Some of DeFi’s biggest players have joined forces to launch a new alliance geared towards furthering the education, research and best practices of the nascent industry. 

The GoodFi alliance, launched by Radix, includes crypto projects Chainlink, Aave, and mStable, as well as digital analytics company Messari.

Piers Ridyard, CEO at Radix, told Cointelegraph that GoodFi “enables companies operating in the DeFi space to collectively work to solve the issues facing a wider base, starting with the generally “crypto-engaged” but building to a mainstream audience.” As members of GoodFi, companies can share strategies and communal knowledge for attracting new DeFi users.

Their mission is to get 100 million people to put at least $1 into DeFi applications by 2025. To achieve this objective, the alliance has prioritized education to help raise awareness of the utility behind DeFi applications.

Ridyard explained:

“The key resource here is not money, but time. Specifically, the time of the people who are in the best place to help the DeFi industry both understand the target customer better, and expand our addressable market by helping a broader audience understand why DeFi is both good and important to get involved with.”

Decentralized finance was one of crypto’s most remarkable growth stories of 2020, with projects like Chainlink and Aave leading the charge. LINK is now the world's ninth-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $11.3 billion. Meanwhile, AAVE is in the fourteenth spot following 500% year-to-date returns. 

At the time of writing, nearly $55 billion had been locked into DeFi projects across a range of applications and use cases.

Although DeFi has yet to lure a wider mainstream audience, early crypto adopters have been attracted to the idea that traditional financial services can be recreated or improved upon using blockchain technology. For that reason, DeFi is expected to be one of the hottest industry verticals moving forward.

Ridyard believes getting people to put $1 into DeFi projects is akin to early internet adoption. “Getting homes connected is the hardest part,” the alliance said of the internet in the 1990s. “With DeFi, getting the users to put their first $1 in is the very hardest step.”