As the crypto industry rides another bull cycle into 2025, there is renewed optimism that decentralized finance, or DeFi, will see a wave of mainstream adoption. The technological advantages of doing so are enormous as Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev set out in a recent observation on the efficiencies of using DeFi.
“The cost of running a crypto business is an order of magnitude lower, because you get to leverage so much of the public infrastructure, and these public blockchains do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to settlement and transactions…There’s a view of crypto as a technology layer that is going to be really accelerated once people understand that there is a huge efficiency advantage,” said Tenev.
Tenev’s assessment of DeFi is spot on. Unfortunately, there is an obstacle to his vision becoming a reality: The user experience when it comes to DeFi, even in the case of consumers familiar with buying Bitcoin, still lags far behind conventional websites when it comes to ease and convenience. Even as DeFi platforms have become relatively more user friendly, the barrier remains far too high for mass adoption.
The good news is that a breakthrough is on the way. It will come with the help of fintech companies, which have long excelled at user-friendly design and are taking a growing interest in DeFi solutions.
How fintechs will drive onchain finance
Fintech companies have engineering and development cultures that align more closely with tech companies than traditional financial institutions. Their agility and openness to innovation make them ideal early adopters of DeFi solutions, which operate natively and transparently on decentralized networks. Many DeFi networks and services are open-source, giving development teams full visibility and access into the underlying code.
We’re already seeing the lines between traditional fintech and crypto blur. Centralized exchanges, like Coinbase and Binance, have offered debit cards while more fintech companies, like Revolut and Robinhood, are building or acquiring crypto onramps and exchanges. This convergence highlights fintechs’ unique ability to adapt quickly, positioning them as the ideal bridge to bring crypto closer to mainstream users.
Other examples of traditional fintech companies seeing the promise of crypto include Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge and PayPal’s $PyUSD, both of which demonstrate how stablecoins are enhancing payments and enabling tokenized deposit accounts. Very few people now doubt the outsized role stablecoins are expected to play in evolving payments infrastructure. Similarly, DeFi protocols are ready to serve as the backend for an ever-growing array of financial services that fintechs offer to users. By combining the consumer-focused expertise of fintech with DeFi’s transformative infrastructure, this convergence will unlock crypto’s next era of growth.
What Fintechs can gain from DeFi
Fintech companies rarely own the financial infrastructures that power their products. Instead, they plug into TradFi companies that own proprietary and closed-source financial infrastructures. This dependency limits their control and increases costs. DeFi offers an appealing alternative: open financial infrastructure that is publicly accessible, user-owned rather than privately owned, transparent, and cost-effective for businesses and users alike.
But what is open financial infrastructure and how is it connected to DeFi? Most DeFi products and services operate autonomously on public blockchains with open, publicly-visible code, and transactions that occur transparently on public blockchains. They are often supported by open-source development communities that minimize redundant work and streamline integration processes through shared code and infrastructure.
All of this offers fintech firms a competitive advantage against slower-moving incumbents. It can also make development cheaper, translating to lower costs and higher margins over time. Savings may even be passed on to customers in the form of lower fees.
Building products on open infrastructure also offers fintechs and their customers the ability to take advantage of network effects that come from plugging into larger networks. By tapping into existing international marketplaces via open infrastructure Fintechs companies can offer their users cheaper, more efficient services. Whether you are talking about trading, borrowing, lending or other types of marketplaces, more buyers and sellers tend to lead to more accurate, and lower, prices for all participants.
Perhaps most importantly, there are now DeFi products that give companies an unprecedented level of control over how they build on and interact with this open financial infrastructure. With the most flexible, customizable DeFi products, companies are able to manage their unique risk tolerance and meet all compliance requirements without having to build siloed, proprietary systems from scratch. Much of DeFi’s infrastructure is already designed to be a shared foundation for a variety of companies simultaneously, serving use cases including FX, yield-bearing accounts, lending, and more.
Permissionless and immutable DeFi protocols will allow fintechs to own more of their financial tech stack–beyond distribution into “manufacturing”–in a tech-native way.
The path to towards fintech-driven mass adoption of DeFi is far from clear, of course. There are still challenges when it comes to regulation and ensuring users can embrace DeFi in a secure way. Meanwhile, legacy financial firms are likely to try and block DeFi adoption in order to protect their traditional business lines.
But as fintechs begin to leverage DeFi for a growing number of services, its advantages will become too obvious to ignore. The long-term result is easy to anticipate: a transformed financial system that is more open, transparent, and efficient.
Paul Frambot is the CEO and co-founder of Morpho, a DeFi lending protocol with $6 billion in total value locked.The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
