Derivatives of Ethereum constitute a vast majority of the decentralized finance application creators. This is according to a report released by an industry watchdog on June 6, 2019. The decentralized finance can be viewed as an ecosystem that is made up of applications that are built on decentralized networks. They include blockchains that do not require any permissions and protocols for peer to peer facilitation of lending, borrowing and trading with a variety of financial instruments in the digital environment.

The ecosystem's supposed offering of a decentralized network that does not require users to have any permission also reportedly holds the full custody of those users' cryptocurrency assets. In the report, the industry watchdog stated that the main underpinning of the financial ecosystem includes platforms for lending and borrowing that support a range of blockchain asset types. One of those asset types on the decentralized finance platform is the MakerDao, which trades under the MKR moniker. It also includes the MKR's sister stable coin called Dai, which trades under DAI.

The industry watchdog also argued that because Ethereum is the largest blockchain platform in the cryptocurrency market, it is the natural origin for most of the decentralized apps. In the future, this could change when new or growing platforms such as EOS begin to take over. It could be a while before this happens.

In May 2019, the blockchain firm ConsenSys published an article about blockchain and the decentralized network application development job kit. According to that publication, its intent is to support prospective developers who are looking to write decentralized network applications in languages such as JavaScript, Solidarity or Python using the Ethereum blockchain environment.

This combination of blockchain and decentralized network application development get to the root at several of the core topics of cryptocurrency platforms. They explore such widespread issues as consensus algorithms, incentives for better security and token standards. They also touch upon the ability to scale up or down as needed, public and private key encryption, digital signatures, smart contracts zero-knowledge proofs. Trusted execution environments are also a topic worth exploring in this digital environment.