Andy Mukherjee, Columnist

When Terminator Robots Police Loan Markets

Is decentralized finance a 21st-century utopia or dystopia? Two opposite views are starting to emerge.

January 12, 2023 at 10:54 PM UTC

Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News.

DeFi vs TradFi.
Photographer: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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Nine days after Avraham Eisenberg began to borrow curve cryptocurrency tokens on Aave, a decentralized lending platform for digital assets, he found his $38 million1loan abruptly liquidated by terminator bots.

An estimated $10 million loss on a failed punt sounds only mildly annoying, compared with everything else going on in Eisenberg’s life — the self-described “applied game theorist” was arrested in Puerto Rico recently for allegedly draining $110 million from trading platform Mango Markets. Still, the zapping of the trader’s short CRV position, as the curve tokens are known, has sparked a lively debate.