Decentralized Finance (DeFi): A Primer for Professional Investors

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is one of the most exciting corners of crypto. The goal of DeFi is to create a more accessible, efficient, and transparent financial system by leveraging one of crypto’s greatest breakthroughs: programmable money. In this white paper, we put the DeFi movement into context, contrast it to the incumbent alternative, and explore how much market share the disruptive technology could capture. We find that if DeFi were to attain the same penetration relative to its incumbents that other successful disruptive technologies like e-commerce and electric vehicles have achieved (50-70%), it could become a $15 trillion industry over the next 5-15 years.