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.
Why this is also security work
Defensive infrastructure protects users from harm, through audits, monitoring, key management. That work is essential.
But a system whose participants cannot read what they are taking part in produces a different failure mode: erosion through indifference. Protocols survive on momentum rather than intent. Risks are read through incompatible cuts that no one synthesizes. Users protect themselves while the commons stays undefended.
That failure is also a security problem, and it sits upstream of every audit. Editorial work that restores coordinated reading and makes situations intelligible enough to be chosen is security work at the layer where it is currently missing.
This view of security is not isolated. Industry-wide calls, like the recent statement from zeroShadow, SEAL, Bybit and others on coordinated crypto freezes and recoveries, make explicit that the absence of shared frameworks, common reading, and collaborative response is itself a structural vulnerability. Editorial work upstream of these coordination problems is part of the same effort.
Servile and 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. Servile watchfulness is funded. Transversal watchfulness mostly is not. The blog operates in the second register, and it is itself a concrete case of the question it raises: how to sustain a transversal layer that, by definition, cannot sell services to what it observes.
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.
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.
A wider effort
Beyond individual pieces, the blog is an attempt to begin something the ecosystem currently lacks: a public narrative on what we are collectively building, supporting, and bringing into existence in DeFi. Not a doctrine, not a manifesto. A space where situations can be read carefully enough to be chosen, and where that reading can be shared, contested, extended.
This is not the work of one writer alone. The point is to start, clearly enough that others can join, infléchir, or build alongside. The current corpus is the first contribution to that space. The blog is meant to be a beginning, not a conclusion.
Support
In April 2026, the blog applied to the Ethereum Security QF Round on Giveth, following a direct invitation from Griff Green to participate as an editorial observer publishing for free.
The project page on Giveth is the place to support this work: 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.