Nic Carter and Linda Jeng have produced a useful paper titled “DeFi Protocol Risks: the Paradox of DeFi” that explores the risks that DeFi will need to address and navigate if it is to deliver on the promises that they believe it can. There is of course plenty of scepticism about the potential for blockchain and DeFi to change the future of finance (including from me). What makes this paper interesting is that it is written by two people involved in trying to make the systems work as opposed to simply throwing rocks from the sidelines.
Linda Jeng has a regulatory back ground but is currently the Global Head of Policy at Transparent Financial Systems. Nic is a General Partner at a seed-stage venture capital film that invests in blockchain related businesses. The paper they have written will contribute a chapter to a book being edited by Bill Coen (former Secretary General of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) and Diane Maurice to be titled “Regtech, Suptech and Beyond: Innovation and Technology in Financial Services” (RiskBooks).
Linda and Nic conceptually bucket DeFi risks into five categories:
- interconnections with the traditional financial system,
- operational risks stemming from underlying blockchains,
- smart contract-based vulnerabilities,
- other governance and regulatory risks, and
- scalability challenges.
… and map out the relationships in this schematic
DeFi protocols: Map of interconnected risks
Conclusion: “No Free Lunch”
The paper concludes around the long standing principle firmly entrenched in the traditional financial world – there is “no free lunch”. Risk can be transformed but it is very hard to eliminate completely. Expressed another way, there is an inherent trade off in any system between efficiency and resilience.
Many of the things that make DeFi low cost and innovative also create operational risk and other challenges. Smart contracts sound cool, but when you frame them as “automated, hard-to-intervene contracts” it is easy to see they can also amplify risks. Scalability is identified as an especially hard problem if you are not willing to compromise on the principles that underpinned the original DeFI vision.
The paper is worth a read but if you are time poor then you can also read a short version via this post on Linda Jeng’s blog. Izabella Kaminska (FT Alphaville) also wrote about the paper here.
Tony – From the Outside
From the outside 
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