Forgive my naïveté, but aren’t you describing a decentralized exchange (DEX) instead of what FTX was? Looks like Uniswap, a popular DEX, is still alive and well.
We have a chance to make finance better with companies that are completely transparent. Where all funds are held by code which can be audited and proven that they can't steal funds.
Decentralized versions of what FTX did already exist:
- Exchanges: Uniswap, Balancer
- Lending Markets: Aave, Compound
- Options: Lyra, Ribbon
- Perps: GMX, Perpetual
We don't have to suffer through scammer after scammer until the end of time, and we don't need overbearing regulation to save us. We just need transparency.
Real finance is already being done in these platforms and I wish more people would take it seriously and realise this can be a much better future for everyone.
Plus because they're open source and composable we can innovate much faster but that's a thread for another time.
What we need is better, more equipped, and less corrupt regulators.
FTX (The entity) going bust and losing all customer funds and you buying a shitcoin and losing your funds.
One is FTX's fault, one is yours. If you are using a DEX, you understand that anyone can add their token to the list if they have enough liquidity.
DeFi has no fiat gateway though, that's the biggest bottleneck. The gateway is the centralized exchanges, and I think people tend to park their money on them once they deposit/convert their dollars.
2. More importantly, an email provider that doesn't make an effort to distinguish between 99% of spam emails and 1% of legit ones is definitely useless and worthless.
Because it's a protocol anyone can build a frontend on top of it to filter out any information they like, just like Email. Zapper, DeFi Saver and Zerion are examples of this. Element Finance runs using Balancer under the hood but you wouldn't know and aren't exposed to any tokens or pools they don't manage.