What enlightenment does the development of ancient agriculture have on today's DeFi revolution?

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Crypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)

, Author: Juan Escallon, translation: Li Hanbo, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

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Mesopotamia is the ancient region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, straddling present-day Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey. It is the birthplace of civilizations such as Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria.

9500 BC. In the fertile Tigris-Euphrates river basin, humans developed one of the most important technologies in history, that of breeding plants and animals. The invention of agriculture was the key to the development of human settlement civilization. It enabled Sumerian farmers to accumulate large surpluses of grain and other crops, which in turn enabled them to start from urban settlements such as the city of Uruk, one of the oldest cities in the world. Uruk, in present-day Iraq, was the largest capital city in the world in the 4th millennium BC, with about 80,000 inhabitants. As agriculture developed, the Sumerian region expanded and urbanized, transforming into one of the world's first great civilizations.

In the first few centuries, only a few crops could be cultivated. Wheat, barley, millet and other grains were the earliest crops. Barley was treated as commodity money, but paid at a premium. Other crops were later developed such as sesame (for oil production), lentils, figs, cucumbers, apples, etc. Other parts of the world also developed agriculture and grew other crops better suited to their geography and climate. Interregional trade enriches the food supply for the population.

Farming was initially done entirely by hand. Over the centuries, various techniques have been developed to increase productivity and output."reward"2012 saw a digital farming revolution. The digital currency implemented through the blockchain network enables human beings to embody value through a new type of digital asset called encrypted token (also known as encrypted asset). A few months after the stock market crashed in March 2020, the blockchain community created an incentivized DeFi ecosystem for users, called liquidity mining.

The basic idea is to motivate users to work together to maintain the community. This reward is usually paid in the protocol's native token. Taking Bitcoin as an example, miners provide computing power to provide security for the network, and are rewarded with the native token of Bitcoin (BTC); award."In the first few months, there were almost no digital assets in DeFi that could be mined. Synthetix, a protocol for issuing and trading derivatives, and Compound, a lending platform, are among the pioneers. Users are incentivized to stake their assets on a protocol or decentralized exchange. In doing so, they provide liquidity to an emerging market, and"reward

Digital assets such as $SNX and $COMP are rewarded as a subsidy to the supply side of the currency market. It is a smart way to solve the chicken and egg problem of the platform business model.

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First

digital crop": $COMP and $SNX"Anyone can issue a token, anyone can create a market, there is no limit. Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, by volume, make this possible. Automarket makers (AMMs) - the new thing in DeFi that will revolutionize the world economy.

Capital started pouring into the protocol. DeFi and Ethereum started to grow parabolicly. Many other protocols started their own liquidity mining programs. A yield mining boom has begun, sparking a new crypto bull run.

In the coming weeks and months, a whole new crop of digital currencies will be launched. Balancer, an automated market maker ($BAL), Curve, a decentralized exchange for stablecoins ($CRV), Universal Market Access, a derivatives platform ($UMA), and more. Sophisticated strategies have also been developed to mine with several assets at the same time, and algorithms to optimize yields have been developed.

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Economic and political rights are now embodied. Some of them have a value accumulation mechanism that provides cash flow to holders, and some provide voting rights to determine the further development of the protocol. This turns them into productive assets, similar to traditional capital assets such as stocks.

Ethereum is open and permissionless. The code is open source. Virtually anyone can copy, edit and redeploy smart contract code. Anyone can design and issue virtual assets. As a result, various monetary experiments were sparked. A new generation of food tokens, such as YAM, SUSHI, and PICKLE, have emerged, many of which are forks of previous successful projects. They are all experiments, very speculative money games. Unfortunately, many of them have no real economic value, or are zero-sum games at best. The community quickly learned that not all digital crops are edible, and some are even "poisonous". pay attention!

Technology advances over time. In the first few weeks, digital miners started to make a profit. Mainly by staking each asset separately and seeking the highest return. Over the next few months, new protocols were developed to improve the efficiency of digital mining. They are called Money Robots because they automate mining and investing without human involvement. In other words, they turn an active investment strategy (yield appreciation) into a passive investment strategy, executed by smart contracts.