I'm curious would it make sense to build a DeFi project that only uses HIve?
It would make sense but is not possible since Hive has no smart contract capabilities. So, there is no way to DeFi in the sense that you are thinking on Hive. That said, Hive does offer some DeFi capabilities with more being built. The project @klye is working on, @hive.loans, is one such example.
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