Binance Smart Chain Presents: “Bridging DeFi and Real-World Assets” at Xend Finance DeFi Hackathon 2021

As the first company to build on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) out of Africa, and one of the first in the world, we are well aware of the advantages of BSC and being part of the Binance Labs family. Binance has assembled an incredible ecosystem that encompasses all layers of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency and maintains a firm level of support for all of their portfolio companies.

At the Xend Finance DeFi Hackathon 2021: Decentralizing Africa and Beyond, Julian Tan, BSC Ecosystem Coordinator, shared a presentation on the growth of DeFi (Decentralized Finance), the problems still presented with DeFi, the BSC ecosystem and its roadmap, and tips for developers working on the future of DeFi and how to bridge it with real-world assets.

You can see the deck he presented below:

To watch Julian talk us through his deck, you’re going to want to watch the YouTube stream here:

You can register or watch any of the upcoming Panels and Workshops for free here: https://hackathon.xend.finance/

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Complete Transcript of Julian Tan’s Speech and Presentation is Below

Hey Kevin, thanks for your very kind introductions and once again thanks to the Xend Finance team for having me on this panel today, so if I could quickly share my screen I would like to basically talk and share some of the insights that I see as well as what BSC has been doing, basically along the lines in terms of some of the traditional finance issues as well versus DeFi and how BSC is helping to solve it with DeFi, and what can people actually expect of BSC as a tool for developers around the globe.

So as Kevin has introduced me, I’m the BSC ecosystem coordinator and I’m here to talk to you about traditional finance and DeFi. I think a lot of people actually understand what’s going on between traditional finance and Defi, but for those people who don’t know there is a trustless system in DeFi, so that means we’re cutting out all the middle people, you no longer need to have the body, a bank, a person, or any other intermediary that could operate between you and your assets, and so the concept of trustless basically is a core element of the blockchain achieved via the utilization, as well as execution of smart contracts.

By cutting out the middleman, transactions can now happen a lot faster and cheaper, and that’s why DeFi right now in a global perspective is gaining a lot of attraction.

And you see that happening every day with TVL, the utilization of the blockchain, not just on BSC, but you see that happening on Polygon, you that happening on Solana, and we definitely think that this could show up as the days and the year goes by as well as the sophistication of the blockchain technology as well as smart contracts improve. So in BSC we have about 1000 different projects currently live, also in different parts of the DeFi ecosystem.

We have some of the more famous ones like Cream Finance, ForTube for lending, for wallets, we have a couple of them as well, the more famous ones are like MyEtherWallet, Coin98, TrustWallet, Swipe. For stablecoins, we have quite a few, we have Curves, we have Ellipsis, BUSD, Bdollar. They’re all supported and all supporting our ecosystem as well.

And for yield farming as well as Launchpad those are definitely things that most people are interested in on how to make their money grow.

For yield farming, we have some really cool ones like Beefy Finance, we have Alpaca Finance as well and for launchpad we have Pancakeswap, HotCross, BSCPad, just to name a few, it’s impossible for me to name all 1000 of them.

If I missed out any of these project names, no hard feelings! So if we start to look at how DeFi versus traditional finance space has developed over the last couple of years, you can quickly see that in terms of the gross value locked versus the net value locked, that the growth of DeFi has been exponential and this is only the beginning considering that this is a fairly new kind of thing or fairly a new kind of venture. I would expect this chart to be a lot steeper as well as bigger as the industry develops and more ideas are coming up in terms of what people are able to achieve, the autonomy that people are able to achieve when it comes to swap contracts and as well as the utilization of the blockchains. And you see, right now we even have GameFi. So zooming into some of the key infrastructures in terms of the BSC DeFi ecosystem, we obviously had a call on every single DeFi ecosystem. You will have stablecoins, new farming, decentralized exchanges, lending protocols as well as the collateralisation of various assets. So this is what we at BSC view as one of the crucial elements of what they call DeFi Legos that would allow other kinds of applications, other kinds of economies like GameFi to actually build on top of them, giving rise to new industrial and new economic models using what has been developed by these applications. If you compare them to traditional finance, you realize that for stablecoins, yield farming, you are earning interest rate based on your stablecoin pegged to the dollar. In the traditional finance world that is something called a savings fixed deposit account where you’d actually deposit your fiat and earn interest from those. Obviously, in traditional finance it will probably be stock, brokerages or even FX, that kind of platform may be like Robinhood.

For lending protocols, you could easily compare them to bank loans as well as the traditional finance lending system and collateralisation of real world global assets. That’s also there in traditional finance with mortgage facilities, or at the station, or certain assets that allow you to get that kind of loan from your traditional financial kind of institutions.

So of course, all the good things about decentralized finance, as I just said, the DeFi is still really in its infancy stage, and there’s a lot of issues right now on DeFi, issues such as smart contract vulnerabilities, we have volatility in digital assets as well, just to name a few. But the whole issue is that self custody is one of the major issues as the entire system requires everyone to be responsible for their own assets. So if you look at the characteristics of the blockchain where the blockchain transactions are immutable, sometimes it’s very hard to actually reverse the transaction when the transaction has been made, or if you lose the private keys to your wallet, then there could be a huge issue for you as a user.

So how is BSC helping to bridge this gap between decentralized finance or centralized finance? We have several things that could allow developers to easily just come in and build their platforms or their protocols on BSC.

The first of which is obviously the Priority One campaign. For people who are not very familiar with what we’ve been doing, the Priority One campaign is basically a campaign where we are leveraging our own BSC accelerator funds and helping projects that are building on BSC to actually have more money to actually propose what hackers and those kinds of hacking syndicate search to come in and, give a shot at hacking the protocol itself. Obviously you define any kind of critical or high issue, find bugs that might lead to jeopardizing of users’ funds then obviously we will help the project to pay out a certain percentage of the vault that they put up. Another thing would obviously be the Binance bridge. This is something that we feel also definitely helps to bridge these decentralized finance as well as central financial world because in the early days of blockchain, I think in 2017, 2016, if you’re looking at switching an asset on Ethereum to a different one, I mean probably like Binance chain, you’re gonna have a lot of issues. But today It’s so easy, so easy to switch your Bitcoin on Polygon, your Bitcoin on the Ethereum Network or even your Bitcoin on BSC, and a lot of these that we do on the facilitation that we do is through the Binance bridge. A lot of these assets are now also on Binance bridge. Just for example, earlier today we’re finally bringing Solana and a few other kind of tokens that wasn’t previously on Binance smart chain but now to Binance Smart Chain, so you’re able to exchange their tokens and access from even different kind of platforms even for Solana to come in to BSC and on board to any of the protocols that you have Interest on. Obviously, for us we also have partnership with several audits firms, just to name a few like SlowMist, so we have green lane arrangements for each and every of these auditing firms. I’m not too sure about if we’re bringing on another protocol, but for BSC, if you are going for an audit and the average waiting time is about two or three weeks. That could help you guys gain kind of confidence as well as it allows your community to have that kind of confidence knowing that your code has been reviewed and looked at by a reputable firm.

As I previously mentioned about the Binance bridge, we also have something called the B-tokens, which we wouldn’t go too much in depth on what they are. They are basically tokens that are on different kinds of protocols that have been issued on BSC. So it’s really easy now for any kind of developer to base their native token even on a different protocol to come into play on BSC. Because we can easily get these kinds of B-tokens available for liquidity through the Binance bridge or through some of our liquidity providers and allow you to quickly bring over all your assets to BSC and run the show as per normal.

Another thing is obviously DeFi Legos, I think what I take pride in as well as I’m pretty sure I speak for the rest of the BSC team when I say that we have a pretty solid as well as comprehensive foundation to DeFi legos. We should then allow anyone to come in and build in more complex kinds of new farming protocols, or even build an entirely new ecosystem based on the kind of DeFi Legos foundation that we’ve laid out. Another thing that I definitely wanted to say about how we’re helping to bridge this gap is through the MVB program, for people who have been keeping up with us, the MVB program is where, It’s like we gamify it, the entire building program. For developers that are actually building any of these projects that gain the most amount of traction, they will be able to gain like several good stuff from us, from the BSC team, sometimes we do investments or even grants for projects that come through these MVB programs, and if you actually look at the Binance centralized exchange as well helps to support our initiatives by giving us a prioritization for projects that are on BSC.

So this MVB program is like a fast track acceleration program which allows you guys to easily grow with BSC. We have the high performance infrastructure that has been built in the BSC and there are several really cool things that are coming on such as we are about to,

I can’t say too much, but we are about to give a really good and solid solution in terms of the GameFi issues that we currently have amongst the entire blockchain ecosystem, not just BSC. A lot of these games are actually limited by lower TPS as well as high densities. So we are constantly looking at our existing infrastructure as well as improving that so that we help to provide an optimum kind of platform for any formal developers to come in and build on it. So for our tech roadmap, the first thing is definitely interoperability and composition. Our team imagines a world where you know eventually every single protocol will be able to onboard via different blockchains. So the people at BSC are definitely for this kind of interoperability when it comes to protocols.

We are prioritizing high performance EVM infrastructure optimization. Some of the things that I was suggesting would be a faster block finality. We are also looking to start to provide more light node support for archive APIs and write streams, as well as resolving all these storage locally as well and the concurrent execution of the EVM and then network enhancements.

We would also be supporting on-chain randomizers in time to come, as well as we are looking into privacy preserving solutions that could help safeguard your privacy whenever you are on board through a chain like BSC.

So that’s actually what I really wanted to share with anyone who’s tuning in. If you’re interested to learn more about BSC or take part in any of our programs, feel free to reach us at these various links Twitter, Telegram, developer Telegram community or even reach out to us in terms of if you think your project is really interesting and you think that we might be interested reach out to us through the BSC accelerator fund.

Thank you.