Hot take: the only "value" of defi is the ever-increasing sprawl of inscrutable piping that funnels fiat from token buyers to token sellers. Inscrutability serves to hide the fact that at end of the day, no real goods or services are being produced. It's just a money funnel. 1/

The ever-increasing inscrutability creates artificial information asymmetries, arbitrage opportunities, and transaction fees. It's all *knowable* -- it's all on public ledgers -- but tracking the money flows through the ever-growing hairball is a full-time job. 2/

One day, the inbound fiat will slow to a trickle. Then what will your defi tokens be worth? What can you *do* with them, if there's no money passing thru the hairball? If you can't answer this question, you may want to think twice about your holdings (not investment advice). 3/

If you're going to build a business on a blockchain, it's going to be important to your long-term success to tie your token to a *real* good or service you provide. Then at least real money will be flowing to *your* token. 4/

Another thing to think about -- the defi hairball isn't going to disappear. You should take care in your system design that it can't just leech off of your customers' inbound money (or if you allow it, you'll at least get paid for it). 5/

Representing goods and services as tokens has many benefits to a startup, but once the *token itself* becomes the business, then to the rest of the world, it's just another stand in the defi hairball, and just as vulnerable to swings in the volume of inbound fiat. /fin

PS: "Jude, you hypocrite! You work on STX which makes a BTC yield!" The difference is that PoX serves as the base layer of a remittance mechanism that ultimately serves to compensate *users* for the *value they bring* to user-owned *Web apps.* So, money paid for real services.