[CptFribble]

Serious question from a crypto noob - what's the point of defi systems if they're all built on stablecoins and depend on the value of a fiat currency at the end of the day? Especially for permanently-deflationary coins like BTC?

[cslarson]

Non-pegged stablecoins are now starting to be experimented with on Ethereum, Rai and Bank/Float, for example.

[rawtxapp]

You can use them without being affected by Bitcoin's volatility on the same kind of blockchains and smart contract platforms.

And you can borrow stablecoins for your BTC without selling it.

[herbst]

Have you seen fiat fonds these days? Most stablecoin defi looks a lot more promising than anything my bank has to offer.

[duskwuff]

Cynical take: a lot of it is effectively financial cargo-culting -- building structures which mimic traditional financial products, like banks, loans, and investment funds, in the (fruitless) hope that this will create value.

[kfarr]

I thought the same thing about NFT art trading. But if everyone is part of the cargo cult and the cult is making real money then is it still a cargo cult?

[ben_w]

One of the stories about how cargo cults were first noticed was someone needing to do an emergency landing, noticing a runway that wasn’t on their charts, landing, and finding the locals had built it so that aircraft full of cargo would land on it.

Given it was successful despite being a cargo cult (the plane landed QED), by symmetry the ability to make money with cryptocurrency doesn’t make it not an economic cargo cult.

(One must do more that this to show that it is a cargo cult, rather than that it is still possible for it to be, which I say despite liking the cargo cult comparison and being generally very against cryptocurrency).

[duskwuff]

> But if everyone is part of the cargo cult and the cult is making real money

False premise. Some people are making money, but only at the expense of others. There is no value being created here.

[mandelbrotwurst]

They're built on Ethereum, not stablecoins. The stability of the network currently relies on stablecoins only in the sense that people use stablecoins to store wealth in situations where fiat is more stable than crypto.