Founder Friday: August 4th, 2023 — Curve Ball
Written by
Plural Energy
Happy Friday! It has been another amazing week at Plural, but I can’t go into too many details about everything going on…stay tuned in the weeks to come!
The news of the week is the hack of the Curve protocol and the resulting threat to the DeFi space. It has been on my mind a lot and I decided to spend this week’s Founder Friday sharing some thoughts and reflections on it rather than the usual weekly recap.
The TL;DR of the Curve situation:
The Curve Protocol was hacked due to a security issue with the programming language Vyper.
Hackers now control millions of dollars of CRV and can liquidate with the click of a button.
The threat of the above is causing a CRV sell off.
Turns out, the founder of Curve has borrowed over $100M against CRV across many DeFi protocols. If CRV continues to drop his position is likely to be liquidated.
Many feel that this liquidation event could cause a broader contagion within the DeFi space
The Curve situation has helped clarify my perspective on Plural and DeFi in a few ways.
Plural Perspective
This week’s events have no direct impact on Plural. We have yet to launch our protocol and always have taken security incredibly seriously. Importantly, our team has no plans to rely on tokens to support their lifestyles at any point. I also have not been concerned about the wider market implications. The superpower we offer our ecosystem is meant to be long term and lie in the technology — a much more enduring sources of value than month to month market trends.
Moreover, this week’s events have made me more bullish than ever on what we are doing. DeFi needs more uncorrelated assets and sources of real yield in the ecosystem. The value we bring to the renewable energy industry with financial technology and the value we bring to investors with financial access has always been clear. Now the value we bring to the broader ecosystem is even more obvious. But it begs a broader question, what is DeFi for?What is DeFi for?Many of us believe in the crypto future. All of us probably have slight differing views of what a crypto future looks like, but they all generally trend around blockchain being very commonly used rails for the distribution and administration of value. Close your eyes and fast forward as long as you need to for the crypto future you imagine to be real — 5, 10, 25 years, whatever.Now ask yourself, what is DeFi for in the crypto future? For me, it is being meaningfully applied in real industries to make capital formation easier, eliminate nepotism from financial access, bring liquidity to illiquid markets, break down walled financial gardens, and more. In my vision of a crypto future, governance tokens like CRV are not the most common forms of collateral and DeFi lending protocols have many more use cases beyond enabling leveraged trading and liquidity access for protocol founders.“We’re early.” We’ve all heard it and I certainly believe it. Although we are early, things are about to get serious in DeFi. The picks and the shovels have been built and now it is time for this technology to bring real change to real industries and real people. At Plural, DeFi is for something very important: putting more clean energy on the grid. The Plural crypto future is much closer than many think.
