资源描述
bitkom Decentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? The Blockchain Trend explainedDecentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? 2 Imprint Publisher Bitkom Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media e.V. Albrechtstrae 10 | 10117 Berlin P +49 30 27576-0 bitkombitkom bitkom Contact persons Julian Grigo | Bitkom | P +49 30 27576-126 | j.grigobitkom Patrick Hansen | Bitkom | P +49 30 27576-410 | p.hansenbitkom Co-Authors Julian Grigo | Bitkom Patrick Hansen | Bitkom Dr. Anika Patz | lindenpartners Victor von Wachter | University of Copenhagen Cover image Clifford Photography Copyright Bitk om 20 20 This publication constitutes general, non-binding information. The content reflects the view of Bitkom at the time of publication. Although the information contained herein has been compiled with the utmost care, no liability is assumed with respect to its accuracy, completeness or topicality. In particular, this publication cannot take into account the particularities of individual cases. The reader is therefore personally responsible for its use. Any liability shall be excluded. All rights, including the duplication of any part, are reserved by BitkomDecentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? 3 Index Index 1 Introduction _ 4 2 Blockchain technology foundation for DeFi _ 5 3 Building financial services bottom-up _ 7 4 DeFi real-world examples _ 11 5 DeFi risks and challenges _ 15 6 Outlook _ 20Decentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? 4 Introduction If we can email virtually anybody in the world, why cant we send them money just as easily? Or offer them a loan? These questions are the foundation of Decentralized Finances (DeFi) beliefs, activities and objectives. In short, DeFi refers to an ecosystem of financial applications that are built on top of a blockchain. Its common goal is to develop and operate in a decentralized way without intermediaries such as banks, payment service providers or investment funds all types of financial services on top of a transparent and trustless blockchain network. The DeFi field is currently experiencing an incredible surge. More than two billion US Dollars (USD) a value that doubled over the last weeks in June 2020 have already been deployed (locked-in) across a variety of DeFi applications that offer lending and borrowing services, exchange services, monetary banking services (e.g. the issuance of stablecoins), tokenization services, or other financial instruments such as derivatives and prediction markets. In that sense, DeFi is not a specific thing, but more a loosely defined collection of ideas and projects to resha- pe financial services through blockchain technology, thereby removing the middlemen. Its disruptive potential has brought DeFi into the spotlight of the blockchain and fintech com- munities, and increasingly also to the attention of traditional financiers and policymakers. However, it appears that these different parties often lack a common understanding of what DeFi is and is not, and further, of how DeFi can overcome major technical, operational and regulatory obstacles that challenge its further development. We firmly believe that DeFis growth and success is inextricably linked to greater dialogue, cooperation, and integration with political stakeholders, regulatory supervisors, traditional finance, and fintech. As a cross-industry business association and Europes biggest tech network, we not only want to contribute to this trajectory, but also to create and support cooperation in the first place. This is why we decided to write a whitepaper as groundwork for further discussions, network meetings, and policy consultations. After these introductory words in chapter 1, the paper continues with a short recap of blockchain technology in chapter 2. This serves as the basis for chapter 3, which explains how DeFi builds financial services bottom-up. Chapter 4 deep dives into three of the most prominent DeFi real world applications, namely Maker, Compound and Uniswap. Chapter 5 takes a closer look into the major risks and obstacles that the DeFi ecosystem has to overcome, for example, technical limitations (bugs, hacks, throughput, UX etc.) and also regula- tory and operational bottlenecks. Chapter 6 closes the whitepaper with a mid-term outlook of DeFis path forward in the coming years. The goal of this paper is to reach as many people from different backgrounds as possible, explain the basics of DeFi, and raise interest in this promising young technology field. For newcomers, this might be the first step. But we hope that you, like us, will build on these insights and take further steps to become a DeFi enthusiast. So lets get started! 1 IntroductionDecentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? 5 Blockchain technology foundation for DeFi for DeFi How is it possible that investors entrust more than two billion USD to decentralized applications, against which they have no legal recourse and which are often less than three years old? Where does this trust come from? The answer lies in the technology: blockchain technology. In the case of DeFi, it is usually the Ethereum blockchain that provides this level of trust. While we assume that readers of this paper are familiar with Bitcoin and blockchain in general, we will very briefly recall some important aspects below. Bitcoin Bitcoin is the worlds first blockchain. Its sharp price increase end of 2017 made Bitcoin finally famous to broader groups of society. The two core properties of Bitcoin are scarcity and security. It is scarce because there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin issued. When Bitcoin was invented in 2009, it was the first and only limited digital resource that could not be copied as often as desired, as opposed to a digital picture or text. From an investment perspective, Bitcoin today is referred to as digital gold, as it is primarily considered an alternative and uncorrelated investment asset. It has never been hacked and trades today (as of July 2020) at a price of more than 9,000 USD, resulting in a market cap of 127 billion USD. The security part is a bit more complex: Bitcoin is based on the blockchain technology. But what is a blockchain? The entire history of Bitcoin transactions is stored in a transaction list, the ledger. Each new transaction is added and attached to this ledger. However, this is not done on a single transaction basis, but in blocks. This chain of blocks is where the name Blockchain stems from. If this blockchain were stored in a data center that was then success- fully attacked, the attack could put the security of the whole network at risk. It would only take one successful attack to discredit the blockchain and all of its listed blocks and transac- tions. Therefore, the ledger is stored in a decentralized way on multiple computers. It is cur- rently estimated that there are about 10,000 active full nodes (i.e. computers storing a full copy of the blockchain), that are distributed all over the globe. Attacking Bitcoin would require attacking all computers storing the blockchain (or a large number of these computers) at the same time. This, in addition to cryptography, is the major reason for Bitcoins security. Bitcoin serves a fundamental and fairly easy use case by storing value through time and transac- ting value if necessary. The user can do no more than receive, store, or send units of Bitcoins. One major weakness (or, depending on the perspective, a major strength) of Bitcoin is its significantly limited programming language that is incapable of implementing complex computational logic into Bitcoin transactions. We can therefore say that while Bitcoin is poor in features, it is exactly this limitation that serves the property of security. 2 Blockchain technology foundationDecentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? 6 Blockchain technology foundation for DeFi Ethereum and smart contracts When trying to enable more use cases than simply receiving, storing, and sending Bitcoin, moving off-chain (moving away from the decentralized processing and storing of data) was not an option for the emerging blockchain community. Thus, in 2013, five years after the birth of Bitcoin, a group of visionaries around Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum is a blockchain. Its native digital currency Ether is also scarce, but offers much more flexibility upon which develo- pers can build. Ethereum is the worlds leading programmable blockchain with approximately 200,000 developers1 and thousands of available applications. Ethereums main programming language, Solidity, is turing-complete, i.e. it can implement any computational logic. Ethereum introduces the concept of so-called smart contracts. Smart contracts are programs that automati- cally execute transactions on the blockchain according to previously determined terms and conditions. They are relatively inefficient (in terms of latency and throughput) compared to centralized computing, because, like simple blockchain transactions, smart contracts are execu- ted in a decentralized manner. That said, their strength stems from a high level of security and transparency. Anyone can potentially verify the results. Because of their decentralized nature, a set of interacting smart contracts are also called decentralized applications (dApps). In contrast to smart contracts, traditional banking software is neither visible nor understandable for the banks customer. The user has to trust that companies programs do what they promise to do. In con- trast, no person, state, or company has to be trusted in smart contracts, because the code is publicly visible: copied thousands of times in public ledgers, which together form the blockchain. But, we want to be fair and note that only few users have the skills and resources to seriously evaluate smart contract code themselves. Similar to the traditional financial system, users usually end up trusting certain institutions or people such as auditors or experts. Looking at the development of blockchain technology from Bitcoin to Ethereum, one can conclu- de that Ethereum adopted important aspects of Bitcoin, but expanded it by enabling computa- tional logic on top of it. If Bitcoin was poor in features, Ethereum is rich in them. 1 /developer- ve/#:text=The%20One%20Million%20Devs%20website,number%20one%20decentralised%20app%20 platformDecentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? 7 Building financial services bottom-up bottom-up In this chapter we explore how an alternative financial system can be built on the basis of smart contracts. We start at the very bottom with financial Lego bricks, the smallest units of DeFi, and ultimately look at the entire Lego house, an ecosystem of decentralized services. Financial primitives: core financial functions coded into smart contracts Smart contracts are very flexible and offer solutions for industries such as energy, logistics, healthcare, and in particular, the financial sector. Here, smart contracts can enable simple functions such as payment (stablecoin) and credit (lending/borrowing), as well as more complex functions such as derivatives (leverage, swaps) and trading with crypto assets (decentralized exchanges) fully automated and decentralized without any intermediaries. Decentralized applications that are based on a set of interacting smart contracts and serve these basic financial functions are referred to as financial primitives. Already today, financial primitives can incorporate functions like payment, lending & borrowing, trading, wealth management, derivatives, insurance and probably many more. While most of the DeFi applications are still analogous to existing financial products from the established financial world, one can expect entirely new DeFi use cases to emerge in the future. In theory, everything that is programmable is imaginable. Financial primitives are the backbone of DeFi. A number of financial primitives build an ecosys- tem of interoperable services, i.e. the DeFi ecosystem. You can think of them as Lego bricks that can be plugged together with other Lego bricks as desired. Building an entirely new financial system the DeFi ecosystem and its architecture Obviously, we are still at the very beginning of the development of DeFi, but it is impressive what has already been created in such a short time. Ethereum was only developed in 2013 and went live in 2015. The long-term vision of DeFi is to connect these Lego bricks in order to build a Lego house, a fully-functioning and fully-automated trustless financial system. We believe that the real advantages of DeFi lie in the intelligent combination of modularized financial primitives. 3 Building financial servicesDecentralized Finance (DeFi) A new Fintech Revolution? 8 Building financial services bottom-up Figure 1: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Stack: Product & Application View While we only take a closer look at three DeFi protocols (Maker, Compound, and Uniswap) in our whitepaper, this diagram shows impressively the variety of different DeFi protocols that are currently being developed. In DeFi, the blockchain (in this case called layer 0) provides the trust and security level. Above this layer 0 is layer 1: where basic financial functions such as a decentralized stablecoin for payments in the DeFi ecosystem are built (e.g. DAI and the MakerDAO-protocol, see chapter 4). The next level (layer 2) provides users with slightly more complex functions like lending/borro- wing (e.g. Compound) and trading assets. This is followed by layer 3 and more sophisticated financial services built in dApps (e.g. decentralized exchanges (dEx) like Uniswap or prediction markets like Augur). Finally, on the aggregation layer 4, user friendly dApps combine different functions and build a service similar to what we know from todays banking apps: storing and sending money, investing in assets, borrowing against these assets (leverage trading), etc. Source: StakingR Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Stack: Product & Application View Legacy Legacy Finance Bridges and Facilitators Tokenization Consumer Wallets & Browsers Data Providers & Research Staking- and Infrastructure-aaS Automated Asset Management (AAM) Asset Management Core Finance & Stability Payments, Fiat Bridges & Gateways Insurance (Staking & DeFi) Stablecoins (decentralized) DEXs, Relayers and Aggregators Derivatives and Synthetic Assets Liquidity and Market Making Lending, Saving Lending / Collateralizing / Liquidity Provision Core Infrastructure Staking / Generalized Mining Privacy (Tx &
展开阅读全文