In 2018, Sergej Kunz was sleeping on an inflatable bed in a former dental-prosthetics workshop. He had moved out of their apartment and relocated into an office he had rented for Ethereum (ET
In 2018, Sergej Kunz was sleeping on an inflatable bed in a former dental-prosthetics workshop. He had moved out of their apartment and relocated into an office he had rented for Ethereum (ETH) mining. It was a "grimy ground-floor space with a basement," with no kitchen, no bathroom, just a toilet and a sink that ran only cold water.
He was living on about 300 euros a month and showering at the gym. He would later describe the period as both the lowest point of his life and a strangely clarifying one.
It was also, more or less, the room where 1inch, a popular decentralized finance ecosystem, began.
This is one of the many stories of a chaotic era narrated across "reDeFine Money: An Insider's Story of Decentralized Finance and Web3."
This is not your conventional book written by a single author. Across four hundred something compact pages, some twenty founders and executives, from Aave, MakerDAO, Curve, PancakeSwap, Dune, Dragonfly, Flashbots, and 1inch, which published the volume, narrate the history of decentralized finance in their own words.
What they tell you is a story about growing up and maturing over the years.
It opens in the garage years filled with hackathons, whitepapers, the "DeFi summer" of 2020, yield farmers chasing protocols named after food.
Then, it closes in the boardroom, with the GENIUS Act of 2025 establishing the first federal framework for stablecoins, JPMorgan and Citi piloting tokenized deposits, and Robinhood offering Europeans tokenized shares of Apple on an Ethereum network.
What was interesting for me is the industry that once promised to make banks obsolete now measures its success by how eagerly banks adopt its plumbing.
The book made me wonder if DeFi will remain a complementary layer beneath traditional finance, or transform it completely.
The book is at its most interesting when it arrives at 2022, the year the industry nearly collapsed under its own weight. Terra's LUNA token spiralled to zero in May, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital liquidated by June, and FTX imploded by November.
The survivors' accounts are genuinely candid in places. Chef Mochi, the pseudonymous head of PancakeSwap, admits to being astonished less by the failures than by the governance vacuum that permitted them.
Eowyn Chen, of Trust Wallet, recalls lying awake wondering whether the industry is standing on true systemic risk.
But everyone came to almost the same conclusion that the things that broke - the exchanges, the hedge funds, the algorithmic experiments - were all centralized.
The decentralized protocols, transparent and overcollateralized, held on.
Related: 1inch co-founder explains how to fix crypto’s fragmented liquidity problem
As an explainer, the book is "designed for a general audience." In fact, the explanations on blockchains, automated market makers, and rug pulls are some of the clearest I have read.
But the founders themselves cannot stay in plain English for long. Within a few pages, the reader will come across terms like "MEV extraction," "order-flow auctions," and "request-for-quote protocols." So for a reader who is very new to the space, it might be handy to keep Google Search open on the side as you read the book.
★★★★½ 4.5 out of 5 — Recommended
The book's real value is not the definitions or the crypto jargon. It is that so many voices, skeptics and true believers alike, came together to tell the story of how they got here. The result is a documented history of decentralized finance and the Web3 era in all its chaos and glory.
Future historians of finance, whatever they ultimately conclude about decentralization, will be grateful that someone got these people on the record while they could still remember being broke, anonymous, and certain.
A free PDF version is available here. The physical copy will be available at events attended by 1inch.
Related: Changpeng Zhao has some scores to settle in 'Freedom of Money'
