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2020 is an extraordinary year. The COVID-19 pandemic has put the economy on pause, while new infrastructure has helped the digital economy accelerate. New infrastructure refers to infrastructure construction focused on the technology side, including information infrastructure, integrated infrastructure, and innovative infrastructure. Information infrastructure includes new technology infrastructure represented by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain , and computing power infrastructure represented by data centers and intelligent computing centers. As the incentive layer of IPFS and a distributed storage public chain with blockchain genes, Filecoin follows the trend of the times and was officially launched at 22:44 Beijing time on October 15, 2020, to help blockchain and even the new generation of the Internet solve data storage problems, allowing the new property - "data" to be stored at low cost, safely and efficiently, thereby building a decentralized, global, secure and efficient Internet. Filecoin constrains miners through a pledge mechanism, thereby building a network with strict rules, high service quality, and the ability to respond to customer storage needs 24 hours a day, thereby promoting the commercialization of Filecoin. However, high pledges have also largely restricted the development of the Filecoin network. In response to this, Filecoin officials have released a solution to pledge coins on Slack and Twitter - Defil, namely Defi+Fil. During Filecoin Launch Week, Colin from Filecoin discussed the topic of DeFi with Stani Kulechov from Aave, Loong Wang from Ren Protocol, Corbin Page from ConsenSys Codefi, and others. What does a fast-growing network look like for DeFi? Here are the main points. Q: How do you view the intersection of Filecoin and DeFi? What application markets do you think Filecoin will open up? Loong Wang, Ren Protocol : A long time ago , there was a memo circulating about decentralized applications and the ability to put these dapps on-chain. The idea was to replicate the ecosystem of Web2 in a decentralized Web3 world. Soon, this idea was delayed by two things: Filecoin solves the storage part. Other chains are also starting to solve the other part of the equation, which is transaction costs. Today, we see that the best dapps of all kinds are financial applications, and the reason for this is that on-chain transactions are relatively cheap. If you have to pay a few dollars every time you want to take an action, you want to make sure you extract value from that action in a very direct way. You want to trade or lend or yield farm, because you want to make sure you can recoup the cost of taking that action in the first place. I think big data sets in finance are a clear example of the intersection of Filecoin and DeFi . A lot of trading power and investment knowledge comes from accessing and analyzing big data sets. For its part in the Web3 ecosystem, Filecoin does help open up opportunities for a new class of DeFi applications that can leverage massive amounts of data that, until recently, could only survive on decentralized protocols. Corbin Page, ConsenSys Codefi : The state of Ethereum is bursting. With the launch of Filecoin, we can now move storage to Filecoin to do some of the heavy lifting like paying for time costs and token bonding curves. Most importantly, these heavy lifting data tasks become accessible from DeFi applications. I think we'll see an entire ecosystem shuttling back and forth between the Filecoin storage network and the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. And I think one of the most immediate use cases for Filecoin and DeFi is just a simple custody front. Many DeFi and Web3 applications have completely permissionless backends, but their frontends still have to be hosted on AWS or Azure. With Filecoin, you can now have a permissionless frontend that matches the permissionless backend of these DeFi applications. Owning FIL is like owning an IOU of internet real estate. If you own FIL, you know that you can upload data to the Filecoin network at any time in the future. This makes it different from any other crypto asset currently on the market, which naturally makes DeFi very interesting. If you tokenize FIL on Ethereum, you can now put it next to tokenized BTC, tokenized ETH, governance tokens, or any other type of crypto asset. Over time, these assets will be completely uncorrelated. For example, if you have tokenized FIL in the Aave lending market, it will behave differently than some of the other assets in that market. This is a very exciting opportunity for those of us in DeFi. Q: Part of the Filecoin protocol requires miners to purchase FIL as collateral in order to operate their mining operations. How do you think DeFi can help miners gain FIL liquidity? Stani Kulechov, Aave: Collateralization is the foundation of DeFi protocols. It is the best way to unlock liquidity. Lending in existing DeFi applications has always been about users putting up valuable assets as collateral to unlock liquidity. In other words, any valuable asset in the protocol can be lent and pledged in a highly available system. In this particular case, that available system is Filecoin mining. I can imagine that this could be an interesting use case in terms of lending. Recently, we have seen a large number of liquidity pools, such as Uniswap, emerge as viable alternatives to centralized exchanges. Q: What do you think prompted the migration of liquidity from centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges, and what similar changes do you think will happen in the entire crypto space in the future? Loong Wang, Ren Protocol : It all comes down to ease of use and composability . If you want to participate in centralized exchanges (CEXes), you will have to constantly balance your liquidity across these platforms. They may have different deposit and withdrawal times, and there is the added concern of trusting your data to someone who may not be trustworthy. CEXes may seem like a better experience: you might get tighter spreads, deeper liquidity, faster trades, and more traditional trading mechanisms like limit orders. However, ultimately, there is still a higher friction to working with a CEX. If you hold crypto in a wallet, the “distance” from that wallet to a CEX is greater than from that wallet to a decentralized exchange (DEX). Compared to fully decentralized exchanges, CEXs are actually very limited. You can perform many different financial actions in a single on-chain transaction. This type of composability is a major advantage of automated market makers (AMMs), DEXes, and other Web3 applications. I think what we’re going to see in the future is DeFi spreading across multiple blockchains. Different chains will evolve and specialize in unique capabilities. They’ll make tradeoffs, and consumers will choose between those tradeoffs for different reasons. So you’re going to need interoperability between chains to keep this composable nature of DeFi going. Just like we saw liquidity migrate from CEXes to DEXes, we’re going to see liquidity spread across multiple chains simultaneously and grow. Corbin Page, ConsenSys Codefi : Composability and usability are a big advantage of DEXes and other Web3 applications. A lot of people call them "money Lego" because you can snap them together. For example, an engineer's dream is to figure out how to merge a lending platform with a flash loan system. Mechanisms like flash loans are not even possible in centralized crypto platforms like CEXes. Now, we are building on the existing Internet of Value by adding the information and data aspects of the Internet. As we develop more and more building blocks every day, we will gradually have more unique applications that can only live on the blockchain protocol; there will be no centralized alternatives available. We will have all these types of new experiments and applications because of this unique composability feature, which is what makes us developers really excited about these systems. Q: A large number of DeFi builders are considering looking for solutions on Filecoin and DeFi . What advice do you have for these developers as they begin to explore the intersection of Filecoin and DeFi? Stani Kulechov, Aave : I want to emphasize that building tools to support the network is something that is very much appreciated. This is how the Ethereum ecosystem grew a few years ago, and it was very difficult to build things without these tools and libraries. So that's my advice, I recommend building tools and libraries to help other developers and users. Loong Wang, Ren Protocol : Embrace the composable nature of Web3 . One of the unique things about composability is that it’s ultimately better for users because you can’t retain users just by building moats. So you have to be fundamentally better. With Filecoin, we are seeing for the first time the tokenization of an asset that is not a financial instrument in nature. Filecoin is actually a functional tool. Developers can and should think about it in a fundamentally different way and build applications that we can't even imagine today. What does it mean to lend storage? Is this functionally different from lending financial assets? These are questions that developers should be thinking about in order to build and deliver outcomes that are different from what we see today. Corbin Page, ConsenSys Codefi : I recommend creating wild ideas . The crypto and Web3 ecosystems are moving so fast that you should have 6 months to really understand where things are going. I encourage developers to be new and wild in the solutions they come up with . This may seem contradictory, but I also recommend solving real problems. Our ecosystem spends a lot of time getting ideas off the ground, which is fun and amazing. However, at the end of the day, if we want this thing to be impactful, we have to solve real people's problems; and a lot of these people live outside of our crypto space. There are a lot of problems to solve, so make sure to ground these fantastical creative ideas in reality and build solutions that people actually want. |
