With DeFi you can side step the non-essential bits of centralization and delay in finance and investing. There's quite a bit of unnecessary complexity and opaqueness in finance and investing today, which only serve to protect monopoly and hegemony.

Except it's not at all. You can take synthetic TSLA shares and deposit those as collateral to mint stablecoins as a loan. Where else can you do that from your web browser at 10am on a Sunday and confirmed in 30 seconds?

Clearly the demand for this isn't exactly as important as anyone claims given the abject failure of the microloans industry to pan out.

The problem with loans generally isn't that you can have one at 10Am on a Sunday morning.

I've always thought the retail lending side of DeFi was silly. The risk is too high. Screenshot this, mortgage backed securities will be the first major success of blockchain debt based products.