Jeff Cangialosi

This talk from Mike Silagadze called “DeFi for Normal People” has been in my cue for a while. I finally had a chance to sit down and watch it. It’s not necessarily earth shattering, but it lays out in excruciating detail the process of moving fiat into crypto and then trying to invest that crypto into DeFi. With persistence, a crypto-savvy friend, and some extra cash to burn a normal person can get there in terms of using a DeFi application like Etherfi, but Mike details just how painful this process is today. He posits that we need to find a better way to meld the on and off chain worlds. Normal people are not going to endure this painful process otherwise.

Where it seems like Mike lands in the talk is that we need to build applications that mesh well with the existing financial world but have DeFi perks. The Etherfi credit card seems like just that. Stake some ETH then be able to spend with that card anywhere you normally would with a card, but the kicker is that the staking rewards help pay down your card balance. That’s a novel feature that even a normie would go for as long as the onboarding process wasn’t crazy. It might not be for everyone, but it’s an example of the DeFi and CeFi worlds blending, which is where I think we need to go.

Even as someone fairly deep into crypto, the current liquid staking offerings can feel a lot like a scary black box. Put some money in and the magic box will reward you with new tokens, yield, and some points. If we want liquid staking and other DeFi strategies to account for a portion of the average investor’s portfolio we’ll need to remove some of that black box feel and make the experience as simple as possible. Obviously this is a new field still being developed, but I hope we continue to see projects build with Mike Silagadze’s advice in mind and try to blend the DeFi and traditional worlds of finance by putting ourselves in the shoes of non-crypto natives trying to interact with this technology.