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Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google

vitalik.eth.limo · 1,601 words · saved by 1 readers

One of the important tensions in the Ethereum community for a long time has been the tension between (i) applications that bring in enough revenue to economically sustain the ecosystem, whether that means sustaining the value of ETH or supporting individual projects and (ii) applications that satisfy the underlying goals that brought people into Ethereum. Historically, these two categories were very disjoint: the former was some combination of NFTs, memecoins, and a type of defi that was backed up by temporary or recursive forces: people borrowing and lending to chase incentives provided by protocols, or a circular argument of "ETH is valuable because people use the Ethereum chain to buy and sell and leverage-trade ETH". Meanwhile, non-financial and semi-financial applications (eg. Lens, Farcaster, ENS, Polymarket, Seer, privacy protocols) existed, and they were fascinating, but they either got very little usage, or paid far too little in fees (or other forms of economic activity) to s

Dark Mode Toggle Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google 2025 Sep 21 See all posts Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google Special thanks to Binji, Josh Rudolf, Haonan Li and Stani Kulechov for feedback and review. One of the important tensions in the Ethereum community for a long time has been the tension between (i) applications that bring in enough revenue to economically sustain the ecosystem, whether that means sustaining the value of ETH or supporting individual projects and (ii) applications that satisfy the underlying goals that brought people

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