DeFi Summer
Summer 2020
Lending, liquidity and token incentives drew users into an interconnected financial experiment.
Origins
Decentralized finance combined smart-contract lending and exchange protocols. Users could move assets between applications, creating strategies that depended on several contracts and their assumptions.
The moment
The 2020 period remembered as DeFi Summer saw liquidity incentives become a defining attraction. Uniswap’s September UNI announcement documents one major protocol’s distribution to past users and liquidity programs.
The aftermath
Composability made new strategies possible, while tying users to contract, collateral and market risks. DeFi Summer is an editorial period label rather than a coordinated launch. The linked UNI announcement offers a dated artifact within that wider movement.