Decentralized Finance, DeFi for short, is a term used to describe the decentralized services and products made possible with the help of decentralized technology. Example of DeFi includes lending services, decentralized exchanges, marketplaces, stablecoins, derivative platforms and much more. Other entities in the ecosystem include infrastructure platforms, payment providers and custodians.

Decentralized finance is an upgrade of traditional financial systems, which are centralized and as a result of this centralization, prevents a lot of individuals from accessing financial services and contributing to the global economy. The primary advantage of DeFi products is its ability to cater to the unbanked and undocumented, which form the majority of the world’s population. Many Defi entities describe this as being the most salient feature of decentralized systems.

These open source financial initiatives is a key part in the growth of the crypto ecosystem, as several projects have built their services and products on reducing the trust involved in financial services. This is in contrast to “fintech”, which primarily focuses on new emerging systems that are beneficial, but centralized.

The DeFi ecosystem has been steadily growing since the launch of projects during the boom of 2017, and current statistics show the total value locked in the ecosystem to be roughly $471 million. Examples of platforms include the MakerDAO ecosystem, Augur, Bancor and the Kyber Network.

Given that decentralized finance tools is at its optimum with a greater number of users, multiple scaling solutions, such as second layer protocols, are being worked on - including the Lightning Network, which has been growing in usage over the past year. 

In this tag, read more about decentralized finance (DeFi) news, price predictions, opinions and analyses created by users.