Finance Redefined: Can DeFi and on-chain governance change human nature? Oct. 7-14

This week, one bit of news really grabbed my attention: Dharma getting criticized for allegedly trying to capture Uniswap governance.

Or at least that's what I previously used to describe it - if you visit the website now you basically only see mentions of DeFi and some very trippy images.

If you take a stroll through the Compound or Uniswap governance dashboards, you'll probably see the general issues I see with these types of "Decentralized community governance" protocols.

To be fair, the Compound and Uniswap forums could not be more different.

Uniswap's "Reward anyone who randomly used us in the past" was definitely much more equitable than Compound's "Let's distribute tokens with no lockup to whoever manages to pull in the most capital."

Corporate boards benefit the team and the already-rich who can devote capital to the venture, it's just that with DeFi you get tokens instead of shares.

Maybe it's possible to have a truly decentralized governance system - whatever that means - but it certainly won't happen when we actively reward wealth with control.

There's another blame game that makes very little sense and suggests people are still crazy.

People put huge sums of money and then lost it - one particular address put in 1,000 ETH and got back 74 ETH. But despite Cronje's giant, stark warnings people were still bashing this as yet another example of him "Testing in prod" and making people lose money.

Then there's nobody to blame and we can all enjoy DeFi again.