What Is DeFi?

Decentralised finance (DeFi) is an umbrella term for financial service applications that run on public blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana.

In DeFi, retail users can take advantage of services that conventional financial service providers have predominantly been providing to wealthy clients for decades — exchange currencies, borrow, lend, earn interest, trade assets, trade derivatives and much more.

Conventional financial service providers are part of what is referred to as Centralised Finance (CeFi) though, meaning that they act as gatekeepers or intermediaries for the lion share of financial services provided today.

This implies that retail users need to go through these institutions if they’d like to use specific financial instruments or buy and sell specific financial assets.