It’s been a wild ride watching decentralized finance grow alongside the DeFi Pulse community. From every celebratory tweet about climbing up a rank on our leaderboard to the palpable buzz around new listings, we’ve been blown away with how the community has adopted our metrics and relied on us as a resource for DeFi. We’ve always prided ourselves on the quality data and transparency we could help bring to DeFi.

DeFi is growing fast like really, really fast

The thing with DeFi is that it evolves like an organism. Say one team makes a cool new feature for their project. Then, another project likes that new feature and integrates it into their DApp. Soon enough, it has become a standard for the industry. This happens faster and faster has the money legos begin to stack up, combine, and innovate quicker. As time goes on and with each and every update, addition, and improvement, decentralized finance grows exponentially. And it becomes exponentially harder to track.

We’ve come across this phenomenon while building and maintaining DeFi Pulse’s metrics. Staying on top of the entire DeFi space is something we knew we couldn’t always do alone. Allowing projects to contribute towards tracking their own metrics seemed like the most practical first step to ensuring we always provide users with the most reliable and accurate data as the space continues to grow. To keep up with this decentralized industry, many projects listed on DeFi Pulse now contribute code to their unique adapter to track their DeFi metrics.

Recent events have illustrated first-hand how interconnected DeFi as an industry is and the importance of informing users on the risks involved with DeFi. As many people’s starting point for discovering decentralized finance, DeFi Pulse understands its responsibility to the community, especially new users. It occurred to us once again that due to the sheer rate of DeFi’s growth, the only way to take on systematic risks in decentralized finance is by working together with the community to form standards for monitoring and assessing user risks. So in order to avoid our becoming gatekeepers of DeFi, we’re taking steps to give the keys back to the kingdom.

The truth is DeFi has grown beyond the scope of one set of eyes

Introducing the DeFi Pulse Registry, a new directory of DeFi projects committed to transparency about user risk. With over 1 in 40 ETH locked in DeFi (and growing), this is a vital time to develop community standards around risk.

The goal is to work with the community to create a registry of DeFi projects and the potential risks users may face while using them. DeFi Pulse Registry will help DeFi users make better decisions by making it easy to find reliable info regarding projects’ risks.

The DeFi Pulse Registry plans to track three major categories of DeFi user risks:

Centralization Risk – What are the risks to users associated with admin privileges?

Economic Risk – How has the project addressed the economic risks of using this protocol?

Security Risk – How has the project addressed the security risks of using this protocol?

Of course we’re interested in receiving feedback from the community about what risk metrics should be tracked. And in time, we will look to decentralize the management of this registry as part of a broader effort to decentralize DeFi Pulse.

Most new users know the general risks of crypto and DeFi, but things change so fast, and users struggle to get a true sense of each protocol’s specific risks. Still, they trust us by locking lots of real value in our protocols and apps. Then when something goes wrong, many feel blindsided or betrayed and leave the space for good.

We can build stronger relationships with users by trusting them with complete, current info about the risks they face. A DeFi protocol user with full knowledge of all risks involved is more likely to return after a loss than a user who was simply cautioned to do her own research and avoid risking too much money. DeFi Pulse Registry aims to build trust with users through openness about risk.

Please support us today to create a safer DeFi for tomorrow

As ironic as it sounds, we hope that everyone in the industry, from users to project developers, sees the value in building trust among DeFi users for trustless systems. So please, if you’re interested in contributing, donate to the DeFi Pulse Registry Gitcoin Grant and share this message with members of our community.

DeFi Pulse is part of Concourse Open Community (along with projects like DEX.AG and ETH Gas Station). We’re a small, distributed team, and we’ve been fully self-funded since our start in 2017. We’re only interested in outside funding that doesn’t require compromising our core values.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter or join the discussion in our Telegram or Discord.