When I was preparing a similar article about decentralized finance last year, I knew why it was a “DeFi year” for me: The most popular question I heard then was, “Could you tell me what DeFi is?” A lot has changed since then. All my friends — and they are far from the blockchain space — now ask: “Have you heard what this DeFi project is doing?” or, “Between that and another project, which one solves this problem better?” And so on. The public discourse now stands on a higher level of understanding of this industry. People outside of crypto are doing research — they read, explore and ask profound questions. Isn’t this the mainstream adoption we all have been hoping for? It is for me.
To gain more insight on the matter, I reached out to different experts from the blockchain industry, asking: “After 2020 was named the year of DeFi, did we already see mass adoption of decentralized finance in 2021? What could help it gain even more adoption going into 2022?”
Ahmed is a co-founder of Biconomy, a developer platform that empowers blockchain developers to enable a simplified transaction and onboarding experience for their Web3 projects.
“More scaling solutions will become essential to the mass adoption of DeFi products and services. We are seeing that most DeFi applications go live on multiple chains. While that makes them cheaper to use, it adds more complexities for those who are trying to learn and understand how they work. Thus, to start the second phase of DeFi mass adoption, we need solutions that simplify onboarding and use DApps that are spread across different chains and scaling solutions. The endgame is that all the cross-chain actions will be in the background, handled by infra services such as Biconomy or the DApp themselves, so the user doesn’t need to deal with it themselves.”
Alex is a writer, speaker, investor and advisor focused on the impact of emerging technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies. He is a co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, a multi-million-dollar think-tank that is investigating blockchain strategies, opportunities and use-cases.
“The 2020s will be the DeFi decade. Why? DeFi extends Satoshi’s concept of peer-to-peer electronic cash to lending, trading, investing, managing risk and more, all of which are built on top of distributed networks, not corporations. In one year, the DeFi industry’s market capitalization has ballooned 30 times to $150 billion. The total value of user deposits, or total value locked, has surged 100 times to nearly $200 billion. DeFi is maybe the fastest-growing industry ever, but despite its meteoric growth, it’s still very small. According to DeFi Llama and DeFi Pulse, there are perhaps a couple million people using DeFi across various platforms like Ethereum, Solana and Cosmos. The next decade will see a billion people, many of them unbanked, get onboarded to financial markets for the first time ever via DeFi applications. In the same way billions leapfrogged landlines and went straight to cell phones, so too will billions leapfrog traditional banks and go straight to DeFi.”
Ankitt is the CEO of EasyFi Network, a layer-two DeFi lending protocol for digital assets.
“Yes! After the DeFi boom of 2020, we’ve seen a significant rise in the number of DeFi users. But for mass adoption to truly unfold, the user experience in DeFi and onboarding process should be simplified. We need projects to be able to blur the lines between TradFi and DeFi, facilitating a seamless transition. Solving the scalability issues and reducing the costs associated with cryptocurrencies could also propel the industry toward mass adoption.
Moreover, I believe that interoperability could also be a game-changer in DeFi. Interoperability could just improve the overall user experience in DeFi, providing a way for users to easily transact between chains and choose the one that suits them most. This is why we’ve placed a special emphasis on interoperability with EasyFi. As a layer-two lending protocol, EasyFi has multichain accessibility and bridges the various gaps in DeFi.”
Daniel is a research analyst at Nansen’s platform, which combines on-chain data with a proprietary database of activity across more than 100 M blockchain wallets to provide real-time, actionable insights for investors and financial institutions in the expanding blockchain ecosystem.
“DeFi TVL growth: 2020 — from $630.26 million to $19.82 billion (approximately 3,033%)
2021 — from $19.82 billion to $241.79 billion (approximately 1,120%)
A large increase in TVL despite a slowdown in growth as compared to 2020
However, DeFi TVL is now more sticky. DeFi […]
source From DeFi year to decade: Is mass adoption here? Experts Answer, Part 1
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