The Huge Question at Ethereal Summit NY: Is DeFi Sufficient for Ethereum?
That was the tension on display at Day 1 in the ConsenSys-organized Ethereal Summit NY, a Blockchain Week gathering held at Pioneer Operates in Red Hook, Brooklyn on Friday.
Earlier in the day, Messari founder Ryan Selkis presented a counterpoint. If ethereum, he argued, truly reinvents finance, that could be a lot.
“If you believe about ethereum as programmable dollars and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, that’s almost certainly excellent enough,” Selkis argued.
Still, speakers kept coming back to DeFi, which was unquestionably a significant recurring theme for the day, given the rise of ethereum lending platform MakerDAO. However it was also clear that the crowd was not prepared to give up on ethereum operating the decentralized web.
Soleimani’s “ultimate bull case” for the blockchain, for instance, was when DeFi reaches the nation-state level.