The System Was Never Designed

I found DeFi in 2019. Here's the map I wish I'd had.

My colleagues in Israel spend two hours driving to work. Two hours back.

That's 960 hours a year. 40 full days. Gone. Sitting in traffic.

Why? The roads were never built for the city that grew on top of them. Each generation just stacked onto the last. Layer over layer, until no one could untangle it.

That's not just their roads. That's our money.

If you designed the financial system today, from scratch, you would never build the one we have. Banks. Middlemen. Days of waiting. A small cut taken every time your money moves from one database to another.

We accept it because we never look under the hood. The system counts on that.

But the cracks are showing.

Inflation you feel every week. The same groceries, a bigger number at the till. Money printed faster than anyone can explain. People finally asking who decided this.

Even the giants are moving. Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal are quietly shifting onto new rails.

Those rails have a name. DeFi.

It's simpler than it sounds. Money that runs on open rails instead of through gatekeepers. It moves in seconds. No middleman. No permission.

The next time you send your kid money overseas, it arrives instantly, and all of it arrives. No 3% quietly vanishing on the way.

I stumbled into this in late 2019. I've gone from the degen trenches to the institutional side, watching the next financial system get built from both ends.

And we are still early. Painfully early. Most people are standing at the edge with no map, waiting to be told what to think by someone who's selling them something.

Here's the part that matters for you.

When money gets rebuilt, wealth moves. Not to the smartest people in the room. To the ones who saw it early and understood what they were looking at.

It's happening again. Right now. The only difference this time is that you're here before the crowd.

You don't need to be a genius. You don't need to be an insider. You need a clear map, and someone who reads the terrain honestly.

That's the whole job of this letter.

Every month: a sharp brief on what moved and why. Plain breakdowns of how this stuff actually works. All read through an Asia lens the West keeps missing.

No hype. No coins to sell you. I tell you what I see. You decide what to do with it.

The people who understand this early won't just watch the next system get built. They'll stand inside it.

Be one of them.

Subscribe below. Come read along, and let's make sense of it together.