Flare is Building a ‘Fully Decentralized’ DeFi Hub: Co-Founder

DeFi“Flare is essentially emerging as a kind of DeFi hub,” said Philion in a recent sitdown interview with Decrypt, adding that it’s “growing very quickly” through partnerships and integrations.dappsWith a total value locked (TVL) of $20.75 million according to DeFiLlama, Flare hit 1 million active wallets in August 2024. “Our TVL is relatively small, but it’s growing quite quickly,” Philion said. The network has a “large, reasonably mature set of DeFi protocols now that have built on Flare, which TVL is flowing into,” through integrations with bridges including LayerZero, V2, Stargate and Polyhedra, he added.Flare is also gearing up to launch FAssets, overcollateralized bridges for “non-smart contract tokens like Bitcoin, XRP and Dogecoin,” on its Songbird canary network in December, followed by a mainnet launch “early next year,” according to Philion.BitcoinFlare’s bridge is “one of the safer ways” to enable people to bring their Bitcoin, Dogecoin, XRP and other non-smart contract coins to the network, where they can be used in EVM-based DeFi protocols, Philion said. That opens up opportunities to “start using those tokens in a way that they haven’t been before,” across Flare’s DeFi protocols including Uniswap V3-style DEX SparkDEX, liquid staking protocol Sceptre and compliant daily futures trading platform XDFI.NFTWhile meme coin launchpads and NFTs are red meat to crypto degens, Philion added that the Flare team has “put a lot of time and effort into how we make the DeFi ecosystem on Flare as safe as possible,” explaining that the network has integrated with Chainalysis, Elliptic and Hypernative for “constant DeFi monitoring.”As well as launching FAssets and “getting our data onto other chains,” Flare is also exploring the possibilities of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).The secure enclaves, whose use cases include safeguarding biometric data on smartphones, have a variety of applications for blockchains, said Philion. “They are trustless, tamper proof and confidential, so they allow you to basically process information without anyone being able to see within it,” He added that they’re “between 1,000 and 10,000 times cheaper than zero-knowledge computation.”DEXsThe network is planning a hackathon for early 2025 around developing an integrated TEE for Flare. “That’s quite a sizable engineering effort,” said Philion, “but it’s a very interesting area for us to look at, and very much on our plate.”Sponsored post by FlareLearn More about partnering with Decrypt.