Conversation

2) NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. NOT BORROWING ADVICE. NOT LENDING ADVICE. NOT ADVICE. JUST NOT.

3) There are a bunch of borrow/lending protocols;

@compoundfinance

@AaveAave

@CreamdotFinance

, etc. There's a complicated backstory that this post isn't going to attempt to address.

4) I'm not talking about who did what. I'm also not talking about their respective tokens. Each token has some price/market cap/etc. I'm not looking at those, and so don't know how this would apply to that anyway. This is about the protocols.

5) My sense -- and this could be wrong! -- is that you can sort of order them on a spectrum: Compound -- Aave -- Cream from safest to boldest.

6) In general when you introduce more coins, move faster, etc., you increase the default surface of these protocols. You also increase the utility of them.

7) That's not to say everything is a tradeoff! Adding some things massively increases utility and doesn't increase risk that much. Adding others does the opposite. But on the pareto frontier there are tradeoffs.

8) My TL;DR here is: variety is good. Some situations call for super well understood, immutable, 'safe' coin lists with no frills. Others call for dynamically adding where there's demand. For instance -- should you be able to lend UNI and borrow against it?

9) On the one hand, it's super volatile, and adds risk. On the other hand, there's huge demand, and it would add a lot of value to be able to accept it. There's a tradeoff there!

10) More generally in DeFi, I'm excited to see more projects build variants on each other instead of pure copy-pastes. Pure copy-pastes don't add much. Variants let people choose which version suites their needs.

11) I'd love to see AMMs branch out (like

@BalancerLabs

did!) into differentiation; and I'd love to see more types of pools people could use instead of assuming that pool == x*y=k AMM. And I've love variants on rebases: not pure splits but a treasury managing the new tokens.