Good day, everyone on Steemit and I welcome you to my blog. I'm very excited to be in the academy today to participate in the new contest with the topic "Decentralized Finance (DeFi)", contests in the academy have always been so unique and I will gladly participate in this educational one again. Go with me as I share with you on this topic.

The traditional financial system that we have known for ages or let me say the ones most of us met when we were born or the ones we have been using in the olden days have always been a centralized financial system. Conventional banks are some of the examples where customers of a financial organization are required to take permission from a central authority before their transactions can be processed.

Technology has evolved and there comes Decentralized Finance (DeFi) which is directly opposite to centralized finance. DeFi is a new financial technology that came into existence some years ago which enables users or investors to perform different financial activities on a platform without taking any permission from a central authority, we can say that it's designed with a peer-to-peer algorithm where anyone can decide on their own at any time.

Furthermore, all activities that are possible with centralized finance are also possible on DeFi, transactions like buying and selling (trading), exchange/swap, lending, and borrowing, adding liquidity, yield farming, and many others can easily be done on DeFi platforms. The use of DeFi doesn't require the KYC (Know Your Customer) that would be requested by a traditional bank before you can transact with them.

There are many things that make DeFi possible or let me call it some features and I will be listing some of them below:

There is nothing that has advantages that don't have its disadvantages, though DeFi sounds very advantageous at the same time, it has some disadvantages, also centralized finance too. I will be writing about these things here.

DeFi	CeFi
There is no central authority	Existence of central authority
No third party in transactions	There are third parties in transactions
Ownership by the user	CeFi authority holds the ownership of accounts
No Paperwork required	Documents are required to verify a customer
No limit to services	There may be limits according to users' verification level

Yes, I have used decentralized exchanges many times through my decentralized applications on my web3.0 wallets (Trust wallet, Tronlink, Metamask, and many others). Now, I will be explaining my knowledge about decentralized exchange also known as DEX.

Decentralized exchange is the type of cryptocurrency exchange that is completely decentralized for crypto transactions in the absence of intermediaries. Unlike the centralized exchange, DEX doesn't have a visible order book it only uses the AMM model to quote prices for cryptocurrency pairs at a point in time to complete a transaction.

Furthermore, the AMM model mentioned above uses the liquidity in the pools to quote the price of a cryptocurrency, and with this, liquidity providers earn money from transaction fees on the DEX. In other words, others are matched by smart contracts on DEX without having the presence of third parties.

For someone to use a DEX, you have to connect a compatible wallet to the platform and then proceed to perform transactions like an exchange, adding liquidity, staking, yield farming, and many others. Examples of decentralized exchanges are SunSwap, Sun.io, PancakeSwap, UniSwap, and many others. SunSwap is my favorite among the aforementioned decentralized exchanges.

SunSwap has been my favorite of all the DEX I have used so far, SunSwap was launched in the year 2020 and become the first DEX on the Tron blockchain which can be used to swap TRC20 tokens like TRX and others. SunSwap also allows one to add liquidity and others, this ensures that one earns passive income on their assets.

Furthermore, using SunSwap requires connecting a Tron-based wallet to the DEX and performing the transaction of choice. I always use my TronLink wallet to connect to SunSwap DEX whenever I want to swap TRC20 tokens or other transactions. SunSwap was known as JustSwap formerly before it changed its name. I will show you some of the features of SunSwap.

First of all, I will use the DApp on my Tronlink to visit SunSwap.

Now, I connected my wallet and I can choose the pairs of TRX I will be willing to swap. For example in this, I chose to swap 34 TRX to SUN (356).

I moved to the pool where one can add liquidity on pairs one chose to.

My experience with decentralized exchanges has been great so far. I love DEXs.

The old financial sector is shifting towards decentralization to make the space trustless, permissionless and transparent, and the only way to achieve this is through Decentralized finance. There are new projects every now and then that are built on top DeFi, this shows us that the future belongs to decentralized finance and more people will adopt it shortly.

Furthermore, as one of the early adopters of DeFi, I strongly believe in its future and I will be adopting more of its products in the crypto space because it provides us with so many ways to earn. The future of finance in DeFi, you can see that the popular exchange Binance has developed its own DEX, this is to show that they are following the trend and wants to retain their potential customers by giving them a DEX that keeps users in total control.

Decentralized finance is gradually replacing the old traditional financial system with the development of many projects recently. Many people have enjoyed how DeFi has given them total control over their financial properties without the need for the submission of any paperwork, and with high flexibility. I believe in the future of DeFi so much, thanks to the @crypto-academy for this beautiful contest topic.

I invite @patjewell @yakspeace, and @dave-hanny to join this contest.