Citibank Covers DeFi, says Open Financial Platform Enables ‘Greater Innovation and Competition’

New York City-based Citigroup is the latest bank to educate its fund managers on the concept of the booming decentralized finance (DeFi) sector.

This week, much like other banking giants, Citi reported better-than-expected earnings for the first quarter, driven by lower loan volumes and improvements in the macroeconomic outlook.

But for the cryptocurrency industry, what has been more interesting was the fact that their latest report, “Future of Money” on Crypto, CBDCs, and 21st Century Cash, covers the benefit of DeFi.

Defined as the “open financial platform on top of which all projects reside,” the openness of the ecosystem enables greater innovation and competition and allows uninterrupted interoperability, it said.

Name checking Maker (MKR), Compound (COMP), Uniswap (UNI), and UMA (UMA), the report further notes that one can seamlessly move capital between these platforms in minutes and minimal fees.

Programmability, transparency, permission-less, non-custodial, and lack of intermediaries are the benefits mentioned by the bank.

The report particualry covers MakerDAO in detail, calling it “The Decentral Bank,” a complication system that enables collateralized loans paid out in stablecoin. DAI is the network's own crypto-based stablecoin which the bank says is akin to “so-called commercial bank money, which is backed by deposits or cash.”

It is defined as the heart of the DeFi ecosystem, which is one of the oldest and “most sophisticated projects on Ethereum.” ETH -0.80% Ethereum / USD ETHUSD $ 1,760.70
-$14.09-0.80% Volume 6.81 b Change -$14.09 Open $1,760.70 Circulating 122.37 m Market Cap 215.46 b 1 y Coinbase Predicts Substantial Growth of Newer L1 Chains & Institutionalization of Regulated DeFi 1 y A Possible Crypto Recovery Moving Into New Year, Risk-on Sentiments Send The Stock Market to Another Record High 1 y The Sandbox Game Is Migrating to Ethereum Sidechain Polygon and Launching A DAO in 2022

The report then talks about how the lending protocol, which has over $9 billion in total value locked (TVL), can be thought of as a digital pawn shop or a perpetual repo market for digital assets.

The world is going to wake up to DeFi https://t.co/SAUHrB5JkU

— Hunter Horsley (@HHorsley) April 16, 2021

The DeFi sector is growing at a fast pace, which first exploded into usage last summer when yield farming allowed people to earn as high as four-digit APY. From a mere $730 million in total value locked a year back, today, this sector has surpassed $100 billion in TVL.

The top 100 DeFi coins' market cap has also reached about $130 billion, which was under $2 billion at the beginning of last year, as per CoinGecko.