DeFi — the non-custodial emerging world

MakerDAO was the dominant player in the DeFi market for a long time. It was a lending protocol with two tokens, a stablecoin coin pegged to the USD (DAI) and their protocol token (MKR).

These were the days that the entire amount of Ethereum locked in Defi protocols was c. $500,000 (c. March 13, 2020). And then suddenly, the explosion of Defi tokens was upon us. The amount locked in Defi crossed $1billion in June, then crossed $10bilion after mid-September, and now (late October) we are slightly above or below $12bill. We are approaching 9million ETH locked in all the Defi space.
Lending and Decentralized exchanges are the dominant subsectors with more players and around $4 billion locked in each of these areas.

Last year in September, Celsius, lending rates were 10+%, Bitcoin.com in partnership with Cred also offered 10+% on BTC and BCH; Binance lending (centralized) offered 15% to BNB token holders for their ETH and Tether holdings.

At the time, Celcius and Nexo were the rising stars of the centralized lending cryptocurrency space and Uniswap and MakerDao were in the decentralized space.

I recall spotting dYdX which is focused more on margin trading for cryptocurrencies in a more decentralized way.

Today, `the Defi FAANGs` include many more players like Compound, Uniswap, Aave, Yearn.finance and MakerDAO (but not №1 in market cap or growth rates). These are simply some of the current ventures and this may change soon. They serve only one purpose: To highlight the Defi variety and main characteristics, without getting into technical details of how these protocols function and what their differences are.

Crypto lending rates — October 2020 (Defirate)

Defi remains complex and for people that don’t have MetaMask accounts or some such, it sounds all Greek to them. So, what is the big deal and what does this craziness (in terms of price activity) imply?

In the Blockchain space there are two painful major events that have had long-lasting ripple effects. The…