Flare is Building a ‘Fully Decentralized’ DeFi Hub: Co-Founder

Flare, the “blockchain for data,” is building out its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, Co-Founder Hugo Philion told Decrypt.

“Flare is essentially emerging as a kind of DeFi hub,” said Philion in a recent sitdown interview with Decrypt, adding that it’s “growing very quickly” through partnerships and integrations.

The EVM-compatible Layer 1 network offers developers “decentralized access to high-integrity data from other chains and the internet,” leveraging its Flare Time-Series Oracle and Flare Data Connector to provide decentralized applications (dapps) with an alternative to centralized off-chain oracles.

With a total value locked (TVL) of $20.75 million according to DeFiLlama, Flare hit 1 million active wallets in August 2024. “Our TVL is relatively small, but it’s growing quite quickly,” Philion said. The network has a “large, reasonably mature set of DeFi protocols now that have built on Flare, which TVL is flowing into,” through integrations with bridges including LayerZero, V2, Stargate and Polyhedra, he added.

Launching FAssets

Flare is also gearing up to launch FAssets, overcollateralized bridges for “non-smart contract tokens like Bitcoin, XRP and Dogecoin,” on its Songbird canary network in December, followed by a mainnet launch “early next year,” according to Philion.

“Traditionally, bridges for things like Bitcoin and other non-smart contract platforms have been fairly centralized,” he said, pointing out that Wrapped Bitcoin goes “essentially through a custodian,” while other efforts such as multisigs and MPC “ultimately come down to a relatively limited number of parties.” Philion emphasized that Flare “wants to remove that trust by making the bridge fully collateralized—in fact, overcollateralized.”

Flare’s bridge is “one of the safer ways” to enable people to bring their Bitcoin, Dogecoin, XRP and other non-smart contract coins to the network, where they can be used in EVM-based DeFi protocols, Philion said. That opens up opportunities to “start using those tokens in a way that they haven’t been before,” across Flare’s DeFi protocols including Uniswap V3-style DEX SparkDEX, liquid staking protocol Sceptre and compliant daily futures trading platform XDFI.

As well as DeFi, Flare has become a platform for NFT protocols and even meme coins, with Philion noting that “someone is launching something similar to Pump.fun on Flare.”

While meme coin launchpads and NFTs are red meat to crypto degens, Philion added that the Flare team has “put a lot of time and effort into how we make the DeFi ecosystem on Flare as safe as possible,” explaining that the network has integrated with Chainalysis, Elliptic and Hypernative for “constant DeFi monitoring.”

Reading the TEE leaves

As well as launching FAssets and “getting our data onto other chains,” Flare is also exploring the possibilities of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).

The secure enclaves, whose use cases include safeguarding biometric data on smartphones, have a variety of applications for blockchains, said Philion. “They are trustless, tamper proof and confidential, so they allow you to basically process information without anyone being able to see within it,” He added that they’re “between 1,000 and 10,000 times cheaper than zero-knowledge computation.”

That, he said, would enable Flare to process “vast amounts of data,” making dapps built on the platform competitive with data-rich Web2 applications. TEEs and verifiable off-chain compute are “some very interesting low-hanging fruit,” said Philion, adding that potential applications include CEX-like DEXs, fee tiers for users, and machine learning.

The network is planning a hackathon for early 2025 around developing an integrated TEE for Flare. “That’s quite a sizable engineering effort,” said Philion, “but it’s a very interesting area for