More than a decade after its creation, bitcoin BTCUSD, +5.35% and other cryptocurrencies have failed to achieve the dream of a new, widely-used global currency free from the manipulations of central banks. Yet the burgeoning movement of decentralized finance, or DeFi, has the potential to shake the very foundations of central banking and financial regulation that has defined the U.S. financial system for more than a century.
Last Wednesday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler also sent a warning to investors on decentralized exchanges, emphasizing that their activity is still “implicated” by securities laws and that the SEC will not hesitate to bring cases against such participants. Witovet compared his company to the publicly traded Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust GBTC, -2.34%, which enables investors to get exposure to the price of bitcoin in their portfolios. DeFi technologies does the same, but for DeFi activities.
Chris Blec, publisher of the website DeFi Watch, is a bitcoin enthusiast who was drawn to the digital currency because of his skepticism of central banks and large financial institutions, but frustrated that if he wanted to actually trade bitcoin, or use it to purchase things, he had to go through centralized and regulated exchanges.
He gave the example of Compound, a protocol for borrowing and lending cryptocurrencies, which has about $8.3 billion invested in it. Users are rewarded for participating in the protocol with a governance token, and users are able to vote on changes to the protocol, proportional to the number of tokens they own.
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