Messari Daily Brief Jan. 13, 2021 - DeFi Drama

I love me some DeFi drama, and the cast of characters building “self-driving banks” never disappoints. We had a little bit of everything yesterday.

It started with yearn.finance’s Andre Cronje (one of our people to watch in the 2020 Theses), and his self-proclaimed “rant" on why building in DeFi sucks. In short, development time takes much longer than expected (a coding truism beyond crypto?), “communities” are mostly just impatient ass holes, real users are scarce, devs get shit for failure while investors get praised for performance, devs shouldn’t give away their tokens, it’s better to be an anon shitcoin trader than a DeFi pioneer, and stress gets compounded by the open-source nature of the work that allows anyone to come in and eat your hard-earned lunch.

Andre hedged plenty in the intro. He’s not ragequitting, he admitted this was a “therapeutic" post, and I dig it when people drop the facade and share the struggles of entrepreneurship in a world that deifies entrepreneurial prodigies.

That didn’t stop people from sharing their (strong) reactions, most notably Uniswap’s Ashleigh Schap who pointed out that “hey, maybe VCs aren’t so bad as tokenholders” and “hey maybe if you don’t like vampire attacks you shouldn’t integrate them (e.g. SUSHI) into YFI” and “hey community isn’t BS”. But then other people pointed out “hey look who’s talking Uniswap doesn’t build meaningful developer relations” and “hey Uniswap forked Bancor too ‘member?” and “hey maybe don’t build open-source if you don’t like forking.”

It’s all very entertaining, and I feel for the folks in the DeFi trenches: we’re used to seeing tech’s big winners reap massive monopoly rewards, and DeFi moats are harder to build. But also…things aren’t so bad if you can leverage $100k in grant financing to build a $6 billion project in three years, or create a billion-dollar protocol token in less than six months thanks to preceding open source contributions.

Relax, we’re all gonna make it. (I think.)

Headlines that matter:

• INTEL (enterprise): Nexus, Curve, Synthetix proposals; Rococo Testnet (DOT/KSM); LOOM token swap
• Ribbit-Paradigm lead $15M round for India's CoinSwitch Kuber (The Block)
• Former CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler to chain Biden’s SEC (The Block)
• And Peirce notes that means a “fresh look” at crypto (Decrypt)
• OCC Chief Brian Brooks embraces DeFi and “self-driving banks" (FT)
• It’s his final act before stepping down this week (CoinDesk)
• Las Vegas miner Marathon will raise $250M in a direct listing (CoinDesk)
• Gemini backing a new Canadian Bitcoin application (CoinDesk)
• SolidX sues its former ETF partner VanEck (Decrypt)
• Daily Shade: "Fork me, no fork you, Uniswap."