DeFi refers to a suite of decentralized financial applications built on blockchains. They attempt to replicate traditional financial services like borrowing, lending, saving, and earning interest. DeFi is distinct from other financial services in that it relies entirely on automated smart contracts to facilitate transactions.
Many view DeFi as the Wild West of finance and exotic even by crypto standards. While traditional financial institutions are subject to a wide set of regulations, DeFi protocols operate in a regulatory vacuum, requiring no paperwork from users. This helped some DeFi enthusiasts (known in the crypto world as “degens”) earn outsize returns even when interest rates were low—though such an outcome is far from guaranteed, and the risk can be high.
The freedom offered by DeFi has fostered creativity. Unlike the staid offerings of Wall Street, DeFi protocols financially engineer novel forms of trading and lending. Some, such as lending protocol Aave and the decentralized exchange Curve, are highly regarded and have even attracted old-school financial institutions.
Most DeFi projects are controlled in large part by the very people who use them. DeFi protocols are often deployed by pseudonymous teams that later shrink into the background and allow the community to govern the platform instead. Users suggest and then vote on proposals with protocol-specific governance tokens.
Uniswap, a decentralized exchange, is powered by the UNI token. Lending protocol Compound has COMP, and yield aggregator protocol Yearn Finance is run by YFI. These tokens function a little like voting stock in a public company. Like stocks, governance tokens are valued more as financial assets than for their governance rights.
A measure called total value locked (TVL) tracks how much crypto is stored in DeFi protocols. At its peak in November 2021, DeFi commanded a TVL of $180 billion. That’s up from about $1 billion at the start of 2020.
Despite the increasingly common practice of having DeFi protocols audited by independent experts, the space is filled with scams and shoddily written code. Hackers frequently exploit protocols to steal customer funds. Users rarely get their money back.
In the most recent bull market, centralized companies like BlockFi and Celsius attracted millions of customers by promising to invest their funds in high-yield DeFi projects in return for a small cut of the profits. A number of these imploded and are even under criminal investigation, but this is more an indictment of the companies than DeFi itself. The technology is promising enough that the respected U.K. publication The Economist made DeFi its cover story in late 2021.
Go deeper:
DeFi Llama—Dashboard
See also:
What is Ethereum?
Staying safe in crypto—avoiding scams
Crypto investing 101
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Etherscan—explore Ethereum
MetaMask—a popular crypto wallet