2020 was a game changer for Ethereum.

The vast majority of its success was fueled by #DeFi.

Here's what happened in 5 Tweets 🔽

1) Governance Tokens 🪙

Projects gave complete ownership of billion dollar protocols to their users, often using retroactive airdrops.

Early adopters earned tokens for past usage, and token-based voting now dictates all technical upgrades.

https://t.co/uzR8NW5AyD
2) Liquidity Mining ⛏️

Power users were the first to earn on-going distribution by providing liquidity.

$COMP sparked the wave, with $BAL coining the term a few weeks later.

https://t.co/BGqUNjc0kC
3) Yield Faming 🌾

Projects coupled liquidity mining and governance tokens to boost 'yields' by combining lending rates with an incentive layer.

APYs peaked as high as 1M% during 'DeFi summer', leading to a 'food coin' craze like $YAM and $SUSHI

https://t.co/59pCAav7pk
4) Fair Launches ✅

Who needs investment when you can launch using yield farming?

@iearnfinance debuted $YFI with no formal funding, seeding a community treasury for self-sustainability.

The notion of a core team and community became one and the same.

https://t.co/OuTWjSrcjd
5) Meta-governance 🗳️

Delegation and indexes allowed projects to vote on other protocols using assets under management.

$DPI is the best example, using its $COMP and $UNI to vote based on $INDEX sentiment.

https://t.co/XLjrtRau3w
Key Takeaways:

- Early adopters got paid
- Putting capital to work netted the highest returns
- Liquidity allowed teams to seed a community treasury.
- Treasuries accrued tokens, used to govern other protocols.

Most importantly, team and community merged together.
What's Next?

Composability will flourish, and projects will win liquidity based on cash flows, rather than short-lived APYs.

Governance incentives will boost participation, leading to a vibrant number of protocol politicians.

Curation will thrive.
https://t.co/dxw2P0roQL
This was without a doubt my most exciting year in crypto.

If you're new to #DeFi, take time to learn more with great outlets like @DefiantNews @DeFiRate @BanklessHQ and @Yield_TV.

S/o Daily Gwei by @sassal0x and Daily Ape by @Darrenlautf 💪

Until then, keep up the honest work!

More from Crypto

So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.

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