The chance for DeFi to fulfill the technology's promise

The ecosystem is crowded with early versions of DeFi with many flaws: Because the tech is new, because the chains they run on have their own shortcomings, and because people are greedy and see a chance to make a lot of money very quickly by rushing products out without concern for who ends up paying for their gains.

Instead of fast-tracking projects that do not meet their own stated ideals, we must aim higher to interest the general public in elements of DeFi that are sustainable and fulfill their promise.

Few do, but we as an industry can fulfill our promises with DeFi.

The cost of the nascent DeFi industry failing to promote such a set of requirements is that DeFi projects will follow ever-shortening cycles of fork, launch, mine and dump until it becomes patently clear that there's no future to these projects.

There is a simple set of guidelines we should demand before taking part in any DeFi project.

In short, the project should actually live up to the claimed tenets of what makes DeFi better than current systems.

Every DeFi project should be controlled on-chain by token holders, not just through multisignatures and polls.

Otherwise, DeFi remains as privileged as any other form of finance where only those who are already rich have a chance of really participating.

In too many of the current incarnations of DeFi projects these profits for some come at the expense of many other participants in a form of regressive pump-and-dumps that should make investors long for a comparatively fair zero-sum game.

Only one of these options has the ability to make DeFi go mainstream and fulfill the promise that so many people see even when the projects don't really support them.