Decentralized Finance is Booming; But Exactly How Decentralized is Defi?

The market of the Defi has hit the highest point ever as the final value reached the decentralized financed has increased to over $850 million. A number of new applications, wallets, privacy proposals, protocols, and DEXs is expanding the limits Defi is capable of. However, a healthy dose of caution is needed to counter this jubilation, the reason being that not every product under defy is as decentralized as they would like to admit. In some instances, what is being marketed as Defi, is not at all Defi – it is just finance, having similar centralized controls and chokepoints as before.

Decentralized Finance Products Are Snowballing
Out of the 850 million dollars that are presently locked into Defi, 490 Million Dollars are contained in Maker. The collateralized stablecoins, and the wide variety of Defi products the Maker generates, accounts for 57 percent of the sector’s value. Other Defi backbones include derivatives, from Synthetix (147M Dollars locked up), granting safekeeping of protocols such as compound and instadapp, 104M dollars, and 62M Dollars consecutively. The next one is DEXs, like Uniswap ($48M).

The Ethereum based products that can be amassed under Defi shows signs of a rough period, even after considering the size of their market, which is a fraction of the previous Ethereum use case.

Within this month alone, the Ethereum ecosystem has taken on projects like Syscoin’s bridging protocol, grants collateralized with NFTs from Rocket, social business, courtesy of Set Protocols, and token curated registries (TCRs) done by dispute resolution protocol Kleros. Out of these, Syscoin Bridge’s goal is to concentrate on advancing the defi narrative by promoting interoperability through a decentralized connection to the ecosystem of Syscoin, integrating the better throughout and smaller network charges of the latter with Ethereum’s intelligent contracting capabilities. This will translate to value moving independently across both networks utilizing a trustless, free censorship protocol that uplifts token fungibility. With Plasma currently nonexistent, accessibility to decentralized scaling options has gained a reenergized urgency.

Concerning Kleros, they have created an interconnected TCR that can be utilized to develop crypto-economic supported lists of anything, from accepted social media accounts to loaning dapps to darknet markets. It is also currently incorporating its decentralized set of standard rules in anticipation of cases into Defi platforms, which indicates positive outcomes so far. While people should seriously evaluate the information received from unknown image boards, the snowballing of Kleros threads on indicates the connection marines may have discovered the latest project to fasten onto.

Dil Bole Oberoi