Introducing SMART VALOR DeFi Investing
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) gives the cryptocurrency industry a new dimension and purpose, with financial giants like ING and Bank of America concluding separately that the trend has more disruptive potential than Bitcoin itself. In addition to its aspirations to transform the global financial infrastructure, DeFi comes with many investment opportunities.
Decentralized finance, also called DeFi more popularly, is a financial system that works without the need for a centralized intermediary such as a bank, broker, agent or exchange. More specifically, DeFi refers to financial services that are built on blockchains and work through the software applications known as smart contracts.
Considering the benefits DeFi brings to the blockchain ecosystem, crypto investment platform SMART VALOR is introducing DeFi Invest – a dedicated investment venue that gives users exposure to the DeFi sector.
What Is DeFi Invest?
SMART VALOR’s DeFi Invest is a one-stop solution built for DeFi investors. It allows users to directly invest in DeFi tokens as well as participate in staking and yield farming.
The dedicated platform will list multiple DeFi assets that will be thoroughly analyzed before being selected. On top of that, each listed token will have background information to give investors an idea of the protocol’s goal and economics. However, investors still have to do due diligence before getting exposure to any of the vetted tokens.
At the launch, DeFi Invest will list a limited selection of tokens, including the decentralized exchange protocols Uniswap (UNI) and Kyber Network (KNC), the lending protocol Compound (COMP), as well as the DeFi oracle Chainlink (LINK). Also, the native VALOR token is listed, this is a hybrid token combining centralized exchange with decentralized NFT / tokanized assets marketplace.
Over the upcoming weeks and months, SMART VALOR will be adding more assets for investing to its dedicated DeFi platform. Investors will be able to choose from a balanced mix of existing well-known DeFi protocols as well as new and innovative projects at their early stage.
What sets SMART VALOR’s DeFi investment platform apart is the ability to buy tokens not only with cryptocurrencies, but also with fiat currencies via credit card or wire transfer. This gives European investors direct access to the fastest-growing trend, which is usually more isolated from the fiat world.
Besides investing in DeFi tokens based in the mentioned categories, SMART VALOR users are able to put their cryptocurrency holdings at work by staking or participating in yield farming tools. This part of the platform is set to launch later in the year.
DeFi Invest puts a great emphasis on user experience, especially given that DeFi is still not well understood among many investors. SMART VALOR’s platform is easy to use and allows you to buy and sell DeFi assets conveniently and securely.
Building Your DeFi Portfolio
DeFi Invest allows you to invest in DeFi tokens by category to balance your portfolio and get broad exposure starting with three main categories (with more added in the coming weeks):
- Decentralized exchanges (DEXes) - one of the most popular DeFi use cases are DEXes, which represent cryptocurrency exchanges powered by blockchain. These decentralized exchanges allow people to trade cryptocurrencies directly, without the need for any intermediary. DEXes run as Automated Market Makers (AMMs), in which there are no order books run by a centralized system. Instead, DEXes operate smart contract-based liquidity pools that incentivize liquidity providers to contribute with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Uniswap is currently the second-largest DEX after Curve, although it is the largest universal DEX, as Curve is focused on stablecoins alone. SMART VALOR gives investors the opportunity and means to invest in Uniswap through the UNI token, which is currently among the 15 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap. Also included in the initial launch will be the Kyber Network token KNC. Kyber is a blockchain-based liquidity protocol that allows decentralized token swaps to be integrated into any application.
- Lending - lending protocols account for the largest share of total value locked (TVL) in DeFi projects. At the moment, four out of the five largest DeFi protocols are lending projects, including Aave, InstaDApp, Compound, and Maker. Their combined TVL is just above $55 billion as of October 2021.Users rely on lending protocols to borrow tokens against their crypto holdings or lend cryptocurrencies to earn interest. SMART VALOR will support some of the largest lending protocols, including Compound and Aave. We find Compound to be an exciting first round addition. Compound allows users to earn interest on their cryptocurrencies by depositing them into one of several pools supported by the platform. In addition, borrowers can take a secured loan from any Compound pool by depositing collateral.
- Oracles for DeFi - Blockchain technology has been great for many things in the realm of finance, but they do suffer from some limitations. One of those limitations is that they only have access to information that's included "on-chain". This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a blockchain protocol to work with real-world data. That short-coming led to a solution however and that solution is oracles for blockchain. These oracles work to enable a blockchain to access real-world data, such as real-time price feeds. The DeFi oracles are layers verifying and then relaying critical on-chain data to the smart contract. Perhaps the top oracle blockchain is Chainlink. SMART VALOR is offering their LINK token as part of the launch of our DeFi Invest platform. It's often been said that during a gold rush the ones who get rish aren't the miners, but are rather the ones selling the shovels. Chainlink is akin to that shovel salesman, and that makes its LINK token quite attractive.
With SMART VALOR, it’s easy to create a well-diversified DeFi portfolio. Now you can get exposure to the fastest-growing crypto trend from a single place that is secure and has an intuitive interface. On top of that, you can access DeFi with your credit card, which is super convenient.
Why Invest in DeFi?
Getting exposure to the DeFi sector means investing in the future because the trend appears here to stay and is poised to transform the crypto industry, as well as the entire financial world as we know it in the years to come.
Since DeFi is still at a nascent stage, it’s growing fast, which translates into tremendous opportunities for investors seeking returns.
The fact that increasingly more traditional institutional investors begin to show interest in DeFi protocols proves that we’re experiencing the birth of an industry with disruptive potential. In July 2021, Goldman Sachs’ asset-management division filed an application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to offer an exchange-traded fund (ETF) called the Goldman Sachs Innovate DeFi and Blockchain Equity ETF. It would track the Solactive Decentralized Finance and Blockchain Index, and its shares would be listed on a national securities exchange.
Founded in the Swiss Crypto Valley in 2017, SMART VALOR is one of the first companies to embrace Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Acknowledged by Forbes as one of Europe's 10 Most Exciting Technology SMEs, SMART VALOR today is leading the way with its fully compliant investment platform for DeFi.
SMART VALOR is the only Swiss company operating a full-service digital asset platform authorized by FMA (Financial Market Authority of Liechtenstein) as custodian and exchange provider under the new Blockchain Act (TVTG) and as Financial Intermediary by VQF, a Swiss financial services standards organisation supervised by FINMA (Swiss Financial Market Regulator).