Decentralized finance has been crypto’s defining motif this year, thanks in no small part to the ascendance of token mining solutions popularly known as yield farming. However, despite billions of dollars of crypto assets being locked into DeFi protocols, it has still to be determined whether decentralized finance can realize the lofty goals that inspired its creation, like banking the unbanked and providing greater financial inclusion.
What’s beyond dispute is that the legacy financial system crippled by excessive regulations and distorted by extremely loose central banks’ monetary policies is badly in need of disruption. And this is where hybrid solutions that leverage the best aspects of the centralized and decentralized worlds can play an important role. One such provider that straddles both domains, CeFi and DeFi, is Bitrue.
Enter Bitrue
Bitrue is a reputable financial management platform with a solid user base in Europe and Southeast Asia. Founded in 2018 by a group of crypto enthusiasts led by current CEO Curis Wang, Bitrue started out as a cryptocurrency trading platform initially focused on Ripple’s XRP as one of their base currencies, and the platform still plays a prominent role in the XRP ecosystem. At the moment, it processes the second-highest volume of trades in XRP, more than 15%, and supports a wide range of XRP-denominated trading pairs.
Bitrue’s exchange also features a range of other trading pairs in carefully selected assets with a total daily trading volume of around $300 million. The Bitrue platform has 543,000 active traders and 1.62 million registered users. In year-to-year terms, Bitrue’s community has grown by 330% and its daily trading volume by 620%.
Importantly, while trading remains a core functionality of the platform, it has been rapidly expanding to the world of crypto finance. In particular, Bitrue has for some time allowed users to take collateralized crypto loans and earn interest on their crypto via the pioneering PowerPiggy program. The latter currently supports 26 different coins and loans can currently be taken in USDT, BTC, XRP, or ETH.
Bitrue Makes Its DeFi Play
Recently, Bitrue has revealed that the platform will switch from a purely centralized (CeFi) model of crypto lending and investment to a hybrid model containing both centralized and decentralized components. The first DeFi component that is planned for rollout in Q1 2021 is a peer-to-peer matching engine for borrowers and lenders. Bitrue’s DeFi ecosystem will be powered by the recently created Bitrue Finance (BFT) token. The first round of the token distribution has already taken place via a pre-sale and public sale and the token is now trading on Bitrue. The platform’s original native token (BTR) will continue to be used for its current purposes, such as allowing traders to pay less in exchange fees and receive higher interest rates in PowerPiggy, etc.
Bitrue is also planning to launch its liquidity mining program by the end of October. It will make it possible for users to earn rewards in BFT and other tokens for providing liquidity to the relevant liquidity pools. In contrast to pure DeFi yield farming, Bitrue Liquidity Mining will be much easier to use and accessible even to newcomers to crypto finance. Users will be able to just deposit their coins for a certain period and receive rewards without the need to interact with several different protocols themselves.
Whether you are interested in highly secure and easy-to-use crypto trading and financial services, or a battle-hardened yield farmer, you will find options to explore within the Bitrue ecosystem. The platform is proof that DeFi’s growth doesn’t have to come at the expense of CeFi and vice-versa: the two can co-exist via hybrid solutions that combine the best of both worlds.
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