10 things I’ve learned designing for decentralised finance (DeFi)

What’s interesting to me, is that this is now happening across all seniority levels . I can easily see why smart young renegades might graduate from college, look at Google or F̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k (sorry, Meta ) and go “fuck that”; but we are now seeing a lot of older executives move over too.

It’s good to see them resist the temptation of “resting and vesting ” to pick up a new challenge. Maybe it reminds them of the old days when their company was fun and they got to build cool stuff?

Being completely decentralised means you also get out of your American/European bubble. My own team comprises members in Africa, Europe, Latin America and Russia. It is common for people to use pseudonyms. A few individuals I work with never turn their camera on.

Identity is obfuscated from the start and privacy is by default, not an opt-in.

At this point, I’ve decided to embrace it. Nothing will ever be finished . Instead, DeFi is an asymptote, whereby further progress will get us closer and closer to the line, without ever reaching it.

A fractal pattern is one that contains similar patterns at any level of magnification. You can look at a part of the pattern and still see a near-identical version of the whole.

In designing for DeFi, we tend to come across a lot of the same problems over and over again, at almost every level.

Some blockchains are EVM-compatible (Ethereum Virtual Machine), making it very easy for them to spin up a version of existing dApps. Examples include Fantom, Binance Smart Chain, and Avalanche.

I have worked on dApps for Ethereum, L2s, Solana, Polkadot, Kusama and Cosmos.

I don’t think there will be a single winner. Instead, it’s more likely that networks will evolve into different niches. And if there is going to be one single winner, that day is a while off.

Jakob Nielsen — the OG of User Experience Design — says it can take 20 years for a company to reach the final stages of maturity.

I’d say specific parts of the crypto industry are actually doing quite well. Some companies are at least halfway up the steps, but DeFi specifically? Yeah, not so much.

However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At least right now, because…

When everyone playing the game is a pro, why even bother with instructions? Who needs intro text when they’re just looking for the next kick? Why make it easy, when the whole point is that it’s hard?

If it wasn’t exciting, nobody would do it. I think this kind of degen madness promotes creativity, keeps people on their toes, and accelerates the whole industry. It’s not for everyone, but neither is croquet.

Many players, many games…

This is the flipside. I think it’s ok to have degens rushing in, throwing bombs, and clearing the space, but the eventual goal has to be an open, decentralised, financial system, available to everyone.

The next growth spurt we see in DeFi is going to be greatly improved UX for liquidity mining and farming rewards.

Automated strategies are getting better.

Open-source is sacrosanct, which means that everybody copies everybody and expects to be copied. See something you like? Fork it, make a few tweaks, launch it. Later on, another team will like your tweaks and copy those. We all progress as an industry and the UX gradually improves.

There is a fantastic essay from the inimitable Gwern called “Bitcoin is worse is better ”. It was written in 2011 after Bitcoin hit the heady heights of $11. Reflecting on its wild success, he writes:

“The basic insight of Bitcoin is clever, but clever in an ugly compromising sort of way.”