Leviathan is the name of a book by Thomas Hobbes. It is supposed to represent a creature that is made up of many smaller creatures, symbolizing how individuals come together to create a society.

In many ways this is the perfect metaphor for one of the main benefits of smart contracts.

The ability to take lots of little inputs and aggregate them together to create something formidable.

Imagine a lending protocol like Compound. Many people supply money, it all gets aggregated into a single smart contract, creating a large pool of funds for people to borrow from.

Unlike with traditional finance, there is very little marginal cost to on-boarding a new liquidity provider. It is as easy to supply $5 of liquidity as it is $5m.

All of this liquidity gets combined together to create large pools, made up of these smaller contributions.

This architecture allows the little guy access to the same opportunities as the ultra-rich. In traditional finance, it’s simply too expensive to onboard people for this activity who aren’t providing millions.

Liquidity is consolidated. Now the world can have singular pools of liquidity accessible by anyone for either lending or borrowing.

Given global banking services are highly fragmented, you simply cannot get this kind of efficiency in traditional finance.

Blockchain gained fame by pioneering peer-to-peer payments. Sending money across the world with no bank in between.

Smart contracts pioneer a new paradigm, peer-to-contract interactions. The idea being you do business with a contract that has aggregated all this liquidity, instead of dealing directly with a counter-party. This way, the whole world is your counter-party.

This is where blockchains can really shine, providing unmatched efficiency and scale for financial markets.