In town for Token2049 🇸🇬 Big week coming Hmu

We scrutinize every percentage point on a mortgage. We should bring that same obsession with affordability to borrowing against Bitcoin. Every point of interest raises the hurdle: the return your capital needs to earn before you get ahead. My thesis for Bima is simple: make borrowing more affordable by changing how it’s financed. Put a defined portion of future upside to work subsidizing the cash cost today. Target 0% cash interest first. Explore negative rates where the economics support them. Our white paper lays out the approach. What would you build if the cost of capital stopped holding you back?

DATs are becoming the new grift, and the funniest part is that it actually works. Here is the playbook. You take a dead or dying DeFi protocol. No users. No traction. No product. It is basically a warm corpse with a token chart attached. Then you pivot into a DAT. Most people have no idea how NAV-based assets really work. A DAT is essentially a bundle of NAV-denominated instruments wrapped in a marketable equity shell. Preferred equity, bond-like payouts, capped upside, predictable distributions. Nothing wrong with that. It is a legitimate structure. But in crypto, it has become the perfect vehicle for zombified teams to reanimate themselves. The formula is simple. Acquire a management vehicle with a listing. Fold your failed project into it. Take the management cut. Then port pieces of the equity onto chain as “assets.” Custody it somewhere credible. Create internal loops that inflate the apparent TVL. Then walk into the market raising on the story of “institutional NAV flows.” And it works. People who could not raise a Series A are suddenly “raising a DAT.” Forks with no users are landing eight-figure exposure commitments. The NAV wrapper becomes a credibility multiplier. The listing becomes the marketing. The chain integration becomes the pitch. The whole thing self-funds. Is this bad? Maybe. Maybe not. This is how financial engineering has worked for decades. Crypto is just discovering it. But founders need to understand the truth: you are not going to make real money from DeFi at institutional scale. DeFi is a democratization layer for retail. It is not designed for corporate treasuries, asset managers, or balance sheet allocators. No serious institution wants to touch an AMM, farm a points program, or LP in a pool with reflexive risk. The real game is NAV. Equity. Credit. Yield. Productive assets. DeFi is the front end. TradFi is the engine. DATs are simply the newest bridge between the two, and like every bridge, it attracts the zombies first.

Liquidation is illegal on stolen land

I spent time in Japan and South Korea recently, and it became clear that most of the real whales out there are not touching DeFi at all. They are looking for insurance to underwrite the simple action of bringing assets onchain. DeFi as we know it is not the answer. It is a band-aid over a deeper structural gap. A DeFi front end with a real TradFi back end is the bridge people are actually willing to walk across. The demand is there. The capital is there. It’s extremely inefficient with bigger players moving money.