I am still not convinced "actually interesting dApp projects" exist. Everything I have seen is either useful for blockchains only, or would be better off implemented in federated/centralized way.
When I had a conversation with someone who traded lehman positions out of administration profitably years after its collapse and the issues that preceded that with JPMs centralized collateral management procedures and their interest in various decentralized analogues in DeFi that could replace it, its good that they are not looking to seek to convince you.
When I had a conversation with someone who traded interest rate derivatives for a big bank for 13 years and their take on how DEX liquidity pools could be a serious contender for ways how people from tradfi can hedge various forms of risk on chain (esp when those markets break down in various places around the world for various reasons [not limited to regulatory reasons incentivizing breakdowns of a particular market]), its good that they are not looking to convince you.
When I did some work for a nigerian fintech that was able to bypass a lot of crappy local/cross boarder payments infrastructure by leveraging crypto markets in order to help provide access to financing/liquidity and settlement infrastructure for local commodities traders and producers to the global market for their goods, its good that they are not looking to convince you.
The great thing about DAGs/blockchains/DLTs is that people don't have to use them for things if they don't want (provided that they have access to centralized/federated alternatives, and actually trust that their incentives are aligned with their own). I don't have to give a shit about random POAPs or NFTs while being able to still use various chains at the same time as others who are only interested in various chains for doing stuff with POAPs or NFTs who dont give a shit about disintermediaton of various things that go overlooked, even by central bankers (especially if they have been relegated to footnotes in various publicly accessable reports that often go unread by the public at large), in tradfi.
Well, there isn't any particular way, I just started looking at traditional startups on angel list that were making/doing things related to crypto, then quickly became interested in decentralized uncollateralized algorithmic stablecoins and started contributing with pull requests and community discussions. From there I just followed my own interests.
> What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers?
You'd cant go wrong familiarizing yourself with things like decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending (that run the gambit from over collateralized to uncollateralized) protocols, stable coins of various designs (decentralized or not) and concepts like staking, yield farming, liquidity pools, oracles, flash loans. With those terms, should be enough for you to DYOR and see if anything interests you to dig deeper (its ok if non of it does).
> How do you follow the meta?
I don't. I narrow in on the topics that most interest me from my experience working in tradfi and look for analogues in defi, I look for ways defi can make the barriers to do such things accessible to people that don't work on bank desks.
>It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy.
Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way.
These are not mutually exclusive. I just want to find high-quality projects that interest me, which may or may not be already popular/successful. It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo. I can’t even determine the lay of the land because of filter bubbles.
Didn't say they were.
> I just want to find high-quality projects
Of course everyone does, but one won't be able to tell the difference at first, and so its best to jump in on any project related to a particular field of interest, start discussing/asking questions with people in those communities (without trying to allocate any of your financial capital), start analyzing the contracts code, and you'll slowly find out about more projects/ideas/concepts.
> It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo.
Well, what the status quo is isn't really important in the exploratory stages, because no matter where you land, people may have different opinions on what that even is and it will be up to you to determine what's the best course of action for yourself.
For example, traders are OK with centralized companies, but the existing ones are burdened by legacy and regulatory reasons... So a new company which calls itself blockchain-based can evade all those and provide superior experience.
In other words, if you were designing new financial service, and you had the magical power to get regulators off your back and banks to cooperate, what would you choose? Centralized or blockchain based?
Partly (and not really limited to a small team, any one can join a community and contribute to a protocol or build upon it with a protocol of their own with the public abi's of the contracts), but another part missing here is that the financial system as centralized as it is, is still pretty fractured and opaque with various hidden ledgers, hidden risk management systems and hidden counter parties all over the place who don't necessarily trust one another and one doesn't really have any way to get any insight to what risk looks like overall between them (and partly because the entities want to capture the value by being in between the users) from the perspective of the public.
> regulators off your back and banks to cooperate,
It's more than about just regulators, its about users having a say over how every actor can engage with a system. If one address starts making transactions that abuse its position with a protocol (via governance or excessive risk taking within the protocol), users can fork the code, make needed changes to mitigate against such, and withdraw their capital from one protocol and use another easily with the new changes. The users themselves can capture the value while also using the system.
> what would you choose? Centralized or blockchain based?
With permissionless DLTs, you can see credit build up in real time with all counter parties involved with a protocol in a way you cannot with the existing financial system without the need for regulations, that __may__ serve, at best in the short/medium and long term interest of users/counterparties (most of the time, regulations end up really only enabling incumbents to come up with better ways to hide how risk builds up while stifling other competitors out of the market, even if initially they end up making things transparent for some aspects of the financial system). And because of the lack of trust upfront, most user will not want to use a protocol that does not open source/verify its contracts on chain.
With centralized systems in jurisdictions with lesser regulations (i.e caymans, bahamas, etc), the opposite is the case where you have even more opacity into operations and very little incentive to be open about it with ones users or counter parties (think something like FRAX/DAI/FEI [where one can see collateralization in real time on chain with the various assets and the leverage] vs USDT/USDC [one has to trust them at their word or spend resources threatening legal action that may at best on show a snapshot of what constitutes is collateral at any given time, and they have no incentive to share their code for how the manage their operations and risk]).
In a perfect world, where everyone could trust each other (and the banks) to be open and honest all the time with their dealings while allowing for some semblance of psuedoanonymity for those who want it, allow potentially anyone to use such even if some individuals may not like another for whatever reasons that have nothing to do with the system of transaction themselves, write code and systems that are interoperable and easy to build on by others, I would prefer centralized. But that world is a pipe dream.