Decentralized finance (DeFi) still demonstrates greater potential than the traditional financial industry, despite recent setbacks, a new report has found.

The report, prepared by the crypto-focused investment firm Hashkey Capital, said the scalability of DeFi solutions already surpass that of traditional financial services many times over.

“Considering the decentralized and autonomous nature of DeFi applications, their business model is highly scalable. We have seen cases where a smart contract developed by a single developer processes billions of dollars’ worth of transactions. DeFi has the potential to be many times more scalable than the traditional financial industry and more scalable than traditional [software-as-a-service (SaaS)] models,” the report said.

The report also stressed how resilient DeFi protocols are, which it said is due to them being “mostly autonomous.”

“For most DeFi applications, nearly all members work in product development, marketing, etc., and if none of them show up to work, the application wouldn’t be affected, and it would be able to continue processing millions of dollars. DeFi protocols don’t need to rely on labor to run,” Hashkey Capital’s report said, while contrasting this with how the traditional financial industry operates.

As a result of how autonomous DeFi protocols are, the net income they generate per employee is also at a completely different level than traditional services, the report pointed out.

Despite the superiority over traditional financial services, DeFi protocols have had a difficult year in 2022. The sector has suffered from pessimism and lower prices across the crypto market, with for instance ETH down nearly 68% year-to-date.

ETH is the native token of Ethereum, the