Introducing: The Block's Open Finance Index (OFI)

Open Finance broadly refers to blockchain-enabled permissionless and transparent financial services and products. These properties — permissionlessness and transparency — depart from traditional capital markets, where access to financial products and services has historically been both geographically confined and the underlying mechanics of financial services are carefully concealed by rent-seeking intermediaries.  

The field of Open Finance has undergone immense growth over the past 18 months. Indeed, the interoperable nature of Open Finance protocols naturally leads to compounding growth as second-order ‘derivative’-products emerge after the release of new base-layer primitives. While there remains considerable room for improvement, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that, at present, there exists a credible alternative to the legacy global financial system in the form of Ethereum-based lending, exchange, payment, derivative, and asset management protocols.