The DeFi space is exploding in 2020. What’s driving DeFi forward? And is innovation outpacing viability?

2020 has been a dramatic and powerful year for the cryptocurrency space as a whole: Bitcoin’s crashes and surges, waves of new users, and changes in monetary policy seem to be paving the way forward for further growth of the crypto space.
However, there is one part of the crypto sphere that has charged ahead of all else: DeFi.The Most Diverse Audience to Date at FMLS 2020 — Where Finance Meets Innovation

Many of the decentralized lending, derivatives, and trading protocols draw their liquidity from Maker’s sai and dai stablecoins, which in turn draw theirs from ethereum. In a short blog post toasting the achievement, Defi Pulse proclaimed “$1 billion marks an important milestone for Defi to be celebrated. It illustrates the progress we’ve made towards our community’s vision of decentralized finance and the future of the world at large.” One year ago, the DeFi market was valued at less than $280M. Today, lending alone accounts for $766.5M.

This explosion of development has also been met with an explosion in the prices of some of the tokens that are associated with various DeFi protocols. To name just a few, Chainlink’s LINK, the Band Protocol’s BAND, and Compound’s COMP have all made headlines with their eye-popping price movements.DeFi token values have surged by 200% since the beginning of the year. The opportunities for startups using this technology are endless which is promising for the DeFi ecosystem diversification and growth. New game-changing DeFi applications are going to emerge, built at a lesser cost and primed to cross over into the mass market.