“I left the traditional financial world for a reason. ...
I’m not some crazy renegade.
I’m quite the opposite”or Ashleigh Schap, the 2008 Great Recession was more
an ideological awakening than an economic crisis. Her
hometown of Houston escaped the worst of the mael-
strom that ravaged large parts of the U.S., her parents
kept their jobs, and the house she was living in retained most of its
value. She had little reason to imagine the wheels would come off
America’s capitalist machine.
Yet the events of that year left a lasting impression on the
teenager. The financial crisis and its aftershocks, which she read
about on blogs and discussed with her classmates, made her realize
that good times don’t last forever. More important to what she
would do later in life, she says they left her with a distaste for a
lopsided financial system that benefits and protects those at the
top at the expense of those at the bottom.
“I’m from Texas. My family is conservative and capitalist,”
she says. “And this was the first evidence I had seen that the ideas
of growth at all times, that the cream always rises to the top, and
that markets will be always be efficient, failed.”
It would be five more years before Schap would discover
Bitcoin—a key moment in her growing rebellion against existing
political and financial structures—and five more before she would
work on creating what she saw as a fairer financial order. She would
also diverge politically from her family. “I don’t talk to them about
politics anymore,” says Schap, who’s now 27.
Her path from the high school chess club to crypto rebel was
far from inevitable. Even before graduating in 2014 from the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin, she joined JPMorgan Chase & Co. in
Dallas as an analyst in the company’s business for wealthy clients.
She says she spent less than half a year there, moved to New York,
knocked around a fintech firm and a family office for a while, and
eventually, in April 2018, landed on the outermost fringes of finance
at MakerDAO.
The key to MakerDAO is in its name: DAO stands for decen-
tralized autonomous organization. It’s an online platform for
creating digital dollars, or so-called stablecoins, and generating
loans secured by crypto tokens—all run by a blockchain-based
computer program and free of oversight by any central party,
such as, say, a government.
MakerDAO is the most important player in the fast-growing
movement known as decentralized finance. #DeFi—widely known
by its Twitter hashtag—aims to create a financial world where
everything from loans to investments is readily available to anyone
F
without having to go through gatekeepers who decide who gets to
play or intermediaries who charge fees at every turn.
It was a world in which Schap felt at home. In her early 20s,
the online game World of Warcraft had introduced her to Bitcoin:
She needed it to buy an accessory for her avatar. She bought five
Bitcoin tokens in February 2013 (and then lost the same number
a year later when the Mt. Gox exchange froze withdrawals fol-
lowing a hack of its systems). Decentralized finance is a natural
outgrowth of crypto’s ideology. The DeFi movement is small; it’s
almost exclusively the preserve of crypto utopians, many of them
clustered around San Francisco. Its critics—and there are many—
say it’s a wild experiment run by people ill-equipped to be design-
ing financial products.
“The technology might be interesting for more efficient deliv-
ery of financial services, but the naiveté and lack of knowledge of
financial history seem shocking to me,” says Richard Bernstein,
founder of Richard Bernstein Advisors LLC and a former chief
investment strategist at Merrill Lynch & Co. “There’s this tear-
down-the-house mentality, with minimal understanding of why
financial regulation even exists.”
Schap says she’s no financial ingénue. “I left the traditional
financial world for a reason, not because I was not being paid enough,
but because I wanted to see what we could do with this new tech-
nology and how far we could push it,” she says. “I’m not some crazy
renegade. I’m quite the opposite. Blockchain has the potential to
create a fairer financial system than we currently have, with more
flexibility and greater opportunities to access credit.”
Indeed, the ideas behind decentralized finance could have
broad resonance beyond crypto circles. Popular uprisings from the
global Occupy movement to the Hong Kong protests are driven by
a young population pushing back against societal injustices and
existing power structures, including in finance.
Working for MakerDAO, her hair dyed pink, her workstation
a stone’s throw from the New York Stock Exchange, Schap had
completely transitioned to the financial resistance. She says she
loved that MakerDAO was the antithesis of a corporate giant like
JPMorgan—less a corporation than a cooperative, a commune for
the digital age with developers and entrepreneurs around the world
collaborating on an exciting new project.
And yet unbeknownst to Schap, even by the time she joined
MakerDAO, a rebellion was brewing within the rebellion. The
infighting—in which Schap would become an accidental78 BLOOMBERG MARKETS