Building liquid, private and fungible barter systems + Reinventing money with Adrian Brink

We have spent a lot of time on DeFi Decoded talking about Layer1’s such as Etheruem and Solana and the question of the so-called “Trilema” where security and speed are traded off against decentralization. And while many new Layer1s have had some early success capturing market share from Ethereum, often it feels like they are trying to ride Ethereum’s coat tails without doing anything really new.

On this episode of DeFi Decoded, Andrew and Alex speak to Adrian Brink, founder of Anoma Labs, which is a truly novel blockchain design. Anoma is a set of protocols for private human coordination with as much privacy as possible. Essentially, Anoma allows any digital asset to function as means of exchange or payment, which all things being equal can create greater liquidity, less slippage, and more privacy in transactions. This is significant as most blockchains focus on unidirectional transactions, i.e. I trade you 1 ETH for your NFT. Anoma is different in that it enables many parties privately to transact in a form of barter system that is as convenient but more private than using money. The end goal of this could be the disruption of money itself, which was created to solve the problems and limitations of barter.