Recently, we had a chat with the Reddit community about decentralized finance together with Sergey Shashev, founder of Broxus and Everscale DeFi Alliance, and Sergey Dzhurinskiy, Everscale DeFi Alliance co-founder and managing director at Warp Capital.
Why is DeFi a significant step forward for the crypto industry? Is it already dead, or is this just the beginning of its journey? And how does Everscale fit into the picture? Let’s find out in this article.
So many chains and so many projects on each chain? Can all of this survive and find enough funds for each chain to persist with its projects continuing too?
There is a large amount of competition in the industry, but that’s not a bad thing. While this can over-saturate the market with solutions, it can also be a catalyst for innovation.
However, those who innovate and offer something truly unique will be the ones that prevail. The industry’s first and foremost priority should be to develop something that can improve people’s access to services, not just make money.
Liquidity mining has spurred growth in the DeFi market, but increased gas fees and network congestion limit users from taking advantage of DeFi’s full potential. What is the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed?
Everscale has low TX fees, so this shouldn’t be a problem. DeFi’s main issue is that exchange services and real users should actively use liquidity. If liquidity sits statically while being farmed, then the model is not sustainable and will not work over several years. Due to Everscale’s linear scalability and dynamic sharding technology, there is no problem with regard to scalability and TX fee growth.
How does Everscale plan to address the regulatory issues surrounding DeFi?
As a layer one blockchain, Everscale is ready for any regulatory changes that may be implemented in different regions and countries. We have been looking at different areas and are sure that regulation will be strengthened in the DeFi sector.
One of these areas is digital identity and on-chain reputation in a more decentralized and secure format. Everscale has a grant campaign for digital identity. A world-class team is currently working on this solution.
We need to remain flexible for different markets, where differing models may be implemented, and we’d like to meet all the regulatory frameworks wherever we conduct business.
How does Everscale plan to address UX issues in DeFi? You mention bridges, farming hubs, etc. Regular people find these extremely hard to comprehend, so what is your solution?
We are utilizing the invisible bridge technology. Our goal is to get into the end services and eventually ensure that there is minimal user interaction with our service system when tokens are transferred from a Metamask wallet to a Trust wallet, for example.
As for the DeFi sector, the entire community of active DeFi users totals about 1 million people worldwide. They do not care about interfaces. For ordinary people there is integration into neobanks.
Will Everscale be able to handle the same amount of traffic that congests Ethereum daily?
Yes, Everscale is capable of handling this. Each wallet in Everscale is a smart contract, which is why we’ve fully solved the CBDC paradox, resulting in the ability to take a vast number of transactions.
Everscale can also have flexible policies for different government, business, and social services. That’s why the blockchain was built with the capacity to handle a large number of TPS.
Most current blockchains have a problem with growing the blockchain state size. Everscale has two interesting concepts — endless sharding and storage fees.
Blockchains that want to last more than 10–20 years are forced to limit the pace of writing to the state size so that the size of the blockchain grows slowly.
After all, validators are obliged to store this entire state forever, and the size of the state also slightly slows down the speed of processing transactions (it is necessary to update the Merkle tree proof of the state), albeit by log (N is the number of contracts on the network).
Therefore, in blockchains that care about their future, for example Ethereum, users are forced to compete with each other for the right to record data to the blockchain state size at auction, because Ethereum understands that it is impossible to write data to their blockchain state size faster than rate at which storing this data becomes cheaper. Otherwise, it won’t be profitable for validators to store it in the future.
Blockchains that do not care about their future limit the recording rate much less, because they have the attitude that their users are important to them now, and they will think about the future later.
In Everscale, there is a complex but unique concept of storage fees, where each contract pays for its storage on the network. Therefore, it makes no sense to limit the pace of recording to the network, because the contract pays for its storage for a while, and then it will be deleted. That means we can offer users a certain price for recording to the network, and they don’t have to compete with each other for the right to record.
The second part is infinite sharding.
Since shards are added dynamically, we can process a potentially massive number of transactions per second, but, of course, this isn’t free, and the transactions will be slower to complete. With the addition of a large number of shards, the time to execute transactions increases, but the number of transactions per second is very large.
As a result of connecting both of these concepts, we get a system that can process a huge number of transactions per second for a constant price (albeit with a slowdown in load peaks, but this slowdown concerns the execution time of one transaction, and not throughput), and at the same time remain efficient for decades, while, unlike with rollups, remaining decentralized.
Can you explain how DeFi creates value aside from “people put money in the box and it grows?”
When looking at DeFi, it’s essential to separate the common misconception from the facts. The facts are that DeFi aims to provide transparency and alternative financial tools to the bank-controlled industry, and it has showcased success at attracting unbanked users to the financial market.
Approximately 1.7 billion adults are excluded from the formal financial system. Countries such as Morocco have over 70% of the population without access to banking services, so DeFi has laid its utility out clearly.
The concept of people placing money in protocols was created as an incentive for pools to meet exchange demands by increasing liquidity, not as a TVL-inflating tactic, even though it was successful. There’s still room for the sector to grow. It’s just a matter of adequately managing tactics that favor the user and incentivizing more activity in DeFi.
Summary
Even though some people may consider DeFi a dead industry already, we’re still at a very early stage and seeing the seeds that will grow into mature trees in the next five to ten years. With the recent collapses, centralized companies are losing people’s trust, proving their incompetence in managing user’s funds.
Crypto is still too difficult for an average user, and Broxus is moving toward crypto adoption, with the main mission to deliver user-friendly, secure, and decentralized financial apps that will reflect the idea that crypto is easy.
