Right from time, lending has grown to reflect the current technological progress and societal changes. Notable innovations include the credit cards launched in the '50s, the widespread of ATMs in the '70s, and online banking pioneered in 1985 by Quicken Loans in Detroit and refined throughout the '90s. Even though new lending products improved and diversified the range of benefits they offer to the borrower, they failed to address the creditor's centralized nature, which proved to be a structural weakness and a design limitation on the lending industry's potentials. However, the widespread use of the internet allowed for "peer-to-peer" lending to be pioneered in 2006 by Prospa. The advent of blockchain technology spearheaded the full potential of decentralized lending. This was popularized by the seminal Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 and made possible by other subsequent innovations, especially by the launch of the Ethereum network in 2015, which introduced programmable and executable "smart contracts". Blockchain technology provided an infrastructure allowing for complex and trustless financial operations, collectively known as DeFi.