With every market cycle, the same fundamental issue causes even greater pain – centralisation ultimately does not work for users.
As always it’s regular people, not the billionaires playing games, who are most impacted by the current FTX situation and wider FTT ecosystem collapse. Many new industry participants used FTX as their first touch point and again have had a perceived safe haven torn down at incredible speed.
We are, quite frankly, disgusted.
Celsius, Luna and now FTX. All collapsing within the past six months and all impacting very real people. But the list of centralised and opaque actors causing severe distress stretches back to the very inception of Bitcoin.
rhino.fi was founded on the belief that, as an industry, we can do things better, and we firmly stand behind that promise.
Building a fully self-custodial platform as an alternative to a centralised exchange has been incredibly challenging. It makes things more technically difficult, more operationally difficult, and it makes competing with the likes of FTX and Celsius hard due to lack of flexibility.
But we do it because, ultimately, it is safer for users in the long run. Even if we wanted to borrow, lend out, or gamble with customer funds, we could not.
The evidence is that when the temptation to reach into the cookie jar of customer funds is there, even the largest entities like FTX and Celsius will eventually do so.
We are building the best DeFi aggregator slowly and steadily because there is no other way for a self-custodial platform. DeFi still has a long journey ahead but the light is on the horizon.
Wallets are getting better, Layer 2 is reaching prime time, and core DeFi products & infrastructure are becoming more battle-tested.
As an industry we need to make sure incidents like yesterday never happen again. Decentralisation is now not just a ‘nice to have’ but is more essential than ever. We need to make sure that centralised services are never again the rails to decentralized finance and financial freedom.
The rhino.fi team
