From decrypt by Decrypt Staff

Flare, the “blockchain for data,” is building out its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, Co-Founder Hugo Philion told Decrypt.

“Flare is essentially emerging as a kind of DeFi hub,” said Philion in a recent sitdown interview with Decrypt, adding that it’s “growing very quickly” through partnerships and integrations.

The EVM-compatible Layer 1 network offers developers “decentralized access to high-integrity data from other chains and the internet,” leveraging its Flare Time-Series Oracle and Flare Data Connector to provide decentralized applications (dapps) with an alternative to centralized off-chain oracles.

With a total value locked (TVL) of $20.75 million according to DeFiLlama, Flare hit 1 million active wallets in August 2024. “Our TVL is relatively small, but it's growing quite quickly,” Philion said. The network has a “large, reasonably mature set of DeFi protocols now that have built on Flare, which TVL is flowing into,” through integrations with bridges including LayerZero, V2, Stargate and Polyhedra, he added.

Launching FAssets

Flare is also gearing up to launch FAssets, overcollateralized bridges for “non-smart contract tokens like Bitcoin, XRP and Dogecoin,” on its Songbird canary network in December, followed by a mainnet launch “early next year,” according to Philion.

“Traditionally, bridges for things like Bitcoin and other non-smart contract platforms have been fairly centralized,” he said, pointing out that Wrapped Bitcoin goes “essentially through a custodian,” while other efforts such as multisigs and MPC “ultimately come down to a relatively limited number of parties.” Philion emphasized that Flare “wants to remove that trust by making the bridge fully collateralized—in fact, overcollateralized.”

Flare’s bridge is “one of the safer ways” to enable people to bring their Bitcoin, Dogecoin, XRP and other non-smart contract coins to the network, where they can be used in EVM-based DeFi protocols, Philion said. That opens up opportunities to “start using those tokens in a way that they haven't been before,” across Flare’s DeFi protocols including Uniswap V3-style DEX SparkDEX, liquid staking protocol Sceptre and compliant daily futures trading platform XDFI.