Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Objectives and Technologies

The blockchain technology and its increasing adoption in increasingly diverse sectors have allowed for a sudden change in perspective in the management of financial flows, bringing in huge amounts of liquidity from not only large investors but also the retail sector, which has approached and is approaching the crypto sector in its broadest sense, first for fun and then with a decent awareness.

One of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain technology and its applications is certainly the ability to address an audience of recipients not only without them being approved or listed upstream by a third party entity but even without the need to have a bank account or an email: the so-called web3 allows users to access this technology simply by creating a wallet and holding their access keys.

The permissionless and decentralized blockchain technology aims to counter, in every application and declination, the centralized systems that have presented various barriers to entry, especially in the financial sector.

In this scenario, an ecosystem whose architecture is structured on finance protocols built on smart contracts, more or less complex software that draw on a linear if-this-then logic, has found its natural application.

To give the reader a practical view of how a smart contract works, it is customary to draw on the operation of a coffee machine, where inserting a coin or a key generates a security deposit (called an escrow account) from which, upon delivery of the good or service (in this case, a coffee), the corresponding amount will be deducted, concluding a purchase contract in an automated way.

Decentralized finance (or DeFi), thanks to the complex development of smart contracts, aims to simplify traditional financial dynamics by offering solutions ranging from peer-2-peer currency exchange to trading, savings activities, yield farming, and access to credit through collateral-backed loans, all without going through an intermediary such as a broker, bank, or even a centralized exchange.

Blockchain: a technology with diverse applications.

Although relatively recent, the technology that we broadly define as “blockchain” appears as a plurality of languages that present different peculiarities, and while bitcoin has undoubtedly paved the way in terms of decentralization and value reserve, it is also true that over the years, other protocols have aimed to find solutions to different needs, and one of the most interesting under this aspect, although not chronologically the first, is certainly Ethereum, a blockchain that was born, unlike bitcoin, to be programmable.

Our years of experience in a software house specialized in blockchain and fintech like Blockchain Italia have allowed us to evaluate a wide range of solutions to tackle the DeFi sector, and the architecture designed by Algorand, of which we are among the first 12 Global Partners Worldwide, has proved to be perfect for the intended purposes.

Algorand, a project launched in 2019 by Prof. Silvio Micali, a renowned name in the fields of cryptography and mathematics, is a protocol that uses a different consensus mechanism from Bitcoin and Ethereum, the PPoS (Pure-Proof-of-Stake), which allows for a sustainable, ecological, and at the same time economical blockchain.

The Algorand infrastructure has minimal times and costs for transaction execution, ensuring increasing decentralization, maintaining a high degree of security and the impossibility of generating forks; moreover, the AVM (Algorand Virtual Machine) allows for programming smart contracts at a high level.

Algorand also aims to be a meeting point between Decentralized Finance and institutions, incorporating peculiarities of both worlds and allowing for hybridization between the two sectors.

Blockchain Italia’s experience: Folks Finance.

In this context, after studying and analyzing the market, at Blockchain Italy we have decided to launch a Decentralized Finance protocol on Algorand with the aim of representing accessible and flexible finance for everyone: thus Algolend was born, which will then be renamed, to better pursue its goal of spreading among heterogeneous users, Folks Finance, “finance for the people”.

Folks Finance is an emerging protocol in the Algorand ecosystem that offers high ease of use, low transaction management costs, and aims to meet the dual need of traditional finance: to deposit an asset and receive interest, and to borrow capital by pledging collateral without intermediaries or mortgages.

The platform responds to the need to scale and improve the decentralized lending sector and differs from many other DeFi solutions for its long-term time horizon, which encourages good users.

Furthermore, Folks Finance guarantees the highest security standards, thanks to numerous audits carried out by specialized companies and the lowest risks for users, thanks to a unique way of defining loan parameters and testing each collateral/loan pair, assigning a specific smart contract and specific covariance for each one.

Finally, following Algorand‘s perfectly outlined environmental strategy, which boasts of being “The greenest blockchain“, Folks Finance has partnered with ClimateTrade to be Carbon Neutral from day zero and thus contribute to improving the environmental impact, often a weak point of other blockchain technologies.

In conclusion, the possibilities offered by emerging technologies are increasing and blockchain guarantees innovative formulas and new forms of development that translate into greater accessibility in the financial sector, opening up an unexplored world for a large segment of the population.

It is a complex world, built on calculations and automations that inherently carry a high degree of risk, but with due precautions, it can be a game-changer to support and integrate traditional finance. It is necessary to proceed with caution, building one’s own educational and experiential baggage, but with a strong willingness to accept change and innovation, which historically have contributed to that evolutionary process that constitutes eternal human research.