[mwerd]

How about AAVE and their Arc product specifically? https://www.fireblocks.com/blog/permissioned-defi-goes-live-...

You've got a fully compliant (in terms of anti money laundering), whitelisted counterparties only, decentralized lending and borrowing platform that completely eliminates the friction of a typical corporate treasury banking experience.

You deposit dollars, you earn yield in dollars. If you want exposure to eth or BTC, you can exchange dollars for either or borrow at transparent rates. The transaction settles in seconds and the fees are fractions of what it costs to wire funds.

My organization uses Wells Fargo for similar services (sans BTC and ETH) and pays considerably more for the pleasure of receiving less in return. Aave achieves it with virtually none of the back-office or legacy COBOL based software that these dinosaur, heavily entrenched, ethically challenged financial institutions require. It's like pre-acquisition WhatsApp compared to at&t efficiency comparison.

There's innovation and value creation happening in crypto, whether you choose to see it or not.

The hostility to crypto from a bunch of SV engineers who have scammed society out of billions (trillions?) of dollars pitching ineffective digital marketing is not without irony. Not to mention the societal and political fallout from the uncontrolled spread of misinformation, aided and abetted by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and other SV darlings. Pushing ads to fuel consumerism and coming on here to complain about emissions from proof of work Blockchains. It's rich.

It's not easy to build software that actually solves large scale problems. Most of the companies/apps in crypto will fail, just like internet startups. What succeeds will likely disrupt the financial system.

[warsheep]

Isn't this a circular argument? The question was what "useful" things do these crypto solutions/companies provide, and your example is a product which allows regulated entities to invest in crypto.

"Why is X valuable? Because X allows you to invest in... X."

Also, in this specific example (Arc), is the solution even considered DeFi? There's a centralized list of whitelister entities and you can only participate if you're a customer of these entities. So they're like banks.

[mwerd]

No, the question was what in crypto isn't a scam.

Whitelisted counterparties borrowing and lending to each other without having to trust a third party to intermediate, such as fedwire, swift, or dtcc, is clearly not a scam. It's a b2b product with at least 30 sizable informed and willing institutional participants. They could take their capital anywhere else in financial markets but choose to take it to Aave.

It's the same platform Aave offers anyone else on Ethereum, polygon, arbitrum, and other chains coming soon. The customers of the arc product have a regulatory compliance burden that arc solves for them but the tech is the same.

[mostertoaster]

I see crypto as a guy had this beautiful idea that the little guy could topple big powerful banks, and then all that happened is powerful people will find a way to exploit it for more power.

Crypto is neither good nor bad, but people are.