SVET Reports
BCG Rise and Fall
It has been a year since I published the series of reviews dedicated to big consulting companies’, so-called, ‘blockchain competencies’. In those reviews Boston Consulting Group (BCG) stands relatively high in the informal ranking of global consulting houses’ familiarity with DLT, right after PWC and ahead of McKinsey.
However, in their latest ‘Rise Of DeFi’ Report (sponsored by crypto.com and dated September 2020) the group of BCG Amsterdam employees managed to surprise me by lowering their analytics’ standards to the level, which makes this piece almost useless even for the undereducated corporate management types, which are the usual target auditory of such works.
Despite 2019–2020 signaling a start of the whole new epoch in the life of our industry, it looks like not much have changed in ‘corporate consultants’ approach to crypto. It still remains superficially transactional and reveals a lack of fundamental understanding and practical involvement with DLT projects.
Do not take me wrong, I highly appreciate this paper’s positive tone in which it speaks about DeFi. After all it serves our cause :)
However, even if this report is ‘sponsored’, wouldn’t be expected from BCG to deliver the objective, professional, based on practical examples review instead of just producing a plain-vanilla version of ‘DLT propaganda’?
Quote: ‘Despite the value SMEs add through innovation and entrepreneurship, their banking needs have not been met, because for centuries, financial services have been delivered through centralized parties who act as trusted intermediaries between economic agents.’
Moreover, BCG consultants go as far as to downplay the most serious threat to DeFi existence — that of govs crack-down on its major development teams, most of which are sited around us, here, in SF and area.
Quote: ‘The FATF recommendation as of today is that if the DeFi protocol is sufficiently decentralised and the entity behind it is not involved in day-to-day operations, it may not be classified as Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) and hence is immune from the Travel Rule.’
As if SEC has ever restricted itself in its actions because of some kind of ‘recommendations’ coming from EU bureaucrats :)
We'd better be prepared for govs heavily lashing against DeFi main players much sooner than most of us expect and not to be distracted by corps' consultants, which run for cover faster than you can think every time when angry govs agents appear in their peripheral field of vision, leaving all their clients to face alone whatever coming to them.
There is a little doubt that despite all of those economic and political cataclysms, SEC stays firm on its main target - to frighten all of us out of crypto (and, of course, DeFi) back to the beautiful world of the indiscriminate financial surveillance, unreasonable transactions' costs and unguaranteed access to our own assets.