DeFi ‘Should Be the Foundation’ of Every Financial Product: Compound’s Robert Leshner

There is a approach to view this summer time’s crypto liquidity crisis—and the ensuing bankruptcies and bailouts of centralized lenders—as having demonstrated that decentralized finance (DeFi) is working because it ought to.

At the least that is how Compound founder Robert Leshner sees it.

“I believe the final couple of months have proven, indubitably, the benefits that DeFi creates,” Leshner advised Decrypt at Chainlink SmartCon in New York. “DeFi ought to be the muse for just about each kind of market and monetary product sooner or later.”

As Bitcoin plummeted and centralized companies just like the now-bankrupt Celsius scrambled to maintain their companies afloat, the primary money owed they started paying off had been money owed made in DeFi land. 

Whereas many collectors nonetheless proceed to attend to see their funds, again in July the lending agency paid off the final of its decentralized loans to MakerDAO. Beforehand, Celsius had gone down the road from Maker, then Aave, and likewise Leshner’s personal Compound protocol. 

And all through this chaos, none of those platforms suffered a single “hiccup” due to smart contracts‘ unstoppable code and visibility.

“Each single DeFi protocol, Compound included, principally went by unbelievably turbulent occasions with out a hiccup,” Leshner mentioned. “They had been designed for radical transparency. So everyone knew precisely what property had been in Compound, what the debtors seemed like, how wholesome the debtors had been, and all the collateral that was essential to help these borrowing positions was already held by Compound.”

The funds, for instance, weren’t getting used elsewhere to realize further leverage. (If they’d been, everybody on Crypto Twitter would’ve recognized about it.)

As for the dealings of the assorted centralized platforms, Leshner mentioned, none of this transparency existed, so companies like Celsius and Voyager might take their clients’ funds and do no matter they needed with them.

“No person knew what they had been doing; in contrast to a DeFi protocol, they acquired to handle their enterprise nevertheless they noticed match,” he mentioned. “They had been aggressively lending, un-collateralized, to Three Arrows Capital, or they had been buying and selling their clients’ funds, or doing all these loopy issues that nobody thought their enterprise mannequin was. And these are the issues with CeFi [centralized finance]. And these are the issues I believe regulators ought to take a look at and say ‘Wow,  in the event that they had been DeFi, none of this might have occurred.'”

Make every thing a stablecoin

In the meantime, the fast development of dollar-pegged blockchain tokens over the past two years has been nothing wanting gorgeous. And it begs a key query: Why not put all monetary markets on blockchains?

“I believe we will begin to see plenty of different stablecoins, each for foreign currency just like the pound or the yen, but in addition for various property,” Leshner mentioned.

So as a substitute of simply vanilla fiat flying round on numerous blockchains, he argued that quickly we’ll start seeing property like actual property or authorities bonds. 

And importantly, it’s all going to appear to be a stablecoin—simply pegged to one thing else.

“In most use instances and examples, real-world property—whether or not it is actual property, or shares, or bonds, or one thing that is held off-chain coming onto a blockchain—it is going to appear to be a stablecoin,” mentioned Leshner. What’s extra, these new sorts of property are going to search out “plenty of adoption in DeFi” over the subsequent decade.