An Essential Reading List on the Short and Tumultuous History of Decentralized Finance

An Essential Reading List on the Short and Tumultuous History of Decentralized Finance Cornell professor Eswar Prasad’s recommendations are anything but academic. In 2021, Cornell University economist Eswar Prasad published The Future of Money, in which he explored the various ways digital innovation was changing finance. Financial technology startups were enabling mobile payments and peer-to-peer lending, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin were emerging as a store of value, and central banks were considering issuing their own digital currencies. Prasad was also interested in how these changes would shape financial systems and monetary policy around the world. Five years later, many of the transformations he observed have continued, and even intensified, while others have fizzled. Prasad originally thought decentralized finance would upend traditional institutions. “None of that has really come to pass,” he says. Instead the most successful forms of blockchain technology have been centralized. “If you think about stablecoins, they are the antithesis of what the creator of Bitcoin was trying to accomplish,” he says.