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Many (if not all) smart contracts offering banking services to the unbanked (De-Fi) are usually hosted on centralized web servers. While it's possible to interact with smart contracts by running their code on the ETH blockchain network, this involves a steep learning curve to the end user. The average person would interact with De-Fi apps on centralized infrastructure, as convenience/ease of use is put on top of everything else. For "De-Fi" apps to be 100% decentralized they'd need to be hosted on a P2P network like IPFS or even ZeroNet. But I guess that people don't care about "De-Fi" apps' decentralization as long as they're able to make profits in the shortest amount of time possible.

Do you think that "De-Fi" is not as decentralized as its proponents claim it to be? Does it need improvement? Your input will be greatly appreciated. :)

Well said brother, as long as people tend to make profit, they care less about what servers the apps are hosted on, whether centralised or decentralized. I understand defi apps not being decentralized is against decentralization itself but then the solution is more considered than the safety for the now. The need will arise some time In the future.

Sadly, the term "Decentralized" in today's standard has been reduced to connecting your non-custodial wallet to these platforms who claims to be peer to peer. To a lot of non-techies, being able to control the keys is enough for them to say it's De-Fi.

Just by looking at the hacks compiled by zasad@ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5267124.msg54946420#msg54946420
That should be enough to tell that these platforms have central point of attack.
  
Another example is IDEX, who is also part of the ethereum DeFi ecosystem, asking KYC and store it on their servers.

What suggestion for improvements can we give? I don't really know. Unless their blockchain allows them to do so, we can't do much.

For me it is decentralized we can see that on some major projects. Centralized approach is being with held with some of those projects.

For example curve finance it is decentralized but its governance is majority cotrolled by centralized authority, so where does it lead the project? Many thinks that decentralized revolves on simple smart contract but honestly I dont feel it.

Im not sure about it. Ive used IDEX before, the only changes they made is the approach  on their registration aside from importing wallet details to an email. Yeah we can say that they are moving to a centralized gaming but not totally remove its objective.

This is so true, as long as people are going to make a good profit, they don't give a damn if the Defi is decentralised as it is claim to be. I would say that this is a big problem, what if the people behind collude with someone or they themselves steal the funds that is supposed to be being locked? That is very dangerous and people could lose tons of money here.

thats why those potential buyers of these defi projects should do their own due diligence before jumping aboard. if they will be rekt then thats their fault as no one is obliging them to invest on this hype. they can do all the possible assessments for each project before shelling out their hard-earned money. because once you bought, there's no turning back. you can just hope that the project will take off and do their job to actually realise their objectives...and in time, get your profits.

Of course, not all Defi are truly decentralized and that's okay. most of these projects are just people who want to make money on the hype, but there are also quite a few projects that are very strong and really decentralized

nobody really cares about the percentage of decentralization in defi as long as it makes money. and it's not ideal to expect the website being distributed because infrastructure are also limited. maybe they can do it with zeronet but the security is still questionable. anyway, most people are more than happy with having the option to gain yields without sending their tokens to central party and just lock them in a smart contracts.

It is true, behind the development is in most cases one team with the CEO, that is very respected and community will aways follow his ideas. The completely decentralized projects are Bitcoin and Grin - no creator, no CEO, no pre-mine, no master-keys, not created for their profit :).

As I wrote yesterday, DeFi is just another bubble like ICO. A lot of super-questionable projects and a lot of empty money spurred by a thirst for easy money. Bubble in a bubble inside a bubble - that's what your DeFi and all its projects are (I'm sorry, but it is).

Yes it is really a bubble that investors and traders love to play with. I so many new defi yesterday, checkint on their social media, it seems their post or let say initial post are all about presale and how to raise fund. This is quite alarming cause the purpose of defi has been overwhelmed on uniswap. I think thats a nasty goal to earn bucks. I prefer to earn hard profits with real products. So far sinx and compound shows really a good potential.

The decentralization is in the level of handling of coins and tokens. It's not due to the nature of the site or project but due to the nature of the blockchain they are involved with.
Decentralization in the sense every transaction and freezing happens on the blockchain. Whether or not the blockchain is decentralized is another question. Though Defi is a good way ahead, the current hype is actually making it a joke and may hamper its reputation on long run.

Agree on the explanation of Decentralization of DeFi. There is no such thing as total Decentralized because it was created by human and it will be maintained by human too. In that sense, At some point there’s a centralized part even on bitcoin, without the miners, blockchain can’t run itself.

I just want to make a note on the hype on DeFi. It not bad because it just mean that there is a real demand on DeFi coin. The only problem on DeFi is those fake project with pump and dump coin. This is the real cancer on DeFi ecosystem.

Of course, DeFi is a new bubble, similar to the era of ICO... And some one-day projects, like in the old days, collect a lot of money... Human greed knows no boundaries and mistakes are always repeated in the end! ;D

As for decentralization - in my opinion, the initial idea that the first cryptoanarchists tried to convey has long been spoiled... Most people (almost all of them) are trade on centralized exchanges! So what difference does it make whether DeFi is decentralized or not? It seems to me that they just don't care about it...

Everybody wants to get to the conclusion that DeFi is a bubble. I disagree. For something to be a bubble, it needs a lot of people to invest into it and put greater and greater sums of money. For this, it needs to be accessible enough. In case of ICOs, anybody could get in as the entry barrier was only knowing how to send ETH from your wallet. To earn money in De-Fi, you need a slightly higher level of proficiency in finance and coding. Those people will continue to make money using bots for quick trades, flash loans and arbitrage opportunities.
The whole thing will continue to be funded by the big players who are adept at all of this and the smaller ones can hope for smaller profits if they manage to take out the money before it all crashes down. In fact, this is exactly how stock markets work for the small retail investor. The window of information that you have about a company is very limited while the institutional investors can raise or sink a stock with insider knowledge. If you are lucky enough to catch the wave, you will benefit too.

The one difference is that company stocks can be evaluated on the basis of their performance. De-Fi tokens on the other hand can only be evaluated on the basis of the hype. The hype is manufactured by the big players. If a small investor can play along then they have the opportunity to earn money otherwise the biggies will continue to circulate the money amongst themselves keeping the charade going long enough and not letting it have bubble characteristics.

I probably usually express myself the wrong way when talking about DeFi as a bubble. Whenever I do so, I usually talk about the coins like YFI that popped up and boomed in a matter of weeks like crazy. I can't see this going well, the same way pretty much any other crypto boom didn't end up well either. Most other members probably talk about the coins as well.

The tech will probably stay and evolve. The problem is imo that too many people are now rushing in to buy coins like YFI and this cannot go on forever. It's a constant talk about false ideas, especially decentralization, as if DeFi solves everything. It doesn't - there's a long way to go before we finally get to a properly structured and working decentralized app that has absolutely zero centralized features in it and is 100% trustless and reliable for most use cases.

Defi is all about making profits in a short amount of time. During the 2017 bull run, many didn't really care about the potential of the coin and invested their sum blindly on various projects to become rich within a few months. This ended up in investors losing all their money and scammers running away with it. There was no decentralization achieved through ICO coins but many claimed that it was indeed decentralized. I got into crypto only during the crypto craze of 2017 but luckily never invested in a single shitcoin at their ICO stage. The same goes with Defi craze where developers yell out that coin is worthless but it gets pumped to $23,000 per coin within a few months of launch.

Forked coins trend started gaining traction in 2013 bull run, ICO started gaining traction in 2017 bull run and now Defi is gaining traction in 2019 bull run but the end result would be like a coin or 2 would survive during the next dump.If we really need to save bitcoin, we should completely eradicate the newbie pump and dump strategy but rather teach the new joiners of crypto about decentralization, banking, bitcoin and technology. Bitcoin has evolved into a investment trading tool, forked coins evolved as a backup to bitcoin, ICO coins has evolved into a useless scam and Defi will be evolving into another decentralized scam but nothing more.

99% of the ICO coins would have never known why bitcoin was created by satoshi, so ignoring this Defi and trading is a better way to enrich ourselves in bitcoin.

Know what I see? What a lot of people say about Defi but don't really take advantage of it.
Most people just speculate on the price of tokens and do not care about decentralization processes.
All of you are right when you say that the project interface should also be located in decentralized networks.
Although any programmer can work with a smart contract without a web interface.
I don't see this as a problem right now, if there is an attack or server blocking, the community will make a mirror.

This is well said. I think the biggest question is, how many projects out there are even decentralized? Just like you said which I also agreed to, people do not care about decentralization because so far they have the opportunity to make money within a shortest time possible they are okay. Funny enough, for a project which calms to be a decentralized finance platform, but however isn't decentralized shows the level of negligence which has grown in the mind of people as they only invest to make profit, no more because of the idea or whatever. Till date, Bitcoin has remained the best and only decentralized cryptocurrency, others or maybe 95% are just a shadow of what they protary to their investors.

you are right and it is clear that Defi projects still utilize centralized platform to promote or develop their project which opposes the blockchain technology it is promoting. i think that the reason behind this is we are yet to have fully and solid decentralized web servers were such project with high traffic can be carried out. i believed that in the future, the defi projects will migrate easily to decentralized platforms offering web services.

Right now, People that are super hyped about deFi products don't really care about where the servers are or whether or not the it's hosted on centralized web servers or  not.  They have no interest research the nitty-gritty details abeg these DeFi products they're investing it. It just reminds me of the good old IEO days where everyone was only concerned on how much money they could make on each ICO or ICO they participate in. I can say nearly 96% of not all Crypto projects (not just DeFi) are hosted on centralized web servers.

Have you heard about this project?
https://web3.foundation/about/
"About
Our mission is to nurture cutting-edge applications for decentralized web software protocols.
Our passion is delivering Web 3.0, a decentralized and fair internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny. Polkadot is our flagship project."
They have ready-made solutions for decentralization and uncensored internet projects.
The future of cryptocurrencies will be built on such ecosystems.

I don't think we are ever getting to a completely decentralized "app". Decentralized , sound money is probably the only use case of truly permissionless blockchain. Whenever we put a cap on the capability of a technology, there are a bunch of people who want to quote Bill gates about how "64 KB would be enough memory" (paraphrasing). Yet, people have been trying to prove it otherwise for years now. The best solution they come up with some form of DPoS oligarchy.
The whole proposition that developers want to build things in such a way that their data is immutable is just not good enough. Nobody wants their applications to run that way. The users as well as developers are mighty happy with centralized databases. DeFi isn't decentralized. It is only a new type of banker trick to get rich quick.
 
This shit is too widespread and is far too along for anything to make a difference now. The maximum that will happen is some sort of bug again resulting in people losing money or a clever hack siphoning funds. Yet, that hasn't stopped anybody.
To take an analogy from the existing system, investment bankers have been making crazy money like YFI or erstwhile ICOs for ages now. Its just that they aren't called out for it as only a select few have access to it. DeFi is just spreading it out in such a way that anyone with enough smarts and enough desire can earn that money now. This was the same with ICOs. If you were quick enough to get onto the bandwagon of the initial ones, one would have made money. DeFi just created a niche that arbitrage traders running trading bots are ideally placed to exploit. For good or bad, they are fast becoming crypto's investment bankers. Ideals notwithstanding, I think for the time being, that is the crazy reality of this shit.

If there is anything that DeFi-scam is capable of and suitable for, it is only to give hope of making a profit "here and now". As an example-buy some of YFI in the evening for 30L, and in the morning sell for 37k and never touch it again. As with any other DeFi project.
It will be interesting to see a thousand and one posts later that " Oh no [DeFi project] turned out to be a bubble/scammers what to do??? Beware!!!" and others.
When you are a beginner, you are in the maximum risk zone.

Completely agree with you, mate. There's been a lot of misconception regarding the term "decentralization" in the crypto/Blockchain space. Most people don't care about this since they're only focused on making money in the least time possible with "De-Fi" apps. In the long run, they'll experience the risks of centralization which crypto was meant to avoid in the first place. A truly decentralized "De-Fi" app would serve its purpose well in being censorship-resistant, outside the control or manipulation of third parties. With a centrally-hosted "De-Fi" ecosystem, the industry becomes no different than regular banking. Consider so called "decentralized exchanges" hosted on centralized servers, asking for KYC from their users. The term "decentralization" has been wrongly used for companies' own benefit.

Ultimately, the hype will lead towards many undesired situations that will make people think twice before choosing "De-Fi" over traditional banking. Just like it happened with ICOs some time ago, "De-Fi" will turn out to become a "failed experiment" in the long run. If it succeeds, only truly decentralized "De-Fi" apps will be able to survive for as long as crypto/Blockchain exists in the mainstream world. Let's hope developers put decentralization first above convenience so that "De-Fi" becomes a household name in the crypto/Blockchain industry. Just my opinion :)

I would say that like with every new technology or innovative service defi is also just booming now but to become better in all aspects it will require time and infrastructure so over time we will see all the improvements and adjustments.

So truthful mate, Decentralized is just on empty words, I haven't seen a real project that's 100% decentralized like Bitcoin, maybe the reason why things are like this is because Bitcoin creator is unknown and nowhere to be found till date and for most new dex projects are still controlled by teams

There is a rapid increase of these DeFi apps/projects and many of them I believe are not fully decentralized, even DEX is not fully decentralized they just called it decentralized and claimed it even if they are not to make it sounds better. People now if they heard about defi with high yield returns they don't care about decentralization they just jump into it for a quick buck. I guess defi is overhyped.
I think so, but it's the best tech we have for now, I just gonna watch how this technology evolve and I hope this will be useful for everyone.

To be honest i have not personally used any defi app as of yet other than uniswap and as far as uniswap is concerned i think it is completely decentralized because there is no third party interference as we have to complete the transaction via our own wallet with the help of metamask.

The web server maybe centralized indeed, but the defi platform itself should using decentralized platform like blockchain for their infrastructure.
It is not 100% decentralized because to using decentralized web server, you will need using blockchain that can make web server like Arweave or Keva and need some advance knowledge to coding it.

This was exactly the same 2 and 3 years ago when people were talking about decentralized exchanges and making it seem like such an amazing concept when all they were talking about was simply non-custodial wallets. I think people will never truly understand what makes Bitcoin so special and what makes Defi projects in general crap.

Tons of scammers has seen that DeFi projects are getting funding and they unfortunately focus on the part where they are getting funded and not from the decentralization part, nor even the whitepaper part, they do not care what a defi is, they do not care what they could do with it, they just want to create something, get money for it and leave it to people to use it while they go spend that money on their own lives and not to betterment of the coin.

I have seen a ton of people like that, unfortunately they say they created the coin and they sold the coin and their job is done, it is a sad fact but there are people who are like that, they only care about their own money and they do not care about the community that is supporting the coin they created which is why they are called scammers even though it is technically not illegal.

I have the same opinion as you.  As of investors, they care less on the features of the projects.  All they have in mind is to gain profit and that is all.  Would you believe that these investor will use the project apps?  I bet no, or maybe just once.

Most of the people who have a capitalist mindset are usually very closed minded about anything detail. They think of money ahead of and above all else, the most important thing in life is profit. I really like this kind of opinion, because with this we can know more about something that an entity can hide from us as users. Indeed, this is not completely decentralized, because the developer still interferes with the policy steering. Every decision made by a developer can be beneficial for some parties and detrimental to others. Of course, the worst thing that can arise with this authority is that an ecosystem that is unnatural and unhealthy can occur.

The role of the developer at this time seems very central, whereas this is very contrary to the principles of decentralization

You are right and very on point but do you think there is something like decentralization in this crypto ecosystem? Personally, I don't really see the entire crypto space as decentralized. In as much that the main idea of cryptocurrency is decentralization, Cryptocurrency and blockchain is not decentralized.  We use centralized exchange platforms to trade cryptocurrencies and these platforms decide the amount of coins you can withdraw within 24 hours.

The developers will find a way how to get a hold of their project in any way they can. I really don't think that we will see full blown decentralized platform in these DeFi projects. Some of them may contain backdoors that a regular user can't see but those that are blockchain experts can uncover those loopholes. But it will take time before someone can do those expose. And most of the time these projects already screwed thousands to millions of dollars before someone can reveal their true nature.

Developers should be able to check the github of the Defi projects to see whether its safe to use or not.  Cant say if they are 100% decentralize but I would like to beleive its the most decentralize so far after all what is needed to run it are the protocols under the blockchain.

We don't even need a website nor dokain server to run these Defi protocols and as long as its opensource and the project doesn't have any bug/loopholes, it must be decentralized.

Completely agree with you, mate. People will never understand what "De-Fi" is really all about. All they care is to fill their pockets with money, even if they have to face the risks of centralization. Businesses and companies know this, which is why they focus more on convenience rather than making their platforms truly censorship-resistant. Ultimately, tech-savvy people and libertarians will focus on decentralization above anything else. While it's still possible to interact with "De-Fi" smart contracts directly from the Blockchain, it takes some technical knowledge to get ahold of. "De-Fi" apps need some sort of user-friendly interface where people can interact with them without any prior technical experience. And sadly, the only way to do this is via a centrally-hosted website.

In the bright side, there are many projects working on a truly decentralized web. We have IPFS, ZeroNet, and even the SAFE Network which aim to bring censorship resistance to the Internet. Hosting "De-Fi" apps there would truly make them unstoppable. There are many ways to achieve full-fledged decentralization limited to developers' own imagination. As long as the entire crypto/Blockchain industry remains decentralized, there should be nothing to worry about. Over time, centralized "De-Fi" platforms will fail as people recognize their inherent risks. Decentralized solutions will ultimately prevail once the hype phase is over in the not-so-distant future. Just my opinion :)