How DeFi could challenge the ETF sector

Philipp Pieper from Swarm Markets

Brazilian asset manager Hashdex’s decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange-traded fund (ETF) began trading in Brazil on February 8th. It’s the first ETF based on tokens generated by DeFi protocols and signifies the coalescence of two of the greatest innovations in financial markets over the past 30 years — crypto and ETFs.

ETFs were revolutionary in the early 1990s as correlated assets could be grouped together and traded as a single financial product, for the first time. This meant greater diversification…