DeFi is Eating CeFi

For centuries, access to financial services has been controlled by gatekeepers—predominantly white men in suits who decided who was creditworthy, who could open accounts, who could participate in wealth-building. Women, people of color, immigrants, and the poor have been systematically excluded from these systems. DeFi is changing this, and the incumbents are terrified.

The Gatekeepers' Monopoly

Traditional finance (CeFi) requires permission. You need a credit score, an address, identification documents, and often the right connections. These requirements disproportionately exclude women— especially in developing countries where property rights, employment records, and banking access are denied to us by law or custom.

In the United States, women couldn't open bank accounts without a male co-signer until 1974. Globally, over one billion women remain unbanked today. This isn't an accident—it's a feature of systems designed by and for men.

Permissionless Finance

DeFi protocols don't ask for your gender, your race, your credit history, or your connections. They ask only: do you have the collateral? Can you meet the protocol's transparent, publicly auditable rules? This is radical equality encoded in software.

A woman in rural Kenya can access the same lending rates as a hedge fund manager in Manhattan. A trans person denied banking services can still earn yield on their savings. An immigrant without a credit history can participate in global finance. This is the promise of DeFi.

The Feminist Case for DeFi

Economic independence is the foundation of all other freedoms. Without access to financial services, women cannot save, invest, start businesses, or leave abusive relationships. DeFi provides these tools without requiring permission from the systems that have historically oppressed us.

This doesn't mean DeFi is perfect—the space has its own problems with harassment, representation, and accessibility. But the underlying technology is neutral in a way that traditional finance has never been. Our job now is to shape these protocols to serve liberatory ends.

What's Being Eaten

DeFi is not just competing with banks—it's making certain functions of banks obsolete. Automated market makers replace trading desks. Lending protocols replace loan officers. Yield aggregators replace wealth managers. Each of these replacements removes a human gatekeeper who could (and often did) discriminate.