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Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a relatively recent variation on FinTech that is seeing a massive surge in popularity. As of the time of writing, there’s over $12.4 billion of value locked into DeFi. DeFi products are powered by smart contracts, which allow transactions to take place autonomously when certain conditions are met. Smart contracts are made up of blocks of code that live on the blockchain and run in decentralized apps, or dapps, to execute financial activities.