Decentralized finance (DeFi) has grown from 1B total value locked in May 2020, to over $26.3B total value locked in DeFi platforms to date. A huge growth that shows the trust and interest from cryptocurrency investors in decentralized finance protocols.
For those of you that are new to DeFi, I would recommend you to read this 1-minute post: What is decentralized finance (DeFi)?
Summarised: It’s finance software built upon (often) the Ethereum Network. This is used to for example transact digital assets, borrow and lend money, smart contracts, build decentralized applications (DApps) and many more use cases.
I am a huge fan of decentralized finance. The options for financial tools are truly unlimited. I’ve been using DeFi platforms since early 2019.
I use various platforms at the same time, to maximise the returns of my provided liquidity. This however makes it difficult to keep an overview, and also makes it difficult for me to maximise the staking/farming profits. So I went out and looked for a solution there.
Late 2020, I stumbled upon OctoFi. OctoFi is the type of platform I had been looking for. It’s possible to invest in DeFi in one platform, which aggregates thousands of opportunities from other platforms with decentralized finance oracles tentacles.
I found the first version to be pretty basic, I didn’t really use it. Now that the team launched V2 however, I find myself using this on a daily basis. It has made my DeFi experience (and returns) a lot better.
Background information on the team
The OctoFi team chose to remain anonymous. Usually, this would be a big red flag for me, as I (unfortunately) have been scammed multiple times in 2020. However, OctoFi is one of the most transparent projects I’ve seen.
The team chose to remain anonymous because they want this to be an actual decentralized project. This means no leaning on founder reputations, avoid ‘cult leader’ vulnerability, empowering the project to stand on its own, empower the community, minimise the chance of getting shut down and have an actual focus on the product and ecosystem.
Their so called ‘aquarium’ offers full transparency reports with insights into the use of tokens (distribution and usage), development updates and other revenant information.
These reports provide more transparency and insights than many projects (with non-anonymous teams) offer their community. It’s clear the team is in it for the right reasons and has no intend to do anything malicious.
The platform has also seen a series of internal and external (security) audits. No major vulnerabilities were found in the used smart contract(s). The security audits were the final pieces I needed to be convinced to start using the platform. Also read: Anonymous Teams in DeFi, a Blessing, or a Curse?
OctoFi V2.0 Platform
As stated, the team recently launched OctoFi 2.0.
One thing that immediately stood out to me was the UX and UI. It’s clean, simple and very easy to navigate through. As well as we’re seeing various new features. Currently, the dashboard offers the following features (fully decentralized, open-source, you connect with your ERC-20 wallet):
- Fiat on/off-ramps (off-ramp powered by Bitrefill)
- Markets (exchange pairs with BTC / ETH / USDC markets)
- (Instant) Swap trading
- Explore and invest in liquidity pools (Uniswap, Balancer, Curve & yEarn pools currently supported)
- Governance tools with an overview of all projects powered through governance. Easy to create, manage and vote on proposals.
- Exploring tools to explore top tokens by market cap, token sets (automated trading strategies), liquidity pools, trending pairs, top-5 derivative exchanges and the top-5 24-hour gainers/losers.
The team communicated to be working hard on additional features, such as: spot trading, derivatives, tokensets, borrow & lending, NFTs and market making tools.
The platform also provides full insights in your ERC-20 wallet. You can easily view all of your tokens, NFTs, debts (if you borrowed funds) and liquidity deposits in pools.
One other feature I could see being used a lot is the ‘Transaction History’ feature. It’s incredibly difficult to keep a good overview of all your transactions, as they add up when using DeFi platforms. OctoFi offers you the ability to view full transaction history and to download your transaction history in a CSV file, that you can save to always be able to provide authorities with a full overview of your account.
Conclusion
I believe decentralized finance is only going to grow bigger. And, I’m a big supporter of projects like this that are started by people with good intentions, who truly put the power in the hands of the people that actually use the platform.
I recently wrote a few posts for their knowledge base. I was happy to see they not only provide the tools to make using DeFi easier, they also provide the tools to do research to projects to hopefully that way reduce the number of victims that fall for scams. As well as the tools to learn more about DeFi, Ethereum, Wallets and the OctoFi platform.
There’s a very strong community here that wants to help improve the platform. They all seem to enjoy participating in this ecosystem too, with interesting conversations, MEMEs and GIFs every day.
AMA (16 Jan 2021) Happy New Yield - the recent Ask-Me-Anything session also provides tons of new updates on what features and developments to expect next.
The results are there. Usage increases every day. Their token (OCTO) has increased from a $0.18-1.08 bonding curve value to a value of $45.70 each ($16.1M market cap) with more than $500,000 daily volume on Uniswap alone.
OCTO is interesting, because 100% of the platform fees are distributed among OCTO holders. As the platform continues to grow, and total revenue through fees continues to grow, so do the payouts to token holders. A $16M market cap, compared to AAVE ($3.3B), COMP ($1B), and various other DeFi platforms shows the tremendous growth opportunity here.
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This post is for informative purposes only, I’m not a financial advisor and I currently do have a position in OCTO. I have not been paid for this post, this post is out of personal interest. I write my Quora posts because I enjoy doing so, and want to help educate people on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies for free.
