cbBTC is completely centralized and coinbase admits that in their docs.

However, base’s “bring the world onchain” marketing campaigns will handwave away the fact that the entire system users is permissioned and can rug them at any minute.

Users don’t change defaults. People won’t “go onchain”, learn how to use “crypto”, and then promote themselves to a more secure system. They’ll just stay on base. Coinbase will direct them there.

There’s nothing wrong with this from a business perspective. There’s a market demand. Coinbase meets it.

But if this is the endgame (we’ll see) for “Bitcoin DeFi”, we have little to no reason to build any of these applications on blockchains. You don’t need a blockchain for completely centralized application modules. It’s just a technique to provide some illusion of decentralization imo