In mid-February 2020, the total value locked within decentralized finance (DeFi) applications first exceeded $1 billion. Fueled by the DeFi summer of 2020, it wouldn’t even take a year before it multiplied 20-fold to reach $20 billion and only another ten months to reach $200 billion. Given the pace of growth so far, it doesn’t seem outlandish to imagine the DeFi markets hitting a trillion dollars within another year or two.
We can attribute this monumental growth to one thing — liquidity. Looking back, DeFi’s expansion can be defined in three eras, each representing another significant development in removing barriers to liquidity and making the markets more attractive and efficient to participants.
Jimmy Yin is a co-founder of iZUMi Finance. Before entering the world of DeFi, he was a researcher at North American Blockchain Association and community member of World Economic Forum. His PhD was supervised by Max Shen at UC Berkeley and HK University. Jimmy pursues enhancement of liquidity in both crypto and spirit.