Bella: Why Are We Building a One-Click DeFi Aggregator?

Bella Protocol
7 min readAug 17, 2020

The cryptocurrency and crypto assets market is a trillion-dollar market with substantial room for growth

  • The combined current market cap for all cryptocurrency assets is worth more than $350 billion, and underlying assets are cyclical.
  • Stablecoins are the capital supply side of DeFi; currently, the total market cap for stablecoins is around $12 billion.
  • Global money supply plus cash equivalent (M1) is about $30 trillion. M1 plus near-cash (M2) is about $96 trillion. The market cap for the global equity market is around $90 trillion, almost equivalent to the size of M2.
  • Cryptocurrency is like the equity market, and stablecoins is like M1 in the crypto world. By analogy, the market cap for stablecoins would go up if they were treated as money supply plus cash equivalent. Hence the total market cap for stablecoins should be close to $100 billion. On the other hand, if stablecoins are compared to M2, the market cap should be around $300 billion.
  • When the market is in an upward trend, there will be a strong demand for borrowing and lending. The overall crypto market cap is expected to exceed $1 trillion. Stablecoin holders will have a high demand for asset management services. DeFi products and platforms, which are currently offering sizable rewards for liquidity providers, will take up a considerable amount of the market shares.
  • Conclusion: There’s room for 10–30x growth in overall market cap for stablecoins. Along with it, DeFi will boom into an even larger market.

The current market penetration rate of DeFi is only 1%, a large number of users have not yet been reached

  • There are about 5–10 million active crypto traders worldwide.
  • Compound is the largest DeFi platform. It has around 33,000 deposit addresses, compared to only 4,800 loan addresses. There are fewer than 20,000 addresses that are holding COMP.
  • Furthermore, about 50% of COMP mining rewards are divided among a few dozen whales. At present, the number of both DEX and DeFi liquidity providers is still small.
  • We conducted a user survey targeting crypto users in March and July 2020, and the questionnaire collected more than 700 admissive responses in July, here’s the result.
  • Conclusion: DeFi is still a game being played by a small circle of smart people, most of whom are the early adopters of crypto, geeks, crypto whales, and institutional yield farmers. People are calling for DeFi products for the masses.

Opportunities for cross-protocol arbitrage constantly spring up. The aggregation of DeFi is an irresistible trend

  • As DeFi has become a hot topic, numerous projects have emerged. Liquidity mining products are turning up endlessly. Users need a product as a “how-to guide”.
  • There are more complications with aggregating DeFi products and platforms compared to DEX aggregators such as 1inch Exchange. DeFi aggregators need to be judged from a variety of perspectives, including profit, risk, and safety.
  • DeFi products have evolved from simple price-comparison sites aiming to find the highest interest rates to suites providing a combination of cross-platform arbitrage, liquidity mining, and liquidation.
  • DeFi aggregation has a strong demand for automation. Liquidity mining and staking require more than one platform and multiple times of contract interactions, resulting in high gas fees that can reach up to $100, increasing the difficulty of transactions, and increasing delays.
  • In general, the user threshold is extremely high. Therefore, individual investors have a strong motivation to use aggregation tools to allow them to participate in DeFi with their cost and time saved.

Hybrid Finance: the combination of DeFi and CeFi

  • The advantage of DeFi is that the liquidity of each platform is actually shared by the whole market. The prosperity of one platform can improve the entire ecosystem.
  • CeFi’s centralized custody service allows users with no crypto wallets and or DApp experience to participate in DeFi conveniently. There is no need to understand smart contract interactions. CeFi shortens the user journey for DeFi, optimizes the user experience, and lowers the threshold.
  • DeFi can provide CeFi with new product features, making CeFi mining rewards more flexible. The combination can achieve differentiated competition between trading platforms and grab a lot of users.
  • Conclusion: Bella will add users to trading platforms and vice versa. It empowers exchange products and achieves differentiated competition for a win-win situation.

Developing DeFi product is a test for the team, the threshold and potential are far higher than other kinds of project

  • DeFi is the first decentralized application in the crypto ecosystem that has a sustainable business model.
  • Product capabilities, smart contract technology and security capabilities, international operations and user growth capabilities, crypto ecological resources (project Parties, institutions, miners, trading platforms, arbitrage teams), none of the above elements are dispensable.
  • Gone are the days of all the DeFi products needed is issuing a vague white paper and looking for an influencer to promote it. DeFi is a fair battlefield for the true strength of products, security level, and operations now. It is also the birthplace of the decentralized world giants of the future.
  • Conclusion: Bella has a dream team in the blockchain industry, a keen insight into the industry, and a down-to-earth spirit. It will soar up high with the aid of ARPA’s AGH growth method, deep accumulation of resources in the industry, and an active community of nearly 100,000 members in 12 languages ​​around the world.

Crypto Market is riding on a mobile network tide like in 2013, Asia market has a huge potential

  • At present, due to the popularity of Metamask, 80% of the traffic of Compound, Aave, and MakerDAO still comes from PC. But with the rise of mobile wallets such as imToken, Trust Wallet, and Coinbase Wallet, and the Web3 providers such as Magic and WalletConnect becomes widespread, the proportion of mobile users will increase significantly.
  • Currently, DeFi users are mainly from Europe and the United States. We believe the prosperity of Asian market will only be late yet not absent.
  • Conclusion: At present, there are still no flawless mobile DeFi products on the market, and there is no vigorous operation targeting Asian users: these are the two main focuses of Bella.

The infrastructure for Ethereum and other blockchains is evolving, and there will be better user experience

  • The number of addresses for decentralized wallets has been on a steady rise, and mobile wallets with better user experience are emerging.
  • On-chain asset classes will be increasingly diverse. As of now, BTC is still the holy grail of DeFi. The total value locked for WBTC, RenBTC, HBTC, and other ERC-20 tokens has been exploding. Up to now, more than 13,000 BTC have been locked on Ethereum.
  • The Infrastructure needed for the development of DeFi, such as stable coins, Oracle, DEX, and developer tools, has shown great improvements in the past two years. Ethereum 2.0 and some layer 2 scaling solutions are expected to increase the contract interaction speed and reduce gas fees. This trend is expected to continue.
  • Conclusion: The application of DeFi products will further spur the development of Ethereum infrastructure, and they will advance together in an upward spiral.

What are we building?

We are building a suite of products that aim to make financial products easily accessible to anyone with a mobile phone and the internet. The idea is simple: allow users to earn the best rate available with just one click.

  • Bella One-Click: An asset management platform for both new and experienced users.
  • Bella Lending: A lending platform that can collateralize cryptocurrencies and liquidity pool tokens.
  • Bella Flex Savings: Allows participants to deposit their assets, and the system will pick the investing strategies with the most optimized risk-adjusted return based on the user’s risk preferences. Strategies include cross-protocol arbitrage and liquidity mining.

Our Vision for Open Finance

DeFi will one day step out of the small circle of crypto users and become a pioneer of open finance.

There will always be tremendous opportunities during paradigm shifts. From the internet era to mobile internet era, from Facebook to Instagram and TikTok, massive opportunities have been created during these shifts. Blockchain, a decentralized settlement system, was destined to change the financial industry from the moment it was born.

Bitcoin has created the medium for decentralized exchange. Lending, as an ancient financial tool, will become the cornerstone of open finance with the help of DeFi. From the rise of USDT, USDC, DAI, and other stablecoins in the past two years, we can see that the market cap of stablecoins will be the base layer and provide the fundamental liquidity for open finance and will provide the funding supply for DeFi.

Ultimately it will be the state-led cryptos such as CBDC and Libra that will carry DeFi and open finance forward. At that time, the collateral will blossom into highly liquid assets, commodities, and bonds, and not just be limited cryptos like Ethereum. Then its capital supply side will be the cryptos that are issued by countries. Trading, settlement, lending, and financial derivatives together will form a dazzling ecosystem of open finance, a whole new trillion-dollar market.

What’s next?

In the next 24 hours, Bella team will release Bella’s roadmap, $BEL token info, and detailed product introduction including product matrix. Please pay close attention to our Telegram, Twitter and Discord!

About Bella

Bella is a suite of open finance products including automated yield farming tools, lending protocol, 1-click savings account, customized robo-advisor, and more. We believe everyone deserves equal access to premium financial products and services with elegant design and smooth user experience.

Bella brings your familiar mobile banking into crypto with just one click. With Bella, you can just simply sit back, watch your asset grow, and leave all the heavy-lifting to secure, automated smart contracts.

Bella’s core team consists of serial entrepreneurs and blockchain veterans who have tremendous experience and proven track record in finance, cryptography, blockchain, and engineering.

For more information about Bella, or to join our team,

please contact us at contact@bella.fi

Learn about Bella’s recent official news:

Medium: https://medium.com/@Bellaofficial

Twitter: @BellaProtocol

Telegram: https://t.me/bellaprotocol

Discord: https://discord.gg/JamMH5P

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Bella Protocol

A suite of DeFi products to bring your familiar mobile banking into crypto with just one-click.