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Key takeaways from Decentralized Finance: What It Is, Why It Matters

DeFi’s two foundational qualities — permissionless-ness and transparency — translate to multiple, powerful use cases. Open at source

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decentralized finance aka “DeFi,” the ecosystem of blockchain-enabled products and services that replace traditional financial intermediaries with freely accessible, autonomous, and transparent software.

While it’s still early days for DeFi (just a couple years in), its associated economy is already large and consequential: Ethereum, the backend infrastructure for DeFi, settled about $1.5 trillion in transactions last quarter, or 50% of Visa’s payment volume; decentralized money markets are issuing billions of dollars worth of loans every month

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