DeFi's invisible ceiling
The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has made great progress in the past couple of years, and I've been considering the competitiveness and market size at the agreement level. I analyzed the former in April (), this short article will concentrate on the latter.
Regarding the current DeFi status of Ethereum, my biggest concern is it is susceptible to one or a few invisible ceilings (I will explain below). According to Eugene Wei's definition, the invisible ceiling is an invisible upper limit-it can not be measured directly, and will only can be found in an analysis that violates the facts-but it really limits growth. Although it is prematurily . to create an assertion, the DeFi ecosystem might have touched these limits. For example , the greatest value of ETH pledged in the DeFi protocol makes up about about 2-3% of the sum total ETH. In this specific article, I'll evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of the existing DeFi system in accordance with CeFi (centralized finance). Then, I'll try to explore some invisible ceilings that limit the growth of DeFi and produce solutions. Application Scenarios of DeFi Even though the application scenarios of DeFi are very rich (including no-running lottery, prediction market, pledge, identity, and so on ), its current main uses are the following:
* Increase leverage (for example, pledge lending in Maker, Compound, or margin trading on dYdX) * Transactions (e. g. 0x, Uniswap, Kyber, IDEX, dYdX) * The three major applications of synthetic asset exposure (such as Synthetix, UMA) account for the majority of the DeFi activities. Each of the aforementioned decentralized financial agreements directly competes with centralized alternatives. Next, we analyze the dynamics of the application scenarios one by one to know the invisible ceiling of DeFi. For some traders, the two most critical options that come with leverage are leverage and cost. But in these two aspects, DeFi is inferior to CeFi.
* DeFi has lower leverage. Subject to system delay (Ethereum block generation time is 15 seconds), the leverage can not be too high. Why does a greater latency reduce steadily the maximum multiple of leverage? Thinking about the volatility of encrypted assets and the danger of serial liquidation within 15 seconds of block time, it's burdensome for DeFi to supply highly leveraged products. dYdX launched a 10 times leveraged BTC perpetual contract () in April, however in comparison, the typical leverage of BitMEX users is 25-30 times (). * CeFi has lower borrowing costs. CeFi organizations reduce trust-based mortgage requirements (such because the size of the loan department dealing with trusted customers) by expanding credit (such as banks like Silvergate), or by giving large amounts of customer deposits (such because the loan department of Binance and Coinbase) To achieve this. Even though sometimes, the loan interest levels of the existing DeFi agreements are lower, they have structural flaws. Although it is theoretically possible that traders will slowly start trading Compound's cToken-the protocol effortlessly replicates the advantages of Binance and Coinbase's centralized ledger-but this may decentralize the liquidity between cToken and the underlying assets. So can the DeFi protocol provide more leverage? Thinking about the volatility of cryptocurrency and the existing flaws of Ethereum (15-second block time), it's hard to imagine that a platform will give you more than 10 times leverage. The tragedy of Black Thursday on March 12 continues to be vivid (). But some Layer 2 solutions (such as Skale) can achieve 1 second block time and reduce network latency (please note that the vanilla optimistic rollup architecture can not reduce block time, so it can not solve this defect). But it's unclear whether decentralized exchanges (DEX) and traders like dYdX will transfer settlement to Layer 2 solutions such as for instance Skale. So in the end, can DeFi agreements provide more competitive loan interest levels? The clear answer is: probably not. I are expecting that in the next several years, increasingly more banks (which can provide credit through partial reserve loans) will enter the crypto field, and the cost of capital provided by centralized finance institutions will gradually decrease. Additionally , since DeFi agreements can not insure trust relationships, they require a greater mortgage ratio, that may further increase the capital (opportunity) cost. In the foreseeable future, I think the DeFi protocol won't be able to defeat conventional leveraged providers. Even though DeFi agreements can provide some clients with marginal profits that conventional vendors can not provide, industry share is quite small. Most market participants aspire to optimize the fee and availability of leverage, and the DeFi protocol is difficult to match CeFi in these two aspects. Today's market data also clearly shows this: almost all leverage in the present crypto ecosystem is provided by conventional exchanges. Source: DeFi Pulse, Skew It is worth noting that when all trading activities are used in a certain, open and credible neutral DeFi standard protocol (for example, an individual Layer 1 I mentioned a few weeks ago), then DeFi can eradicate basic risks, Thereby improving the capital efficiency of all market participants. But this possibility is quite low in the foreseeable future. Transaction DeFi protocols are far inferior to centralized alternatives in a number of main aspects. Over all, these factors prevent DEX from grabbing CEX's market share.
* Delay and probabilistic determination. Since Ethereum adopts the Nakamoto Consensusâthe consensus is followed by high-latency probabilistic determinationâthe buyers and sellers can not know their exact location in real time. As a result of not enough precision, their transactions must be more conservative (for example, utilizing a larger spread). In this regard, any solution with a shorter block time can alleviate the problem. * Miners are front-running. As the crypto ecosystem matures and traders transfer more transactions directly to the chain for settlement, block producers will quickly maximize the huge benefits (MEV) available to miners. At these times, miners will quickly trade first, which can be very detrimental to liquidity providers. * Whole position leverage and offset positions. Currently, Binance and FTX provide users with different types of product full positions (for example, a bullish perpetual position to ensure call options). In the next year, I are expecting they'll gradually offer offsetting positions (for example, through ETH short positions, users extend long BTC positions), after which other centralized exchanges will observe up. Even though a decentralized environment can theoretically provide full-storage leverage, since the decentralized trading market is not yet mature, practical operations tend to be more difficult. * Lack of legal currency channels. It is difficult to transfer users from the fiat currency world to the encryption field in a decentralized way on a large scale. You can find indeed a few teams working on this dilemma, but non-e of these are finding ways to crack it. Before that, stablecoins certainly are a good stopgap measure for users who already hold cryptocurrencies. * Throughput and gas costs. Traders desire to settle transactions quickly, readjust the mortgage ratio, after which quickly open new orders. These operations demand a lot of gas costs. Therefore can the DeFi protocol reduce latency and offer faster certainty? On low-latency Layer 2 (such as Skale) or Layer 1 (such as Solana), the answer is yes. Can the DeFi protocol alleviate the risk of profit-seeking miners? Some Layer 1 does have theoretical solutions, nevertheless they cause higher latency, complexity, and gas costs. For a few Layer 2 license verification nodes, the answer is yes. Can the DeFi protocol replace having less legal currency support? With stablecoins, the answer is yes. In the foreseeable future, it's difficult to see decentralized exchanges surpass centralized exchanges. Even though you can find relatively clear answers to solve the issue of delay and finality, experienced traders 1) don't want block producers to preemptively trade, 2) aspire to have the ability to trade margin trading and offset positions so that you can boost their capital efficiency. This case can also be very obvious in the information: conventional exchanges account for almost all trading volume, and almost all price discovery depends upon CeFi. Source: CoinAPI, Bloxy Synthetic assets To be able to trade synthetic assets, the exchange must make provision for 1) a mechanism for managing collateral and paying winners/losers, and 2) a dependable price oracle. Currently, these two functions of conventional exchanges are very good: they both manage collateral and run a centralized price prediction system for perpetual contracts (perps). Additionally , FTX also launched ingenious synthetic assets for the 2020 US presidential election, including the TRUMP and BIDEN contracts. Even though theoretically DeFi protocols can provide arbitrary synthetic contracts (for example, through Augur), they don't seem to have any execution advantages besides inheriting all of the inherent options that come with DeFi protocolsâautonomous custody and permissionless oracles (but It could be a loophole rather than an advantage, depending on the situation). Centralized exchanges have been in a great position in synthetic market competition, and so they have proven this through perpetual contracts. Breaking through the defects mentioned on the DeFi invisible ceiling, the most common one is delay. Since the price of encrypted assets fluctuates so sharply, delay is crucial. Its price might fluctuate by a huge selection of points in just a couple of seconds, and the 15-second block time and Satoshi Nakamoto's consensus make systemic risks worse. The operating time of centralized finance is measured in nanoseconds; the operating time of decentralized finance is measured in seconds. At the moment, there is almost no DeFi that will operate in the nanosecond time dimension, but with an answer like Solana-it may be the only blockchain that separates global state updates from time changes-the running time of DeFi may be reduced to micro Second level. In Ethereum 2. 0, it'll generate a brand new block every 12 seconds. DeFi may be the current highlight of Ethereum, but Ethereum 2. 0 is not optimized for DeFi. Again, throughput is an obvious problem. Even though the Ethereum network is operating smoothly more often than not; but on your day of Black Thursday, March 12, its dilemmas were exposed-Ethereum simply cannot withstand such a large transaction volume. Although DeFi transaction volume is just 1% of CeFi. On the other hand, encrypted CeFi transactions only account for 0. 1-1% of conventional asset classes (excluding foreign exchange). DeFi features a long way to go. Investing in DeFi Even though the DeFi protocol faces structural disadvantages for most users and traders, their services continue to be much better than CeFi in a few market segments, and these market segments might contain vast amounts of dollars in opportunities. For example , I think there's a huge market for non-custodial perpetual contract transactions. Because of the causes mentioned above, DeFi perpetual can not replace CeFi in a short span of time, but I think a platform that delivers DeFi perpetual contract transactions will have a substantial market share. Given that the sum total market value of main-stream CeFi exchanges is approximately US$20 billion, and industry continues to be growing rapidly, a trading venue that delivers non-custodial perpetual contracts might be a good investment opportunity. With the continuous improvement of DeFi's underlying technology infrastructure, it'll gradually occupy CeFi's market share. At some time in the next couple of years, as all necessary infrastructures be and much more complete, I are expecting a step function change in the DeFi growth rate. So just how does people judge when DeFi won? The clear answer is: when price discovery shifts from centralized exchanges to decentralized venues. If you're developing any novel DeFi protocol or infrastructure that powers DeFi, please call us via email or Twitter. As a result of Haseeb Qureshi for his feedback on this article. Disclosure: Multicoin Capital held SOL, ETH and BTC and invested in Skale and dForce at the time of publishing this short article.
















