The price of DeFi Coin (DEFC) shot up more than 160% during yesterday’s crypto trading session after the developing team completed a key milestone of its road map that involved the launch of its decentralized exchange known as DeFi Swap.

The value of the token is standing at $0.42 this morning according to data from CoinGecko and accumulates a 24-hour gain of over 180% as market participants potentially expect that demand for the token will continue to rise once the exchange goes live.

DEFC aims to become a substitute or alternative to well-established decentralized exchanges such as PancakeSwap and Uniswap by allowing users to exchange tokens without the need for an intermediary through the use of smart contracts.

The protocol charges a 10% tax on sells and buys. These rewards are automatically transferred to investors and they aim to discourage short-term trading of the native token.

This latest advance marks a turning point for the project as its progress toward achieving the milestones outlined in its road map was a bit stalled since the end of last year.

Cryptoassets are a highly volatile unregulated investment product. No UK or EU investor protection.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) – The $200 Billion Opportunity

Decentralized finance is a hot segment of the crypto ecosystem that seeks to eliminate the need for an intermediary to settle all kinds of financial transactions going from lending money to exchanging assets.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as DeFi Swap are an alternative to their centralized peers – i.e. Coinbase or Binance. They offer anonymity, fast execution times, decent liquidity, and low transaction fees.

Most DEXs are powered by the Ethereum network and allow users to transact with ERC-20 tokens – those that are also powered by this popular smart contracts blockchain.

DEXs use automated market-making features to attract liquidity so they can increase execution speeds. DEXs compensate liquidity providers for pooling their holdings and smart contracts are responsible for executing all transactions automatically.

According to data compiled by Stelareum, the total locked value in DeFi protocols at the moment stands at $181.5 billion. Even though the amount has declined recently from its 2021 peak of around $250 billion amid the market’s overall risk-off attitude, if the blockchain ecosystem and its derived solutions continue to evolve positively in the future – as most expect – the total value locked in DeFi protocols should remain on an uptrend in the long run.

There are many areas of the financial industry that can be disrupted by decentralized applications including lending as these solutions can connect investors and borrowers and facilitate the process of transferring funds, pledging the required collateral, and deducting interest payments periodically through the use of smart contracts.

Another interesting area of finance that can be disrupted is capital raising. Companies could turn to decentralized solutions to raise money via the issuance of digital bonds whose connected transactions are regulated and automatically executed by the conditions set in a smart contract as well.

There are still multiple challenges that this particular sub-ecosystem must overcome such as low interoperability between the different blockchains and a slowly evolving regulatory environment.

However, the disruptive potential of this trend and its capacity to attract billions if not trillions of dollars once protocols reach a more mature stage in their development is particularly high.

Can DEFC Become a Leading Play in This Growing Ecosystem?

The price of DeFi Coin remains well below its all-time high of $4 per coin reached in July last year but that does not mean that the token cannot get there again. Back then, the fundamentals were not strong enough to support such a climb but now that DeFi Swap has been launched the scenario has changed entirely.

With the price currently standing at $0.42 per coin, it is not crazy to think that the token could 5x from here to around $2 per coin now that the project has advanced decisively toward achieving its ultimate goals. This may make DEFC one of the most attractive DeFi coins nowadays.

“We have had a number of technical issues to resolve related to early design decisions that turned out to be much more problematic to implement securely than at first envisaged”, stated Scott Ryder, the founder of the DEFC project in regards to what happened in the past few months.

The founder justified some of the delays that the project has experienced in reaching its key milestones by stating that there was “no way” that the team could opt to launch a product that “was not rock solid” as that would have been a “much bigger danger to investors”.

“We could have kept putting out PR updates saying we were behind schedule, but that would likely not have been enough for the most vocal of our critics, so instead we ploughed ahead with executing on our roadmap, which we have now achieved as far as the first version of our DEX goes”, he stated.

Cryptoassets are a highly volatile unregulated investment product. No UK or EU investor protection.