Rapport de l’OCDE sur la finance décentralisée

L’OCDE a publié début 2022 un rapport intitulé « Why Decentralised Finance (DeFi) matters and the policy implications ». Ce rapport de 70 pages commence par à définir la DeFI, identifier ses champs d’application et retracer l’évolution des marchés de la DeFi. Il analyse ensuite les apports et les risques de la DeFI puis les relations entre DeFi et finance traditionnelle centralisée (CeFi), pour conclure sur une série de policy considerations.

Lire un extrait de la préface du rapport.

Decentralised Finance or ‘DeFi’ is an effort to replicate certain functions of the traditional financial system in an open, decentralised, permissionless and autonomous way, based on blockchains. As with any distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based application, DeFi could potentially offer efficiencies driven by automation and disintermediation powered by blockchains and smart contracts.

At the same time, DeFi gives rise to a number of risks for markets and their participants. The provision of financial services by DeFi applications in ways that do not comply with financial regulations expose retail and institutional participants to risks. These risks are related to excess volatility, unregulated leverage and other forms of regulatory arbitrage, governance-related risks, market manipulation, risk of illicit finance or outright fraud. Collectively, these activities could undermine investor confidence and market integrity.

The growing application of DeFi and its increasing interconnectedness with traditional markets presents an urgent challenge for policy makers seeking to maximise DeFi’s potential efficiencies for financial markets, while managing risks. The institutionalisation of crypto-assets is growing. The market cap of stablecoins issued by the largest issuers exceeded USD 150 billion at the end of 2021, reflecting a nearly 500 percent increase over the last year, with DeFi recording a 50-fold increase over the same period, albeit from a very low level.

These trends are requiring policy makers to reconsider the conventional oversight framework that was built with intermediaries at its core, given the absence of single regulatory and supervisory access points in decentralised systems. Regulatory compliance of DeFi protocols may be further obstructed by their global reach and operation. These protocols have no defined jurisdiction and geographical location for their operations, making it difficult for supervisory authorities to establish jurisdiction. This jurisdictional uncertainty challenges enforcement, particularly given the speed and ease with which financial service providers are able to change locations in response to actions of authorities.