1/7 There are two conceptual trends in crypto finance, diverging from each other, stemming from fundamental disagreement on how the new financial system should look like.

My working terms for these are:
1. Traditionalists
2. Revolutionaries

2/7 Traditionalists

are those who are using crypto to build better version of what we already know. They believe that there is a reason TradFi works as it works, and DeFi should expand on it, not fundamentally change it.

3/7 Traditionalist builders usually have previous TradFi experience, they build what they already know and improve on it.

Projects: USD pegged stablecoins, order book DEXes, tokenized securities, most of derivative platforms.

4/7 Traditionalists have experience to know how the product and market should work, thus can avoid many mistakes and ship good products. But their experience makes them blind to new and creative ways to rebuild finance.

5/7 Revolutionaries

are those who are looking at crypto finance with new lenses. They don't try to replicate TradFi, but create new and original financial stack. They believe current finance is broken or skewed for various reasons and try to build it differently from scratch.

6/7 Revolutionary builders are usually unsullied by previous fin. experience. They rather apply experience from computer science, gaming and other fields (if any).

Projects: AMMs, Bitcoin, (some) prediction market and synthetic assets platforms, (some) NFT use cases

7/7 Revolutionaries are more likely to just blunder and re-discover many lessons from thousands of years of financial history. Most of what they build looks like a toy. However in rare cases they are onto something, they can re-define the way we do finance, making a 0-1 impact.

FYI I am not sure which approach will win. I have horses in both camps.

However I secretly root for revolutionaries, because I think current financial system is broken, works inefficiently thx to technical debt, regulatory, historical and political baggage.