
Episode #250
Will Aave Eat Wall Street? with Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo of Aave Labs
Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo, Chief Strategy and Business Officer at Aave Labs. Listen in as they trace how a peer-to-peer ETH lending experiment called ETHLend became the largest lending protocol in crypto — $80 billion in deposits and roughly $40 billion in loans at peak, on under a thousand lines of code and no back office. Luigi explains why overcollateralized lending doesn't care who you are, what borrowers actually do with the money, and why flows moved to Aave when Celsius and BlockFi blew up. Plus: why Clarity failing may advantage the risk-tolerant, why bank deposit economics break when the floor on a checking account rises, why every fintech he speaks to is already building on DeFi, and why tokenized equities are the most interesting thing to hit crypto since stablecoins.

