What: A growing number of developers are seeking to rebuild both the financial system and the internet economy using blockchains- databases distributed over many computers and kept secure by cryptography.

Why it is important: The promise of De-Fi is that it could lead to a better kind of finance: a system that is quicker, cheaper, more transparent, and less reliant on powerful centralised institutions.

The ultimate goal of the blockchain is to replace intermediaries like global banks and tech platforms with software built on top of networks that direct the value they generate back to the users who own and run them. Of all digital activities, these efforts towards decentralizing finance that are most advanced.

Decentralised finance (DeFi) seeks crowdsourced control that many deem unreachable. But piece by piece a new kind of economy is being built through applications on various blockchains. Each addition makes it more likely that the whole will amount to something meaningful and powerfully disruptive.

Innovations, such as automated marketmakers, arbitrage systems, and self-stabilizing currency regimes, are already pushing the boundaries of financial technology. Can decentralized finance lay the foundations for an open digital economy?

Decentralisation offers an alternative: interoperable, transparent, often efficient systems that, by distributing control over software, guard against the concentration of power. On a blockchain, the software governs the hardware. Once a decentralised foundation to store and execute lines of code has been laid, anything can be built on top – assets or applications.

Adventures in defi-land