Catnip.Exchange and Protocol Unbundling

Growth in decentralized finance has been driven by the success of a few core financial primitives starting to work well enough to replace centralized counterparts. The best examples of this are DEXs, which facilitated $23.5 billion in trade volume in September, led by Uniswap surpassed Coinbase in monthly volume.

The success is highly self-referential. Most of DeFi is about speculating on itself. DEXs are for trading tokens, and lending protocols to unlock leverage for bigger token positions. Likely, much of the $1.34 billion in Bitcoin currently on the Ethereum blockchain is there to yield farm tokens.