Decentralized finance feels like the future. This category of financial services is built on blockchain technology and transacted solely in crypto. It’s executed by automated programs called “smart contracts,” which helps reduce costs. And advocates say DeFi is more democratic: Everyone involved is just an anonymous node on the blockchain, making favoritism impossible.

But how will it really play out? Some tell the Boston Fed’s podcast, Six Hundred Atlantic, that it requires too much tech savvy to be truly inclusive. Others worry about the safety of a “trustless system,” where the lack of an intermediary could make DeFi vulnerable to people with bad intent. And skeptics doubt decentralized finance can remain decentralized at all.

 

View the presentations New York University professor Hanna Halaburda and UC-Berkeley professor Christine Parlour submitted for the Boston Fed’s 68th Economic Conference. Watch the panel they participated in, titled “Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), and Smart Contracts: Hope or Hype?”