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

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