Ever since President Donald Trump's administration signaled favorable crypto regulations, banks, financial institutions and big fintech firms have been looking to bring funds on-chain, and seamlessly offer compliant access to decentralized finance (DeFi), according to blockchain development firm Alchemy.
DeFi, traditionally a way for anonymous users to engage in a complex system of automated lending and borrowing of assets, can bring to a whole new audience of users to conventional finance (TradFi), with the possibility of compliance guardrails in place and abstracting away the headache of dealing in smart contracts.
The common pattern is best described as growing a “DeFi mullet,” according to Alchemy, a picks and shovels provider for blockchain builders that has been described as the “AWS of crypto,” a reference to Amazon Web Services, the ubiquitous cloud computing platform that powers much of today's internet.
“I see firms like Fidelity, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Revolute and Robinhood, who are all at different stages of evolution, but who all want to allow their users to take their funds, like their USD or like fiat money funds, and then use DeFi tools,” Alchemy CTO Guillaume Poncin said in an interview.
“The common pattern is best described by the term ‘DeFi mullet.’ These are the most interesting use cases, I think, where you can use DeFi under the hood, and the user doesn't even really need to know that that's happening,” Poncin said.
A concrete example of this type of thing is the way users of U.S.-listed exchange Coinbase (COIN) can easily get loans in exchange for locking up their bitcoin BTC, a type of margin loan that retail investors don't normally get access to, Poncin pointed out.
“Now it should be possible for Fidelity to offer these types of margin loans against your money-market fund account, as an example,” Poncin said. “All of this is plumbed into [crypto] wallets and DeFi, so that as a user, it's just one click. You want a loan against your Vanguard holdings? Here is a loan.”
“I think a lot of fintechs are looking at that as a great proof of concept of what can be done. if you're tokenizing your money-market fund or tokenizing your other assets, private equity, whatever, eventually what you want is to give your users utility over that. And the utility vehicle is DeFi.”
Alchemy appeared around five years ago, offering a developer platform for firms looking to build large scale blockchain operations. The firm went on to offer programmable links between programs known as APIs, allowing for data indexing, smart contract automation and smart wallets that feel invisible and intuitive. Poncin said. APIs, in effect, put the software plumbing behind the scenes and ease the burden on end users.
“The old school way with blockchain wallets would involve installing Metamask, but that’s a very cumbersome process,” Poncin said. “The new trend is, if you are Nike or Stripe, you want to provide crypto wallets to your users they don't even know about; they're completely invisible under-the-hood wallets.”
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