paris. But France has long been at the forefront of experiments in financial markets and instruments, including using real estate as collateral for a paper, yield-bearing stablecoin called the Assignat. The Assignat had a face value, with interest coupons attached. It began trading as currency fairly quickly as coins became scarce due to hoarding. That’s interesting, but not what makes the Assignat unique. The collateral backing these notes was land seized from the Crown and the church. Perhaps there was a memory of the discounted prices Henry VIII got when mass dumping church lands. Or perhaps the revolutionary French were just more thoughtful than Tudor monarchs. The new government wanted to realize fair value of the lands by selling them off in an orderly manner. But it also needed money today. The solution was the Assignat. Issue the notes backed by huge swaths of land, attach a small yield (3% in examples I found), and pay it off with the land sales + rents in the meantime. It’s a pretty elegant solution - a lot like asset backed securities today. Of course, there’s never been a government that felt it had enough money, so they just kept issuing Assignat notes above the collateral value. Surprisingly, markets seemed to have anticipated this, with significant fees charged by money changers to convert large denomination Assignats to petty notes within a few months. Either they didn’t believe the collateral was good or foresaw the temptation to debase the notes just as they would metallic coins. While the Terror under Robespierre managed to force acceptance of the notes in the neighborhood of face value, his fall let the true value show up in markets immediately. In the end, the Assignat should look familiar to anyone dabbling in stablecoins backed by illiquid real estate. Its failure modes map pretty closely to those seen in DeFi.

I know it’s nerdy, but I find this kind of thing exciting as a user of their dashboard.

I don’t have an informed position on the specific governance conflict, but lack of independent boards are a pretty common problem for foundations. A board’s job is to hold management accountable to share/tokenholders. This obviously doesn’t happen when shareholders or tokenholders have no control over a board. I think a lot of people assume foundations are nonprofit and bound structurally to good governance processes. Unfortunately, even a willing company or foundation probably has difficulty identifying and bringing on independent directors. Often they have to dip into adjacent or several-steps-removed industries just to find someone who clears basic competency. The Venn diagram for DeFi domain expertise + can read financial statements with a critical eye + willing to be That Guy in a room with a founder or CEO is about 50 people (I can recommend some). And that’s before conflicts of interest, which make the combination a near unicorn. And while it’s probably easier to take someone from TradFi or fintech and teach them crypto than to make a DeFi native cram a bunch of accounting and business textbooks and make it stick, it’s still not a great solution. Good luck to the Safe folks if they do need to source independent directors who aren’t just collecting a paycheck to warm a seat.