Decentralised Finance: How Australia Fits into the Picture

DeFi Applications

Lending platforms

The DeFi market is currently expanding at an explosive rate. According to figures released by DeFi Llama, cryptocurrency investors have put up US$250 billion worth of assets as collateral in various DeFi projects, funds which are then lent out in the form of cryptocurrency loans.

Parallel to the expansion of the cryptocurrency market, DeFi will become increasingly able to provide loans via the various lending platforms that are popping up around the world. In effect, DeFi lending platforms are digital banks, taking money from cryptocurrency depositors and lending it out to borrowers.

Instead of traditional bank loans, the DeFi platforms rely on "smart contracts" — primarily the Ethereum blockchain — which uses computer code to authorize, execute and verify transactions.

Lending markets serve as one of the most intriguing and promising applications of DeFi by connecting borrowers to lenders of cryptocurrencies by means of platforms that enable individuals or companies to either borrow cryptocurrencies or provide crypto loans.

In order to obtain a loan, borrowers must put up collateral — usually ether, the crypto currency issued by Ethereum, the principal system on which all cryptocurrency applications are based. Borrowers tend to receive loans in the form of stablecoins pegged to traditional currencies like the dollar.

Alternatively, borrowers can post collateral in the form of bitcoin, which then gets deposited in a crypto pool that is overseen by a smart contract. Should the price of bitcoin take a precipitous fall, the smart contract automatically liquidates the collateral to protect depositors who have provided the loan funds in the form of stablecoins. Meanwhile, lenders earn money from the interest rate the platforms charge for lending out their funds.

Decentralised exchanges

Decentralised exchanges use smart contracts to enable traders to execute orders without an intermediary. Users trade directly from their wallets by exchanging one currency for another, for example Bitcoin for US dollars or euros for Ether, by means of the smart contracts behind the trading platform. Traders are solely responsible for managing and securing their funds and risk losing their holdings if they lose their private keys or send funds to the wrong addresses. The advantage of bypassing financial intermediaries and preserving anonymity is offset to a degree by the lack of security a bank or a centralized exchange provides.

Stablecoins

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the value of a non-crypto asset (i.e. the US dollar) that offers price stability, which in turn provides greater security for DeFi collateralized lending. Tether is one of the leading stablecoins.

Australia: Making a splash in DeFi

Australia currently ranks 12th out of 154 countries according to the Global DeFi Adoption Index published by Chainanalysis. This index uses three metrics in its assessment of DeFi adoption: on-chain cryptocurrency value received by DeFi platforms weighted by public private partnership (PPP) per capital, total retail value received by DeFi platforms and individual deposits to DeFi platforms.

Australia's DeFi sector is currently experiencing a boom led by various companies such as Synthetix (SNX), which hopes to become a decentralised version of derivatives exchange BitMEX; Maple Finance (MPL), which offers loans for crypto institutions; and newly launched tiiik, which offers a digital wallet that allows investors to earn interest on DeFi products. Other new Australian DeFi players include Thorchain, Ren and mSTABLE.

While the DeFi sector is currently in its first developmental phase much like Bitcoin in its early days, individual investors have three main ways of investing in this evolving industry. First, one can obtain cryptocurrency-based loans; second, one can earn interest by lending (staking) their crypto holds, looking to invest in DeFi coins. Block Earner, for example, is an Australian fintech outfit that provides a DeFi online savings platform, which pays 7 percent interest on deposits. Third, investors can simply invest in DeFi coins in the same way that one can purchase cryptocurrencies.

Evolving market

Investors willing to take a plunge in DeFi should be aware that the underlying volatility of the cryptocurrency markets can rattle the DeFi sector in the event of sharp declines in bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptos. There is also the added spectre of rug pulls, a relatively rare but catastrophic form of fraud.

Rug pulls see unscrupulous DeFi developers create a new token, pair it to a leading cryptocurrency such as tether, set up a liquidity pool, and then use secret back doors encoded into the coin's smart contract to mint millions of new coins before liquidation. This was the case in 2020 when SushiSwap developer Chef Nomi cashed in his SUSHI tokens after raising over $1 billion in collateral finance, which caused the price of SUSHI to crash to near zero.