Jim Bianco: "I Try to Tell People About DeFi; It Will Come Here and Completely Flatten You"

Jim Bianco has decades of experience as a macro markets researcher. He's been leading his firm Bianco Research since 1990, which has family offices and traditional money managers as clients. He was at UBS and Lehman Brothers before that. He’s as TradFi as it gets, but recently, he’s been falling down the crypto rabbit hole —hard.

He says that while bitcoin was interesting as an investment, to him it’s DeFi that really caught his attention. It was after installing MetaMask, and doing some yield farming and NFT investing, that he realized, DeFi is a new financial system, and it will replace the old one. And the reason is simple: it’s just better.

He has carefully brought this up to his clients, but it’s been tough. Those that don’t underestimate open finance, are waiting to retire before they have to catch up. But Bianco thinks DeFi is taking over sooner than they think, and when it does, they’ll be just like taxi drivers in a ride-sharing world.

Bianco believes the biggest risk is US regulation but he sees it as a risk to the US, not to DeFi. He believes the US’s stifling regulatory environment will force innovation to start elsewhere, it will likely grow in the developing world and then come to the US and as he put it, completely flatten everything else.