Hifi Finance (formerly Mainframe) is a decentralized finance protocol that brings fixed-rate, fixed-term lending to Ethereum-based blockchains. Hifi allows anyone to borrow against their crypto. Hifi uses a bond-like instrument, representing an on-chain obligation that settles on a specific future date. Buying and selling the tokenized debt enables fixed-rate, fixed term lending and borrowing.
$HIFI is an ERC-20 native utility token that empowers community governance of the Hifi Finance Protocol. $HIFI aligns and balances incentives within the system and is critical for the sustainability of protocol upgrades. Throughout the Lending Protocol, $HIFI may be utilized to vote on governance proposals, unlock discounts, achieve greater capital efficiency, increase protocol rewards, and access additional leverage. To be specifically, $HIFI is used for:
- Governance votes;
- Staking to ensure the safety of the protocol;
- Rewarding contributors to the ecosystem
Hifi Finance provides users with a way to borrow assets against their cryptos – such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ERC20 tokens. Just like decentralized exchanges and dApps work on-chain, Hifi works like traditional finance creating bond-like structures for future settlement on-chain. Borrowers lock collateral in a vault for fixed-rate, fixed-term debt tokens that can be swapped for instant liquidity allowing users to leverage long positions.
One of the Hifi Finance network’s features is that it employs several different sub-protocols with enhanced encryption services and functions like Dark routing. This ensures that privacy is safeguarded and communications going through the network are protected. The Hifi Finance platform allows users to safely and securely send files, create Decentralized apps DApps and store data on the blockchain.
To guarantee the accuracy of validator nodes, Hifi set up the protocol to execute incentivized economics, i.e., validators are rewarded for their work.
Hifi Finance was founded by Mick Hagen in 2017. Through 2018 and 2019 the team released a decentralized chat application and a decentralized operating system, but both products failed to gain significant traction.
In 2019 the team pivoted into Defi and started working on a decentralized lending and borrowing platform. Mick handed over the role of CEO to Doug Leonard in early 2020. Doug had been working with the company since 2018 with a background in software development and IT security.
Doug rebuilt the team, acquiring the token streaming protocol Sablier, and hiring its founder and developer Paul Razvan Berg as the lead engineer. In February 2021 Mainframe officially rebranded to Hifi.
