Alternative lenders are generally considered a low interest rate phenomenon: when interest rates are low, money is cheap, so alternative lenders can compete with banks because their cost of capital is comparable to the cost of capital of banks. Then, when the interest rates regime changes, things get much tougher: cost of capital for alternative lenders rises and it becomes increasingly difficult...
RWA#5 – All you need is Bond – Pt2
The microcosm of DeFi has been highly successful in the last few years in creating a set of new financial rails based on a new paradigm. These financial rails have been extensively used by a niche of power users who played with them in many different ways, with the clear goal of speculating. So far, a very limited intersection exists between the new DeFi rails and off-chain economic...
RWA#1 – Centrifuge: Real World Assets for Crypto investors
From my humble point of view, the most interesting piece of financial innovation in circulation today is what a small group of decentralized finance startups is doing: trying to bring real world assets on-chain. Roman style mosaic of robot lending money – DALL-E What these companies are doing is fascinating, and yet extremely challenging at the same time. They are trying to migrate...
RWA#0 – Credix: capital markets as a service
The goal of this post is to provide a deep-dive in one of these decentralised credit marketplaces Credix, to analyze its capital-markets-as-a-service proposition and contextualize it in the wider lending space.
Buy now, pay later, a new payment standard?
The goal of this post is to provide a guide on what buy now pay later is, which are its main dynamics, why it is so successful and how profitable it will stay in the longer run.
DeFi Lending 2.0: Reputation & Real World Assets
The main argument of the essay is that, in order to really become a mainstream product, DeFi lending will have to expand across two main dimensions: reputation and real world assets.
A lending stack: merging DeFi with Traditional Finance
Last year, I wrote a post defining the most important component of a banking stack. This post is the complement to that one, and i describes the core elements of a modern lending stack, adding some new DeFi pieces to the architecture.