‘It’s This Really Precious Thing.’ Lex Sokolin on DeFi’s Next Chapter, and Frances Coppola on the End of Banks

This week on the Opinionated podcast, we welcome two Londoners: Lex Sokolin and Frances Coppola.

Lex Sokolin is the global fintech co-head at ConsenSys, the Ethereum development studio, as well as a CoinDesk columnist.

Lex discusses his recent piece "How DeFi Can Avoid the Irrelevance of P2P Lending and Crowdfunding," where he compares DeFi to once-hot financial ideas such as equity crowdfunding.

He explores how DeFi can avoid the fate of those trends. DeFi has global scale, he says, a thoroughly open-source nature that spurs innovation, and it offers built-in tokenized incentives for participation, among other advantages.

“DeFi is displaying the evidence of traction with something between 500,000 and 1 million people using DeFi protocols,” Sokolin says. “There’s a magic in DeFi that wasn’t in P2P lending and crowdfunding.”

Frances Coppola is a veteran writer on banking, finance and economics and the author of “The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing.”

She discusses her recent opinion piece about the state of the banking system called “Banks Are Toast but Crypto Has Lost Its Soul.”

“The nature of the business is changing so fundamentally that what we think of as big banks and what they do will be very different in the future,” she tells us.

But while some see stablecoins as a helpful way to move currencies around the world, Coppola believes that the industry has sold out its values by adopting fiat-backed coins like tether.

“This game has been played from time immemorial. [It’s] creating fake things to represent real things. I think the fact that you put it on a blockchain makes any difference really,” she says.

Tune in to hear two bold thinkers with big ideas about the future of finance.

Lex Sokolin twitter.com/LexSokolin
Frances Coppola twitter.com/Frances_Coppola