How will DeFi Reshape the Future of Finance?
The AMA Interview for Prof. Campbell Harvey
Figure 1: A photo of the interview (Center: Prof. Campell Harvey; Top Left to Right: Prof.Luyao Zhang, Lewis Tian, William Zhao, and Xinyu Tian)
About Prof. Campbell Harvey
Introduction to Prof. Campbell Harvey:
Figure 2: Prof. Campbell Harvey
Prof. Campbell Harvey is a Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as President of the American Finance Association in 2016, and he has been named “Quant of the Year” for 2020 by the Journal of Portfolio Management. He edited The Journal of Finance — the leading scientific journal in his field and one of the premier journals in the economic profession from 2006–2012. Prof. Harvey obtained his doctorate at the University of Chicago in business finance.
Over the past six years, Professor Harvey has taught Innovation and Cryptoventures at Duke University. The course focuses on blockchain technology covering both the mechanics of blockchains as well as practical applications, and it is extremely popular among Fuqua students. He also teaches Tech Driven Transformation of Business and International Finance. Prof. Harvey also offers a Coursera course “Blockchain Business Models”, which enjoys a fantastic reputation. His recent publication, DeFi and the Future of Finance, is available for pre-order on Barnes & Noble and Amazon and has drawn wide attention from researchers and finance practitioners. In the fall, he will launch a four-course Coursera sequence under the title of DeFi and the Future of Finance. The courses are DeFi Infrastructure, DeFi Primitives, DeFi Deep Dive, and DeFi Risks and Opportunities.
Figure 3: Defi and Future of Finance
Prof. Harvey is also Partner and Senior Advisor to Research Affiliates, LLC, which oversees $200 billion in client investments. He also serves as the Investment Strategy Advisor to the Man Group plc, the world’s largest, publicly listed, global hedge fund provider.
Learn more about Prof. Harvey from his personal website, and follow him on Twitter and Linkedin.
AMA Interview Video
Watch our AMA interview for Prof. Campbell Harvey on our YouTube channel, SciEcon.
Questions 1
William:
In your book DeFi and Future of Finance, you write that “the scaffolding is emerging for a historic disruption of our current financial infrastructure”, and you argue that “those fintech initiatives that use decentralized methods — in particular blockchain technology — have the best chance to define the future of finance”. What leads to these comments in your book?
Prof. Harvey:
DeFi can rebuild traditional finance by lowering transaction costs.
That is a question that deserves more than a few minutes of response, so let me be very clear as to what actually meant by the scaffolding of a new city. So, this is the type of disruption to finance that is not causing a renovation, but a rebuild from the bottom up. DeFi is a very, very powerful idea that we have the potential to completely rebuild finance as we know it.
Figure 4: Western Union Transfer in 1873
In the book, I start with the history of finance, and it’s kind of interesting that we started with a peer-to-peer system, and that was the barter system [1]. But in the last a hundred and fifty years we’ve been stuck, so really not that much has changed, we got the same commercial banks, the same brokerages, the same stock exchanges, the same insurance companies. And it’s interesting, also in the book, I start off with an image of one of the first wire transfers done in the world. Western Union was the pioneer here. It was from 1873. The transfer was $300. What’s interesting for my students is that there was a fee associated with that, and the fee was $9 so the 3%, which is basically what we have today. So little has changed. 3% is what it costs you for a credit card swipe. I transferred some money to Europe the other day, and my bank said “Oh well, you’re such a good customer, so we’ll waive the fee”. But the rate that they quoted was 3% off of the current market rate, so they’re making 3% on that transfer.
What does that mean? It means that we’re stuck in a situation where the cost of transacting is very high. That means the savings rate that you get for putting your money in the bank is zero or maybe negative. Loan rates are very high. The system is not very inclusive. I point out in the book that 1.7 billion people are unbanked in the world today, and probably more are underbanked, and this causes so many problems. For example, say you’re an entrepreneur. You have a great idea, and potentially the idea has a return on investment of 20%. You go to your bank for funding of that great idea, and your bank says, “Well you’re too small. We are not interested. We want to do business with the very largest firms, not you. If you definitely need the money, here is a credit card and we’ll extend the credit limit. And oh yeah, by the way, the interest rate on the credit card is 24%!”
Figure 5: Centralized and Decentralized Finance
What does that mean? It means that this really good project will not be being pursued. And, we need projects like this. That is what drives real economic growth. The US is stuck in this 2–3% growth range, Europe in the 1–2%, Japan in the zero percent. China is doing a lot better, but we all know that the growth rate is decreasing and it is crucial given the demographics of China that the growth rate remains very high. So a lot is at stake here, and our current centralized financial system is basically causing a problem. That problem directly leads to lower investment, lower employment, lower GDP growth. I think that is the big picture context of where decentralized finance comes in.
Questions 2
William:
It’s great to hear how you think centralized finance can contribute to the world economy in general. We also know that El Salvador recently adopts Bitcoin as their official currency for a very similar reason, the high transaction fee you’ve been talking about. How do you think DeFi will reshape the finance industry? We also noticed that the co-authors of your new book are entrepreneurs and investors. How do you think DeFi will reshape the way that scholars research finance and collaborate with practitioners?
Prof. Harvey:
DeFi can disrupt centralized finance, other fintech, and centralized crypto exchanges by enabling users to directly interact with peers.
So I have to admit that the academics are well behind a lot of practitioners on this. So, I was at a conference before the pandemic, and there were 300 finance academics. I was doing a speech, and I said “raise your hand if you know what DeFi means”. There were like two people that put their hands up. Okay, think of that: two people out of 300. More know about it today, but these are supposedly the thought leaders — they are the teachers of the next generation. You mentioned El Salvador is adopting Bitcoin as a legal tender [2] and most of the news is on Bitcoin: it’s going up or down, or Elon Musk is saying something about Dogecoin or Bitcoin.
Figure 6: Apps and DApps
Decentralized finance is something completely different. So decentralized finance is not about speculating in Bitcoin. Decentralized finance mainly focuses on the Ethereum blockchain [3], which is a different (but related blockchain) than Bitcoin, and crucially it allows for smart contracts or what we call decentralized apps (dApps) [4]. The key thing here is with a dApp you interact with your peers. So, currently when we have an App, like on our phone, we’re interacting through a middle person collecting data, pushing advertising to us, exploiting us by selling our data. But decentralized finance is completely different, because it is truly a peer-to-peer system. We’re interacting with a computer program, a smart contract [5] that exists in the Ethereum blockchain, which is completely transparent so anybody can see it. The code is available. If you’re doing business with somebody, you know exactly what their balance is. You see all of the history of transactions. There’s no middle person to make a spread. There is seamless interoperability between these applications.
So today, for example, it takes two or three days for me to transfer money from my bank to my broker, or vice versa. There’s nothing like that in decentralized finance. These applications work together, and any transfer is immediate. So indeed, the difference between transaction settlements doesn’t exist. If you buy a stock in the US today, it takes two days before the stock’s ownership is transferred to your name. In decentralized finance there’s nothing like that. When you do the transaction, the asset is signed over to your private key, and it happens at the same time as the trade.
I think it’s also useful for people to realize the difference between (DeFi) and let’s say, trading with a centralized exchange like Binance [6] or Coinbase [7]. Those are centralized, so there’s a broker that is just like traditional brokers, but they deal in decentralized finance. So there’s a middle person. They make a spread. So, again there’s just no difference (between centralized exchanges and traditional finance).
Figure 7: Decentralized Exchanges
In decentralized finance, when we talk about the exchange, we talk about DEX or decentralized exchange [8]. This is where you’re trading with an algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re a buyer or a seller. And you can exactly
Figure out the price that you’re going to get given the balances that are in this algorithm in terms of the liquidity pool. People supply liquidity, they get paid for that, there are small transaction fees that are associated with this, and those transaction fees just basically reward those providing liquidity (or provide a backup pool of money for risk management). There’s no brick and mortar, there’s no back office, there’s no headquarters, and there’s no board of directors. This is an algorithm.And it reduces costs. You know economists disagree upon a lot of things. But there’s one thing that they agree upon, and that is if you’re reducing transaction costs, that’s really good for the economy in general. This is exactly what this disruption is doing. I’ll give you an example of just how big this disruption is. I was invited to speak to one of the major stock exchanges in the world, which remains unnamed. I flew in, and I knew I was going to talk about blockchain-type of topics, but there was no agenda specifically. I got there, and they had their board of directors, which was interesting plus all their senior management. They basically had just one question, “How long do we have?” OK, so the centralized institutions know that it’s a matter of time that they will be disrupted by this technology. Even for centralized institutions like Binance, their major competitors are the decentralized exchanges, and they know it. If you look at trading volume, you can see this.
It’s kind of interesting the way I look at it. There’s a lot of fintech out there, and most of the fintech reduces some frictions in traditional centralized finance. So, you get to trade, let’s say, your stocks with a lower fee than (trading) traditionally, which is good for investors. But it’s all temporary, in my opinion. So fintech that uses the legacy centralized financial structure will be disrupted by decentralized finance. While it’s good in the short term, it probably just doesn’t have the legs for the future.
Decentralized finance, well as young right now, is less than 1% into this disruption. It’s on the right path, and that path will have many bumps in the road, and my book is very careful to point out the risks of this innovation. Any new technology has a risk. If you want something risk-free, then you’re not going to advance, so you’re satisfied with that zero percent (or negative) real economic growth. So you need to take risks, and there will be challenges. We need to expect there will be issues.
Figure 8: Blockchain Forks
But the good thing about decentralized finance, given that everything is open-source, is that somebody if they see an improvement that can be made on an existing protocol [9], they can just fork [10] it, which means you just copy the code, make your change and then launch a competitor. Can you imagine that happening in traditional finance? For example, you have some interface with your bank and you make a suggestion to make it a little easier for the user, it can take years to actually change. This can happen in less than a day (in DeFi). You make the change, you have a new product, and you launch it. And for everything that fails, you
Figure out how it failed, you fix it, and you relaunch. So this idea of fork-ability is a really powerful idea, and it allows for these protocols to change and improve very quickly. In centralized finance these commercial banks have hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code, it is so difficult for them to do anything innovative, whereas in decentralized finance it’s very quick.
Questions 3
William:
Thank you so much for talking so much about DeFi! I totally agree with you that there’s too much attention given to Bitcoin, dogecoin, and speculation, but actually it is the DeFi that really represents the future because it hugely reduces friction in the economy while improving efficiency and speed of innovation.
So we know that you have taught the class “Innovation and Cryptoventures” at Fuqua for many years, and you have held a Coursera class “Blockchain Business Model”. Why do you think it is so important for students, scholars, and business leaders to understand blockchain technology? What is the best way to learn, teach, and practice blockchain in finance?
Prof. Harvey:
People need to understand DeFi to be disruptors rather than disruptees.
Yeah, so it’s interesting, again this is a great technological innovation. I’m glad that the students at Duke are able to access my course. Indeed I have two courses at Duke. One is “Innovation and Cryptoventures”, which is the DeFi course. I’ve also taught another course called “Tech-driven Transformation and Business”. We do more than blockchain there. We also do quantum computing and brain-machine interface. So, those are the three technologies that I believe which are just incredibly disruptive for the future.
But the goal here is really simple for me: I want to position my students so that they have a chance to have a vision of the future. They need to make very important decisions that impact the value of their human capital. And I want them to be disruptors rather than disruptees. So, my goal is to present the vision of the future for my students. I’m not a person that does case studies, which to me is the study of the past. I’m very unconventional and I enjoy interacting with my Duke students.
But, I have more ambition, and that involves reaching out to the rest of the world. My book is part of that, but I’m also launching a learning experience on Coursera that is called DeFi and the Future of Finance. It consists of four different courses. It follows the book and structure but there’s a lot of extra material that I work in. So it begins with the first course on fundamentals, DeFi Infrastructure, that talks about what money actually is, the history of money, and some of the key concepts that underlie DeFi.
The second course is called DeFi Primitives. Here I talk about the building blocks of DeFi and how those building blocks actually work, as some of these algorithmic formulas for, for example, a bonding curve [11]. Indeed, in the very first part of the course I put up a word cloud and it has about 75 different words.
Figure 9: Word Cloud in the course “Innovation and Cryptoventures”
Some of the words you actually know, but you don’t know them in the context of DeFi, like minting or slashing. So, the primitives go through many of those words, and by the time we finish the second course, students are in pretty good shape on the structure.
Figure 10: Top 10 DeFi Projects
Then the third course is called DeFi Deep Dive. And there I go and examine the leading protocols. I look at Compound [12], Aave [13] and MakerDAO [14]. And then I look at exchanges: Uniswap V2 and V3 [15], and look at Balancer [16] as an alternative. And then I look at derivatives markets including dYdX and tokenization. That’s very practically-oriented to understand the key protocols in DeFi.
The fourth course is the DeFi Risks and Opportunities. So there’s an extensive discussion of the major risks, for example, scalability. We just don’t have the capacity that centralized finances have. So maybe you can do 18 transactions per second on Ethereum. But Visa is doing 25,000 and can do 75,000. That’s going to change next year in Ethereum but it’s still a risk that we need that throughput to be greatly increased.
Figure 11: Environmental Risk of Bitcoin
Also the environmental risk. So, for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum use a very energy-intensive algorithm to ensure the security of their blockchain and much of that energy is not clean. So, that poses a significant risk. Ethereum will mitigate that risk or eliminate it effectively when they switch to a different mechanism called Proof of Stake [17]. Bitcoin is not going to change, but again I don’t really talk that much about Bitcoin in my courses. It’s the first crypto, it needs to be understood, and I expect that we will see the environmental risk for Bitcoin mitigated when we move the energy-intensive mining from areas like China, where it’s really carbon-intensive to areas that have locked, clean energy, which means countries like Iceland that have essentially unlimited geothermal which is clean but they can’t export the energy because of their isolated location. So I think that would be resolved also but the risks are really important to understand.
William:
Yes, thank you, Prof. Harvey. It’s really great news for us to hear that you have launched your course module, and I think the fellow students here and our other audience will be very interested in having such a systematic education on DeFi. It will be great, and we will really appreciate your work.
Prof. Harvey:
Just to be clear that the four-course sequence is not completed yet, so it’s not launched yet. I’m working on it. I’ve shot two and a half of the courses, and next week I’ll finish the other one and a half. And it will be launched within hopefully a month on Coursera.
Questions 4
William:
So the next question will be on the Internet Computer (IC) [17]. We mentioned this a bit in the email, but I will introduce it here again. It’s the first frictionless blockchain with web speed and internet-scale throughout the world. It extends the functionality of the public Internet so that it can host backend software, transforming it into a global computing platform. Imagine a Twitter or even TikTok built on a blockchain. Do you think IC, or any other decentralized technology, can solve the Blockchain trilemma decentralization, scalability, security)? How do you think the IC can possibly empower the financial industry?
Prof. Harvey:
Blockchain has huge potential in many more applications.
Again you pose a very complex question. So, there are many initiatives going on in terms of blockchain technology. And it’s really important to realize that the low-hanging fruit for blockchain technology is the financial applications, and that’s what we’re mainly seeing right now.
But there are many other applications of this technology and the appeal is very significant. Because if you have a secure blockchain like the Bitcoin blockchain or Ethereum blockchain, it is basically a record that can’t be tampered with, so you can’t edit the past. Immutability is a key characteristic of blockchain technology. For example, hackers and nefarious actors, or even the government can’t go in and change the past. So if this says you own something in that blockchain record, then you own it; nobody can take that away from you.
Figure 12: Blockchain Technology
So, this is a very attractive technology for many different applications. And we do study in my course some of these applications outside of finance. It can be used for identity, which is a very logical application. It can be used for another kind of low-hanging fruit application — the supply chain. It exists today, where you walk into your store, there’s some lettuce, it has a QR on it, you scan the QR, and you know where that lettuce was picked, whether it’s organic or not, the day it was picked, every single hop on the supply chain, and how long it has been on the shelf at the local store. That’s all blockchain-based, and again nobody’s going to edit it. So, you can imagine something on the shelf for like a week, and the store edited it (changes the label) saying, we just put it out a few hours ago. We don’t want that to happen. It’s credible to do this (with blockchain).
Figure 13: Internet Computer
You mentioned the Internet. The whole DNS [18], the structure, is highly centralized. And that needs change. The Internet initially was an idea of decentralization, but it isn’t decentralized, and there are many different challenges. But blockchain technology offers the possibility of a truly decentralized Internet. What will happen: decentralized file storage, decentralized computing. All of these actually exist today in a limited form: they haven’t been fully realized, but they will be realized. Energy, electrical grids, there are just so many applications here of this technology. We’re just at the beginning. This is, again, the tip of the iceberg, and we are at less than 1% of the realization, so there’s a lot of upsides here.
You mentioned how to learn about crypto space. It’s hard to find good sites for this, but it’s an extraordinary opportunity for young people especially. This is exactly where you want to be, at less than 1% point in the disruption because that means that you can be part of this revolution. And that means there are so many opportunities. Don’t be discouraged if you’re not a computer scientist. The most important trait here is creativity. You identify a problem, and you determine whether blockchain is a viable solution to that problem. If it is, then armed with your idea, and you can find a developer to help you out with it. So, my course is called Innovation and Cryptoventures. The innovation is that my students need to propose a new idea. And you need to propose an idea like a venture capitalist would be receiving an idea. I’m the venture capitalist, and I’m the one that’s assessing the quality of the ideas. It’s 50% of the grade, and I’m pretty tough.
Question 5
William:
It’s very inspiring as young people to hear you saying blockchain is only a tip of the iceberg currently, and I think your effort would certainly encourage more people to jump into this field! The last question today is about risk, as you mentioned in our previous talks and also in your book on the seven risk factors of DeFi. We know some people have criticized that cryptocurrencies provide convenience for say, ransomware as we’ve seen in the recent Colonial case, and money laundering. We have also seen concerns from the policymakers from the US, EU, and China about the use of cryptocurrencies. How do you think these risk factors may endanger the prospect of DeFi? Do you see any potential solutions to the risk factors that you mentioned in the book?
Prof. Harvey:
The benefits cryptocurrencies bring outweigh the risk factors.
A great question, and a great question to end up on. This is really important. Any new technology has got some risk. As I mentioned earlier, if there’s no risk, there’s no upside. That’s kind of the most basic rule of finance.
Figure 14: Cash of El Chapo
So, there is a risk, and there is some criminal activity that is done with cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in particular. But it is minor compared to the criminal activity that’s done with cash. I showed a picture of this famous Mexican drug lord called El Chapo and the raid of his house in Mexico. There’s a room that has got 200 million dollars of one-hundred-dollar bills. Why? Cash is anonymous.
It’s a big misunderstanding to think that Bitcoin is completely anonymous. You can be anonymous initially. You can set up an address and say, “send me this ransom and I’ll unlock your hard drive”. Everybody sees that the ransom transfer. Everybody sees the money goes to that address, and then you might try to mix it around by sending it to some other addresses. Everybody sees the other addresses. Every transfer is visible to anybody, including law enforcement. And then you have to get it out. So how do you monetize it? How do you eventually transfer that Bitcoin to something else? It might be dollars, it might be gold, and it might be diamonds. Well then, you have to go off-chain. Again, this is a system where the ledger cannot be altered, so your illegal transaction is there forever. When you’re caught and you go to court, it is swift justice, because the ledger shows this illegal transaction. Nobody can change the ledger. You’re done. So, it turns out that things like Bitcoin or Ethereum are probably the last technology that you want to use for doing anything illegal, because they are public — the ledger is public.
Figure 15: Blockchain Transactions are Transparent
People talk about this and it gets a lot of press, just like Bitcoin gets a lot of press. Oh well, there’s some Colonial pipeline ransomware and stuff like that. That will continue to go on. But there’s a bigger issue here that there are some cryptos that are truly anonymous [19]. This issue is not just an issue with cryptocurrency, but it is an issue in general. We have our encrypted apps where we can send messages that nobody else can see, or we can talk or do a video completely encrypted. That also potentially enables terrorism or illegal activity, which is a bigger issue than blockchain, and it’s a mistake to just focus on some of the illegal activity. I asked my students what they think the proportion of one-hundred-dollar bills in terms of all the US currency actually is, and they’re thinking well, maybe 10% or 15%. It is 79%. And nobody has one. If you try to go to a store and pay with a hundred-dollar bill, they’re not going to take it. So where are those hundred-dollar bills? El Chapo.
So, this criticism is largely a false criticism, nevertheless, it is discussed in public, we have to deal with that because it’s kind of a media-friendly story. But again, we need to look beyond. For any new technology, there will be some costs, so this might be one of the costs. But you need to weigh that with the benefits, and the benefits are VERY substantial. This is, again, like a revolution. And I feel that my academic colleagues that are studying banking, and there’s a large number of academics that are in that field, are really missing something big. For those that go to traditional banks for their jobs, I tell them, go there, and then the first day you’re there, you should be looking to jump to the next job, because there isn’t a long-term future for you in traditional banking. And it really comes down to what I said at the beginning of our talk, that this is a revolution, and you have the opportunity to be part of it, or, be swept away by it.
William:
Thank you, Prof. Harvey! I think it’s a great response to the risk factors, and I really like how the benefits outweigh the risks in decentralized finance. I think your insights are really valuable for us, especially the young people in our audience at Duke and DKU. I believe that our conversation today will inspire more people to think more about DeFi and even work on it. Thank you again for joining the interview today!
Prof. Harvey:
Great, thank you for inviting me.
Relevant Materials
[1] Barter System
In trade, barter is a system of exchange in which participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange.
[2] Legal Tender
Legal tender is anything recognized by law as a means to settle a public or private debt or meet a financial obligation, including tax payments, contracts, and legal fines or damages. The national currency is legal tender in practically every country.
[3] Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH or Ξ) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. After Bitcoin, it is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain.
[4] Decentralized Application (DApp)
A DApp is a computer application that runs on a decentralized computing system. DApps have been popularized by distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as the Ethereum blockchain, where DApps are often referred to as smart contracts.
[5] Smart Contract
A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control, or document legally relevant events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement.
[6] Binance
Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange that provides a platform for trading various cryptocurrencies. It was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao. Binance is currently the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world in terms of the daily trading volume.
[7] Coinbase
Coinbase Global, Inc. is an American company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, and as of March 2021, was the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume. On April 14, 2021, Coinbase went public on the Nasdaq exchange via a direct listing.
[8] Decentralized Exchange (DEX)
Decentralized exchanges (DEX) are a type of cryptocurrency exchange, which allows for direct peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions to take place online securely and without the need for an intermediary.
[9] Decentralized Network Protocol
Peer-to-peer networks, where no entity controls an effective or controlling number of the network nodes, running open-source software also not controlled by any entity, are said to affect a decentralized network protocol.
[10] Fork
In the blockchain, a fork is defined variously as “what happens when a blockchain diverges into two potential paths forward”, “a change in protocol”, or a situation that “occurs when two or more blocks have the same block height”.
[11] Bonding Curve
A bonding curve is a mathematical concept used to describe the relationship between price and the supply of an asset.
[12] Compound
The compound is a protocol on the Ethereum blockchain that establishes money markets, which are pools of assets with algorithmically derived interest rates, based on the supply and demand for the asset.
[13] Aave
Aave is an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol for earning interest on deposits and borrowing assets. It shifts from a decentralized P2P strategy to a pool-based strategy.
[14] MakerDAO
The Maker Protocol, also known as the Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD) system, allows users to generate Dai by leveraging collateral assets. Dai is a decentralized, unbiased, collateral-backed cryptocurrency soft-pegged to the US Dollar.
[15] Uniswap (V2 and V3)
The Uniswap protocol is a suite of persistent, non-upgradable smart contracts that together create an automated market maker, a protocol that facilitates peer-to-peer market-making and swapping of ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
Website, Difference between V2 and V3
[16] Balancer
The balancer is an automated portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor. One of the main differentiators from Uniswap and Suchi is the amount of flexibility and control it provides to pool owners.
[17] Internet Computer (IC)
Developed by DFINITY Foundation, the Internet Computer extends the functionality of the public Internet so that it can host backend software, transforming it into a global computing platform. Using the Internet Computer, developers can create websites, enterprise IT systems, and internet services by installing their code directly on the public Internet and dispense with server computers and commercial cloud services.
[18] Domain Name System (DNS)
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and decentralized naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities.
[19] Cryptos that are truly anonymous
For example, Monero is a cryptocurrency where every user is anonymous by default. Unlike the transparent blockchains of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the sender, receiver, and amount of every single transaction on Monero are hidden.
Acknowledgments:
Interviewee: Prof. Campbell Harvey
Interviewer: William Zhao
Executive Editors: William Zhao, Xinyu Tian, Ziliang (Lewis) Tian
Advisor and Chief Editor: Prof. Luyao Zhang