Directions For DeFi (Part 1): Institutional & Offchain

Disclaimer: This and the next AF will be a summary of my ramblings about DeFi in the last few weeks. These ramblings stem from a discussion from our research call where we ended up debating whether DeFi is going through stagnation phase.

DeFi summer is now on the verge of crossing the five-year threshold, transforming from a niche experiment to an half a decade old ecosystem with billions in value locked. The fundamental building blocks necessary for an internet-native financial system are already in place.

From swaps and lending protocols to CDPs, interest rate derivatives, perpetuals, and even options markets—all the essential financial primitives have been developed to a level where they’re accessible to both traditional finance professionals and crypto-natives. The next chapter for DeFi will likely be more incremental. This isn’t to say we won’t see brilliant primitives emerge—but the pace of breakneck development has natu