fivebinaries

Cardano is missing a foundational DeFi primitive. Payroll, vesting, DAO grants, structured payouts — today they happen off-chain, through custodians. Introducing Nula: Cardano's first token streaming protocol. 🧵

It hasn’t funded DeFi well. The vast majority of that money has gone into DeFi protocols that never even achieved a mainnet release (no fault of catalyst). DeFi protocols are responsible for nearly all of the onchain activity on Cardano, and thus all of the transaction fee revenue generated by the treasury. DeFi makes or breaks a blockchain ecosystem, if you don’t carve out a large enough share of the DeFi market to achieve sustainability then you are toast. We need to win in this market; the acquisition of all other markets depend on it. If you don’t have a sizable portion of the DeFi market, you cannot break into the enterprise market. The only exception to this is Bitcoin and competing with Bitcoin for the store-of-value market is a death sentence. We don’t have intent / solver markets on mainnet (ie. No cow swap equivalent) We don’t have liquid restaking / shared security markets (ie. No EigenLayer equivalent) We don’t have onchain insurance protocols (no nexus mutual) We don’t have flash-loan services (No AAVE flash loans; makes 99% of automated trading strategies in other ecosystems completely infeasible here) We don’t have cross-margin perp futures (no GMX) We have no blockspace supply-chain protocols. We have no programmable DEX pools (hook contracts) We have no linked savings accounts (no PoolTogether) We have no crowdfunding protocols (no juicebox) We have no token streaming protocols (no superfluid) We have no composable leverage (no Gearbox) We have no self-repaying loans (alchemix) We have a few DEXs and one serious lending protocol, and that’s it. Even if these were the best protocols in the world it wouldn’t matter, because DeFi relies on composability, on cross protocol looping strategies, on the presence of all the other defi primitives which serve as building blocks to facilitate meaningful financial activity. With just a DEX all you can do is swap; the vast majority of financial activity involves more than just trading one asset for another.