Wow, I have been forwarded by a friend of mine this interview, dated back in August 2021 to the Bloomberg Podcast “The Odd Lot”, its a very cynical yet realistic view on how DeFi works, and also gives you a good perspective to interpreter all teh following events:
Bankman-Fried Described Yield Farming, Left Matt Levine Stunned
SBF: (28:06)
Right. So let me, okay, cool. I'll stay on the cynical route, think about like cynically, what could happen here? Well, okay. So you've got this boxes and it’s kind of dumb, but like what's the end game, right? This box is worth zero obviously. And like that, you know, you can't like keep this smart cap or something. But on the other hand, if everyone kind of now thinks that this box token is worth about a billion dollar market cap, that's what people are pricing it at and sort of has that market cap. Everyone's gonna mark to market. In fact, you can even finance this, right? You put X token in a borrow lending protocol and borrow dollars with it. If you think it's worth like less than two thirds of that, you could even just like put some in there, take the dollars out. Never, you know, give the dollars back. You just get liquidated eventually. And it is sort of like real monetizable stuff in some senses. And you know, at some point if the world never decides that we are wrong about this in like a coordinated way, right? Like you're kind of the guy calling and saying, no, this thing's actually worthless, but in what sense are you right?
Tracy Alloway: (29:15)
Can I just ask on this point, I mean, so are you saying that the value has to derive from everyone agreeing that it's worth something? And I know like on the one hand, that seems like a simple point about crypto, but on the other hand, throughout crypto's history, there have been these different arguments about how it actually gets value, you know, use cases for the underlying technology — for blockchain. Everyone's gonna start migrating stuff on blockchain, and then you're gonna have a real economic use attached to these assets. And that's where the value's gonna come from. But are you saying that it depends more on everyone just agreeing that these are worth something?
SBF: (29:53)
So really what I'd say is that it could come in theory from either. You can sort of get a market cap either because of cash flow and then Warren Buffett's like f*ck this. Like, I'm going to buy this if it's at too cheap of a price, because I'll just buy it and own it and get cashflow from it. And that's great. Or you could see something get market cap in the way that, I don't know, Doge coin or SHIB coin have, where people are just kinda like ‘ha ha’ and then they buy it. And if you're like, that's dumb, it has no cashflow flow. I'm gonna short sell it. You lose all your money. And, you know, those like, at least like over the last few years, those have both been ways that assets have gotten market cap. And I sort of like think that this starts to hint at like, at least some interesting angles on this, because it's not just cryptocurrencies that have had this dynamic, right? How about like, you know, AMC or Hertz or GameStop or meme stocks in general have like a very similar pattern to this and the sort of concept of maybe people will pay something for it even though it doesn't seem traditionally valuable, is not a crypto specific concept. Although it certainly has become like…
Pretty Straightforward I would say.
But a lot of other pearls like this on the whole article.
If you prefer listening to it, this is the original Podcast, where the following interview is taken from:
Sam Bankman-Fried and Matt Levine on How the Crypto Market Really Works