In DeFi, the question is not only how to avoid losses, but how to choose what one supports, inhabits, and brings into existence.
Who I am
I am Arem. My work sits at the intersection of strategy consulting, design, and craft. Since 2019, I have been exploring the Ethereum ecosystem, DeFi, and the governance questions that run through them.
I write from a position adjacent to DeFi, close enough to follow its dynamics, distant enough to write about it without being captured by its incentives. Not a developer, not a security researcher in the technical sense, and not affiliated with any protocol.
Why this blog exists
This is a research and writing project focused on how situations in decentralized finance become intelligible, or fail to.
In DeFi, information is abundant. Signals circulate across technical, market, and social layers. Yet this does not necessarily lead to understanding. Most readings remain fragmented. They allow for reaction, but not always for decision.
The blog works on this gap.
Its purpose is not only to clarify risk, but to make situations intelligible enough to be chosen. Because reading a system only to protect oneself is not the same as reading it to decide what one supports, inhabits, and brings into existence.
This distinction changes what is expected from the reader. Not vigilance alone, but agency.
What you’ll find here
The blog approaches DeFi as a field of situations rather than a collection of protocols. Its work consists in:
- reconstructing how situations take shape across layers
- articulating signals that are usually observed in isolation
- clarifying what a given configuration enables or constrains
The objective is not to simplify complexity, but to render it intelligible enough to act, and to choose.
Recent work spans three axes:
A practice of reading, with More Dashboards, Less Wisdom? and the analysis of Pharos as a stablecoin observatory.
A discipline of delegation, with the four-part series Self-Custody, But How Far?, on the boundary between assistance, delegation, and abandonment in an environment increasingly mediated by AI.
An economy of public attention, with Transversal Watchfulness, on what DeFi still does not fund: the structures that observe the system without belonging to any of its parts.
Transversal watchfulness
The ecosystem has learned to fund part of its observation layer: risk providers paid by the DAOs they analyze, security firms under commercial contract, audit shops with retainers. This work is serious and useful, but it serves an identified payer.
Alongside it runs another function, rarer and more exposed: transversal watchfulness. Observers that look at several competing protocols without belonging to any of them, that can map dependencies cutting across actors, that can call out a problem affecting a potential payer without jeopardizing their economic survival.
The distinction is structural. The blog operates in the second register.
How
All content is published in full, in two languages (French and English), for free, with no sponsorship and no affiliate links. Independence is structural, not performative.
Support
arem.blog has a project page on Giveth, open for independent support of this editorial work. The page exists as a sustainable channel for contributions from readers who find the work useful.
→ giveth.io/project/editorial-observer
Contact
Not only how to protect, but how to choose.
The analyses presented on this site do not constitute financial advice.