With over $33M in funding, Compound.finance is making big moves in DeFi, and they’re not alone

Okay, let’s be honest, finance can be a pretty boring world. I have friends that have worked in finance for years and they all typically say the same thing, love the money, the work, eh – kinda boring.

When you think of traditional, slow moving industries banking and finance is right up there with apparel and energy. All huge industries, but not famous for moving quickly or going out on a limb with innovation.

All that being said, the big boring world of finance is being disrupted by a new set of startups that aren’t afraid to move quickly, innovate, and challenge the status quo. The name for this emerging sector is DeFi which stands for Decentralized Finance and one of the leaders of the pack is Compound.finance, a startup backed by some of the biggest Venture Capitalists in the world like Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and more.

I recently came across a list of the top DeFi companies organized by category, and holy moly, it’s pretty nuts to see how much this space has exploded over the last couple of years 🤯

DeFi Pulse

As I went through, the list I saw that .FINANCE definitely seems to be popular with DeFi startups and in general, non .COMs represent more than half of the domain extensions.

When I think about someone like Compound.finance, I can understand why they might prefer this to something like Compound.com. Sure, there’s no argument that Compound.com is a great domain, but Compound.finance provides additional context to the brand. We’ve seen this with the explosion in both the .AI and .IO space as well as startups are frequently using what comes after the dot as a core part of their brand.

I could see Compound.com being used for a wide range of applications from medical to finance, social to gaming, but Compound.finance, yeah – I know that’s a finance company. With investors pumping over $33M into the company it’s also clear that Venture Capitalists are also a-okay with these new domain extensions as well.

Of course, these are still the early days, there’s always a chance that every new gTLD fails and twenty years from now every market leader is on a .COM…but something tells me twenty years from now we’ll see online branding continue to change and evolve, and this just might be an early look at where it’s going 🚀

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton