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| Exploring the transformation of value in the digital age By Michael J. Casey, Chief Content Officer July 30, 2021 If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.
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How decentralized, really, is DeFi?
That’s a question sparked by Uniswap’s move to restrict investor access to certain tokens on its platform, seemingly in response to threats from regulators, and the topic of our column this week. We also explore the relationship between bitcoin difficulty and price and the meme fun that was had with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) description of cryptocurrency developers as “shadowy super-coders.” In our podcast this week, Sheila Warren and I were joined by my old friend and former CoinDesk colleague Noelle Acheson, who is now head of Markets Insights at Genesis, a CoinDesk sister company. The three of us picked apart a couple of prominent essays that were critical of Bitcoin and crypto assets. Have a listen after you read the newsletter.
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The Crypto Founder's Dilemma – DeFi Edition Illustration: Rachel Sun/CoinDesk It’s a question you hear a lot from crypto outsiders: Why did Satoshi Nakamoto choose anonymity? Why not write your name into the history books as a contributor to the march of progress?
I can’t answer the question definitively, of course. I don’t have Satoshi’s ear – not that I know of, at least. (He/she/they may well be among the many Bitcoin OGs I’ve spoken to over the years.) But I do know this: If Bitcoin’s inventor was an identifiable human being or group of human beings, it would not have been able to grow as it has. In fact, it may well have died shortly after its birth, much like e-Gold before it or Liberty Reserve after it.
One can imagine state or federal regulators knocking on the fully identified Satoshi Nakamoto’s door and hitting him/her/them with a cease-and-desist order for running an unlicensed money transmission business. The Bitcoin founder could have protested, "the network is decentralized"/"neither me nor my fellow node operators hold custody of customer assets"/"it’s code, protected by the First Amendment." But the power of law enforcement at such times often means that nuances like that are lost.
There’s a lesson here for the folks who built automated money maker Uniswap as well as for other protocol developers within the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry.
Uniswap is a decentralized exchange. Unlike centralized crypto exchanges and wallets, it takes no custody of customer assets. In theory, it’s governed by a decentralized community, whose members use its native token, UNI, to coordinate voting on financial conditions and other elements of the system.
But last week Uniswap Labs, the company that launched the protocol, announced it would limit trading in certain financial assets on its site. Citing "a shifting regulatory landscape," the company restricted access to tokens that are synthetically linked to the value of stocks and other traditional financial instruments. This came after Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler warned that stablecoin tokens pegged to traditional securities may themselves constitute securities that are subject to its oversight.
With this one outcome, DeFi is suddenly looking a bit less decentralized.
For some time, DeFi advocates speculated that regulators who’ve found ways to impose anti-money laundering, know-your-customer and securities rules on centralized, custodial crypto exchanges and wallets such as Coinbase would run into a dilemma with decentralized exchanges because, supposedly, there is no one in charge for them to go after. But Uniswap’s quick response to a regulator’s public comment is a reminder this was an overly optimistic view. The protocol might be distributed, but if there’s an identifiable, centralized entity running the interface with that protocol, and it can be pressured to block access to it, the distinction seems moot.
Regulatory Test
It may still be that there’s a decentralization threshold beyond which regulators can’t or won’t intervene. Administration of a protocol’s governance could evolve to where it’s out of the hands of its founders and is now guided by the decisions of its network, so it escapes the scope of regulation. That’s kind of what SEC Director of Corporation Finance William Hinman said in a much-cited speech about Ethereum in 2019.
If so, a big test of that idea may come with MakerDAO, the decentralized lending platform that runs the dai stablecoin. In a blog post last week, founder Rune Christensen said the MakerDAO Foundation, which currently runs the lending system, will hand over control entirely to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), also called MakerDAO.
As Christensen explained on our podcast recently, the founders quickly learned it was impossible to launch an entirely decentralized platform from the start. The decision-making of the foundation was needed for the system to run effectively at first, but the founders worked to build out the participation, liquidity and a structure that would eventually allow the protocol to run by itself.
Whether the formal move in that direction now is enough to protect dai from the stablecoin regulation that is also expected to be forthcoming is another thing. Legislation to provide a “comprehensive legal framework” to regulate cryptocurrencies and stablecoins was introduced in the House of Representatives Wednesday.
It does look as if DeFi is now very much in the U.S. government’s crosshairs.
Hot on the heels of Gensler’s message and the Uniswap response, a new infrastructure bill that’s looking to raise tax revenues from crypto traders included decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer marketplaces in its definition of the brokers from which information would be demanded.
As Anderson Kill lawyer and CoinDesk columnist Preston Byrne argued last week, the recent round of cease-and-desist actions by state-based securities regulators’ against centralized crypto lending platform BlockFi (see Relevant Reads below) may be a precursor to similar moves against DeFi. These agencies are viewing crypto interest-bearing products as investment contracts, and thus subject to securities laws, irrespective of whether they are offered by CeFi or DeFi.
In other settings, software code has been recognized as a form of speech, protected by the First Amendment. And as Protocol Labs General Counsel Marta Belcher has argued, some of these actions could constitute breaches of civil liberties based on invasions of privacy.
Still, law enforcement is coming. So, does that mean that the only solution is the Satoshi solution? Is the only way for a project to launch for the founder to use a pseudonym and stay in the shadows?
Sadly, that option may also now be unavailable.
As the Blue Kirby problem demonstrated, where a pseudonymous coder made off with investors’ funds, the market itself is now inclined to demand identity. It’s the best way for investors to protect themselves from a fraudulent founder.
Satoshi’s genius move to build something outside of the glare of public view may have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, available precisely because so few people knew about it and because, to start with at least, there was not much at stake in the way of dollar value.
To me, DeFi founders capture the same inventive spirit that Satoshi embodied. It would be a pity if regulators quash their ability to turn it into something valuable and lasting.
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Off the Charts Diving Difficulty Bitcoin difficulty, a measure of how much hashing power is needed to mine a block of bitcoin transactions, underwent its biggest drop ever earlier this month. The cause: the massive reduction in hashing power brought about by China’s crackdown against bitcoin mining in what was once the world’s leading region for such activity.
The Bitcoin protocol automatically institutes an adjustment every 2016 blocks, or roughly two weeks, to reflect changes in hashrate to maintain a more or less even spread of bitcoin issuance and reward distribution over time.
As the chart below shows, the recent massive drop in difficulty came slightly after the sharp decline in price from bitcoin’s mid-April all-time high of $64,829.
Credit: Shuai Hao/CoinDesk In the latest case, despite the correlation there’s also a strong case to be made that the price and difficulty adjustment relationship is at least partly coincidental. The China crackdown would have prompted a hashrate retrenchment regardless of price, though it’s also likely a decline in profitability accelerated the exodus by Chinese miners and dissuaded competitors outside of China from quickly jumping in to take their place.
The bigger question is: What now? Well, the lower difficulty rate makes existing mining less expensive, which means there’s a new profit incentive to offset the loss of a lower price. So with bitcoin back around $40,000 after dropping below $30,000 a week ago, and with Chinese miners starting to relocate to new locations, some could argue that the bottom has been reached.
The Conversation Shadowy Super-Coders Illustration: Rachel Sun/CoinDesk In comments during a U.S. Senate hearing this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said this: “Instead of leaving our financial system at the whims of giant banks, crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy, faceless group of super-coders and miners, which doesn’t sound better to me.”
For the meme machines of Crypto Twitter, it was, needless to say, a red rag to a bull. There were lots of illustrations of what “shadowy super-coders” looked like. Here’s the version from Eva Beylin of The Graph: And here’s Coin Center communications director Neeraj Agrawal: CasaHODL CTO Jameson Lopp pointed out that if open-source software coders are Warren’s supposed bad guys, she has a bigger problem than she bargained for: For decentralized crypto communities, coders are the heroes. They’re the ones building systems of value, often in defiance of the centralizing, profit-seeking instincts of businessmen. So Warren’s comments enabled some meme-makers to point out a stark dichotomy in the two groups she cited. So many memes were produced that Maya Zehavi saw a collectible opportunity. And within 24 hours, people were using the term “shadowy super coders” in recruiting pitches.
A message from Coindesk
Even though many countries in the Middle East restrict or outright ban activities related to blockchain technology, the region is having its crypto moment. From Dubai’s first-of-its-kind Bitcoin Fund listing to the Bank of Israel’s trial of a digital shekel, interest is picking up in the region as crypto companies work closely with regulators in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to gain some clarity about oversight of digital currencies.
Relevant Reads BlockFi Blocked Before they come for DeFi, regulators have, as mentioned, been focused on one particular “CeFi” player in the crypto lending and borrowing space: BlockFi. The stories of the past few weeks have shown a relentless drumbeat of pressure from state regulators, but also a somewhat defiant stance from the well-funded crypto startup. Thursday last week, Danny Nelson and Nikhilesh De reported that Texas had become the third state, after New Jersey and Alabama, to issue a cease-and-desist order against BlockFi on grounds that its interest-bearing accounts violate state securities laws. Then on Saturday, Danny Nelson reported on a fourth state, Vermont, doing the same. Despite all this, BlockFi plans to go public, according to documents included as part of its Series E fundraising round, Zack Seward reported last week. And, in what is presumably a welcome respite for the company, New Jersey regulators said they’d give BlockFi at least another month before the ban on new interest-bearing accounts is brought down, Nelson reported on Wednesday.
A message from CoinDesk The CoinDesk DeFi Index (DFX), measuring the investable DeFi market, is now available for investors watching decentralized finance. It is the latest index by CoinDesk Indexes, the market standard for crypto assets since 2014. The DFX provides a market-cap-weighted index for a representative basket of DeFi-sector cryptocurrencies that is designed to be investable and replicable for professional investors. Find out more at coindesk.com/indexes/dfx, or email indexes@coindesk.com.
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