[casi]

Plenty of people doing it, defi exploded in use last summer mainly driven by collateralized debt positions in combination with lending tokens.

Lock up ethereum -> borrow dai against it -> lend dai out and earn interest on it, withdraw whenever you want.

There are more complex yield farming strategies to get the best rates on your assets, leveraging them through debt positions and lending. There are pools to automate this like yearn.

There are now sites like alchemix where you can lock up your collateral into a lending pool, borrow against it, and the yield on the locked collateral pays off the borrowed debt position. Self-repaying loans!

Multiple times over the past year I have locked eth, taken $s to pay rent/buy stuff. Then come back later paid back the owed $ and get my eth back.

https://defipulse.com tracks the value locked in different protocols, it was less about $0.5 billion this time last year, now over $40 billion.

https://compound.finance/ https://oasis.app https://yearn.finance https://aave.com

[samvher]

When I read about DeFi I imagined it to be something very different from this. This does not sound sustainable at all. It does sound like a confirmation that this is growing very rapidly.

[dingus9]

A system where borrowers post $250k collateral to borrow $100k, in theory, sounds more sustainable than traditional lending models where a handful of large borrowers defaulting can start a domino effect until a central bank steps in and punishes taxpayers to bail out lenders that took on too much risk.

It's interesting to watch the progression of DeFi projects as they're being developed. Being an early adopter in experimental financial technologies has its own set of risks, but at least these risks don't affect non-participants.