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In DeFi, loan borrowers provide collateral with other crypto-assets, as the process is nearly anonymous. Turley also made an even riskier play, borrowing coins himself so that he could then lend even more.Īll of this is known as yield farming, and it's extremely complex and risky.įor one, there's not much protection if someone defaults on your loan. Still, Turley says he lent his ether and other digital coins and began to collect interest.
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Through DeFi lending, for instance, users can loan out cryptocurrency, as a traditional bank does with fiat currency, and earn interest as a lender. DeFi apps aim to recreate traditional financial systems with cryptocurrency. "I became fascinated with learning who the key players were and staying up on the latest trends." "I'm entirely self-taught - I started interacting with the Ethereum network a lot more," Turley says. Turley felt that he had done enough research to understand what he was getting into, he says. "For me, in 2018, I saw this turning point where was a shift away from speculation to actually building usable products," he says.īy this, Turley is referring to the capabilities of the Ethereum blockchain, as it is used to power the creation of different decentralized applications like DeFi (or decentralized finance) and assets like NFTs (or nonfungible tokens). Cryptocurrencies are volatile, speculative investments. Of course, this was a very risky move - even today, experts warn to only invest money into crypto that you can afford to lose. "It was during the midst of two to three years, when everyone kind of wrote it off, that I was really heavily investing, putting basically all of my income just into ether around like $100." "In 2017, I saw my net worth basically come crashing down," he says. Once Turley graduated in 2018, he got more serious about his cryptocurrency portfolio, he says, even though both bitcoin and ether had recently plunged in value.
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