DeFi Explained ft. Nat Eliason

01/25/22 • 52 min

For the next few episodes of Means of Creation, we are piloting a series of web3 explainers—unpacking some of the fundamental concepts of web3, from first principles. The goal is to explore various topics, trends, and projects that people want to learn more about but find confusing! Essentially, to ask the questions we’ve been too afraid to ask in public.

If you want your questions answered, or have topics and/or guests you want to recommend, feel free to do so by tagging @Means of Creation on Twitter.

We hope you find these conversations valuable!

In this first episode, we explain DeFi, or Decentralized Finance.

Cryptocurrencies have taken a major hit over the last few days—Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen by almost fifty percent from their all-time highs. However, the proponents of DeFi still believe in its long-term potential to be the future of finance.

If we zoom out a little, this belief seems to be well-founded: as of this writing, the value locked in various DeFi projects is $196B. As recently as 2019, that number was merely $600M.

DeFi proponents also go on to claim that we’re just getting started—the advantages of an open and decentralized financial system have the potential to capture trillions of dollars of value.

In this episode, we're joined by Nat Eliason, who helps us unpack this claim. Nat is a writer, crypto engineer, and educator who’s been at the forefront of DeFi long before it became became a trend.

He brings with him a wealth of experience in this space—he teaches a very popular course called DeFi Orientation which enables people to get started in DeFi and earn money from their crypto assets. He helps crypto companies with their tokenomics and smart contract development. He also writes Almanack, a newsletter about DeFi, tokenomics, yield farming, and other related topics.

Nat's experience as an educator and operator lets him simplify complex theories but also demonstrate how to apply them in practice. He was the perfect guest to bring on to explain the rapidly changing world of DeFi.

If you want your questions answered, or have topics and/or guests you want to recommend, feel free to do so by tagging @Means of Creation on Twitter.

We hope you find these conversations valuable!

In this first episode, we explain DeFi, or Decentralized Finance.

If we zoom out a little, this belief seems to be well-founded: as of this writing, the value locked in various DeFi projects is $196B. As recently as 2019, that number was merely $600M.

DeFi proponents also go on to claim that we’re just getting started—the advantages of an open and decentralized financial system have the potential to capture trillions of dollars of value.

Previous Episode

A Look Inside Pinterest’s Creator Strategy

Pinterest is often written off as a digital mood board used to inspire purchases and future plans—a place for its 444 million monthly users to share recipes, DIY craft projects, home décor ideas, beauty tutorials, fashion, or just about anything else.

But in reality, Pinterest is a dark horse in the creator economy. Many of those users have become influential visual curators, going on to build powerful personal brands as creators themselves.

Pinterest wants to further accelerate this trend by giving them better tools to create, distribute, and monetise their content.

Recently, it acquired the video editing company Vochi to provide its creators with better video tools. It also launched a $20 million creator fund last year to financially support creators. Video-first features like Idea Pins, and a TikTok-like “Watch” tab underscore this shift in strategy.

In this episode, we spoke to Silvia Oviedo Lopez, Pinterest’s Global Head of Content & Creators, who has been at the helm as all these changes have taken place. Our conversation with Silvia provides an inside look into why and how Pinterest is doubling down on its creators, and cementing its place in the creator economy.

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

Next Episode

Is Crypto Actually Destroying the Planet?

In this second episode of our new web3 explainer series we ask an important, and hard to answer question: is crypto *actually* destroying the planet?

Over the last year, crypto has witnessed mainstream adoption, with billions of dollars of value exchanged across different blockchains. But this shift has created a pressing problem: the current process of mining blocks and validating decentralized networks is extremely energy intensive. This means that running popular networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum has a massive carbon footprint.

For instance, a single transaction on the Ethereum blockchain is equivalent to the power consumption of an average US household over 7.86 days. Researchers at Cambridge University have estimated that the global mining of Bitcoin uses more electricity than entire countries—countries the size of Argentina, Sweden, or Pakistan.

An increasing number of artists, creators, collectors, and environmentalists have voiced their concerns around crypto’s impact on our climate and the need to spur change. But is their concern well-founded?

In this episode, we take a step back to fundamentally understand the problem. Is crypto actuallydestroying the planet? How is it doing so? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

We're joined by Joseph Pallant, the founder of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, which is aiming to “put the Paris Agreement on the blockchain.” Joseph has been operating in this space for multiple years—his work, insight, and advocacy makes him the perfect guest to unpack this divisive topic with refreshing nuance.