Conversation

Sep 2, 2020

1) Yield Farming, Sushi, and Collective Imagination: The Emperor Has no Clothes

Show this thread

126

485

2) In the end, it wasn't inevitable. If Nomi hadn't fucked up, maybe SUSHI would be at $100. If the team hadn't built, maybe it would be at $1. But it had a shot, because much of what we thought was sacred was in fact chasing yield.

3) There are people whose beliefs in a product or a chain will always dominate other factors. But most of the people you see using something aren't trying to express their faith. Most people are still searching, and using whatever seems best for them at the time.

4) Six months later, a new chef came to town.

336

5) It was dismissed, and derided. And then

@cz_binance

released one of crypto's largest userbases on it, 100 times as large as all of DeFi put together. And showed what always true, but not made explicit: that for most users, chains were no more sacred than products.

190

6) There have been wars over BSC, and whether it's good or bad. I think that misses the point. I'm not

@cz_binance

and I don't build on BSC. So I can't be sure what they were trying to do.

3:29 AM · Mar 8, 2021Twitter Web App

7) But BSC made a number of choices that seem pretty intentional to me. They didn't build a totally new chain; they basically forked ETH. They didn't collect tons of independent validators. They didn't build a new wallet: they made BSC work on Metamask.

Replying to

8) I would be pretty sad if BSC became the future of blockchain technology. But again I don't think it's really trying to. It didn't build a totally new product, and it didn't build a product for decentralized scaling. It built a product which was cheap and easy to migrate to.

171

9) There are a ton of things which would be awesome to see built on a long-term viable, massively scaling, decentralized blockchain. Governance, and core financial instruments, and social media, and much more.

10) And then there are yield farms. No matter what we say about them, they never really needed to be decentralized, at least if the whole point is the yield. You can drop yield anywhere. And no one who's using

@PancakeSwap

is there for the governance.

11) And what

built was the perfect platform for pure yield to migrate to. A chain that's cheap and easy to use and easy to migrate to, both for projects and traders. And seeded with millions of users.

12) It would be easy to be angry at BSC, for taking yield from more decentralized chains. But I'm not. Because BSC isn't stealing governance, and it's not stealing the pillars of a decentralized future. It's stealing yield. It's making DeFi compete for its yield.

181

13) And, really, if we want DeFi to get huge, we can't pretend that yield is the same thing as well-built decentralized primitives. We have to build great products which can outcompete the alternatives.

136

14) BSC has been hugely successful for

@binance

. And BSC proved a point. It's a point the ecosystem needed to learn.

@cz_binance

adapted. He does that quite well. DeFi needs to adapt, too, to grow.

168

15) Because for DeFi to win, it can't be decentralized OR fast OR cheap OR sophisticated OR innovative OR well built OR have a large userbase. It needs to be all of those.

344