Telcoin founder Claude Eguienta on the DeFi culture and stablecoins in 2021

The decentralized finance (DeFi) market has surged massively in the past year, with the launches of Uniswap, Compound, Yearn Finance, and others attracting thousands of users and billions of dollars in mid-2020.

The sub-space has since blossomed into a full-blown bull market that has, at times, mimicked the run of 2017. The one difference is that while the majority of projects of that time had zero usecases and real-world functionality, this time is all about actual yield-generating protocols, mutual funds, credit tools, and much more.

Speaking about the DeFi market’s rise today is Claude Eguienta, who joined Alex Fazel, the host crypto edutainment channel Cryptonites.

Eguienta’s the founder of Telcoin, an ambitious project based on the Ethereum blockchain that connects existing mobile money platforms to a decentralized network, paving the way for a globally marketed remittance service aligned with the telecom industry.

He’s also one of the minds behind Mimo Capital, touted as the world’s first decentralized EUR stable token. Here is a small snippet of Eguienta’s thoughts on the DeFi market and stablecoins.

On MIMO and EUR stablecoins

Eguienta kicked the show off by sharing his motivation behind the Mimo project. The story started when he was working on Telcoin based out of Tokyo, Japan, and networked with other developers and advisors who later observed a peculiar trait in their userbase.

“We had a lot of users in Europe and a lot of followers in Europe in the community. And yet, like everything stable, every time you wanted to leave the risk of volatility, you had to go back to USD,” he said.

This, however, laid the grassroots for what later became Mimo. “Why did you always have to go back to USD and then you look at alternatives and you see that they’re all centralized,” he stated, adding that when’s the Mimo team realized they could build a decentralized stablecoin in the form of a Euro-based version.

VCs in DeFi

The DeFi market is now valued at over $250 billion, and despite its decentralized ethos, it’s showing signs of traditional finance-like behavior in the form of venture capital funds “investing” in the crypto space.

Such VCs oft-take part in closed-door presales where they accumulate tokens at a very, very low price compared to its listing price—leading to an instant and immediate profit whenever the token trades on the open market.

“You cannot, on the one hand, promote the idea of decentralization of everything you can, and yet give 50% of the control to venture capitalists who are like not working for you, if you do want more of a decentralized finance world, right?,” stated Eguienta, who looked visibly irked by the fact.

He stated it was why he made Mimo a fair, transparent platform that allowed each investor an equal opportunity to gain tokens. “You just provide liquidity, just borrow, and well, you will be rewarded governance tokens,” he noted, adding:

“And because you will have some skin in the game, you will have used the software and you would have really used the platform, you would understand and maybe you would be it would be more natural to give you some part of the control of it.”

(Catch all of Eguienta’s thoughts about DeFi and stablecoins in the Cryptonites episode, available for streaming in its entirety right below!)

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