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DeFi Explained

While crypto may still be seen by some as “underground”, a place for enthusiasts and tech nerds, DeFi is something that everyone should be paying closer attention to.

It could be that in a relatively short time the way we bank, borrow, lend, carry out financial speculation and even buy insurance could radically change.

 

Welcome to the world of DeFi!

DeFi stands for decentralised finance. It offers a decentralised financial system that eliminates the need for traditional middlemen: banks, payment providers, exchanges, insurance etc

DeFi today is still very much in its infancy but has a very promising future, potentially providing a more financially accessible and egalitarian possibility for millions, maybe one day even billions, of people around the world. 

That sounds like a good thing indeed!

 

TradFi vs DeFi

Traditional Finance is, as the name suggests, traditional financial players like commercial and investment banks and brokerage houses that can often be hundreds of years old and are involved in every aspect of finance from banking to trading and everything in between. 

On the opposite of that spectrum are the young new upstarts starting a revolution by throwing hand grenades into the traditional and gentile world of TradFi. 

These DeFi upstarts envision a world where there are no organisations controlling access to the world of finance and where the rule book is literally set alight and unceremoniously thrown out the window. 

In this article we are looking at the highly innovative world of DeFi and how it contrasts and potentially threatens the cosy and highly entrenched world of traditional finance (TradFi ).

 

DeFi vs TradFi, a historically monumental shift

Today’s financial systems might feel antiquated when compared to the wonders of the technology-driven world we live in. 

The world of TradFi tries to keep up with consumer needs by building on top of an existing closed system and open finance has helped somewhat to drag TradFi into the modern age. 

We must however keep in mind that even open finance whilst fresh and innovative is still constrained by the rules and limitations of traditional finance and their way of doing things.

DeFi on the other hand is starting from scratch in many ways and building something totally new and free from the constraints of TradFi.

The inescapable fact is that times and consumer habits, needs and expectations have changed and now technology exists that can facilitate the kind of monumental shift we are seeing in the crypto world. 

It is no different to automobiles challenging the horse and cart or online travel agencies such as Expedia or Booking.com challenging traditional travel agencies during the early internet boom.

 

So, what does DeFi potentially have in store for us? 

First, do note that this is a revolution and not an evolution. 

The automobile wasn’t a horse that could go faster, the automobile eliminated the horse completely from the picture. 

In much the same way DeFi is not an evolution in TradFi but rather a true revolution, a re-start from scratch, in a sense. 

Of course, people’s core financial needs are still pretty much the same: earn, hold, pay, save, borrow, lend, invest, convert, trade, insure, donate. 

But the infrastructure to do those “basic” things is about to be re-written completely!

Just as in the early days of automobiles when there were plenty of accidents along the way, no speed limits, no speed cameras or speeding tickets, DeFi is currently a bit of an unregulated, free and “wild-west” of finance. 

It’s basically doing everything that traditional finance does, and more, without re-using a single piece of it.

 

DeFi explained

Decentralised Finance is the “money” arm of the crypto world. 

Think of it as Wall Street 2.0, where decentralised companies go public and services like lending, borrowing and derivative trading can all be accessed by anyone.

 

How Defi Started

In many ways, Bitcoin could be seen as the very first example of DeFi even though the term DeFi hadn’t been coined yet, if you pardon the pun! 

Bitcoin was and still is a decentralised monetary system independent of any government or central organisation, the very essence of DeFi. 

But the only use cases were “hold” and “pay”. There was no lending, borrowing, trading or anything else natively built on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The first example of what we would today consider to be Decentralised Finance started in 2015 with Maker. 

Maker had a vision to create a decentralised financial system that would be governed by its user community and, in doing so, give borrowers more control of their assets. 

Maker allows users to borrow Dai, the platform’s native token which is pegged to the US dollar. 

This is one via a set of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, which govern the loan, repayment, and liquidation processes

So Maker lends money against collateral, like a pawn shop or a real estate mortgage dealer. 

That was DeFi use case #1. 

In 2018 Uniswap was released and allowed the exchange of any token for another token without the need for a central exchange and in 2020 AAVE made lending and borrowing decentralised. 

From then on things went crazy and today you can earn, hold, pay, save, borrow, lend, invest, convert, trade, insure, and donate with Decentralised Protocols. 

Whereas in open finance fintech apps are interfacing with established financial institutions to provide consumers with a greater ease of use, developers in the DeFi world are rewriting the rule book completely. 

They are not looking for ways to integrate with traditional intermediaries but rather eliminate them from the picture completely! 

Why connect to a bank’s back end if everyone can hold their own keys and be their own banks?

How can this be possible you might be asking, don´t we need these very solid financial establishments like banks to provide us with lending, borrowing, derivative trading facilities and so forth? 

Well, it turns out that we maybe don’t. 

As mentioned above, the majority of DeFi applications are built on top of very sophisticated blockchain technology called Ethereum which had a market value of $225 billion as of 2nd August 2023. 

To put this into perspective, Barclays Bank had a market cap of $31 billion on the same day. 

So the market cap of Ethereum was nearly 7x that of Barclays Bank! 

Considering that Ethereum came into being in 2015 and Barclays Bank was founded way back in 1896, Ethereum is certainly no financial lightweight when compared to the big boys in TradFi. 

 

There are four main tenets that all DeFi apps share

DeFi apps use a blockchain as their core ledger

All DeFi apps use blockchains for their underlying technology, a few of the most prominent blockchains used to build DeFi apps include Ethereum, Solana, Terra, and Binance Chain. The blockchain performs the central task of recording a ledger of all transactions in the form of blocks.

DeFi apps are open source and transparent by design

Being open source and transparent by nature allows a level of auditability making it possible to delve into smart contracts to see exactly what a smart contract is doing in terms of functions, user data and permissions. Lastly, the entire flow of funds is auditable, this is pretty major when compared to TradFi where everything is hidden away behind proprietary systems accessible only by people on the inside.

DeFi apps are interoperable and programmable

We often hear about “money legos” when looking at DeFi. This is a reference to their composability. Each individual DeFi app can be seen as a “Lego brick” for a specific financial service or product that can be freely combined with others. These “Lego bricks” are in a sense clicked together for each individual transaction in real-time enabling a level of speed, flexibility and innovation that would be unthinkable or even impossible in the way more closed-off and proprietary world of TradFi.

This is why innovation happens so fast: if you want to build a service that requires “swapping” tokens and “lending tokens” as fundamental building blocks and then adds some value on top, you don’t need to rebuild those two building blocks, you can just “plug into” Uniswap” and “AAVE”, and you only need to build the small thing that is unique to your app. 

In traditional finance that could take months of negotiations; in DeFi it takes the minutes required to connect to an API.

DeFi apps are open and accessible to all

One of the most underappreciated aspects of DeFi products is the inherent equality of accessibility. No institution or intermediary can deny service which is also known as being permissionless. 

If you have sufficient funds within your wallet for the transaction that you wish to carry out, you can do it irrespective of where you are from or who you are, it’s as simple as that. 

Compare that to TradFi where an individual can still decide whether a person gets approved for a loan or can even open up a bank account! 

The DeFi world does not care about these sorts of things. 

As long as you have enough coins or tokens in place to carry out the desired transaction there is nobody there to stop you. 

In a world where discrimination sadly still exists and where so many people around the world still do not have access to basic banking facilities let alone sophisticated financial services it´s clearly about time!

 

The DeFi ecosystem now

Some examples of DeFi apps include: 

  • Decentralised Exchanges – also known as DEXs – such as Uniswap where trades can be executed without the DEX having to hold on to your funds to execute trades. 
  • Decentralised Derivatives Trading – On Synthetix for example, you can trade in commodities, something akin to derivative trading without the need to have and hold the commodities in question, instead you trade something called Synths that are synthetic assets. 
  • Lending – Compound is a decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform where users can earn interest or borrow assets against collateral. AAVE too.
  • Insurance – Nexus Mutual is a decentralised autonomous organisation that provides smart contract insurance.

 

Risks and opportunities with DeFi

By now the opportunities of using DeFi are probably apparent: Autonomy, speed and opportunities previously unavailable.

But there are also quite a few risks still associated with Decentralised Finance that you should consider before rushing into anything.  Here is an overview of the types of risks you are looking at:

1. The risk linked to the “smart contract”

The risk linked to a “smart contract” (the computer code on the blockchain) you are using (AAVE, Uniswap,…). For example, we have seen the following happen in the past:

  • Oracle Attacks &/or Clever Arbitrage Execution: Manipulate the price through oracles, volumes or both, get lots of stuff for cheaper than it is, and then sell it at its real value.

Example: bZx, Cheese Bank, Harvest

  • Contract Design: if you let them print tokens, they will. 

Example: PickleFinance

  • Reentrancy Attack – happens if a contract makes an external call to another untrusted contract before resolving. For example, if it transfers funds before setting its balance to zero, an attacker can beat the withdraw function to death and essentially drain the entire contract. 

Example: Akropolis, dForce, and Origin

  • Front-end issues: bugs in hosting or domain leads to attacks – not specifically DeFi, but still a problem faced by NiceHash. If you go to app.uniswap.org trusting that it’s Uniswap when it’s in fact an attacker, it doesn’t matter how safe the Uniswap smart contract actually is, because that’s not who you are interacting with.

2. The financial risk

As in the risk of not being repaid when needed, or at all, even if everything keeps mostly working

  • While most lending platforms use over-collateralisation to reduce credit risk, over-collateralisation does not completely remove credit risk – The collateral assets that back loans on DeFi platforms have a high level of variation, in liquidity & stability of price.  
  • Liquidity: if all the money in a lending pool is lent out, you can’t withdraw, and you need to wait until some loans are repaid.
  • The yield is still mostly variable today. If you deposit at 11% today, it might be 2% tomorrow. 1 year low is 0.68%
  • If you rely on EUROS for spending but lend out USD, there is a bit of an exchange risk too. 

3. Blockchain or stablecoin risks

  • If the Ethereum Virtual Machine or Parachains or, your blockchain of choice breaks or gets hacked. But at that point, we potentially have a bigger problem.
  • Ethereum transaction fees and congestion leads to the inability to move in/out.
  • Your stablecoin of choice proves to be worthless, gets hacked…and your unit of value = 0

4. You make a mistake

You are your own bank, so your mistakes are your mistakes: Hacked keys, hacked notepads, metamask hacks, paper wallets lost in the wash or giving your money to a fraudulent project could all see you lose your money.

 

As wikipedia says, “Inexperienced investors are at particular risk of losing money using DeFi platforms due to the sophistication required to interact with such platforms and the lack of an intermediary with a customer-support department.”

 

Conclusion

Throughout human existence there have been events that have significantly shaped our societies, discovering fire, the wheel, horses for farming & transportation, the industrial revolution, the internet and most recently web3/crypto and DeFi. 

While DeFi may still be the new kid on the block, this kid isn’t messing around!

Whichever way we look at it, a shift in the status quo in finance and financial equality is urgently needed at a global level and now seems like the perfect time to throw that proverbial hand grenade!

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who are clover finance

Clover Finance (CLV) is a “one-stop” cross-chain DeFi bridge that provides a more accessible gateway to DeFi for everyone, including those that may be new to Decentralised Finance (DeFi).

Clover Finance was founded in May 2020 and the live mainnet was launched in July 2021

The rapid and exponential growth of the crypto ecosystem hasn’t come about without its fair share of problems. 

The two core problems that need to be solved are high gas prices (transaction fees) and network congestion due to bottlenecks causing the network to slow down and raising gas prices. 

In addition, as the wider crypto eco-system grows, there are more blockchains being introduced and while this helps reduce network congestion there is definitely a need for some form of cross-chain compatibility and easier access.

 

Network congestion is a growing problem in the crypto world

Currently, the bulk of the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) action is happening on the Ethereum blockchain, the second-largest crypto blockchain network after Bitcoin. 

Ethereum and Bitcoin both use what is known as a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus system for validating transactions. 

On the plus side, the Proof of Work consensus model is pretty robust and in crypto terms a relatively tried and tested technology. 

The key problem with Proof of Work-based blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin is slow transaction times resulting in higher transaction fees, in some cases fees exceeding the value of the transaction itself. 

As a result, many organisations are scrambling to tackle this growing problem, one of these projects is Clover Finance.

 

What does Clover Finance Do?

Clover Finance is building what is known as a foundational layer to enable Gasless user interactions to make the user experience easier and simpler, especially for those that are not hardcore crypto users. 

As crypto slowly edges towards something a little less techy and slightly more mainstream, the user experience needs to be simpler and the cost of transactions and network congestion problems need to be addressed. Otherwise, the situation will only get worse as web3 technology scales and touches more of our daily lives.

 

Cross-chain compatibility is needed

The other issue is cross-chain compatibility, when there was only one blockchain and one coin, Bitcoin, it was relatively easy. Everything happened on one blockchain and there was a single cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. 

This is clearly not the case anymore and things are only accelerating. 

Clover Finance is developed based on substrate, the foundation of the Polkadot network. 

Polkadot is what is known as a sharded multi-chain network and is able to process many transactions on multiple chains in parallel.

This radically reduces the bottlenecks that are prevalent on blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum where transactions are processed one at a time and not very efficient. 

One Clover Finance product, Clover Wallet allows users to view multiple assets without having to switch networks and supports Ethereum, Polkadot, Kusama and Binance Smart Chain to name a few.

 

Who are the brains behind Clover Finance?

The founders of Clover Finance are Viven Kirby, Burak Keceli and Norelle Ng. 

Viven Kirby is an experienced enterprise resource planner and serves the role of project lead at Clover. 

Burak Keceli is the tech lead at Clover Finance and has been an avid programmer since the age of 10, he was the creator of MBO Games as well as an instant cross-border payment platform, Stagg. 

Norelle Ng is the operations lead at Clover Finance and a seasoned blockchain expert with a background in human-computer interaction.

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web3 the new technological wave

The crypto juggernaut is gathering speed and at a breakneck pace. What was once the sole domain of crypto enthusiasts is now entering the mainstream with a vengeance. 

It seems that nowadays everybody is talking about crypto and itching to get in on the action. 

In particular, the focus and excitement is in the explosive areas of Web3 and DeFi. 

In this article, we are going to look at some of the fundamentals and longer-term investment opportunities presented by the major technological shifts taking place in the world of web3 and Defi.

It’s 2009 and Bitcoin arrives on the scene

It all began in 2009 with the arrival of Bitcoin, a revolutionary decentralised digital currency without geographical barriers or any form of central government control. 

The pioneering blockchain technology running under the covers planted the seeds for where we are today. 

Bitcoin itself is still purely a means of holding and transferring value, much like a traditional fiat currency like the dollar or euro or a valuable commodity such as gold. 

Bitcoin does not serve any other extended purpose. The arrival of Bitcoin however introduced a breakthrough technology, the blockchain which has opened up a multitude of possibilities that have the ability to disrupt virtually every industry and in particular finance. 

Welcome to DeFi and Web3…

From its earliest beginnings, the crypto world has evolved at rapid speed and has in recent years spawned an entirely new industry known as decentralised finance or DeFi for short. 

DeFi mainly runs on the second largest cryptocurrency network, Ethereum. Ethereum has gone from being a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin to becoming a broader ecosystem for DeFi projects mainly due to the availability of smart contracts. 

Smart contracts are agreements or contracts written in software that are not open to interpretation, discussion or adjustment. 

They execute exactly as per the instructions written into the smart contract and provide an ideal instrument on which to build sophisticated businesses in a trustless environment. 

In DeFi a smart contract sits in the middle as the authority, as opposed to a centralised institution as is typical in traditional finance and most other businesses.

What is Web3?

Web1 was the original bare-bones internet, simple, informational websites mainly. You can get a taste of Web1 by looking at ancient search engines like Lycos, hotbot and webcrawler that are still lurking around on the internet.

Web2 was commerce-driven and spawned the internet giants we all know today, Google, Amazon, Expedia, Facebook and so on. 

Web3 is the new kid in town and one that is creating quite a ruckus. 

Web3 has the potential to truly shake up and revolutionise the world we live in, create entirely new industries and potentially level the playing field, especially in finance. 

In essence, Web3 is the next major evolution of the internet, one that is decentralised and based on peer-to-peer technologies such as public blockchains. 

Take an organisation like Amazon, which is a centralised profit-driven Web2 business, it provides a centralised platform and infrastructure on which things can be bought and sold on the internet. 

In a Web3 world, there is no centralised Amazon, but rather a highly sophisticated blockchain technology using smart contracts that provide the software protocols and required levels of security needed to enable transactions without requiring a physical intermediary. Sorry, Jeff Bezos!

This Web3 model is extending into banking, trading, insurance and more. Just as there was an explosion in commerce-driven websites during the Web2 phase, we are seeing the same again with Web3 and this is presenting investors and novices alike with opportunities to get in early on the Web3 superstars of tomorrow.

Investing in protocols and the fat protocol thesis

Below every significant technology there are usually key protocols. There has been a fundamental shift in the way protocols are being monetised. 

Our current web technology is dependent on protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP and billions of emails rely on POP/IMAP protocols to enable sending and receiving. 

The crucial protocols that have enabled much of the technology we rely on today have been in effect given away for free by the developers who generously created them on an open-source basis. 

They are free to use and exploit and exploited they have been without a shadow of a doubt and one can argue with good effect. Imagine if every email cost money! (more on that later..)

Thin protocols/fat applications vs fat protocols/thin applications

In Web2, there are what are known as thin protocols and fat applications where the vast majority of the value is in the applications built on top of the protocols, think Google, Amazon and Facebook running on top of the core internet protocols. 

The value in Web2 is on the application side, not the protocol side. 

In Web3 this has fundamentally changed and has been flipped around, the protocol is fat and where the bulk of the value is and the applications running on top are on the thin side. 

Bitcoin’s creators cleverly invented a protocol and system that has an inherent value system and which rewards its participants at the core. 

If we were to look at POP3/IMAP, commonly used to send and receive millions if not billions of emails every day there is no financial reward. 

This on the one hand is great as emails remain free, but those that developed this essential protocol did not make a fortune from it. 

As a crypto investor, investing in protocols should be considered in addition to investing in the individual applications that are running on top of the protocols, a fundamental difference when compared to Web2. 

The name of the game is to be able to identify and invest in the protocols and applications of the future. 

There is something called the fat protocol thesis which says that the total value of all the apps running on top of a protocol such as Ethereum will never exceed the total market value of Ethereum. 

Thus according to this theory, Ethereum should continue to grow in value as the ecosystem it supports grows. 

The fat protocol thesis seems to be holding and provides a reasonable rationale on which to invest in protocols/blockchains for the longer term.

Web3 is the gold rush of the 21st century

One can liken the current Web3 boom to that of the famous gold rush of the 1800s. 

The pursuit then was gold and attracted hundreds of thousands of prospectors to California and South Africa. 

In a similar way, DeFi has exploded onto the scene with almost limitless possibilities, unlike gold however which is limited in quantity, DeFi projects are virtually limitless in scope.

However, not all projects will succeed and could be as useless as a hole in the ground so the secret is to know which tokens to pick and invest in and that isn’t easy even for seasoned crypto investors. 

Web3 money markets and how to earn a passive income from DeFi

Speculation is not the only way to profit in the crypto world. 

Just as with traditional financial markets, it’s also possible to earn a modest passive income by putting crypto assets to work. 

With interest rates still at a historical low there is a need for ways in which one can earn a reasonable passive income in DeFi from crypto assets by way of yield farming, staking, becoming a liquidity provider and through the lending of crypto. 

In very simple terms one can use their crypto assets to earn income in the form of fees or interest rather than profit from the growth of the underlying Web3 asset.

Conclusion

In the simplest terms, imagine having the chance to invest in Amazon, Facebook and Google when they were first starting out. Sadly, that boat has already sailed, however, the next generation of Amazon, Facebook, and Google are on the sidelines, fueling up and ready to make an impact. Just as with the web2 era, only a handful will become major players, the challenge is figuring out who the future DeFi and Web3 giants might be and get in on the action early!

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