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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I’ll play along. Which projects are those?

Decentralized finance is pretty massive right now and has some really novel ways to deploy capital. It's not mainstream or outside of crypto perhaps but it is definitely based on strong utility.

Scroll down this list[0] and you'll find many projects providing a ton of utility (and some, I'm sure, that do not, but I'm definitely not claiming all crypto projects are legitimate/useful)

[0] https://defipulse.com/

Defi is just securitized lending with smart contracts. There is nothing novel about it. And all you do is borrow against your crypto so you can lever up and buy more crypto.

This is just adding margin into decentralized trading.

There are financial primitives that cannot exist in traditional finance that I'd call pretty novel. For example flash loans allow uncollateralized loans for millions of dollars[0]. Or take KeeperDAO[1] or Dai[2] or any of the other meta protocols generating returns by providing utility. Also the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.

[0] https://aave.com/flash-loans/

[1] https://medium.com/keeperdao/a-keepers-guide-to-arbitrage-mi...

[2] https://makerdao.com/en/

Flash loans are just for trading arbitrage. Like I said, speculation is the only major use for cryptocurrencies.

You just blanket state that DAOs are providing utility. I asked you how these things are doing that.

Effective arbitrage is required for efficient markets. Again I'll repeat: the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.

The specific DAO's I linked to build products that allow for shared arbitrage profits and an autonomous decentralized stablecoin respectively- the utility is found in the effective distributed markets they help optimize.

The very fact that you can trade coins or earn interest on a loan in a decentralized manner is the utility. Composable financial legos are pretty useful.

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