"I Want People to Know Anything That Goes Against DeFi as a Tool for Financial Liberty" Chris Blec

In this week’s episode, I interview Chris Blec, a researcher advocating for transparency in DeFi. He was first drawn to cryptocurrencies through Bitcoin. He decided to go into crypto full time, first consulting with a token project in the ICO days, and later, in late 2019, by creating a YouTube channel where he aimed to educate users on how DeFi projects work under the hood. Here is where he came across what has become his focus since; the actual centralization behind supposedly decentralized protocols.

Chris realized developers behind many projects hold so-called admin keys, which offer a way to unilaterally change projects’ code and even drain users’ funds. His focus on decentralization theatre has also led him to criticize tokenized governance, which he argues could make DeFi a plutocracy.

He has leveraged his background in marketing to very loudly question his targets, with Twitter threads, reports on his research site DeFi Watch, and open letters. His most recent decentralization crusades have been focused on Polygon and Uniswap. All these questions and what appears to be constant criticism inspired some in the DeFi community to try to raise $50M for him to quit crypto. Meanwhile, Cointelegraph wrote a feature piece calling him maybe the most annoying man in DeFi. Chris seems unphased.

To him, he’s just doing his part so that we don’t waste this opportunity to make a new, better financial system. He may be rubbing some people the wrong way but he believes that thanks to him, users have learned about the risk of admin keys and, maybe, DeFi is a bit safer and more decentralized because of it.

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