How Defi is Changing Financial Services?

Maria Garcia
4 min readSep 17, 2020

Defi happens to be an influential buzzword in 2020 for numerous causes. Most prominently, the development of blockchain networks has remained tense. The symbiotic public recognition of blockchain technology, including the provision for distinct financial practices, has led to various institutional and administration buy-in concerning Defi platforms. During December 2019, the Defi strategy had $700 million value of digital assets secured within its financial products. Lately, this number exceeded $3.6 billion.

So far, 2020 has not been the biggest of years. However, for Defi or decentralized finance, 2020 has remained a stratospheric development period, including the cumulative value locked in growing from under $1bn to only under $8bn today.

However, being very much under its infancy, the leading ecosystem is swiftly transforming the face of modern finance by taking components from a wide variety of functions in traditional finance and forming them into treacherous and open protocols with smart contracts and tokens.

Here is a glimpse of the possibilities Defi could unlock:

Lending

With benefits like the ability to apply digital assets like insurance, the instant settlement of stocks, including no credit checks, Defi lending portals embody an all-embracing abundance of charm related to other credit systems.

Information from industry website, Defi Pulse states that from March onwards, Defi lending on portals including Aave and Compound has grown higher than seven-fold to $3.7bn, while investors seek profits when interest prices remain historic lows.

Nevertheless, Defi lending does not happen to be for the faint-hearted. Borrowers usually signify traders who take out credit in Ethereum, and others trade them on different exchanges against additional cryptocurrencies. They later aim to repay the credit and stock their earnings, analogous to short-sellers within the stock markets.

Financial Data

In the province of conventional financial businesses, data is administered by a small community of stakeholders who manage access, pricing, and type of data.

In accession to reducing corruption, Defi strives to facilitate the democratization of information. One organization, a Swiss non-profit organization, DIA, aims to turn into the open-source Bloomberg concerning traditional finance and crypto.

Utilizing Defi, DIA’s portal equips financial companies with a stable and established single root of financial business data concerning any asset and market type. It will eventually help reduce the problems witnessed currently with commercial market data suppliers around the globe.

Rapid Networks and Layer 2 Payment Systems

New layer two payment solutions happen to be helping to build fast payment channels like the Lightning Network. The Ethereum hard fork Istanbul happens to be offering improved layer two solutions. The notable outcomes will be visible in the amounts of trades per second that the user companies can manage while balancing their operations. It will lead to “unforeseen market performance.”

Zero-Knowledge, Trustless, and Permissionless Systems

One of the most significant advancements in decentralized finance happens to be developing strategies that can readily authenticate transactions.

Assuming that it happens to be game-changers signifies an underestimation. Years before, third parties like Stripe, PayPal, and others established innovative payment technologies in the conventional banking system. Nevertheless, these processes possess highly established confirmation processes that need days and demand multi-factor verification items.

We’re not yet far superior when it comes to biometrics, which may reduce common user faults that pads cost concerning services. On the other hand, tomorrow’s operations will turn out to be so incredibly smooth that they’ll hardly file with stakeholders who happen to be pushing through complex digital activities.

Furthermore, building those varieties of operations that circumvent yesterday’s confirmation processes will transform how we look at money. With the arrival of permissionless business technologies, numerous distinct types of markets are made feasible.

Insurance

Insurance, in each of its forms, happens to be crucial to our everyday life. Moreover, much like all things online, Defi accounts can signify exposed to hackers. ConsiderYam Finance, for example, that quickly accumulated $750 million value before its crashing days just following its initiation. A bug inside its code turned it out to be unlikely for the application to function precisely.

Presently, a few Defi insurance providers like Nexus Mutual and CDx protect everything ranging from lending, transactions on exchanges, and creating an ecosystem according to transparency and convenience.

Their ambition implies quashing costly traditional coverage companies that operate as trusts and guarantee that insurance happens to be less costly and adaptable to both individual and institutional users. Though Nexus Mutual and co, however, have a long way to go before disturbing traditional authorities, Defi insurance portals help reinvent the present design space.

Final Words

As Defi lies in the boundary area of finance, users need to trade with care and remain attentive to the dApps they happen to be using. The entry threshold concerning developers happens to be still shallow, plus there are sure to be several rogue apps hovering around.

Provided that DeFi’s potential to interrupt various industries at scale and the speed of growth in this space is superior to anything business regulators have had to meet, there happens to be a significant incentive when it comes to regulatory bodies to operate more firmly than ever in securing that a safe path is formed.

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Maria Garcia

Passionate about blogging on Cryptocurrency, Blockchain applications, Artificial Intelligence & IoT.