Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Defi is a broad category of smart contracts which loosely correspond to digital investment schemes running on a blockchain which allow users to create overcollateralized loans out of stablecoin and which have side payouts in so-called "governance tokens".

DeFi generally refers to a collection of services which offer lending products offered by non-banks and which exist outside the regulatory perimeter as a form regulatory arbitrage and to fund margin trading activities to speculaate on crypto assets.

See also yield farming, AMM, DEX and shadow bank.

References

  1. Allen, Hilary J. 2022. ‘DeFi: Shadow Banking 2.0?’ William & Mary Law Review, Forthcoming.
  2. Walch, Angela. 2019. ‘Deconstructing ‘Decentralization’: Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems’. C. Brummer (Ed.), Crypto Assets: Legal and Monetary Perspectives, 1–36. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244.
  3. Anker-Sørensen, Linn, and Dirk A Zetzsche. 2021. ‘From Centralized to Decentralized Finance: The Issue Of’. Available at SSRN 3978815. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3978815.
  4. Aramonte, Sirio, Wenqian Huang, and Andreas Schrimpf. 2021. ‘DeFi Risks and the Decentralisation Illusion’, 16.
  5. Barbereau, Tom, Reilly Smethurst, Orestis Papageorgiou, Alexander Rieger, and Gilbert Fridgen. 2022. ‘DeFi, Not So Decentralized: The Measured Distribution of Voting Rights’. In Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/80074.
  6. Barbereau, Tom, Reilly Smethurst, Orestis Papageorgiou, Johannes Sedlmeir, and Gilbert Fridgen. 2022. ‘Decentralised Finance’s Unregulated Governance: Minority Rule in the Digital Wild West’. Available at SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4001891.
  7. Brennecke, Martin, Benjamin Schellinger, Nils Urbach, and Tobias Guggenberger. 2022. ‘The De-Central Bank in Decentralized Finance: A Case Study of MakerDAO’. In 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2022). https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2022.737.
  8. Chen, Yan, and Cristiano Bellavitis. 2020. ‘Blockchain Disruption and Decentralized Finance: The Rise of Decentralized Business Models’. Journal of Business Venturing Insights 13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbvi.2019.e00151.
  9. Ciriello, Raffaele Fabio. 2021. ‘Tokenized Index Funds: A Blockchain-Based Concept and a Multidisciplinary Research Framework’. International Journal of Information Management 61: 102400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2021.102400.
  10. Eikmanns, Benedikt C., Pascal Mehrwald, Isabell M. Welpe, and Philipp G. Sandner. n.d. ‘Is Ethereum the New IOS? Exploring the Platform Economy of Decentralized Finance’. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3992625.
  11. Harwick, Cameron, and James Caton. 2020. ‘What’s Holding Back Blockchain Finance? On the Possibility of Decentralized Autonomous Finance’. Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, October. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.qref.2020.09.006.
  12. Johnson, Kristin N. 2021. ‘Decentralized Finance: Regulating Cryptocurrency Exchanges’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3831439.
  13. Maia, Guilherme, and João Vieira dos Santos. 2021. ‘MiCA and DeFi (“Proposal for a Regulation on Market in Crypto-Assets” and ’Decentralised Finance’)’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3875355.
  14. Nedashkovskiy, Alexander. 2021. ‘Understanding DeFi Ecosystem and How Can It Change or Transform Existing Financial System’. https://lutpub.lut.fi/handle/10024/162989.
  15. Qin, Kaihua, Liyi Zhou, Yaroslav Afonin, Ludovico Lazzaretti, and Arthur Gervais. 2021. ‘CeFi vs. DeFi – Comparing Centralized to Decentralized Finance’. ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:2106.08157. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08157.
  16. Saengchote, Kanis. 2021. ‘A DeFi Bank Run: Iron Finance, IRON Stablecoin, and the Fall of TITAN’. IRON Stablecoin, and the Fall of TITAN (July 16, 2021).
  17. Schär, Fabian. 2021. ‘Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain-and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets’. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review 103 (2): 153–74. https://doi.org/10.20955/r.103.153-74.
  18. Sun, Xiaotong. 2021. ‘Centralized Governance in Decentralized Finance (DeFi): A Case Study of MakerDAO’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3971791.
  19. Zetzsche, Dirk A., Douglas W. Arner, and Ross P. Buckley. 2020. ‘Decentralized Finance’. Journal of Financial Regulation 6 (2): 172–203. https://doi.org/10.1093/jfr/fjaa010.
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