The blockchain industry is excited, very excited about a new (relatively) buzz word – decentralised finance or DeFi as it is rapidly becoming know as.
Is Decentralised Finance (DeFi) set to transform financial services?
The industry is on the move, with more than $4 billion in assets locked up in DeFi projects. Currently, the DeFi industry is growing by nearly half a billion dollars per week as investors and entrepreneurs find refuge in a financial system that is not tied to any government or corporation.
Arguably even more interesting is the movement of institutional investors and traditional finance professions to DeFi as a way to break free from what is often considered to be an outdated and insular financial system. The current DeFi movement is being powered by Ethereum, which offers an open and permissionless system that is easily available to everyone. This interoperability helps companies scale products by easily leveraging other innovations in the industry.
As the industry matures, more resources will be allocated to build DeFi solutions. Currently, there are a handful of exciting developments and projects, either recently launched or launching soon, that have the DeFi community excited, and for good reason — community involvement is at the core of DeFi and one of the leading advantages over the traditional financial services markets.
Entrepreneurs should keep DeFi on their radar as the industry matures and continues to attract significant capital investment. To learn more about the current applications of DeFi, here are some of the FinTech verticals being disrupted by decentralized finance.
Financial Data
Data within financial markets are controlled by a small group of stakeholders that control pricing, access and what kind of data is being provided. In the U.S. alone, the industry is estimated at $15 billion, but only a handful of players control it. Decentralised finance will help democratise data, how data is sourced, how it is presented and create a rewards system that incentivises market participants.
One company, DIA, is a Swiss no-profit is aiming to become the open-source Bloomberg for both crypto and traditional finance. Its platform uses crypto-economic incentives to drive the supply, share and use of transparent, crowd-verified price data and oracles on financial and digital assets. Using DeFi, DIA will provide financial institutions with an immutable and verified single source of financial market data for any market and asset type. This will ultimately help alleviate the problems seen currently with financial markets data providers around the world.
Lending
DeFi lending is based on the benefits brought by the Ethereum blockchain, which allows for transparent and secure protocols to source and secure funds that are incentivised with various crypto rewards. DeFi has seen innovation such as no-collateral loans, compounding interest rates that are much higher than traditional banks and P2P lending that helps eliminate intermediaries that operate their businesses around fees.
DeFi lending is currently seeing massive growth as companies leverage the industry’s composability, which allows applications to integrate and build on top of one another creating a vast network effect. This open-source approach helps promote innovation and encourages healthy competition, something that the cutthroat financial services industry desperately needs.
Decentralized Exchanges
Decentralised exchanges (DEX) are one of the most important innovations in the blockchain industry, as users are always in control of their funds, which are stored in external wallets. This alleviates the risk that comes with depositing crypto into exchanges, which can lead to losing all of your funds in the case of a hack.
In the past 30 days, decentralised exchanges have processed over $537 million in transactions and are currently taking market share from more traditional centralised exchanges. As more traditional assets become digital assets, it is safe to assume that these will eventually be tradeable on exchanges that are decentralised. Naturally, regulatory hurdles could make this a delayed process, but industry experts are confident in the power of DeFi with how we control our assets.
Asset Management
When thinking about asset management, Defi offers distinct advantages. According to DeFiRate, these benefits include non-custodial ownership of assets, composability to seamlessly plug in DeFi products with other products, automation, global access and financial inclusion and pseudo-anonymity.
The one potential downside is that users are completely responsible for their funds and there are no safeguards to protect funds that are lost in wallets or sent to the wrong address. This is not for everyone, but the good news is that DeFi products are evolving at a rapid pace to become more user-friendly and educational to help teach people how to properly manage their assets within the industry.
Insurance
As mentioned in the last point, there are no automatic safeguards or custodians to protect users against user errors. Thankfully, there are DeFi insurance products that can help mitigate risk. This insurance can be applied to pools, personal wallets and smart contracts that are used to pool money for lending and staking.
Currently, there are nearly 10 DeFi insurance providers that are all helping to create an ecosystem that is based on transparency and accessibility. Their goal is to eliminate costly traditional insurance agencies that run as monopolies over certain sectors and make insurance more affordable and flexible to both institutional and casual users.
So, DeFi will continue to play an important role in the evolution of the financial sector for many reasons. For one, DeFi expands the functionality and reach of money. Since all you need to participate in the DeFi sector is a Smartphone, there is huge potential to expand the global economy. Consequently, analysts see this sector as one of the most important currently under development in the crypto space.
This commitment to the development of a DeFi ecosystem is easy to recognise. Importantly, DeFi is the fastest growing sector in blockchain. According to recent reports, DEFI tokens continually outperform their counterparts. Additionally, since this time period represents the beginning of this integration stage, the market now possesses the unique opportunity to see an entirely new industry blossom.
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