Blake West is the Co-Founder & CTO of Goldfinch (www.goldfinch.finance). Backed by a16z, Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol that allows anyone to be a lender, not just banks. With ~$100m in active loan value at time of recording, Goldfinch is the clear leader in on-chain emerging market credit – aka, crypto lending meets real-world businesses. In this episode we discuss challenges and surprises in the early days of Goldfinch, blockers to emerging market credit formation (and why obstacles exist), speculation about the possibility of a unified/global on-chain capital market, and Blake’s best generalizable advice for founders across web3 (hint: ignore the token at first).

Recorded on Friday October 28th, 2022.