"We always needs to ask, 'Who are we building for?'"

Kicking off the annual ethereum hackathon ETHDenver, Aave CEO Stani Kulechov shared an opening address on “leaping decentralized finance [into the] mainstream.”

Aave is a Swiss-based blockchain technology company that officially launched in September of last year. Acting as the parent company to ETHLend – a decentralized financial marketplace for asset-backed loans – Kulechov explained that cross-application coordination and cooperation is key to seeing mainstream adoption.

"We need to approach adoption from an ecosystem perspective," said Kulechov. "You might be building a project that relates to decentralized finance. Each has a use case but if you can connect all these DeFi [decentralized finance] applications … we form an ecosystem where we are bringing together more users."

However, highlighting that mainstream adoption isn't the be all and end all of application development, Kulechov added that "decentralization is a choice" and that to some developers "it might be a good idea to focus on the segment of decentralized users that are privacy-concerned."

As highlighted by Josh Stark – head of operations at blockchain consulting firm Ledger Labs – in a blog post, a new wave of decentralized applications (dapps) are growing in both number and popularity on the ethereum blockchain.

Called “decentralized finance” or “DeFi” applications, these dapps on ethereum give users new tools to manage and use ethereum-based money or assets, Stark explains in his post.

As such, today’s talk by Kulechov is actually one of several centered around the topic of finance.

DeFi-related talks expected to be held later today at ETHDenver include an address by CTO Alex Bazhanau from cryptocurrency lending platform Bloqboard, as well as an address by Tom Bean, a co-founder of decentralized lending protocol bZx.

Tomorrow, the DeFi narrative continues with a panel discussion on the roadmap for many of these finance-focused application on ethereum with a panel discussion between several DeFi startups including bZx, Set Protocol, Zerion and Wyre.

Stani Kulechov image by Christine Kim for CoinDesk