Decentralized Finance (DeFi) as the term sounds, is a type of financial innovation that makes traditional financial services - savings, loans, trading, investing, insurance and more - accessible to anyone worldwide. It was born out of the introduction of bitcoin in 2008 and many ensuing cryptocurrencies that brought along a non-traditional way of thinking and interacting with finance through new technology. Some benefits include: decentralization (cutting off middlemen from transactions), transparency, permission-less globally and inclusive, interoperability, and earning opportunities.

Though it is promising, DeFi is also full of risks. Yield farming is probably the buzzword behind DeFi's popularity because of the huge rewards, which play on human weaknesses and desires to get rich quickly and effortlessly.  

At the same time, people should consider how the pursuit of high yields can be incredibly complex, risky, and not suited for everyone.   

Yes we are! Thank you so much for the question. Currently outside of the United States, the Chamber has members and business partners in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bermuda, Dubai, Greece, India, Switzerland and Vietnam.  We continue to as an organization and enjoy the process of connecting so many like-minded people within the ecosystem.  Thank you very much for the question and we hope you consider taking a closer look at the Chamber for membership as well.

Thanks again for the question.

RChambers

President/CEO

I think the most decentralized of all DeFi Projects / Protocols are as follows: 

1. Compound

2. Uniswap

3. Maker

4. Aave

5. Yearn Finance

6. Curve

7. Balancer

Some of the upcoming protocols from India are: 

- EasyFi

- OpenDeFi

Are you open to remote working engineers? In which case I would advise on reaching out to Indian software Engineers. India now probably has the largest base of Blockchain developers currently. Many of them are working on private blockchains using Hyperledger Fabric and other enterprise blockchain frameworks. 

In fact the core strength of India is in the development of public blockchain based DApps and platforms.  

In 1979, Ralph Merkle patented the concept of hash trees. It is a data structure that allows efficient mapping of large chunks of data in the form of a connected tree / linked list.

Consider it to be like an organization structure for data points. In such a linked set of hashed data structure, any small changes made to the data can be easily identified or spotted.

Cryptos are the best example of the use of Merkle trees.  

The best resources for understanding Merkle trees can be found here: 

- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/introduction-to-merkle-tree

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree 

- https://www.codementor.io/blog/merkle-trees-5h9arzd3n8 

Firstly, there are 7400+ cryptos listed on CMC. Check out the top header bar on https://coinmarketcap.com/. 

Having said that, not all of them are reliable or can be considered fully functional as of now. Many of them are dead, defunct, scams, etc. which you can find on deadcoins.com. 

On to your second question, it depends on the type of problem cryptos can solve. And there are problems aplenty in this world which I believe a cryptocurrency can solve.

If you look around on CMC (coinmarketcap) you will notice that there are different kinds of tokens and coins for different kinds of systems, industries, and markets - payment, governance, social media, storage, real estate, platforms, stablecoins, exchange utility tokens, prediction markets, insurance, trade financing, gaming, decentralized energy, moneylending, banking, supply chain - I mean you name it and we have a coin or token for that. 

So we can have a crypto token for many different industries, processes, and markets. However, I would advise you to look at them with a pinch of salt for completeness, readiness, need, and without a doubt please DYOR!!