A taxonomy for Decentralized Finance

Decentralized Finance (‘DeFi’) has gained tremendous momentum over the past three years by using novel approaches to disintermediating financial institutions in the provision of financial services. However, empirical research in this field is still rare and a more comprehensive understanding of the domain is a missing component in academic research. This paper develops a taxonomy based on a comprehensive literature analysis to structure this emerging field systematically. The application of the taxonomy to 278 DeFi start-ups reveals that most of the DeFi start-ups focus on Ethereum (36.3%) and have a focus on analytics and automation (52%), while only a few incorporate decentralized governance approaches (3.3%), provide decentralized exchanges (14%) or integrate off-chain data