Thanks for this, I also wasn’t aware of this forum. I’ll keep this brief and hopefully respond from a slightly different perspective. I only started investing in cryptocurrencies last year and have been steadily learning. I was attracted to Algorand for the reasons that so many have been, but suffice to say I love the stability, low transaction cost, and that the goals align well with my values, and I see huge long term potential.
As an investor, I’d be very very happy with rewards in the 7-10% range, I see the long term value in price appreciation, and rewards as more of a bonus and inflation hedge.
As far as DeFi participation – I will likely have to install the Pera app and dip my toes in a small way to see where I stand, but what I think may be important for “insiders” to know about DeFi adoption is that even the most established systems do a piss poor job of explaining what it actually is and how and why a newcomer would want to be involved. From the outside, it looks a lot like fancy lotto. Sorry.
Let me give you a concrete example of how and why I would want to participate in DeFi, and what I see as it’s actual promise:
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I freelance. I sometimes need to bridge cash flow issues or slow client payments with a credit line or credit cards. This would be an ideal use case for ALGO DeFi, but the way this currently works is utterly inscrutable to someone not deeply steeped in Crypto lingo, and I can’t pay my vendors with a weird stablecoin. I know this is evolving, I’m just restating the (hopefully) obvious point that real DeFi participation is going to ultimately depend on seamless fiat bridging and plain language explanation of what this is and how to, you know, do it.
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Related to above, I would contribute to a DeFi pool if I understood the rewards and risks better, but I use multiple Ledger Ss to store my keys, and that is not going to change. I don’t even like the idea of bluetooth and built in power source in the Ledger X, so my DeFi participation in the near term is likely to be strictly limited to a small bag of tokens that I’m willing to risk in a hot wallet. I don’t know how wide-spread this sentiment is, but I would love to see support in a DeFi platform for more wallet types, maybe using AlgoSigner or similar to authorize transactions?
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I just received a payment from a client. He used Zelle. I love Zelle, it’s fast and free. What I don’t love is the centralization, and the fact that I’m stuck with a big corporate bank in order to use it. If someone can bridge this gap, make using Algorand “Zelle-like” for merchants and buyers, that would be the Grail as far as I’m concerned. I know it takes someone far smarter than me to know what this involves, but in use, it would mean that someone is able to pay in USD, have the funds seamlessly converted to ALGO and sent to the merchant. I know you’re all probably shaking your heads thinking well duh, what do you think we’re working on?? The answer is I don’t know, and neither do any of the countless non-crypto merchants who would sign up today in a heartbeat if we did know.
That’s my two cents, sorry this got lengthier than promised : )