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DeFi can't hold a candle to the centuries-old trust-based system hawala

Decentralized finance needs to give up on its techno-anarchist utopia, and get more real and centralized. Otherwise DeFi lending will enter annals of finance as failure where hawala has been success

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Andy Mukherjee | Bloomberg
In the history of dangerous naivety, the decentralized finance mania of 2021 will hold its own against the 2007 boom in collateralized debt obligations. It took a financial crisis for the world to wise up to CDOs, which repackaged risky mortgage bonds to make them look safer than they were. “CDOs are nothing but a massive Ponzi scheme,” said the villain of a fictional account of the 2008 meltdown. How much more carnage will it take this time to know that blockchain-based lending is similarly reckless?

The idea that one could ditch regulated intermediaries like banks and make far higher