Few thoughts about DeFi and the future of Finance

https://cointelegraph.com/news/institutional-players-shape-the-future-of-de-fi




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DeFi should try to make code as safe as in nuclear or space industries. Would you agree?

https://www.ccn.com/news/technology/michael-egorov-founder-curve-finance-finance/



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Good response to "Ethereum is dead" takes: https://x.com/brianmcmichael/status/1906373253494366454

In brief, it's very curious how different chains are chosen to be used. Once the tech is good enough, it comes down to "are my assets on the chain safe", "will the rules stay the same", "can someone take my money"? Ethereum is fairly good on that regard: chain revert from The DAO era can hardly happen now, social consensus is not likely to allow for changes which can affect people's funds. It become Bitcoin of smart contract chains.

At this point, it's fairly difficult to dethrone Ethereum as a place for serious money, so other smart contract chains are only successful in other niches (such as gambling and memecoins).



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Really unexpected take from Georgios from Paradigm https://x.com/gakonst/status/1907613235819454643. TLDR - Solidity compiler development is in a bad state (I suspect that it sinked under loads of technical debt), other compiler or language is needed for development on Ethereum. What makes it more spicy - Paradigm did a lot to popularize Solidity by building Solidity-specific tools.

Good news is, Ethereum DOES have another language - Vyper. And its compiler is in a really good state now. If you are a dev - time to check it out!



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Will we see non-USD stablecoins gaining popularity?

https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025/04/07/can-non-usd-stablecoins-compete



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As many maybe know, ve-tokenomics reason to exist is to prevent governance attacks, making decision makers take long-term responsibility over their actions.

Can this be bypassed? Yes, if lock rules themselves are upgradable by governance.

Do we have a precedent? Yes, now we do.

CAKE insiders lock some CAKE tokens fro veCAKE to take over control and, essentially, erase all the governance rights and rewards rights from existing veCAKE holders. Governance attack at its finest.

Best part? They also force-unlock their tokens once the proposal has passed, because governance (in which they just got rights by locking) can do it in the same vote.

So: upgradability is a bug. Don't make your veGovernance upgradable, especially the lock part.

https://forum.pancakeswap.finance/t/cake-tokenomics-proposal-3-0-true-ownership-simplified-governance-and-sustainable-growth/1237



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Very interesting case today. Chainlink deUSD price oracle spiked by 3%, causing $500k of leveraged positions being wiped out [https://x.com/omeragoldberg/status/1928149184902766613].

This is not the first time it happens to Chainlink oracles. The reason for that is using VWAP (volume-weighted average exchange price) as a price source for aggregation. While good with orderbooks, this is a fundamentally wrong thing to do with AMMs!

Instead, one should use the final state price (e.g. price which would have happened if someone swapped after the end of the block). This price is fairly non-trivial to manipulate in AMMs.

In Curve (crvUSD, LlamaLend) we use fully decentralized oracles which average out state prices. They cannot be manipulated this way. I think, Chainlink should learn from our findings and incorporate them in their oracles.

More and more people report that impersonators are DMing everyone pretending to be me, non-stop. Be careful, that's a trap!

Having to disagree with the recent BIS report about stablecoins:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/stablecoins-fail-money-bis-report

According to them, stablecoins perform poorly on 3 tests: singleness (all stables are worth exactly the same amount), elasticity (cash-in-advance requirement) and so-called integrity (money laundering and sanction evasion possible).

- Singleness. USDT and USDC are really no less "single" than bank deposits - everyone can redeem those to the face value of USD. Of course, these assets are ALSO freely traded, so market price can deviate from face value: that can absorb immediate demand (during weekends when banks do not work for redemption, trading demand which is higher than what can be immediately redeemed etc). But tokenized bank deposits would have the same property. Besides, one could sell deposits of a failing bank on a secondary market and exit with a haircut - just like SVB collapse caused USDC to temporarily get a discount due to people selling it on secondary markets.

- Elasticity. Money in banks are not moving fast: usually it is at least T+1 settlement (e.g. 1 day after). So banks can print money while the actual funds are in transit. Stablecoins don't necessarily need this mechanism because settlement is instant. But similar mechanisms can be created, and actually ARE created for non-redeemable stablecoins: for example crvUSD has flash loans with "unbacked" stablecoins because they have to be returned right in the same transaction.

- Integrity. Banks indeed have AML measures which allow to track and freeze assets for anyone transacting, and crypto does not have those capabilities by nature (although USDC and USDT can be frozen). One can of course pre-program "KYC-only" requirement in a stablecoin, but such stablecoins get very little adoption due to inconvenience of use and compliance tools giving false positives (I myself was wrongly flagged b automated tools several times).
But maybe these measures help a lot? Not according to reports which say that less than 1% of financial crimes are stopped (https://regulationinnovation.org/impact/financial-crime/)! Yet, we do have hacks happening in crypto (and they are VERY annoying), but maybe around 50% of the hacked funds get eventually recovered (thanks to ultimate transparency of blockchains unlike banks which are inherently opaque). Much higher than 1% (and some estimates quote much lower numbers for efficiency of AML measures).

So, in my opinion, stablecoins are no worse, or maybe even better than traditional "banking" money on all these three points.

Ethereum is turning 10 years old: the time flies! Over that time, it has grown from an idea to the foundation of the new financial system.
It so happens that I have been a part of this journey via founding Curve, and I am now very honored to join this celebration as one of Ethereum's chosen torchbearers.

But the Ethereum's growth we see is just the beginning! The next big step is real-world integration. Not just experimental dApps, but resilient protocols that can handle international settlements and reshape how the global society interacts with money.

As a DeFi developer, I hold to the stance that we’re not just building “products” — we are building core infrastructure that economies will one day rely on.

To serve as the backbone of tomorrow’s economy, these core services must be robust and transparent. That’s why I’ve been building on Vyper — a language built for Ethereum with clarity and security at its core. Its clean, auditable structure minimizes technical debt and makes smart contracts easier to verify and trust. In my view, this kind of architectural discipline is essential for Ethereum’s long-term role.

Ethereum has all the chances of becoming the foundation for that global financial ecosystem. Its design has always prioritized commitment to decentralization, and the neutrality of its infrastructure makes it a suitable choice as the basis for the future worldwide economy that won’t buckle under political or technical pressure.

The future won’t be about chasing TVL or transaction speed. It will be about trust. About transparency. About making decentralized finance something whole nations can rely on. If Ethereum is to be the core of the global economy, the DeFi sectors as a whole must stop confining themselves by short-term goals and instead start thinking how they affect the Human Civilization as a whole.

Anyone else is debugging on paper?

Someone turned on Bitcoin volatility on October 10. Who should I thank?

As Yield Basis pushed crvUSD liquidity a little bit up - we started seeing a curious fact: USDT volumes (normalized to TVL) are larger than USDC

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What recently came to my attention is the story of Bunni. Bunni was a liquidity engine on top of Uniswap v4 (yes, with hooks), with ve-tokenomics. Good engineering which'd use the best kind of token economics in the world combined with concentrated liquidity. Btw this approach was shown to work if collaboration with a "bigger guy" (Coinbase) is established (Aerodrome).

Anyhow, Bunni was built using Uniswap v4 hooks. And they are VERY hard to build on. Uniswap Foundation was not quite interested in helping them with reviewing the code or audits. So Bunni (who did audits it could afford) eventually got hacked and is now forced to close down [https://x.com/bunni_xyz/status/1981160279871558114].

Uniswap could have helped them to make it not happen. They could have rescued them after the hack, they have funds for it. They could have used it as a message "build on hooks, we will help you". They did not.

I just feel sad for the devs who chose to build on Uniswap and got betrayed. Idk, maybe Uniswap is just not interested in building the ecosystem where hooks do something else than KYC.


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I've noticed some projects out there tend to mention my name or Curve to boost their credibility. Yes, as a developer myself, I often support early DeFi builders as an advisor or investor. But that doesn't mean I'm involved long-term or responsible for what they do.

I am directly involved with Curve and Yield Basis, and also I did work on NuCypher (now part of Threshold Network) in its early days.

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Had a sudden thought yesterday. Fusaka Ethereum upgrade is actually good not just for performance - also for safety! How so?

Well, when Ethereum gas was high - everyone tried to do all sorts of tricks to make their code cheaper to execute. For that, one can avoid re-reading storage variables (often at the expense of readability), use unsafe math or inline assembly. It is MUCH HARDER to build safe smart contracts this way.

If L1 gas becomes truly cheap - we don't have to do all of that. Just maximize safety and readability - that is it!

And remember that Chernobyl disaster was essentially caused by trying to save a little bit on manufacturing control rods, having their "useless" tips filled with graphite. Saving a few pennies in transaction prices on EVM can sometimes lead to similar disasters!

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So, it's the end of year - December 31st. Time to review the results of 2025 and look into the future!

For Curve, 2025 was an interesting one. Here are some highlights:
- Thanks to the introduction of Savings crvUSD, the price of crvUSD become very stable, comparable with that of USDC and USDT;
- crvUSD appeared to be the highest-trading-volume decentralized stablecoin towards the end of the year (thanks for launching Yield Basis);
- We never paid much attention to the number of active users, but surprisingly it actually grows all the time. For example, this year it's 4 times larger than in 2021;
- The highest-ever quorum was reached in a Curve vote - 93% turnout for the proposal number 1279;
- Biggest pools with wrapped Bitcoin are now on Curve (and what's surprising - they are BTC<>USD pools - also thanks to Yield Basis);
- Curve suddenly jumps to be on par with Uniswap with total fees collected for swaps (those are split between LPs and admin fees);
- Special pools were launched for creating liquidity for non-USD stablecoins: FX pools.

Notably, in 2025 Yield Basis was launched, and it already had time to demonstrate that it indeed eliminates impermanent loss which was so annoying for LPs and allows to convert crypto volatility to yields.

Everything created and achieved in 2025 points to what waits us in 2026:
- The work of Yield Basis inevitably increases the amount of crvUSD available for borrowing (potentially, billions, or maybe even tens of billions of crvUSD). Therefore, our team working on Curve will launched the improved LlamaLend (2.0). This improves not just lending but also minting of crvUSD - for safer and more convenient loans and leverage positions;
- USD stablecoins account for 99% of value of all stablecoins currently. Let's change that with FX Swaps!

2026 plans for Yield Basis are also clear:
- Scaling, scaling and scaling again! Everything points to the market having a potential to accomodate for 100-fold TVL increase;
- Adding new assets (starting from ETH). Of course, these should only be the safest and most stable ones.

Anyhow, less words - more action. Happy New Year of 2026!

#DeFi, #Curve, #stablecoins, #Bitcoin, #yield