Billionaire Alexander Lebedev launches a large ‘anti-bankster’ DeFi project

Renowned Russian entrepreneur and banker Alexander Lebedev announced the creation of a large DeFi project aimed at solving chronic problems of the traditional financial system. He wrote about it in a column for column for Novaya Gazeta.

Lebedev argues that the global banking community has turned into an ‘anti-bank’, whose task is to appropriate clients’ funds and launder dirty money.

“A system of financial apartheid has taken shape that drives people and entire continents into poverty,” he said.

According to the entrepreneur, current quantitative easing policy and the expansion of fiat currency issuance will lead to “one more robbing of apocalyptic scale” after the stock market bubble bursts.

Lebedev, previously listed on Forbes, is convinced that the technologies underlying DeFi, despite the current hype and race for easy money, can fundamentally reshape the financial system in the long run.

“Blockchain and smart contracts make the maintenance of the vast majority of people employed in the financial and credit sector unnecessary, and eradicate ‘banksterism’ as a phenomenon,” he argued.

He regards the adoption of the law “On Digital Financial Assets” in Russia as the first step in the right direction. He also mentioned the development of the digital yuan (DCEP) and the decision by the authorities of the Swiss canton of Zug to accept taxes in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Lebedev’s DeFi project, in his words, will offer users the full range of banking services: currency exchange, deposits, lending, settlement and cash-management services, local and international transfers.

For ForkLog, the project’s development lead Sergey Mendeleev, founder of the Garantex exchange, described its main features. He says plans include providing users access to decentralized exchanges (DEX), lending, asset management (akin to yearn.finance) and the creation of derivative assets within a unified DeFi infrastructure, a kind of DeFi bank.

Mendeleev confirmed that the DeFi-bank will have its own governance token, which will allow users to delegate governance powers to a single centre, in a structure reminiscent of the board of any joint-stock bank.

“At any moment the board can be re-elected, and any of its decisions can be overturned by a vote. Such a structure, proven by decades in the real world, provides much greater opportunities for rapid and flexible management of investors’ capital,” he added.

Ethereum-based infrastructure is being built by the engineers of the project Defirex.org, in which Lebedev previously invested $100,000. Some of the technical solutions will be revealed in October, according to Mendeleev.

In his Novaya Gazeta article, Lebedev recommended it for the attention of the central bank and concluded:

“One thing is indisputable: in the form in which this system exists today, it is leading the global economy to catastrophe.”

Read more about the DeFi ecosystem at the link.

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