- In a historic move, Switzerland’s Sygnum bank aims to allow institutional investors to get into DeFi in a regulated manner.
- The bank will provide regulated banking services for a number of leading DeFi tokens.
- Sygnum aims to add more DeFi products (e.g. yield farming) to its range of services.
Swiss bank Sygnum, the world’s first digital asset bank, has launched the first phase of its institutional-grade access to decentralized finance. As a means of this move, the bank is presently authorized to offer regulated services for numerous leading DeFi tokens.
The announcement, which took place on June 15, unveiled that Sygnum will provide regulated banking services for leading decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens such as Aave, Aragon, Curve, Maker, Synthetix, Uniswap, and 1inch Network. In addition, the bank also aims to add regulated banking services for the USD Coin (USDC), a digital stablecoin that is pegged to the United States dollar.
Sygnum stated that this remarkable expansion of the bank’s token offering is a start towards its greater objective of bridging the conventional centralized finance with the revolutionary decentralized finance (DeFi) — something just recently one couldn’t even imagine.
Sygnum Has an Ambitious Goal
Sygnum reiterated that the current range of products is solely the bank’s first phase of its institutional-grade access to decentralized finance, and they aim to expand their offering by bringing in more DeFi products. The bank stated:
In later phases, Sygnum will offer a suite of DeFi yield-generating products and services across its banking as well as asset management offering, and develop custom solutions for its clients with selected DeFi partners.
In an exceptional move, the bank mentioned collaboration with DeFi protocols. While it remains to be seen what such a partnership looks like, it will certainly aid DeFi to get mainstream trust and recognition. “In parallel, Sygnum is collaborating with leading DeFi protocols to develop an innovative range of custom DeFi solutions targeted towards institutional and private qualified clients,” the bank said.
The Current State of DeFi
DeFi is a blanket term for a various list of financial applications (decentralized applications) that work on public blockchains and remove the need for mediators. This modern system is currently perceived to be in the experimental phase, yet it has grown to be extremely big.
In less than 8 months, DeFi has drawn more than $100B into smart contracts. In terms of users, DeFi has attracted more than 2 million users (unique addresses) in less than a year. Moreover, daily volume typically surpasses $2B on decentralized exchanges, which indicated DeFi’s impressive growth.
