Collateralization and Composability: What I learned at DeFi Summit London 2019

Building a better financial system one loan at a time

The DeFi Summit London 2019, held at Imperial College on 10–11 September, was a microcosm of who and what’s happening in the hottest sector in blockchain.

Key players ranging from MakerDAO and ConsenSys to Centrifuge, Oasis Labs (The Oasis Team), Gnosis, Melonport (now Avantgarde Finance Ltd), and UMA were talking about the key opportunities and challenges they’re facing.

In the latter case, overcoming the friction surrounding onboarding, especially with respect to identity and legislation (KYC, AML etc) to gain real user scale, remain thorny problems for the entire space.

Anecdotal estimates from various speakers suggested DeFi’s current addressable market topped out at around 50,000 people/wallets, which is broadly similar to the estimates I’ve heard about the size of the blockchain gaming space.

Certainly it would be interesting to research how much overlap there is between the two.

Turtles all the way down

Clearly plenty of foundational blocks need to be put in place before millions of people are accessing these products, let alone ensuring Joe Lubin wins his $500,000 bet with Jimmy Song about the size of the dapp ecosystem by 2023.

Yet, this state of affairs didn’t (and shouldn’t) dampened the enthusiasm and ambition of companies in the DeFi space. Significantly the most used, new buzzword I heard during the conference was ‘composability’.