Another notable aspect of DeFi v1 was the dominance of complex protocols encompassing a broad range of functionalities, leading to questions about whether they should be referred to as financial primitives at all. After all, a primitive is an atomic functionality, and protocols like Aave include hundreds of risk parameters and enable very complex, monolithic functionalities. These large protocols often led to forking to enable similar functionalities in new ecosystems, resulting in an explosion of protocol forks across Aave, Compound, or Uniswap and various EVM ecosystems.
