What I find most concerning about crypto/Web3 is that a great deal of the projects I’ve seen add unnecessarily complex financial elements to areas of our lives that didn’t have them before. Crypto critic Dan Olson recently described this ethos as the construction of an internet where “everything that can be conceptualized as valuable can be numeralized.” “Play to win” games like Axie Infinity, for example, are a dystopian vision of leisure that replicate exploitation we’re used to seeing in real life. I find myself more alarmed about the crypto’s hyper-financialized vision of the world each day but I also lack some of the historical knowledge necessary to offer a strong financial critique of the space. Which is why I was deeply fascinated when I came across an essay by American University law professor Hilary J. Allen titled “DeFi: Shadow Banking 2.0?”