Money 2.0 Stuff: The 'killer app' was always speculation

The open finance decentralized call-it-what-you-will finance movement has made impressive strides in the past 12 months. Keen users – there are dozens of us! – will find a variety of products at each level of the financial services stack. Prefer fixed rate lending to variable rate? No problem – use Dharma, or wait until some brave whippersnapper inevitably builds a Compound interface with in-built interest rates swaps. Not a fan of Uniswap’s automated market maker model? Use 0x, or DutchX, AirSwap. Don’t want to cross the spread on dYdX? Use Opyn.  

Yet it is only now that open finance has started to materialize that analysts are beginning to question its addressable market. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin stared directly into the souls of open finance evangelists this afternoon as he pronounced that FinCen and other regulatory agencies would closely ensure that financial service operators abide by the Bank Secrecy Act. Beyond these concerns, the question remains: who is the end user? What kind of demand for margin trading do we expect to see from the unbanked? Other than self-custody, what advantages do decentralized exchanges offer to speculators? How do populations in developing economies access these products without a tailored, likely cash based, fiat on ramp? How do we facilitate undercollateralized lending in innately pseudonymous systems?