WITH the turn of the year comes the promise of spring. Yet in the digital asset space, the “crypto winter” is far from abating. Faced with hackings and high-profile platform failures, investors have largely stayed away from the digital asset space.

This has led to views that it is not just cryptocurrency, but decentralised finance (DeFi) as a whole that is going into decline. However, there are also others who are much more bullish about DeFi projects, which use cryptocurrencies to manage financial transactions such as borrowing and lending.

Regardless of where one stands on this issue, there is no doubt that DeFi protocols such as blockchains — online distributed ledgers — bring immense potential for peer-to-peer transactions and collaboration.