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DeFi Basic

DEXTF – The Democratisation of Value/Power and Web 3

DEXTF - The Democratisation of Value/Power and Web 3

The internet, since its inception, has revolutionized the computer and democratized information, enabling instant access for the world to see. Web 1 sets its roots in the late 60s and early 70s, when it was simply a connection between a handful of computers. Since then, the web has grown exponentially, developing into the second phase of the web, Web 2 has managed to touch the lives of almost every individual today. Nowadays, Web 3 is at the centre of everyone’s attention, but what is the history behind Web 3, why does its development matter? It all comes down to decentralisation and democratisation power and value throughout the network’s participants.

Web 1 refers to the beginnings of the World Wide Web. For the first few decades, the internet remained a rare commodity and was available only to the select few majorly who could afford it and were technically sound to use it. This period also had limited content creators, and a vast number of users were only content consumers. The content created during this period was static and was majorly informative and less interactive. Personal and single-page web pages were standard in this era hosted on ISP-run web servers or free web hosting services. Whilst the functionality of Web 1 was lacking, the decentralised nature of the web meant that the value accrued to the users and builders of the networks, such that active individuals within networks benefited from participating in the networks they influenced.

As the world entered the 1990s, Web 1 evolved into Web 2, shifting away from being a content delivery network and into a more dynamic, user-oriented and engageable network. Furthermore, the number of users who now had access to the internet also increased exponentially, changing the whole dynamics of the world wide web, and starting the era of Web 2. While the Web’s back-end technical aspect continued to grow during this period on the base of Web 1, the way the web pages were designed and used changed significantly, Web 2 was a significant upgrade to its previous version as the content now was more user-generated, usable, and interoperable.

 

However, with Web 2 came centralised services by large corporations (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook). Whilst the networks offered in Web 2 are much more advanced and useful than those offered in Web 1, the decentralised aspect of the web has been stolen from its users and developers, instead giving power to a handful of large corporations. This is a clear issue, as centralised platforms follow a predictable life cycle that starts with them attracting participants to their platform and ends with them extracting value from the participants as their power hold over the participants grows over time. Similarly, centralised platforms will stop cooperating with network participants and start competing with former partners for the top spot within their industry, and extract as much value as possible from their participants, who have now become reliant on that specific centralised platform. Within Web 3, the ownership and power is decentralised. Users and developers can own slices of internet services through the ownership of tokens, democratising the power and value throughout the network and avoiding the exploitation of its participants by a single company which ends up fighting its own users and partners for the largest slice of the cake.

 

Currently we are at the beginning of a new era, and Web 3 is the natural next step in the evolution of the web, combining the decentralised, community-governed fundamentals of Web 1 with the functionality of Web 2. Now is the time to get involved with Web 3 and become an influential participant within a network. Within Asset Management, DEXTF is at the forefront of the development of Web 3.0 within its industry. Traditionally, starting up a fund takes a significant amount of capital with painstakingly slow bureaucracy, and regulation, creating high barriers of entry into fund management. DEXTF is democratising the industry, breaking down these barriers and enabling users to create a fund within minutes, at a much lower cost and with greater exposure to innovative crypto assets than traditional means. We, at DEXTF, offer a non-custodial, trustless and permissionless solution which democratises wealth across all users within our network. After developing the world’s first oracle-less asset management protocol on Solana, we have made asset management that much more accessible to our community members. With the help of Web 3 through the Solana blockchain, fast, cheap transactions will help us in achieving our goal of democratising the asset management industry.

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DeFi Basic

Metaverse: Digital Real Estate

Metaverse: Digital Real Estate

As humanity entered the crypto rabbit hole, there were a few things that we could all imagine ending up on-chain. The crypto community as a collective has matured and grown to accept DeFi and its associated innovations such as flash loans, synthetic assets, AMMs, or atomic swaps but also NFTs, which began with the so-called “jpegs,” which arguably differ in rarity.

So here is the thing. How do you marry DeFi to the convenient versatility that NFTs can provide? Enter the digital real estate in the metaverse. If you understand property markets in the real world, you might also have a chance to make it in the metaverse. However, as with all innovations, the volatility that you might experience could mutilate your virtual senses.

But how can virtual real estate be valued?

Firstly, what needs to be understood is the metaverse’s role, especially in the context of billions of people being “forced” to confine within the physical world of their homes. The metaverse, which, for those familiar with gaming, is an open-world environment where “virtually” (pun intended) anything could take place. You want to visit a museum to learn more about the latest NFT art pieces, check. You need to get the latest fashion designer clothing for your avatar; check. You need to purchase land to build your mansion, check. You want to attend a Snoop Dogg concert, check.

So virtual real estate fits into this new parallel universe where anyone has the chance to build what they always wanted in real life and hope to be able to live in it one day as augmented reality and virtual reality advance.

That’s not it, though, because virtual real estate won’t sell itself, and here is the irony: you might require real estate intermediaries such as consultants, agencies, and marketers to help you with the purchase or sale.

Subsequently, as the traded value grows, it would make sense to aggregate this value under REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts), which are real estate funds backed by these assets. Today this is already possible. Fractionalizing NFTs is not only a meme, although it’s best known as of now solely as that.

This last consideration is exceptionally crucial for asset management protocols because the interplay between traditional real estate and virtual real estate will boost the lagging returns delivered in the past two years in the real world.

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DeFi Basic

Metaverse 2.0 or 3.0?

Metaverse 2.0 or 3.0?

In the words of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, the metaverse enables computing to be embedded into the real world and for the real world to be embedded into computing.

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1455624165201887234

But wait a minute, isn’t the metaverse a word that popped up in the NFT craze only recently in the context of crypto? Why have corporations been so quick in appropriating the phenomenon?

https://twitter.com/MorningBrew/status/1455589610067828745

Among the many opinions, one that stands out is that held by Emin Gürer, founder of Ava Labs, who thinks that the ultimate goal for these companies is to boost the targeted ads business. Because if you think about it, you could literally spend hours in the metaverse without ever leaving your home while still churning valuable behavioral data at the service of the so-called surveillance capitalists.

So why has the metaverse been celebrated profusely, especially in relation to NFTs?

This has to do with the play-to-earn narrative that was spurred by on-chain gaming and DAO-led networks that are here to weave the future of work by creating the web 3.0 version of the metaverse. The fundamental difference between web 3.0 and web 2.0 is that the latter does not focus on ownership but on interaction through which important data is gleaned from and returned to the user as a revenue-generating ad for the company and not the user. With web 3.0, the user has the right to a slice of that revenue as they contribute to the network/metaverse.

Therefore, the metaverse, which is discussed mostly around the creators’ economy, empowers a large group of the population that for most of the time was under-appreciated or had no platform and/or opportunity to manifest their abilities. The metaverse represents the world that we always dreamed about, where your identity and all your worldly attributes have no meaning unless you want them to.

Millions in investments both in crypto and in the real world are converging to an agreement that the metaverse is what would propel humanity forward. Who knows, world decarbonization might be greatly accelerated if we built more forests rather than business districts because having an office or a virtual land in the metaverse would mean a lot more.

 

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DeFi Basic

History of Web 3.0

History of Web 3.0

How web evolved and paved the way for the new financial world!

The internet, since its discovery, has revolutionized the computer and democratized information which is now available to all. With its humble beginnings in the late ’60s and early 70’s, when it was a connection between few computers, the internet has grown multi-folds, touching the lives of every individual today. While the next couple of decades remained steady since its inception, the actual steam to the internet’s growth engine came in the ’90s when the popularity of the internet skyrocketed, and the content moved from being more dynamic and user-controlled and oriented. As this trend made the internet famous, the ammunition for the next level is already getting ready when the internet will be more decentralized driven by artificial intelligence and 3D graphics, making it more agile, better connected, and universal. 

While the above paragraph speaks about the past, present, and future of the internet in a single go, in reality, the difference between how the internet functioned and will function is a little more complex- both in terms of the content aspect, user reach and the technical aspects. Let us dive into a little more detail to understand each version of the internet and its difference. 

Web 1.0  (1970-1990)

Web 1.0 refers to the humble beginnings of the World Wide Web. For the first few decades, the internet remained a rare commodity and was available only to the select few majorly who could afford it and were technically sound to use it. This period also had limited content creators, and a vast number of users were only content consumers. The content created during this period was pretty static and was majorly informative and less interactive. Personal and single-page web pages were pretty standard in this era hosted on ISP-run web servers or free web hosting services.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that WEB 1.0 was more of a content delivery network- an easy platform to transfer information from one person to another via websites and webpages, and the content was served from the server file system.

Web 2.0 (1990-2018)

As the world entered the last decade of the previous century, the internet started changing shape, and the focus shifted more towards the consumer. The number of users who now had access to the internet also increased manifold, thus changing the whole dynamics of the world wide web and being known as Web 2.0. 

While the Web’s back-end technical aspect continued to grow during this period on the base of Web 1.0, the way the web pages were designed and used changed significantly, Web 2.0 was a significant upgrade to its previous version as the content now was more user-generated, usable, and interoperable. It allowed free sorting of information and permitted users to retrieve and classify information. Web 2.0 also opened doors to interaction and collaboration between users, thus enriching the whole internet experience where users could do much more than just sharing information.

As the way the data was consumed started changing, the web browsing technologies also leveled up and started using more AJAX and JavaScript frameworks, thus further enriching the user’s experience. JAVA was introduced in the year 1995 and helped in delivering lightweight ways to provide client-side programmability and richer user experiences by creating small applets which generated dynamic content. However, the potential of the web to deliver complete-scale applications didn’t hit the mainstream till Google introduced Gmail, quickly followed by Google Maps, web-based applications with rich user interfaces and PC-equivalent interactivity. The collection of technologies used by Google was christened AJAX. 

Web 2.0 also introduced several tools and platforms that allowed users to interact much more with the applications with ease without having to spend hours writing codes as they had to in Web 1.0. This also expanded the use-case of the world wide web to the user who could now share multimedia over the internet and could do things like podcasting, blogging, tagging, social networking, among others. 

Web 3.0- A Look into the Future

As we look at the history of the internet and where we stand today, we can gauge that a more semantically intelligent web could hold the future. While it would be too early to define the whole of Web 3.0 today, the upcoming version could use and integrate many other innovative pieces that are present today, including peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies like blockchain, open-source software, virtual reality, Internet of Things (IoT), and more. 

Currently, many applications are restricted by design and run only on one operating system. Web 3.0 could enable applications to be more device-agnostic and interpretable, meaning they would run on many different types of hardware and software without any added development costs.

As we look at Web 3.0 in the making, it sure looks to be heading in a direction where the Internet would become more open and decentralized. In all probability, it will be more potent than its predecessors and some of the features that could contribute to its superiority would include decentralization, increased interconnectivity, more efficient browsing due to semantics and metadata from Web 2.0, improved advertising and market, and better customer support. 

While exciting times lie ahead with Web 3.0 in the making, the journey that the internet has gone through in its various phases of evolution is commendable and leaves no doubts that it will keep on growing as technology, content and the way data is produced and consumed keeps on changing. While it’s still not easy to define Web 3.0 yet, innovations in other technological fields have already set its making in motion.

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DeFi Basic

Key DeFi Terms

DeFi Key Terms

Get introduced to building blocks of DeFi

Key terms in DeFi

  • AMM: Automated Market Makers (AMMs) have disrupted the traditional way that buyers and sellers come together. They allow digital assets to be traded in a permissionless and automatic way by using liquidity pools rather than a traditional market of buyers and sellers. AMM users supply liquidity pools with crypto tokens, whose prices are determined by a constant mathematical formula. So, instead of two parties coming to an agreement, traders can instead interact directly with a smart contract and execute the trade


  • APR: APR represents the annual rate charged for earning or borrowing money. APR does not take into account the compounding of interest within a specific year. It is calculated by multiplying the periodic interest rate by the number of periods in a year in which the periodic rate is applied. It does not indicate how many times the rate is applied to the balance

APR is calculated as follows:

APR = Periodic Rate x Number of Periods in a Year

 

  • APY: APR also represents the rate charged for earning or borrowing money but does take into account the frequency with which the interest is applied—the effects of intra-year compounding. 

Here’s how APY is calculated:

APY = (1 + Periodic Rate)Number of periods – 1

 

  • Borrowing Rate : This is the rate a borrower will pay to borrow tokens. The Borrowing rate will always be higher than the Lending rate.
  • CEX: Centralized Exchange. Even though these exchanges cater to decentralized digitized assets, they act as centralized authorities and take custody of a user’s funds on deposit.  Binance and Coinbase are examples of CEXs. 

 

  • Collateral: This is an asset used to secure a loan. In the traditional world of finance, one might put up their home as collateral to secure a cash loan. In DeFi, one puts up cryptocurrency tokens as collateral to borrow other tokens.


  • cTokens: These are Compound’s native tokens. When a user supplies assets to the Compound protocol, they receive cTokens. These, in turn, represent claims on the asset pool.
  • Deflationary Token: Tokens are “deflationary” if a percentage is permanently removed from the marketplace over time. Buy-backs and burns are popular ways of destroying tokens. This causes scarcity which hopefully makes the price rise
  • dApps: Decentralized applications. These are digital apps that run on a blockchain outside the control of a central authority.
  • DEX: A DEX, or decentralized exchange, is a type of cryptocurrency exchange. It operates like a stock exchange, except smart contracts run it. These smart contracts enforce rules and execute trades. Unlike a Centralized Exchange (CEX), a DEX does not take custody of a user’s funds.  

 

  • ETH: ETH stands for Ethereum tokens. These are digital assets built on the Ethereum blockchain.


  • Flash Loan: Flash Loans are futuristic and next-generation DeFi and native to the crypto space. A borrower can take out a flash loan with no collateral. However, it must be repaid within the same block, or the entire transaction is canceled. 

 

  • Flash Swaps: Similar to Flash Loans. A user can withdraw a token and use it before paying for it.
  • Gas: Gas is used to calculate fees on the Ethereum network. Every smart contract execution on the Ethereum network requires gas. When the network is more congested, gas prices are higher. 
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DeFi Basic

TradFi vs DeFi

TradFi Vs DeFi

Old World vs New World! A detailed comparison

Finance has had a riveting story of evolution and metamorphosis over the centuries. What goes back to trading goats and pebbles in barter to using payment gateways on handheld devices, the way money is moved, and how the transaction is recorded has come a long way. And with the advent of blockchain, the game has just changed completely. 

 

In the last decade, finance demonstrated an “about face” that on a business level, dismounted the lure of unicorn fintechs in terms of fees in favor of DeFi, which behind powerful memes and anon coders hides the most successful and fluid business models in recent history.  But in this short period of existence, these innovative aspects of finance have created enough stir to challenge the traditional aspect of finance and its institutions. While it may be too early to say, these newer aspects have started showing signs of how the future of finance would look like. And the difference is so significant in the way they work that the world has started to draw a line between and dividing it into two phases, something that you call Traditional Finance or TradFi and Decentralized Finance, also known as DeFI. Let us dive in deeper to understand each of these phases.

TradFi- Traditional Finance 

With the advent of DeFi, the term “TradFi” was also coined, which is the short form of traditional finance. TradFi encompasses conventional financial institutions like banks, asset managers, insurance companies, private equities, real estate funds etc. While banks in various forms had existed for centuries, the first traceable history of how a modern-day bank looked goes back to 1694 when the Bank of England was founded to take care of the Gold of business people that traveled to the country. As carrying gold was complex and had its other cons, keeping gold in secure vaults at the Bank was a better option for business people.  Business people were given a receipt for their gold, which allowed them to redeem their precious metals upon exiting the country. 

 

While providing security to Gold was paramount, with time, the bank realized that they could profit from the amount of gold passing through their vaults. If businessmen were not returning to claim for their gold for some time, the bank would lend out their gold in return for an interest rate on their deposit. As this was a form of passive income for the businessmen, it made sense for them to be ok with the bank doing this.

This continued over time and soon businessmen became comfortable in transacting with banks and soon the physical gold was replaced with receipts of gold that the bank distributed against the gold it had in its vaults. The bank-distributed paper allowed the recipient to claim the amount of gold stated on the receipt. This was the beginning of gold-backed paper currency, distributed in correlation to the amount of gold a government is holding.

But soon, the cracks began to appear in this system as greed and deceit crept in, debasing the nation’s currency as banks started printing more receipts (currencies) compared to the gold they held in the vaults calling for a change in the system.

It was the year 1971- a significant milestone in TradFi when money changed forever.  Many countries realized what banks were doing, and they started to demand their gold back. Again in the center of the controversy was one of the powerful fiats called the US dollar. Unable to fulfill every demand of returning gold, President Nixon famously unpegged the backing of the US dollar to gold.

The debt ceiling was removed, and the government could print as much money as they liked giving these centralized financial institutions unlimited power. Each time these institutions printed more money, the currency was devalued. And the actual holders of wealth, the ordinary citizens, started losing the value of money they held thanks to inflation that the centralized system had created by having more money into circulation in the economy.

This same system has continued for over 50 years, and more and more money has entered the system devaluing the fiat currency more and more every day. A decision of few has made the citizenry more vulnerable. While TradFi has its share of pros and cons (cons overpowering the pros), the non-availability of an alternative has forced most people to stick with the system. Weighing in the pros and cons should give us a better insight. 

Pros of TradFi

  • TradFi is currently the largest and the most familiar financial infrastructure and has the most number of users. 
  • TradFi has a well-established history, and the systems are tried and tested. 

Cons of TradFi

  • The user or the ordinary citizen has negligible control over the decision that is taken over their money.
  • The banks loan out the actual funds, and the visible account balance is IOU from the bank.
  • The banks’ transactions are extremely slow and expensive both in terms of time and money. The opportunity cost that a user bears while the transaction is being processed is pretty significant.
  • Fiat currency is mostly inflationary  
  • Recent times have shown as an aspect of the economy where banks haven’t hesitated in implementing negative interest rates. This means customers have to start paying the banks to keep their monies. 
  • Requires various laws to be abided by, and consistent paperwork is also needed, especially in large transactions.

DeFI- Decentralized Finance 

With so many cons that come with TradFi and a couple of malpractice incidents carried out by the oligarchs in power that led to the collapse of the whole system, the ordinary citizens have started questioning the system as a whole. 

This led to forming a system that was independent of these centralized financial institutions that had unlimited powers. This was the start of the innovation called blockchain, which has shown a roadmap on how financial systems could work in a decentralized, trustless, and permissionless manner, giving ordinary citizens an alternative over TradFi called the Decentralized Finance or DeFI.

DeFi is an open financial sector that runs on software built on top of a public blockchain at its core. It involves building financial products and services on top of a blockchain to promote an open financial system that promises to end the over-reliance on centralized institutions that are submerged in rules, regulations, and compliance protocols.

DeFi leverages and uses advanced, agile tools to give control to users of what happens with their monies. The new trend offers extra functionality and reduces operational risks, making it an ideal replacement for the current financial system.

Since the steam is catching up, DeFi, many projects have already taken the TradFi functions to blockchain and have begun showing signs of growth, offering an alternative. But while these systems have their pros over TradFi, they are not entirely free of cons. Time to look at those aspects of DeFi

Pros of DeFi

  • DeFi is permissionless, trustless and censorship-resistant
  • It is fast and has borderless operations 
  • Available all the time 24x7x365
  • Cheaper transaction cost than TradFI
  • Stablecoins, a critical component of DeFI, act as a hedge against local currency debasement.
  • DeFI provides higher yields as compared to TradFi
  • Less regulatory scrutiny

Cons of DeFi

  • There is an initial learning curve to understand DeFi, which is predominantly due to its nascency.
  • The user is responsible for his private keys, which, if lost, could lead to financial loss forever as there is no customer service and no way to recover the lost keys
  • The risk by user errors is far higher in DeFi 
  • Lack of clarity on regulation can be a deterrent and hinder the adoption

The Final verdict 

While blockchain in the global financial system is still in the early days, one cannot dispute this technology’s ultimate potential and the problem-solving capabilities that TradFi lacks. Decentralized finance has what it takes to revolutionize the financial sector in a time of growing concerns about data and privacy security.DeFi could be the ultimate winner here because so many people are gaining access to banking services in areas where traditional finance has failed its massive potential.



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DeFi Basic

What Is DeFi?

What Is DeFi?

Learn what DeFi really means and what it offers

DeFi is short for decentralized finance which generally refers to a novel industry of financial products and services that are built over Web 3.0 and are accessible to everyone, permission-less. It is an alternative to the traditional financial system which is opaque, centralized, very tightly controlled by dynastic oligarchs, and has been there for centuries now. The emergence of DeFi has been so strong that people already touted it to be better than traditional finance. This is because DeFi has managed to do what traditional finance and its institutions were not successful in doing- be transparent and exchange information with its users. DeFi allows for the exchange of trustable data across a system, mitigating these barriers to business financial services. At times, the transparency level in DeFi can be electrifying, especially if you had to deal with step-by-step approach in TradFi. Transparency also means building a product that is understandable with a very clear UX/UI, which makes user onboarding seamless.


In DeFi, a smart contract replaces the financial institution in the transaction. A smart contract is a type of self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. Today, a set of smart contracts have the capability of replacing certain financial intermediaries (e.g decentralized exchanges, lending institutions etc). Contracts can be coded to hold,  transfer or redeem funds based on certain conditions. No one can alter that smart contract when it’s live – it will always run as programmed unless encountered by some technical glitch or a bug. While Ethereum was the one that pioneered smart contracts in recent years, many protocols have been able to replicate the success that Ethereum once enjoyed monopolistically. The whole blockchain ecosystem is evolving to solve the inherent limitations of Ethereum. Many interesting solutions are emerging. Be it Polygon which is an interoperability and scaling framework for building Ethereum-compatible blockchains or L2s like Arbitrum, zkSync, Optimism; today DeFi users have a plethora of options to choose from. 


With DeFi the user exerts total control over their monies and also has visibility on how, when, and where it is being deployed without having to rely on a central institution like banks. Take an example of Rabby, Digital Wallet build for DeFi world. One of the key features of Rabby is that user gets a detailed and transparent view of each transaction before approving. 


Being borderless, DeFi opens up financial services to anyone in the world providing instant exposure to digital assets that are global in nature, something not possible in TradFi due to reliance on local currencies, laws, and banking options.  There are already numerous projects over various protocols that help users carry out all traditional finance functions such as lending, borrowing, taking long/short positions, earning interest, etc.  So far, tens of billions of dollars worth (USD 71.36 billion to be precise- while going to press) of crypto assets have flowed through DeFi applications, and that figure is only growing every day.


DeFi is booming! It is paving the way for a trustless and permissionless financial ecosystem, where the user doesn’t have to pay heavy fees, wait long hours and abide by rules created by others. If you are still at the fence, the time has come for you to jump it for good.  

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DeFi Basic

Security & scalability

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DeFi Basic

Resources

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