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Fake versions of Tesla Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and other big stocks, as well as a few popular exchange-traded funds, have been created by the projects Mirror Protocol and Synthetix over the past year.
The tokens, and the programming that allows them to trade, are engineered to reflect the prices of the securities they track without any actual purchases or sales of the real stocks and ETFs involved. So far, volumes are just a tiny fraction of those on regulated exchanges. But for crypto enthusiasts, the potential upside is huge. Unlike the modern art and dunks of the non-fungible token universe, these instruments raise questions about how they fit into a global stock market and brokerage industry governed by thousands of pages of rules from dozens of countries. At the moment, it’s a case of innovation that’s way ahead of regulation. Which is exactly how Do Kwon likes it. The co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, the South Korean company that created the Mirror Protocol on its Terra blockchain, Kwon fancies himself as a sort of modern-day Robin Hood of finance -- in the mode of Vlad Tenev or Chamath Palihapitiya. DeFi “is so powerful in unlocking financial services for disenfranchised people around the world,” he said via email, that “it’s better to move fast and break things. Waiting for fragmented regulatory frameworks to crystallize before innovating is counterintuitive.”
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