Story no.1: Why I joined DeFi I was born in Chisinau, Moldova, in the 90’s, a very confusing time for post-USSR countries going through privatization and having to shift from communism to capitalism basically overnight. By that time, Moldova, just like many USSR countries that suffered from millions of people exiled to concentration camps in Siberia, was lacking intelligent and honest leaders who’d have a clear plan of action to restore the country after USSR collapsed. And it happened overnight, so there was no blueprint, no system, no ideas in place for how to build a new capitalist economy. But a few people, including some who had fled Russia in the 90s, took good advantage of privatization and chaos in my country. We had introduced our own currency but started facing hyperinflation quite soon. And as more men in power started perpetually stealing from people, banks were facing insolvency. I vividly remember being maybe 5 years old when my aunt had to look after me on a cold winter day, and she took me with her to the bank. We stood in a long line for hours, with her hoping she could recover at least part of her hard-earned money from the bank that just announced bankruptcy. She never recovered her money, and started storing all of her cash at home for many years to come. Trust was once again, broken. When I was 14, my parents thought it would be a good idea to get some work experience over the summer. So I worked at an office that deals with companies bankruptcy, organizing files and answering phone calls. I worked every summer there for 3 years. I’ve seen it times and times again in that job: businessmen starting companies, apartment buildings, taking private loans or even down payments for these apartments, spending the money on their own real estate abroad then fleeing the country. There was no transparency, no systems, no prosecution, just fraud and corruption. I’ve seen loads of rug pulls before I even knew what a rug pull is. Perhaps this is why nothing in crypto ever really shocked me. There is a very famous case of bank fraud in Moldova. In 2014, $1 BILLION disappeared from 3 local banks. For reference, our GDP in 2013 was less than $10B. How could such an elaborate scam involving major financial institutions take place? Trust was broken again. All these events impacted me a lot growing up. I was dreaming of a world with more transparency. Where the system is so well designed, that it cannot be corrupted at the order of an oligarch. It cannot fail. Because the system I grew up with failed me, my family and my fellow citizens. In 2018 I was studying business in Copenhagen. I started diving into FinTech, and quickly learned about this totally different thing being built. It was called DeFi. It was the hope I had been looking for all along: a decentralized, transparent new financial system that cannot be tampered with, which anyone can participate in, regardless of their location, status, race or gender. All written in code, not papers. To me, it felt like a calling. I spent all of 2019 reading whitepapers and articles about crypto in my dorm room, and in 2020, I started working at a media outlet called The Tokenizer, reporting on DeFi & tokenization. In 2021, I joined MakerDAO (now Sky), and… The rest is history. To be continued…