Vitalik Buterin, in a twitter thread dated May 7 that discussed the goals of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), spoke of how Ethereum was decentralizing many functions that otherwise would be handled by middlemen. 

While some in the post argued that Bitcoin did a better job of removing, even saying that “Ethereum is prolonging the legacy financial system, full of intermediaries (look at "DeFi")”, Vitalik countered by pointing out the intermediaries involved in Bitcoin - Bitmex, Tether (USDT) and Liquid. 

He followed up by saying that Decentralized Finance (DeFi) - which has been growing greatly and shows no sign of stopping - was performing exactly the function of replacing the legacy financial system. Buterin also points to Uniswap as an example of a “purist” solution.

The DeFi market, which is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, is seeing multiple companies release completely decentralized financial services that are more secure, faster and operate at a much lower cost. The DeFi space has already seen over $1 billion in ETH locked in at its peak, with current valuations seeing it at roughly $830 million. Lending platform dYdX recently reached a milestone of $1 billion in loans, while futures and options interest for both Bitcoin and Ethereum appear to be increasing.

Ethereum is soon to launch its phased release of Ethereum 2.0, a monumental transition for the network that will bring a whole host of improvements that could set Ethereum up for the decentralized world computer that it was originally envisioned to be. The phased introduction will eventually lead to much greater scaling and a switch to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.