One of the biggest stories in the blockchain space this year has been the astonishing growth of decentralized finance (DeFi), with total locked value surging from $690.9 million at the beginning of the year to $11.73 billion today. During Filecoin Liftoff Week, there was a conversation discussing Filecoin's place in the DeFi ecosystem. It is reported that Ren Protocol plans to cross-chain FIL to the Ethereum network. The highlights of the following discussion can better let you understand the significance of the Filecoin mainnet launch to the rapidly developing DeFi.

1. How do you view the intersection of Filecoin and DeFi? What immediate use cases do you think Filecoin will unlock?

Loong Wang,Ren Protocol: Today, we see that the more suitable dapps are financial applications. The reason is the cost of transactions on the chain. If you're paying a few dollars every time you want to perform an action, you want to make sure you're getting value out of that action in a very straightforward way.

I think large datasets in finance are an obvious use case for the intersection of Filecoin and DeFi. By accessing and analyzing large data sets, a wealth of trading capabilities and investment knowledge can be gained. In terms of its role in the Web3 ecosystem, Filecoin really opens up opportunities for new types of DeFi applications that can leverage vast amounts of data that until recently were not possible to use decentralized protocols.

Corbin Page, ConsenSys Codefi: With the launch of Filecoin, storage can now be offloaded onto Filecoin for some of the heavy lifting, such as spending plans and token bond curves. Most importantly, DeFi applications have access to these data-heavy tasks. We will see a complete oracle ecosystem interacting between the Filecoin storage network and the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.

And I think one of the shortest-term use cases for Filecoin and DeFi is hosting the front end. Making it unlike any other crypto asset in the market today, this naturally makes DeFi incredibly interesting.

If you tokenize FIL on Ethereum (cross-chain), you can now put it into the storage network along with tokenized BTC, tokenized ETH, governance tokens, or other types of encrypted assets , these assets will be completely uncorrelated. This is a very exciting opportunity for those of us involved in DeFi.

2. Part of the Filecoin protocol is to require miners to purchase and issue FIL as collateral to run their mining operations. How do you think DeFi might help miners get FIL liquidity?

Stani Kulechov, Aave: Staking is the foundation of DeFi protocols, and it is the best way to unlock liquidity. Users unlock liquidity by staking valuable assets as collateral to support lending in existing DeFi applications. In other words, any asset of value in the protocol can be borrowed and collateralized in a highly available system. In this case, the available system is Filecoin mining. I can imagine this could be an interesting use case in terms of lending.

3. Large liquidity pools like Uniswap have recently emerged as viable alternatives to centralized exchanges. What changes do you think triggered the migration of liquidity from centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges, and what similar changes will occur in the entire cryptocurrency field in the future?

Loong Wang,Ren Protocol: It boils down to ease of use and composability. If you want to participate in a centralized exchange (CEX), you must constantly balance liquidity between these platforms. Another concern is giving your data to someone who may not be trustworthy. The advantages of CEX are access to tighter spreads, deeper liquidity, faster transactions, and more traditional trading mechanisms. However, the friction with CEX is still greater, and trust is still the biggest cost.

Performing many different financial operations in a single on-chain transaction, this type of composability is significant for automated market makers (AMMs), decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and other Web3 applications.

DeFi will proliferate on a large scale, and different chains will develop unique functions. Users choose between these tradeoffs for different reasons. So, you will need interoperability between chains to keep DeFi composable. Just as we saw liquidity migrate from CEXs to DEXs, we will see liquidity spread and grow across multiple chains at once.

Corbin Page, ConsenSys Codefi: For DEXs and other Web3 applications, composability and usability are a huge advantage. Many people call them "money Legos" because you can put them together to do different things.

Now we add the information and data side of the internet to the existing internet of value. Because we are developing more and more building blocks every day, we will gradually have more unique applications that can only run on the blockchain protocol. There will be no centralized alternative available. Because of this unique feature of composability, we're going to have all these types of new experiments and applications, and that's what gets our developers really excited about these systems.

4. Many DeFi builders are considering Filecoin and its surrounding DeFi solutions. What advice do you have for these developers as they start exploring the intersection of Filecoin and DeFi?

Stani Kulechov, Aave: The growth of the Ethereum ecosystem is so fast compared to a few years ago, a few years ago, it was very difficult to build an ecosystem without these tools and libraries. Therefore, I recommend building tools and libraries to help other developers and users.

Loong Wang,Ren Protocol: Embrace the composable nature of Web3. One of the unique things about composability is that it's more user-friendly because you can't retain users just by raising the bar. So fundamentally something better had to be built.

With FIL, we are seeing for the first time the tokenization of assets that are not fundamentally financial instruments. FIL is actually a functional tool that developers can and should think of differently to build applications that are unimaginable today. What does it mean to lend storage? Is this functionally different from borrowing and lending financial assets? These are the types of questions developers should be thinking about when building and delivering tools that are very different from what we see today.

Corbin Page, ConsenSys Codefi: My proposal is in two parts:

• Build things that cannot be achieved today. Developers are encouraged to be hyper-creative with the solutions they come up with.

• Suggestions to solve real problems. Many of these people are still living outside of the crypto space, there are a lot of problems to solve, so please build very creative ideas based on real situations to build solutions that people really want.