While DeFi is still in its early stages in terms of mainstream adoption, the DeFi market has experienced massive growth in 2021: Trading volumes have surged, DeFi exchanges are getting increasingly popular, and the total value locked keeps growing at a fast rate.
However, DeFi is currently not completely ‘decentralized’. This is because of centralized exchanges and companies offering DeFi services. Portal’s aim is to actually decentralize finance by unlocking the potential of Bitcoin.
Portal’s solution
As a DeFi peer-to-peer layer on Bitcoin, Portal is building a truly soft-sovereign, anonymous and uncensored ecosystem using the advantages of the Bitcoin blockchain. This eliminates the need of ‘centralized middlemen’, since Portal offers all DeFi services combined with the security and trust minimization guarantees of Bitcoin. This allows for both fast & cheap and secure transactions.
So, by blending the best of Bitcoin and Layer 2, the Portal ecosystem makes sure that:
- DeFi becomes uncensorable, peer-to-peer and trust-minimized.
- DeFi remains fast and cheap, because Portal swaps move provable execution of cross chain contracts to layers 2 and 3.
- Security and privacy threats get eliminated, as there is no ‘centralized’ control and/or data.
As a self-hosted Layer 2 Wallet and DEX, Portal is engineered from scratch to make atomic swaps between Bitcoin and other assets private, secure, and fast.
The problem with Centralized Custodial Exchanges
In the video below, Andreas from Portal shares more insights into why Portal believes that centralized custodial exchanges are problematic for the crypto space.
Fabric
Fabric is Portal’s layer three technology, functioning as a peer-to-peer market for computation, and enables the deployment of typical smart contract functionalities (trading, options, borrowing and lending & more).
With Fabric, Portal enables a web scale, serverless infrastructure with strong security and privacy guarantees. The technology enables Layer 3 privacy on cross-chain transactions & eliminates the need for centralized custodians. With Fabric, peer-to-peer swaps, liquidity, staking & more is enabled completely private and off-chain.
Portal Partnerships
The project has partnered with many other projects, companies and investors for support of their platform and the development of it.
- In total, Portal fundraised $8.5 million from prominent blockchain & DeFi investors (including Coinbase Ventures and OKEx). These include investment firms, influencers, and exchanges.
- Last month, we covered Portal’s partnership with Polygon. This strategic partnership helps Portal with boosting Bitcoin usability in the DeFi ecosystem.
- Portal has entered a strategic partnership with Chainlink, and will integrate Chainlink price feeds into its DEX network. The partnership allows Portal to get access to trusted and high-quality pricing feeds.
Portal’s goal is to fix the security, censorship, and privacy problems that are caused by centralized financial services built on top of blockchains. By building DeFi on Bitcoin, Portal actually decentralizes finance by integrating the advantages of Bitcoin (security and trust-minimization) & the advantages of centralized alternatives (speed and liquidity).
