The decentralized finance industry undoubtedly has vast potential — the value locked in it has exploded, surpassing $14 billion this month. Though there is speculation over whether decentralized finance is yet another bubble, I believe it is here to stay. How it stays, however, is another matter that depends on how DeFi handles ongoing hacks and other vulnerabilities, how centralized finance incorporates DeFi’s leading features and vice versa.
DeFi encompasses everything that the crypto space fundamentally stands for: democracy, power to the unbanked and underbanked, transnationalism, a truly global and shared economy, all of which many would consider financial utopia.
Antoni Trenchev is the co-founder and managing partner of Nexo, a provider of instant crypto credit lines. He studied finance law at King’s College London and Humboldt University of Berlin. As a member of Bulgaria’s parliament, Trenchev advocated for progressive legislation to enable blockchain solutions for a variety of e-government services, most notably e-voting and the storage of databases on a distributed ledger.