DeFi’s Breakout Moment

How privacy & scalability can help lead DeFi to mainstream adoption; and bringing AMMS to Oasis with a new partnership with Balancer.

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The promise of DeFi is to create an open financial system that makes money accessible with little more than just a smartphone, an internet connection, and the adherence to transparent rules. Yet due to limitations of DeFi today — specifically in terms of scalability and privacy, while self-motivated traders and miners have leveraged Ethereum’s unprotected data and slow throughput to gain benefit in DeFi today, this model is unsustainable.

We believe DeFi is facing its first defining moment: while there has been tremendous growth in DeFi over the past year, the DeFi ecosystem must overcome its performance challenges and capacity for manipulation in order to capture a mainstream market.

Using Privacy and Scalability to Overcome DeFi’s obstacles

Oasis Network has been designed to broaden and deepen DeFi opportunities for players large and small by breaking the obstacles currently plaguing the space. The Oasis Network provides critical advantages that will allow it to support the next generation of DeFi:

• Private smart contracts, which enables the creation of a new generation of decentralized applications born that see privacy as an incentive to create trust with their users
• Private state and transaction details, which prevents malicious players from gaming the system in order to realize higher profits while limiting the participation of smaller DeFi users
• The flexibility to keep data public or confidential, which allows DeFi Dapps to comply with regulations while ensuring protection of commercial interests and participation of financial institutions in the system
• High throughput, which reduces/eliminates the transaction fees that disincentivize any but the already-wealthy to participate in DeFi
• Multiple customizable runtimes, which allows DeFi developers to meet the needs of their applications and implement the set of incentives that best suits that application
• The ability to tokenize data, which brings reputation & records (such as a credit score) to DeFi by encapsulating and protecting user’s information and allowing the creation of ad-hoc scoring models
• Secure computing, which paves the way for the creation of data lending, where the underlying data, not just tokens, are the object of lend-borrow transactions

These are all powerful primitives that will help redefine DeFi, but they’re only the beginning. There is a broad ecosystem of established companies who have built well known and invaluable tools.

Partnering with Balancer to bring AMMs to the Oasis Network

As we seek to build a Private DeFi ecosystem we’re thrilled to announce a new partnership with Balancer. Balancer is a leading non-custodial portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor with $300M in liquidity; it incentivizes investors to add liquidity in exchange for the fees that traders pay to swap tokens on Balancer’s decentralized exchange.

Not only is Balancer being ported to the Oasis Network, but we will also be working directly with Balancer to issue a joint grant to the community to build this powerful integration. The Balancer community will have the opportunity to provide feedback and approval for the grant and its scope via Balancer’s community governance mechanism. This partnership is also an opportunity for Balancer to investigate the benefits of privacy and confidential compute for AMMs in practice.

If you think you can bring Balancer to the Oasis Network — or bring other DeFi tools — apply for a grant today.

Unlocking Private DeFi

Our partnership with Balancer is just the beginning. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be sharing news about the broad ecosystem of DeFi projects we’re onboarding to the Oasis Network. Together we hope to reshape DeFi by building a new more scalable platform that leverages confidential compute to solve challenging issues such as front running, and expand DeFi beyond early adopters to a mass market.

If you would like to learn more about DeFi on the Oasis Network, or have an idea for a project and would like to partner with us, join our Telegram.