Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google

Special thanks to Binji, Josh Rudolf, Haonan Li and Stani Kulechov for feedback and review.

特别感谢 Binji、Josh Rudolf、Haonan Li 和 Stani Kulechov 的反馈和审查。

One of the important tensions in the Ethereum community for a long time has been the tension between (i) applications that bring in enough revenue to economically sustain the ecosystem, whether that means sustaining the value of ETH or supporting individual projects and (ii) applications that satisfy the underlying goals that brought people into Ethereum.

长期以来，以太坊社区的重要紧张关系之一是（i）能够带来足够收入以在经济上维持生态系统的应用程序（无论这意味着维持 ETH 的价值还是支持单个项目）与（ii）满足将人们引入以太坊的基本目标的应用程序之间的紧张关系。

Historically, these two categories were very disjoint: the former was some combination of NFTs, memecoins, and a type of defi that was backed up by temporary or recursive forces: people borrowing and lending to chase incentives provided by protocols, or a circular argument of "ETH is valuable because people use the Ethereum chain to buy and sell and leverage-trade ETH".

从历史上看，这两个类别是非常脱节的：前者是 NFT、memecoin 和一种由临时或递归力量支持的 defi 的某种组合：人们借钱和放贷是为了追逐协议提供的激励，或者循环论证“ETH 是有价值的，因为人们使用以太坊链买卖和杠杆交易 ETH”。

Meanwhile, non-financial and semi-financial applications (eg.

同时，非金融和半金融应用（例如。

Lens, Farcaster, ENS, Polymarket, Seer, privacy protocols) existed, and they were fascinating, but they either got very little usage, or paid far too little in fees (or other forms of economic activity) to sustain a $500 billion economy.

Lens、Farcaster、ENS、Polymarket、Seer、隐私协议）都存在，而且它们很吸引人，但它们要么使用很少，要么支付的费用（或其他形式的经济活动）太少，无法维持 5000 亿美元的经济。

This disjointness created a lot of dissonance in the community, and a large amount of community momentum was backed by the theoretical hope that some application could emerge that fills both boxes at the same time.

这种脱节在社区中造成了很多不和谐，并且大量的社区动力得到了理论希望的支持，即可能会出现一些同时填补这两个框的应用程序。

In this post I will argue that, as of this year, Ethereum has that application, something that can be for Ethereum what search was for Google: low-risk defi, with a goal of achieving global democratized access to payments and savings in valuable asset categories (eg.

在这篇文章中，我将论证，截至今年，以太坊已经有了这样的应用程序，对于以太坊来说就像谷歌的搜索一样：低风险的去中心化金融，其目标是实现全球民主化支付和有价值资产类别的储蓄（例如，加密货币）。

major currencies with competitive interest rates, stocks, bonds) .

具有竞争力利率的主要货币、股票、债券）。

The analogy between low-risk defi for Ethereum and search for Google is as follows.

以太坊的低风险 defi 与谷歌的搜索之间的类比如下。

Google does many interesting and valuable things for the world: the Chromium family of browsers, Pixel phones, their AI work including open-source Gemini models, the Go language, and much much more .

Google 为世界做了许多有趣且有价值的事情：Chromium 系列浏览器、Pixel 手机、他们的人工智能工作（包括开源 Gemini 模型）、Go 语言等等。

But these things are all negligible or even negative as far as revenue generation goes.

但就创收而言，这些事情都是可以忽略不计的，甚至是负面的。

Rather, the largest revenue generator is search and ads.

相反，最大的收入来源是搜索和广告。

Low-risk defi can play a similar role for Ethereum.

低风险的 defi 可以为以太坊发挥类似的作用。

Other applications (including non-financial and more experimental applications) are crucially important for Ethereum's role in the world and for its culture, but they do not need to be looked to as revenue generators.

其他应用程序（包括非金融和更多实验性应用程序）对于以太坊在世界中的作用及其文化至关重要，但不需要将它们视为收入来源。

In fact, I hope Ethereum can do much better than Google .

事实上，我希望以太坊能够做得比谷歌好得多。

Google is often criticized for losing its way and becoming like the antisocial profit-maximizing corporations that it sought to replace.

谷歌经常被批评迷失方向，变得像它试图取代的反社会的、追求利润最大化的公司。

Ethereum has decentralization baked in at a much deeper technical and social layer, and I would argue that the low-risk defi use case creates a lot of alignment between "doing well" and "being good", to a degree that does not exist for advertisement.

以太坊在更深层次的技术和社会层面上实现了去中心化，我认为低风险的 defi 用例在“做得好”和“做好”之间创造了很多一致性，达到了广告所不存在的程度。

By "low-risk defi" I include both the basic function of payments and savings, and well-understood tools like synthetic assets and fully collateralized lending, and the ability to exchange between these assets.

我所说的“低风险去中心化金融”既包括支付和储蓄的基本功能，也包括合成资产和完全抵押贷款等易于理解的工具，以及这些资产之间交换的能力。

The reason to focus on these applications has two core components:

关注这些应用程序的原因有两个核心组成部分：

Historically, I was more suspicious of defi because it did not seem to be providing (1); rather, the main "selling points" seemed to be making money from trading highly speculative tokens (Ethereum's single largest day in fees was from a badly designed digital monkey sale), or getting 10-30% yield from liquidity farming incentives.

从历史上看，我对defi比较怀疑，因为它似乎没有提供（1）；相反，主要的“卖点”似乎是通过交易高度投机的代币来赚钱（以太坊单日收费最高的一天来自设计糟糕的数字猴子销售），或者通过流动性农业激励获得 10-30% 的收益。

One reason why this was the case was regulatory barriers.

造成这种情况的原因之一是监管障碍。

Gary Gensler and others deserve serious blame for creating a regulatory environment where the more useless your application is, the safer you are, and the more transparently you act and the more clear guarantees you offer to investors, the more likely you are to be deemed "a security".

加里·詹斯勒（Gary Gensler）和其他人应该受到严重谴责，因为他们创造了一个监管环境，在这个环境中，你的应用程序越无用，你就越安全，你的行为越透明，你向投资者提供的保证越明确，你就越有可能被视为“证券”。

Another reason why is that at the early stages, risk (protocol code bug risk, oracle risk, general unknown-unknown risk) was too high for more sustainable use cases to make sense.

另一个原因是，在早期阶段，风险（协议代码错误风险、预言机风险、一般未知风险）太高，无法让更可持续的用例有意义。

If risk is high, the only applications that are worth it are applications whose returns are even higher , and so can only come from unsustainable subsidies or speculation.

如果风险很高，那么唯一值得的应用就是回报更高的应用，因此只能来自不可持续的补贴或投机。

But what happened over time is that the protocols became more secure and the risk decreased .

但随着时间的推移，协议变得更加安全，风险也降低了。

Defi hacks and losses continue to exist.

Defi 黑客攻击和损失继续存在。

But they are increasingly being pushed out to further edges of the ecosystem where users are more experimental and speculative.

但它们正越来越多地被推向生态系统的更边缘，那里的用户更具实验性和投机性。

A stable core of applications is forming that is proving remarkably robust.

一个稳定的应用程序核心正在形成，事实证明它非常强大。

Tail risks that cannot be ruled out continue to exist, but such tail risks exist in tradfi too - and given increasing global political instability, for many people worldwide the tail risks of tradfi are now greater than the tail risks of defi .

无法排除的尾部风险仍然存在，但这种尾部风险也存在于 tradfi 中——并且鉴于全球政治不稳定的加剧，对于全世界许多人来说，tradfi 的尾部风险现在比 defi 的尾部风险还要大。

In the long run, one could expect the transparency and automated execution in a mature defi ecosystem to make it much more stable than tradfi.

从长远来看，成熟的 Defi 生态系统的透明度和自动化执行将使其比 tradfi 更加稳定。

Who are the "non-ouroboros" users for whom all this makes sense?

对于哪些“非衔尾蛇”用户来说，这一切都有意义？

Basically, people and businesses who want access to a global market within which they can buy, hold and trade mainstream assets, but for whom there are not reliable traditional finance channels for getting those things.

基本上，个人和企业希望进入全球市场，在其中购买、持有和交易主流资产，但对于他们来说，没有可靠的传统金融渠道来获得这些东西。

Crypto does not have magic secret sauce for sustainably creating much higher yields.

加密货币并没有神奇的秘方来可持续地创造更高的收益。

But it does have magic secret sauce for making the economic opportunities that already exist globally and permissionlessly accessible.

但它确实拥有神奇的秘密武器，可以让全球已经存在的经济机会无需许可即可获得。

Low-risk defi has several nice properties that make it ideal:

低风险 defi 具有几个使其成为理想选择的良好特性：

Going back to the analogy of Google, one major flaw in its incentive alignment is that advertising revenue gives the company an incentive to suck up as much data as possible from its users and keep that data proprietary.

回到谷歌的类比，其激励措施的一个主要缺陷是广告收入使该公司有动力从用户那里吸收尽可能多的数据并保持这些数据的专有性。

This goes against the open-source and positive-sum spirit that historically motivated its more idealistic efforts.

这违背了历史上激发其更加理想主义努力的开源和正和精神。

The cost of this kind of incongruence is even higher for Ethereum, because Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, and so any activity that Ethereum does cannot be a backroom decision of a few people, it must be viable as a cultural rallying point.

对于以太坊来说，这种不一致的成本更高，因为以太坊是一个去中心化的生态系统，所以以太坊所做的任何活动都不能是少数人的幕后决定，它必须作为一个文化凝聚点是可行的。

The revenue generator does not have to be the most revolutionary or exciting application of Ethereum.

收入来源不一定是以太坊最具革命性或最令人兴奋的应用程序。

But it does need to be something that is at least not actively unethical or not embarrassing .

但它确实需要至少不是不道德的或不令人尴尬的。

It's just not possible to say with a straight face you are excited about the ecosystem because it's positively changing the world, if its single largest application is political memecoins.

如果它最大的单一应用是政治模因币，那么你不可能板着脸说你对这个生态系统感到兴奋，因为它正在积极改变世界。

Low-risk defi, with a goal of enabling global permissionless access to payments and to the best savings opportunities, is a form of finance that is positively changing the world, and many people in underprivileged regions worldwide can attest to this.

低风险defi的目标是让全球无需许可即可获得支付和最佳储蓄机会，它是一种正在积极改变世界的金融形式，世界各地贫困地区的许多人都可以证明这一点。

Another important property of low-risk defi is that it is naturally synergistic with, or can evolve into, a number of more interesting future applications.

低风险defi的另一个重要特性是，它自然地与许多更有趣的未来应用程序协同作用，或者可以演变为许多更有趣的未来应用程序。

To give a few examples:

举几个例子：

For all these reasons, I would argue that a stronger focus on low-risk defi puts us in a position much better for economically sustaining the ecosystem while maintaining cultural and values congruence than search and ads ever could for Google.

出于所有这些原因，我认为，与谷歌的搜索和广告相比，更加关注低风险的去中心化金融使我们能够更好地在经济上维持生态系统，同时保持文化和价值观的一致性。

Low-risk defi is already supporting the Ethereum economy, it is making the world a better place even today, and it is synergistic with many of the more experimental applications that people on Ethereum are building.

低风险的 defi 已经在支持以太坊经济，即使在今天，它也让世界变得更加美好，并且它与以太坊上的人们正在构建的许多更具实验性的应用程序具有协同作用。

It is a project that we can all be proud of.

这是一个我们都可以感到自豪的项目。