DeFi

Some thoughts on Robinhood:

I think the frustration from defi users that Robinhood isn't crypto enough is unwarranted.

1. They are a stock trading business who identified a key business area that blockchains help with: trading execution. Using a single engine to generate user state instead of rolling and maintaining their own is a huge win, even if its extremely limited.

2. I remember Perp Protocol doing the same thing with Optimism and Uniswap. They had a controlled ERC20 that only interacted with Uniswap, with a single contract owner. It was hyper efficient.

3. It legitimizes the space. There are a number of key trading systems that would see a huge step function in efficiency if they just used a blockchain backend. Seeing Robinhood do this first might not be interesting for us, but its sending out more signal that crypto will improve your operations.

I know everyone wants anarco-capitalism, but Rome wasn't built in a day!

It’s also internally inconsistent to be championing permissionlessness one day and bitching about $usecase the next