A DeFi aggregator brings together trades across various decentralized finance platforms (DeFi) into one location, saving users time and increasing efficiency for cryptocurrency trades. As the name suggests, DeFi is spread out across different blockchains such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Within each blockchain is an ecosystem of isolated financial protocols.
While having a wide selection of different protocols is beneficial to diversify investments and getting the best yield rates from crypto lending, efficiency and convenience are hindered since the financial information is spread vastly across multiple protocols. That’s where DeFi aggregators thrive.
DeFi aggregators siphon the very best prices from DEXs, lending services and liquidity pools into one place so that users can optimize their trades. Without an aggregator, users need to go to each platform on an individual basis to compare prices that will generate the best deal for them. Then, the user must manually execute each transaction using smart contracts. While this strategy may be fine for casual crypto trading, it severely limits those looking to implement advanced trading strategies.
Not only do aggregators pull the best prices, but some DeFi aggregators even offer a unique, user-friendly way to analyze and combine other users' trading strategies via a convenient drag and drop mechanism. This way, users can create an entirely new strategy of their own using the inspiration of other successful traders. The drag and drop mechanism also helps users visualize complex DeFi protocols via blocks that can be built on top of one another.
Aggregators put UX/UI at the forefront, offering a far superior experience to the traditional way of manually interacting with liquidity layers. As a result, this helps users who are not as crypto-savvy as trading experts navigate the world of DeFi with ease.
The potential downside of using a DeFi aggregator is the gas fees. As Ethereum continues to reach new all-time highs and volume increases across the network, gas fees tend to follow this upward trend. Usually, gas fees are higher on aggregators compared to using the individual protocol. However, some aggregators found a solution to this problem via gas tokens or gas cubes developed into the platforms that let users save money on gas fees. It’s also important to note that while gas fees may be higher on an aggregator, they act as a sort of “convenience fee” since the optimization and efficiency that comes with an aggregator can outweigh the gas fee.
While DeFi has certainly helped bring millions of new users to the cryptocurrency market, there are still users who are intimidated by the sheer number of protocols to choose from and industry-specific lingo. As a result, many crypto enthusiasts prefer to simply hold cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) in a wallet without putting it to better use. With the advent of DeFi aggregators, new entries to the industry can benefit from DeFi without having to understand the technical complexities of trading, coding, blockchain, etc. An aggregator gives power to these new users and helps them make better trading decisions.
In a decentralized economy such as this, it’s still important to centralize some aspects of DeFi for the sake of efficiency. DeFi aggregators bring together the best of both worlds of centralized organization strategies and decentralized finance protocols to create an important tool in this new, exciting industry.