Decentralized Exchanges: Why Crypto’s First Killer Apps are So Powerful - DeFriday #12

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) enables applications like prediction, trading, and financial markets to run on smart contracts, with no middle men (e.g. lawyers and bankers)

What is DeFi all about? Modernizing, disintermediating (banks etc.), reducing layers of fees in the middle. Transparency. This is a big misconception. People think it's opaque and used for criminal activity. Everything in blockchains is open...

The narrative of ownership is integral to decentralized financial technology. Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database, which can notionally be withdrawn or exchanged for goods and services at any point. As the story goes, this requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protoco... See more

-Efficient because intermediaries have been replaced with smart contracts.

Despite working with DeFi teams for the last 5 years, I think onchain finance is a better name for whats happening.

Decentralization is an important substrate, the real pull is the increase in utility and value when an asset comes onchain turns into a money lego.

Whether an asset is blockchain-native or a real-world asset will matter less and less.

E... See more

In a nutshell, the opportunity to be an active participant is one key difference between centralized and decentralized financial infrastructure.