Cryptocurrencies and blockchain power decentralized finance or DeFi and aim to provide an alternative financial ecosystem to the existing, traditional financial system based around fiat money.
DeFi aims to democratize finance by replacing today’s centralized institutions with peer-to-peer relationships. To do this, DeFi needs to provide the full spectrum of financial services, such as everyday banking, payments, lending and borrowing, finance, complex contractual relationships, and asset trading.
The industry has come a long way, with so-called “dApps” or decentralized applications that power many of these use cases. From regular crypto wallets like MetaMask that can be used to send and receive payments, to decentralized exchange platforms like Uniswap, for trading cryptocurrencies, DeFi more than matches what’s available in the traditional financial markets.
These days, there’s a dApps for basically every financial service one can think of. Curve and Aave are decentralized protocols for borrowing and lending, Centrifuge provides people with a way to bring real-world assets on-chain and use them as collateral for finance, and Orbs is a Layer-3 platform that’s focused on enhancing trading experiences.
DeFi’s UX Challenge
That last point is important, for DeFi has a long way to go if it’s to become as widespread as TradFi, with one of the main challenges to overcome is the user experience. Simply put, DeFi protocols can be incredibly confusing things that leave a lot of people bewildered, and if this doesn’t improve, they’re unlikely to ever appeal to the masses.
The challenges in DeFi are numerous, and they begin with the user experience, which is a significant roadblock for user adoption. In many dApps, the user interface can be extremely daunting, alienating newcomers who don’t understand what they’re doing. If they’re putting their money at risk, they need a UX they can understand, but sadly, very few dApps provide this.
DeFi doesn’t do itself any favors with its complex jargon either, with terms like “yield harvesting”, “staking” and “liquidity pools” overwhelming those who are new to the space. Even once people do overcome these initial challenges, DeFi is plagued with other problems, such as low latency, which jeopardizes the reliability of transactions.
Some dApps also suffer from expensive gas fees during times when the network is busy, and the scarcity of liquidity can mean users’ trades are executed at a different price than what they expected, or not at all.
Enhanced DeFi Experiences
Orbs, the decentralized L3 network that paves the way for smooth on-chain trading experiences with aggregated liquidity and support for advanced order types, is focused on creating a DeFi experience that’s as efficient as the one found on centralized platforms. It has made rapid progress in terms of making DeFi more accessible.
It begins with the UX, which has been dramatically simplified compared to older DeFi protocols thanks to a number of smart design choices. For instance, it simplifies the transaction process for decentralized trading, with clear options and concise information. It provides visual representations of the underlying data, such as exchange rates and liquidity, so users can make smarter decisions. Other enhancements include the high contrast and clear typography used in its UX, which makes it easier for users to interact with the platform.
Additionally, Orbs supports multiple blockchain networks and can integrate with almost any kind of dApp or DEX, making it easy for users to interact with. It all adds up to a smooth, frictionless user experience, no matter what network you’re interacting with.
Extending this further, Orbs also provides a bunch of educational resources that intend to make trading more accessible, beginning with its blog posts that explain various concepts around DeF, and its user tutorials, which help to explain exactly what users can do with DeFi. It even caters to developers, hosting a series of webinars and workshops on channels like YouTube that can teach them how to improve their dApp’s experiences by taking advantage of Orbs’ Layer-3 infrastructure.
These educational resources are key to the growth of DeFi. As users become more knowledgeable, they become more confident in their ability to make profitable trading decisions. .
Advancing DeFi’s Functionality
As the DeFi industry evolves, advanced trading features have become more common, yet they’re extremely complex and difficult to build. The smart contracts that enable advanced trading capabilities such as futures orders are limited by their sandboxed design. For instance, they’re unable to trigger future actions at arbitrator times or conditions, since state changes need something external to the contract to initiate them.
In addition, smart contracts are unable to query external data that doesn’t reside on-chain. This is known as the “oracle” problem and explains why many DeFi dApps still rely on an element of centralized, backend infrastructure.
Orbs provides the decentralized backend services that DeFi needs to extend the capabilities of smart contracts. Using its proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, Orbs fulfills the role of a supplementary execution layer, enabling complex logic and scripts that go beyond what traditional smart contracts are capable of doing.
Orbs’ innovative protocols, such as dTWP, dLIMIT, the Liquidity Hub, and the Perpetual Hub advance the capabilities of DeFi and smart contracts, bringing CeFi-level execution to the decentralized trading landscape. They allow Orbs to optimize trading experiences with aggregated liquidity, support for advanced trading orders, and on-chain derivatives, bringing more complex features to deFi.
Moreover, users can customize their trading dashboards to take advantage of only the advanced features they require, so they can create a unique trading environment that’s tailored to their trading style.
Orbs also delivers in terms of customer support, which is extended across multiple channels including email and chat across platforms such as X, Telegram, Line, and Discord, providing timely assistance to users and developers alike in English, Korean, and Japanese. The responsive nature of its support services goes a long way toward improving user confidence and boosting accessibility.
Community Involvement All The Way
Orbs also makes sure that its community of users is heavily involved in its ongoing development and evolution, with the perfect example of a feedback loop. This begins with community building, where Orbs excels with its strong presence across multiple social media channels and forums, inviting users to participate in discussions on its future developments. This community engagement extends to regular incentives aimed at encouraging users to participate.
The Orbs’ team regularly collects feedback from its user base to enhance its platform in terms of functionality and user experience. For instance, the OIP-6 migration was directly approved by the Orbs community, as part of its ongoing ecosystem expansion, which began with the bridging of its native ORBS token from Ethereum to other blockchains. With OIP-6, the community approved the creation of a new mechanism that enables holders of older, multi-chain bridged ORBS tokens to exchange those assets on a 1:1 basis for the newer, updated version of ORBS
In another example of the community’s involvement with Orbs, it recently voted to approve triple APY for new ORBS stakers, in a move that was designed to expand the community by incentivizing newcomers to participate.
Making DeFi Viable
The above examples underscore how Orbs is dedicated to transforming the DeFi industry by enabling CeFi-style execution on-chain. It has created a number of protocols that aim to empower traders with advanced features, deep liquidity, and efficient trading solutions, without any centralized intermediaries.
Orbs’ dLIMIT and dTWAP protocols pave the way for DEXs to support advanced order types that were previously not possible on-chain, giving users a way to make more strategic and controlled trades that can enhance their profitability.
On the infrastructure side, its revolutionary Liquidity Hub helps aggregate liquidity from multiple decentralized sources, leading to more competitive pricing for DEX-based swaps with lower transaction fees compared to the usual DEX trading experience. Finally, the Perpetual Hub supports more capital-efficient perpetual futures trading.
Orbs does all of this while adhering to the core principles of decentralization, ensuring that users have full privacy, security, and anonymity throughout their journeys across the DeFi landscape.
