The creation and management of digital claims in decentralised finance
| 
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies are the oldest and most diffused use case of blockchain technologies. Even though cryptocurrencies are typically regarded as money, and they have been typically treated as a quintessential financial use case, this is not completely appropriate: cryptocurrencies are, in fact, digital legal claims over protocol-driven disintermediated financial relations that often, but not necessarily, operate as money. This distinction becomes extremely relevant in the case of disintermediated advanced financial services (typically defined under the broad concept of “decentralised finance” – DeFi—): DeFi services relies extensively on digital legal claims to operate lending services and loans, aggregation services, matching services, and so on. As a result, a basic understanding of the way in which DeFi works can be quite useful to shed further light on the way in which blockchain can be used to digitise claims over data objects and automatise their shared and potentially simultaneous use among a variety of anonymous and dispersed actors and, potentially, generate and manage monetary rewards over their use. This presentation will therefore provide a general and high—level overview to a non-specialised audience of how DeFi services over blockchain work.
