
Did someone say "bubble?" (Alexas Fotos/Pixabay)
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has exploded in 2020, but retail interest in the space remains quite low, if measured by Google search queries.
These suggest it may still be too early to draw parallels between DeFi’s growth and the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble of the final months of 2017 and early 2018.
Indexed to the peak of searches for “ICO,” searches on Google Trends for the word “DeFi” currently return a value of 18, indicating the retail crowd is as interested in open-source finance as they were in ICOs during the latter’s boom.
The DeFi movement seeks to transform old financial products into trustless and transparent protocols by leveraging decentralized networks.