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The BoC has released a working paper by Jonathan Chiu, Emre Ozdenoren, Kathy Yuan and Shengxing Zhang titled On the Fragility of DeFi Lending:

We develop a dynamic model of decentralized finance (DeFi) lending that incorporates two/these key features: 1) borrowing and lending are decentralized, anonymous, overcollateralized and backed by the market value of crypto assets where contract terms are pre-specified and rigid; and 2) information friction exists between borrowers and lenders. We identify a price-liquidity feedback: the market outcome in any given period depends on agents’ expectations about lending activities in future periods, with higher price expectations leading to more lending and higher prices in that period. Given the rigidity inherent to smart contracts, this feedback leads to multiple self-fulfilling equilibria where DeFi lending and asset prices move with market sentiment. We show that flexible updates of smart contracts can restore equilibrium uniqueness. This finding highlights the difficulty of achieving stability and efficiency in a decentralized environment without a liquidity backstop.
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Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an umbrella term for a variety of financial service protocols and applications (e.g., decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, asset management) that operate on blockchain technology. They are anonymous permission-less financial arrangements implemented via smart contracts — immutable, deterministic computer programs—on a blockchain that have been designed to replace traditional financial intermediaries (TradFi)
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The growth of decentralized finance has been substantial since the “DeFi Summer” of 2020. According to data aggregator DeFiLlama, the total value locked (TVL) of DeFi had risen to 230 billion U.S. dollars as of April 2022, up from less than one billion two years prior to that time. As DeFi grows in scale and scope and becomes more extensively connected to the real economy, its vulnerabilities might undermine financial-sector stability (Aramonte, Huang, and Schrimpf (2021)). As a result, policymakers and regulators have raised concerns about the implications of DeFi for financial stability (FSB 2022; IOSCO 2022).2 Yet formal economic analysis of this issue remains very limited. In this paper, we examine DeFi lending protocols—an important component of the DeFi eco-system—and the sources and implications of their instability. For example, DeFi lending is much more volatile than traditional lending.3 In addition, Aramonte et al. (2022) argue that DeFi lending generates “pro-cyclicality,” the co-movement between crypto prices and lending activities.
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In this paper, we study sources of fragility in DeFi lending caused by several of its fundamental features. These features are informational frictions, such as asymmetric information about collateral quality, oracle problems, and rigid contract terms. We demonstrate the inherent instability of DeFi lending that results from price-liquidity feedback exacerbated by informational frictions, leading to self-fulfilling sentimentdriven cycles. Stability requires flexible and state-contingent smart contracts. To achieve that end, a smart contract may take a complex form. Such a contract also requires a reliable oracle to feed realtime hard and soft information from the off-chain world. Alternatively, DeFi lending could abandon complete decentralization and re-introduce human intervention to provide real-time risk management— an arrangement that would force the protocol to rely on a trusted third party. Our finding highlights a trilemma faced by DeFi protocols: the difficulty involved in achieving simplicity in smart contracts and stability in asset prices while maintaining a high degree of decentralization.

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