The following is an excerpt of DeFi Dad's closing commentary from the Q2 Ethereum DeFi Report. For tutorials on DeFi basics, yield farming, and more, check out his YouTube Channel.
Years from now, I believe Q2 2020 will be looked upon as a turning point in the rise of DeFi and a cementing of Ethereum’s inescapable network effects. Everything worth building is being built on Ethereum, and the narrative fueling this sentiment is the drive to build a new alternative P2P finance system. We’re talking about money legos that stack together to save us time, save us money, and enable greater global access in applications with remarkably low fees, remarkably high yield, and the absence of middlemen.
Q1 already brought about the very public milestone of $1 billion total value locked TVL deposited into DeFi applications, but it was unexpectedly followed by the global economic downturn associated with the coronavirus pandemic. I could have never predicted that after a near 50% drawdown in prices across cryptoasset markets to end Q12020, Q2 would rebound to a new historic milestone of $4 billion deposited into DeFi applications and protocols.
There's something for everyone in DeFi.
Beyond the flashy numbers and hard hitting data you’ll discover in this report, there’s a simple explanation for all this growth: there’s something for everyone in DeFi. The composability of DeFi money legos combined with the largest community of Ethereum developers by many orders of magnitude has resulted in new P2P money applications for lending, borrowing, trading, stablecoins swaps, DEX aggregators, margin trading, futures, BTC futures, tokenized BTC, options, derivatives for commodities and forex, and newly launched ETF-like exposure thanks to Balancer. Most of this was either launched or made widely available for use in Q2—over just 3 months.
DeFi on Ethereum has seen more innovation in 3 months than legacy finance has seen in 3 decades.
It’s not complicated when you use these applications regularly and recognize not only do they work, but they impart an asymmetric value that our community would be devastated to lose access to. If you can recall having first experienced the likes of email, AOL Instant Messenger, and Napster, you cannot un-see such revolutionary value. DeFi is doing to money what email did to the postal service.
Thanks to the variety of DeFi applications built on Ethereum, there’s something for everyone to benefit from. It would be a shame for you to read this ecosystem report of rich data and insights and not follow up by actually trying one of many DeFi applications revolutionizing how future generations will transact peer-to-peer, but one quick warning: once you see this, there’s no turning back.
Download the Q2 Ethereum DeFi Report
Discover emerging network trends and explore the performance of the popular DeFi protocols like Compound, Uniswap, and MakerDAO.