The need for Bitcoin DeFi (BitFi)

It's been an absolutely nuts, crazy, and terrible week in crypto. I'm treating that one person everyone's talking about like Voldemort at this point. He who shall not be named.That said, In every obstacle, there is opportunity. Where is the silver lining?Bitcoin was birthed out of the '08 market crash and has the potential to create a fairer financial system for the entire globe. All 8 billion of its citizens.I want to think that out of this FTX crash. A strong sense of urgency and need for decentralized finance will come from this. Things that focus on not requiring a middleman, everything is handled by smart contracts, and can be audited in a transparent way thanks to the blockchain.

Thats why i'm happy I had Tycho Onnasch on that pod this week.Zest protocol is one of those projects that is paving the way for DeFi connected to Bitcoin. They are handling a very specific niche to start out. Giving Bitcoin holders access to safer yield on their BTC, and institutions/big companies a way to borrow Bitcoin against their balance sheet.If you're like me. That probably doesn't sound super sexy at first glance. And maybe its not. But it is a super important primitive to build proper capital markets and DeFi on top of Bitcoin.If we want to get off the fiat standard and away from these centralized exchanges. We have to build applications and platforms that are better than the alternative. Currently, it's still difficult to use crypto for most users.Zest Protocol is going after one niche customer and solving a big problem.

In this interview, Tycho and I cover a bunch of topics.I was curious how he got into Bitcoin, Why he decided to ultimately build on Stacks instead of another chain like RSK or Liquid, How he found this particular problem to solve, and much much more.Tycho is one of the beasts building inside Trust Machines.They are building the biggest ecosystem of Bitcoin applications. p.s. Their hiring.

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Extra Bonus: I've been going down the AI rabbithole lately. Some of these writing tools have already made me WAY more productive. Very bullish on the future of this space.Ben's daily newsletter is the best way I've found to keep tabs on everything.Check it out.