Blockchain: Is it a hype or a hoax?  19

Marketplaces

DeFi protocols provide functionalities for online marketplaces to allow

users to exchange products/services globally and peer-to-peer. Some

examples are freelance coding gigs, digital collectibles, real jewellery and

apparel.

Payments

Peer-to-peer payments are nothing new in the blockchain ecosystem. DeFi

payment solutions further establish an open economic system for under-

banked and unbanked users. It also helps large traditional financial insti-

tutions to streamline market infrastructure and better serve retail and

wholesale customers.

Prediction markets

Multiple applications in the DeFi ecosystem are growing to harness the pre-

diction of an event and trade value on the outcome of an event. Augur is a

popular DeFi betting platform where users can bet on the prediction of the

outcome of an event like a sports game, economic events, election results

and many more.

Savings

Defi protocols like Compound offer users to earn interest by putting their

crypto assets into the pool to prospectively earn more interest than tra-

ditional savings accounts. Some of the popular applications on the DeFi

platform are Argent, Dharma and PoolTogether. They offer no-loss saving

games in which participants get their original money back whether they

win or not. They also offer high interest rates on Yoru cryptocurrencies for

staking them on the platform.

One of the innovative mechanisms is called yield farming where users

move their idle crypto assets around in different liquidity protocols to max-

imise their returns.

Stablecoins

The new phenomenon that has been in the lime lite is called stablecoin.

Stablecoin is any cryptocurrency that is pegged to a stable asset like fiat cur-

rency, gold or other cryptocurrencies. The stablecoin concept is being used

now across the DeFi space for remittance payments, lending and borrow-

ing platforms and also the upcoming use cases like Central Bank Digital

Currency (CBDC).