The Compound Finance smart contract, and similar contracts, let you deposit digital assets, including digital dollars, and earn borrowing fees from others who w

The Compound Finance smart contract, and similar contracts, let you deposit digital assets, including digital dollars, and earn borrowing fees from others who want to take on leverage. Unlike in traditional finance, the barrier to entry is relatively low, so there's lots of competition and the fees end up being very low meaning users keep most of the profits. Compare this to traditional stock brokers - unless you're in the 1% with a very fancy brokerage account, usually the broker retains 100% of the profits of lending your shares out, with a really good deal being when they share 50% with you. As soon as stocks get meaningfully tokenized on the blockchain, I believe p2p lending of stocks will explode just as p2p lending of cryptocurrency has. It just makes sense for people to keep all the money their shares are earning from stock lending rather than give half or more of it to a brokerage. It would also let stocks settle instantly and non custodially, so there's no "Robinhood had to halt stock purchases because they ran out of money" moment. That's not to get into the fact that a lot of this is traditionally inaccessible from a lot of countries, and smart contracts are global by default.