Is DeFi Eating CeFi? Slowly, Then All at Once - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Um, so we're doing is uh is DeFi eating CFI? Are they symbiotic? Do they kill each other? Who kills each other first? Things like that.

Uh, show of hands. Who who uh who has done anything on DeFi or on chain in the last week? Not as many hands. Yeah. In the last week.

Okay. Decent amount. So, we have a ways to go clearly. Um, so my name is Alex Pack. We'll do we'll do intros first.

Um, I run a crypto venture fund. I've been a crypto VC for 11 years and done a lot of the early DeFi deals uh in the space. Do you guys want to do quick intros about your project? And then, uh, what is the DeFi product that you guys use the most, obviously excluding your own protocols? Uh, yeah.

So, uh Kane, founder of Infinex, um our stated goal is to transition uh out of centralized exchanges into um onchain platforms. Um so, uh that's what we're that's what we're working on is uh trying to end the centralized exchange era. I'm Antonio, the founder. Product they use the most. Oh, product that other than, you know, uh other than my own.

Um I've been I've been playing around with uh noise uh on Megie test net um for for the last few weeks which has been pretty fun. Um trading on attention basically. Antonio the founder of Dydx. We have been around in DeFi for about eight years at this point. Um and we're focused on DeFi derivatives.

I'd say the D5 product outside of DYDX that I use the most, it's got to be Uniswap. I think they're pretty big innovators and I feel like it's hard to use D5 without using some kind of spot exchange like that. Hey everyone, my name is Cindy. I'm the co-founder of Drift. We are the largest exchange on Salana and we are also an all-in-one DeFi protocol.

We have borrow lend spot trading margin trading as well as drus allin one. And as for a defi app to be completely honest I mainly use drift. We we have everything allin one. So that's one of our biggest pitches. Otherwise I also really like all the other apps represented here.

I just realized it's with three per founders on stage. Is that intentional or I don't know. It's going to be a very perph heavy uh discussion. Yeah. Well, let's actually start select.

So, I want to give the highle stats just to paint the picture. Um, so basically there's three areas I think so far where DeFi has made any penetration uh to to sort of get you know significant penetration versus centralized um lending and then trading and then within trading we got per and we have a spot. So lending actually did flip CFI uh in the last cycle. It was basically both of them, CFI and DeFi lending fell quite a bit in 2022 and CFI lending kind of barely recovered. Didn't really recover much at all.

The BlockFi and so forth of the world have never there's sort of never been a new version of that. Actually, with the exception of of Tether maybe, they've they've taken the most market share. Um, but DeFi lending flipped uh and it's actually, you know, exceeded all-time highs. So I think it's like 65% market share and it grew from like 35% a couple years back last cycle. So that one is the one doing well.

The others not so much. So spot I think has been sort of holding steady the last year or two at around 20 25% market share. And then Pers where we have a lot of specialty uh is much smaller but is probably growing faster. So, I think Per's volumes have uh taken market share from like maybe nine like eight or nine% to like 15% um over like versus Binance at least the big guy over the last year and a half. So, it's growing faster but still a much smaller uh levels I guess.

Um what do you guys make of that? Why do you think lending is first? Is that just like a bearish argument for the space? I mean all the competitors blew up, right? So that you know it's uh not a not a great representation of CI uh in the lending space.

So um it was maybe maybe a uh uh forfeoot on the part of C5 for that one. Yeah. Best tallest [ __ ] maybe in a Yeah. Yeah. I think it just has to do with market structure and also the sophistication of the product.

So on the market structure side obviously derivatives are the most complex products that one can trade within crypto and even within crypto they are the biggest products and generally we've seen these products evolve last in CFI and I think we're seeing a very similar type of evolution in DeFi where it starts with spot starts with lending and then ultimately moves towards derivatives as I mentioned Dydx has been around for a while now and Alex as you mentioned and we're just recently starting to see within the past year or two a lot of adoption relative to CFI and it's still fairly small but it's growing over time. I see the biggest reason that lending has grown so much in DeFi is due to composability and the ability to rehypothecate assets within a DeFi native context. you can see uh easily within the Slana ecosystem for instance assets being used on borrow land on one platform um and then being rehypothecated into other D5 lending platforms. You can see the a paper trail of this very easily in a transparent blockchain context in a way that you couldn't with CFI lending. So um DeFi lending has really taken off as a result of the fundamental you know market structure of blockchains and I think um that's going to extend very quickly as the um velocity and the throughput of underlying L1's increase to enable more highfrequency transactions to take place.

Um we're going to see the benefits of DeFi take over the the rest of the you know asset supply chain. Actually, I think the the composability thing you bring up is really interesting because it's I I think you guys all probably differ at least in your architecture. So, you guys are are built on Salana composability chain, right? I think synthetics is more on L2s. You guys have your own chain uh that you decide on and then the the you know the other big uh per exchange hype is on uh is also on its own chain.

Is do you guys think it's not quite as important? Isn't that the main difference? Well, I think I think for purps uh composability is probably the least uh useful thing, right? Um compared to, you know, almost every other primitive um it can be in its own silo. It it's why DYDX was able to to you know go to their own chain so quickly um without really much of a trade-off um versus lending.

You know, if you're on your own island, it's going to be very very hard to uh attract liquidity there. Yeah, and that's absolutely right. I'd say we're going after a very different market segment in per than most other things in DeFi as well. It's just a very sophisticated customer and there's trading firms that require a huge amount of throughput. There's very sophisticated individual traders and I talked about the market structure being one of the main reasons why these more complex products have taken longer to mature within crypto.

The other reason is technical and because these traders demand such high performance. It's interesting because literally just the perste deck space has really been the thing that's pushing technology forwards at least from an apps perspective within the base blockchain technology. So Dydx, we started on Ethereum L1. We built on an Ethereum L2 three or four years ago before it was cool and now we're built on our own app chain as you mentioned, Alex. And the reason for this is it's just a huge amount of throughput that's required.

Right now, the Dydx chain is doing about 5 to 10,000 transactions per second, all with no gas fees. Um, and this is just what you need to cater to this really advanced customer segment. And that's pretty different from you know like a unis swap or a lending protocol or something else that might have different trade-offs. Our current argument here is that composability actually enables a whole new type of per trading which is in which you can see in cost margining. So the ability to use different assets as collateral and this is why we've stuck with Salana and building on an L1 since 2021 because now you can use any asset that's generated on the L1 as collateral.

One example is the ability to use things like sole LSTs that are earning you, you know, 5 to 7% in underlying collateral without needing to sell it into USC. the ability to use native stable coins across um the L1 and benefiting of that composability allows you to have a more rounded trader experience. So, uh I would say yes, uh the performance of the L1 eventually also catches up. I think Salana is actually at a at a place where it can scale um to allow for such high frequency trades as well. Um, but yeah, across the board, I think those are the trade-offs that that we've um, you know, seen within building on L1.

Yeah. Is the goal, do you think, for your products to get to parody to the centralized equivalence or, you know, more interesting novel use cases, right? Composability being maybe one of these things, right? That is sort of the the D5 versus D5 thing that we're talked about. So, if not that, what, right?

Yeah, I'll take it first. And I would say parody is just the start, right? Like why would you use DeFi if it's just the same thing as CFI? Like I've been sitting up on these stages and like you'll hear every [ __ ] panelist be like it's trustless, it's transparent, it's decentralized, use it. And those are true and those are real reasons that you should use something.

But nobody really cares that much about that honestly. And it's up to us as technologists and builders in the space to infuse the things that people actually want to do, which are novel use cases, with these values that we really care about. And that's the reason why we're building in DeFi. And that's the thing we've become very excited about at DYDX is, hey, how can you trade anything on an exchange? And this is the thing that's really started to build a lot of momentum with spot exchanges.

My general thesis on everything that's become popular in crypto so far is we're seeing this trend of an exponentially increasing number of assets year-over-year. Every single year there's about 10 times more assets, number of assets that you can trade in crypto. Back in 2020, there were like a thousand things you could trade on unis swap. Fast forward to 2020 to there were like tens of thousands of things you get NFTts. Today, there's hundreds of thousands of things that are being launched every day on platforms like Pump Fun.

And I think, you know, we'll continue to see that millions, billions of assets someday. And so I really think about DYDX's mission in that uh as being, hey, how do we how are we the professional trading platform for this broad array of assets that you're just never going to be able to trade on a centralized platform? Like how could a centralized exchange list a billion assets, right? It's impossible. It can be done.

And that's what we're building here. And again, going back to the values piece, I think it's really our job to articulate those values, but not necessarily sell you on them. I think it's just our job to infuse those values into the technology with these new things that are what you actually want to do. Yeah. I mean, users care about features, right?

They care about performance. To your point about the the people who primarily trade per uh you know, latency is one of the main things, liquidity, um you know, getting the best fill. They they are uh kind of, you know, unwavering in in what they ask you to do. Um, and so of course you need to get to feature parity, you need to get to liquidity par, you need to do all of the things that uh that you know at least make you competitive with uh CFI, but then that's not sufficient, right? No one's going to leave Binance to get the exact same experience.

Um, you're going to have to go and do more. or there has to be some marginal utility that you offer to the user which is longtail assets, you know, uh portfolio margin, uh cross-chain portfolio margin, you know, there's there's a bunch of things that uh that these venues can offer um at the point that they hit feature parity to exceed feature par with with a centralized exchange. Um the challenge I think for all of us has been getting to feature par. you know the the to your point it's taken us maybe longer than we all thought um to to get there but I do think that we are close to an inflection point where um you know there will be many different venues that are decentralized that are competitive with CPI I actually think that we've already hit feature parity on many fronts that are noticeable for end user if you trade on a CFI per exchange versus most D5 per exchange you won't see a not noticeable difference at all in fact uh you probably wouldn't even realize that you're using DeFi today. I think the real innovation now is taking what is unique to DeFi and what is a net new use case.

And one thing I'm really excited about is the fusion of real world assets and onchain native assets, including the ability for real world companies to launch more tokens on chain and have access to a fullyfledged financial ecosystem that is 100% onchain from the very start. We're starting to see, you know, the idea of internet capital markets take place in in DeFi where companies are choosing to instead of, you know, IPOing going onchain and doing a smaller scale IPO and going through the entire DeFi ecosystem, uh, onchain NASDAQ onchain borrow lend facilities and really just becoming a native onchain company similar to how many companies were native to the internet in the early 2000s And those are the really interesting use cases that we're starting to see converge today. What do you guys think are the biggest um like blockers either in the next few years you're trying to solve? We could talk about the road map or I mean we we've all been building in the space for many many years. So what was something that maybe something that you thought would come really easily took five years right?

Something like that. Well the core technology is really hard. I mean I totally agree with you Kane. Um, I think we are close to being at par with centralized exchanges, but probably not entirely there yet in terms of at least the performance for really protypes of products. So, that's hard.

We've been working on that for a long time. I'll zoom out with my answer to this question though. I think the biggest thing that we're lacking is that crypto is playing on a world stage. like and and I feel like we're seeing this at a lot of these conferences are a good reminder of this, but it feels to me like crypto is still something on a global stage that's pretty insular. And I feel like we need to break out of that.

Every bull market that we've seen historically has been 10 times bigger or so than the one previously. And that's why we're all excited about crypto. At least that's why I'm excited about it. It's a technology that feels very exponential to me in a lot of ways. And it's very tied to finance.

I think the challenge and what we saw with this most recent sort of bull blip or whatever this was is the expectations are so high, right? Like the last actual bull markets, we were seeing crypto play out on a world stage just a little bit, but it was still significant. There was things like FTX stories that pretty much the entire world was paying attention to, right? And do we have that right now? No, I don't think we do.

Is that the end of the world? No. Look how many people there are here right now. But if we want to continue to grow this industry in a really exponential way and if we want DeFi to actually lead this industry, you know, we're talking about like is it 10%, is it 30%. Like yeah, that's kind of interesting today, but like who even cares, right?

Like even if it's 100% someday, then we've just built the exact same thing as centralized exchanges have already built. Like that's not that interesting to me at least. And so I think we want to zoom out. We want to take a longer term approach to this. And we really have to challenge ourselves as web 3 builders to build the next thing that the whole world cares about.

And that's really hard, right? And that's going to take a number of more years than I think we've seen play out in previous cycles. And I think that's why the cycle is taking longer. I think that's why we all need to challenge ourselves to zoom out. That's why we need to challenge ourselves to to build with longevity.

Um, and I feel like our mission at DYDX, and I would guess it's true for a lot of people on this stage, is to just whatever that next thing is going to be in crypto, the thing that most a lot of the people in the world care about, we need to make that tradable in a really professional way on places like Dydx and elsewhere. Yeah. I mean, we had a debate uh what, four years ago or something like this uh where, you know, we were talking about some of these trade-offs and decisions that could be made. Um and I think you know history has shown that you are right uh to a large extent um Antonio where the the key thing is to get adoption and if you if you're optimizing for something other than adoption um which I think in the early DeFi days a lot of us were we were opting for you know things that were like ideologically aligned or um you know some some other goal that was uh orthogonal to just user demand and user adoption. um we created uh a an early um industry that was you know built on enthusiasts built on people that were aligned with the kind of ethos that we had and then there was a a ceiling that we hit and we weren't able to break out of it and and I think that uh by changing some of the requirements that we've been operating under and you know you look at Salana as well Salana is a good example of that um you know really not optimizing for like maximal decentralization right saying that you know we can be uh on different uh you know place in the decentralization continuum and it will be helpful.

So um you know with Infinex that's what we've done. We've kind of started from first principles and said what would good UX look like and what does it need to you know what do you need to build to get there. Um and so you know I I think we've seen a lot of founders who have made that pivot away from uh you know maybe like decentralization maximalism or or censorship resistance and and kind of moved into how do we get adoption? we need to cross the chasm from early adopters and enthusiasts to the the broader market because at the moment CI is still dominating you know the the vast majority of of volume. So most crypto users are still operating in someone's database and we we need to break out of that and and that requires you know uh getting to feature par.

But what are some examples of that you think to cross the chasm right? Is it just better onboarding security? I What does it mean when you want to have like better user experience, right? I think it's everything, right? Like you know um the first centralized exchanges uh you know Mount Gox started in 2011, right?

Then Coinbase and and your Kraken and a bunch of centralized exchanges came and that was the wallet form factor that from you know that moment almost 15 years ago has dominated all of crypto activity. And the reason why it's dominated is because it's by far the best user experience until the point where you lose all your money. It's great. And so you have no gas, no, you know, no chains, all of the assets. It's it's very clearly better than, you know, what we've been doing in DeFi because what we do in DeFi requires uh a level of education.

So we need to make it as easy to use um in every dimension as CFI and then we can start to leverage our superpowers to do better stuff. So I feel like passwords, you know. Yeah, I prefer having a profile but the wallet is not exactly the same, you know. I agree with this. Yeah.

And I think we like the billers who have been here for a long time in the space has spent quite a long time and a lot of effort even getting to this place where we're pretty close to feature parody with centralized exchanges. I actually think we're hitting an inflection point now where it's more about this new stuff. And even if you look at a lot of things in this mini cycle, if we want to call it that, that have become popular, like what is it? What were the first time users in crypto using? They were downloading Phantom, not Binance, right?

And that's something that's actually pretty notable. Like that's never happened before. And I think we expect to see things like that, just new entry points into web 3 without even having to go through a centralized exchange become a lot more popular in the future. And it's again like those new types of use cases. The the main thing that we're missing is really, I would say, more consumer founders building in crypto.

you know, the the technology is there today, the contracts are all open sourced, ready for more people to build frontends on top of. I would say that it takes um a a new influx of founders who are leveraging the existing DeFi technology. We're not actually caring as much for the smart contracts, but new frontends that are tied towards things that people want to use. One example is the rise of prediction markets. You would not think that that's DeFi, but fundamentally to me, uh, prediction markets are a DeFi product.

There are markets, they're trading, they're using open source smart contracts, and we recently launched prediction markets on top of our existing per contracts. And we're seeing an influx of new founders coming in and wanting to take this products from 1 to 10. So, so my my take is that the technology is already there for these um these consumer apps to exist. We need founders who are focused on the distribution layer, who are focused on the sales layer to really take D5 to the next level. We're even starting to see, you know, web 2 giants starting to come in and say, I want to tap into this existing D5 flow and these existing D5 smart contracts.

Why not use the ones that already exist? I think the missing piece here is the link between consumer and the existing layer that we've already built. The part the problem with that though is that as a a builder, even if you come in and say, I'm going to abstract all this complexity away, you're still stuck in the the same kind of equilibrium that we've been stuck in uh since MetaMask was launched, right? Like even if you look at Phantom, okay, yeah, everyone's downloading Phantom, they're downloading a mobile wallet. Um but you're still needing to, you know, create a seed phrase.

You're still needing to secure private keys. There's there's all of this stuff that as a as a DAP builder coming in or an application builder coming in saying, "Okay, cool. You've got existing smart contracts, you've got existing infrastructure, but you still need to conform to the same interfaces that we've had for the last 10 years." And so, you know, we need to be able to break out of that. And I think that's uh you know, that's what we're trying to to do.

And I think there's probably four or five other projects that are trying to do that that are um going to make platforms available where a web 2 person can come in without understanding but it's not there yet. Yeah. And I actually agree with both of you and that's why I articulated as an inflection point. It's like I feel like we have two or so years to go of really hard work before that's true. And I also strongly agree with your point that it's really about now.

It's like the founders that come in over the next year or two are the ones that are going to build the really big new things. And I'm really excited for that. And you know, why is there such sort of like a cult about about founders? Because they're the ones innovating, right? And so I think this currency that we're starting to look at in crypto, we've been talking about technology for a long time and and I love technology, but like I'm kind of tired of it honestly.

And I think the things that we need to start focusing on more are the products. Like what are the new things that you can do that the world actually cares about that you can build in crypto? And it's just going to be a very small number of very high quality founders that actually innovate and build that. Like I have a little bit of anger about just like how much copy, you know, how how much people copy each other in crypto. And I think that's fine, but like if there's like who cares about like the next L1?

Like who cares about like the next unis swap clone on that L1? Like it's kind of interesting. Like there's probably a business there, but like it's really not that interesting from an innovation perspective. And so I really like the things and even the ones that don't ultimately work out that are trying to do something new within crypto. Like I thought friend was really cool even though it didn't fundamentally work out.

I thought memecoins pump fun were really cool. You know, I think some of the things um with like the social coins and social trading, social fi generally are very interesting and not all these things are going to be work out, but at least they're doing something new and I feel like that's what we need in crypto in the next two or three years. I want to hear everyone else's. What are some product ideas or interesting innovations that have happened over the last, you know, eight or so years that you're really excited about that flopped? I'm just gonna be this.

This is a cynical question. I think that crypto cards that are tied to your borrow lend accounts have been very interesting. We've had teams build out a you know Visa card that takes from your drift borrow lend balance where you can actually trade per uh your spending balance and you can spend with your profits or your yield right away. Um I like these applications where you're actually seeing use cases in your your day-to-day life. We talked about using crypto to buy coffee for years now.

And with the growth of stable coins, the growth of DeFi, now you can say you can use your yield to actually pay for your day-to-day life. Um, and I would like to see that being extended to things like mortgages um, and things like automobile payments. I guess the counter is what why do you think crypto cards have been relatively unsuccessful for so long then? I think because crypto has been relatively unsuccessful. crypto payments.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you in order to to be able to kind of uh again cross that chasm, we need to make the ability to hold and send and and transact in crypto as easy as possible. Um and you know, if you look at uh a platform like Binance, it's very easy to send crypto within Binance. Um it's not as easy to send crypto outside of Binance to to other places.

Um, so you know, the walled gardens that everyone's been operating in, uh, with crypto, you know, inside of, you know, Coinbase or Kraken or or Binance are not really amendable to all of the superpowers that crypto has. So, we need to get people onto um, you know, platforms that are are natively onchain, you know, these native onchain companies um, with native onchain, you know, payment rails, and then all of a sudden you're going to unlock a bunch of use cases. Do you think it's finally time for tokenized stocks? been hoping for that. We tried it.

We tried it and we shut it down. Yeah, you did. We did. Yeah. Yeah.

Um it was definitely not the time then. Um I think we have a window of opportunity over the next like 3 years where you can definitely [ __ ] around and find out a little bit. Um but uh you know I've I've heard a lot of people talking about this and I think someone's going to be crazy enough to do it. So on your exchanges maybe or more real world assets maybe. Yeah, I think real world assets generally and just take it as a whole.

I think that's where things are moving more over time, but I again just see that as the middle chapter and what we're doing here. I think the ultimate chapter is doing something new. Like I I just think it's not that interesting um to do the same things that have already been done in traditional finance on crypto rails. Like yes, I know like I'm the one saying these things like it is more decentralized, it is more transparent, it is trustless, like all this kind of stuff. Amazing.

Like we should all do that stuff. But does it have to stop there? Like the internet, like think about information before the internet and after the internet. Like it's like a trillion times more stuff that you can do and you could never have conceived of any of these types of things. And so that's the type of stuff that I'm actually really excited about in crypto.

And I kind of feel like we've lost a bit of that enthusiasm in the space overall. And now we're like, oh, when is like when are we going to be 50% market share with Binance? Like when are we going to get like the RWA on chain? Like I get it. Like that's literally what I'm doing with my business right now.

But the reason that I'm doing that is because I'm very excited about the 10 years, the 20 years from now. And I think that we have to continue to zoom out to that level and almost have a sense of wonder about it and be like this is the internet of value. Like what can we build with the internet of value? There has to be something here that we have not conceptualized before. There has to be some class of founders that come in and do something that people think are impossible, right?

And that's the stuff that's actually going to make it big. And I think we'll see that play out over the next 5 to 10 years. Like it's going to take a long time. Um, and there's real work that all the people on the stage and elsewhere have to do to set ourselves to set the future builders of crypto up for that type of success. But if we're zooming back into just DeFi, like I really think DeFi, think of DeFi as the rails to enable all of that other type of experimentation.

Like I articulated it as I want DYDX to be the place where all of that crazy you know trillionx like trillions of assets whatever it is type stuff where it's the professional place where you can interact and trade with those things. It's not necessarily our job to go out and build them but I am really excited about those things being built and we have to start here zooming back into today. We're doing a lot of hard work to actually build the rails to make all of that future happen. I mean if you think about like the waves of how enabling technologies you know impact society right you talk about the internet um you know we had that first wave a lot of stuff was too early um and you know died out and then it was 2007 to 2009 where uh you know the intersection of uh mobile and the internet really allowed these two different enabling technologies to be combined and and we got um you know this proliferation of new services and and you know amazing things and I think that we are sort of waiting for the the intersection of all of the stuff all the primitives we built in crypto to kind of hit the real world somewhere and then we're going to take off and and have this inflection point and yeah I mean we've been building for a long time and it hasn't quite happened yet so it is a little bit frustrating but I think one of the reasons why it hasn't happened is because we have been locked inside of people's databases and you know Binance is not amendable to uh composability and to you know really uh interfacing with the with the rest of the world. Um, so we need to get people on DeFi Rails and we need to get people building on DeFi Rails and connecting that somehow back to uh, you know, the the main internet and then I think that we'll we'll see a bunch of new use cases that emerge.

Yeah. How much do you think I'm sorry? I'm very excited about tokenized socks. Um because you know I I'm not American and a lot of our user base is not American and I think one of the core principles of DeFi is that we want to enable access to these assets that aren't available otherwise if you are not American to begin with the ability the number of people that have actually told me I really want to buy Tesla stock I really want to buy Apple stock I want to use it 100x leverage with it can you build me a product to do that as I'm parallel Well, none of them are in the US, right? So, so I do think that there's a big opportunity for some are probably too honest.

Some are in the US. I would absolutely love somewhere in the US too. I'd love to trade Tesla per, you know. So, there there is a world there that this activity starts to happen on DeFi rather than Robin Hood because of increased regulatory flexibility in DeFi. And imagine the a world where you can actually cross margin your bitcoin with you know coin stock and uh trade against Tesla per uh Apple options too all in one platform.

We're very excited about that world. Um whether that's going to be in DeFi. I my bet is that it's going to take place in DeFi versus EFI. I think to so I would agree with that and I am excited about those those things in the the coming years as well. I think there will be a big proliferation of DeFi that way.

But again, I I really would challenge us to zoom out here. Like why are we all here? Is it just to make money or are we actually trying to build something that changes the world? I don't know. That's up to you to answer.

But like I've gotten to the points in this journey here where I'm mostly interested in doing something in this entire industry that is going to change the world for a lot of people in a really positive way. And again, I think it's just like when we zoom out to 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we think about trillions, you know, maybe even more assets being traded or just things having value. Like what might that even look like? I can't even conceptualize it. And and that makes me really excited, right?

And whatever that future is to ground it back to the title of this conversation on D5 versus CFI, like I can personally guarantee you that that will not happen on centralized exchanges. It's not because they're doing anything wrong. like you know we have close partnerships like I I think that the centralized exchanges today are relatively trusted brands in the space that's amazing it's just literally impossible right like that's the entire thing that we're building here it's decentralized technology and that's why I think ultimately DeFi will be the rails for those things to be traded it's not even going to be the entire thing like I think 20 years from now we'll look back at DeFi and it'll just be primitives and it'll just kind of work and you'll come into the space and it'll be like wow I I created like something and now it has value and now it has spot and lending and per and it integrates with Robin Hood and like all this kind of stuff. Um, but we're just building this technology at this inflection point in crypto to enable all of that really cool stuff to happen in the future. Sure.

Okay, we only have a little bit of time left. Let's do lightning. Uh, what will be the next DeFi app or category to sorry Antonio to flip CFI? I know it's a small ball here, but what's the prediction? When do you think it'll happen?

I mean, it has to be pers, right? I I think uh that we've got um we've made a lot of progress in the last few years, and you know, that's the place where the switching costs for a trader are probably the lowest. Um and so, yeah, my my view is that it'll be per in the next like 12 months. Yeah. Well, if you're forcing me to zoom back for funers.

Yeah. No, I I do your book with per um and if we go back to the numbers, right? Even though spot has like you mentioned that like spot is at like 30% market share relative to centralized exchanges. So it's already happening right now like spot is already at 30 per are at like 10 to 15% or so. So over the next two or three years I think we'll see those really approach 50%.

Maybe we'll hit that inflection point where that's more than 50%. If I had to pick the one next thing that's like this new space that I'm excited about in DeFi or sorry web 3 generally I'd say it's social. And the reason that excites me is again just more things being assigned value. And I think there's going to be ways that that is very excited from a product and user perspective. I would say a combination of perpetually those are intertwined.

I think more spot volume on chain ultimately leads to more assets being issued on chain which then leads to more demand for for leverage trading. So I think it it has to all happen at once. You got to give a date very quickly, a time, next year, five years. I think that spot trading flips centralized exchanges in two years from now and per in three years from now. Um, and then, you know, we'll get to a trillion assets in 10 years.

Yeah, a couple years for me. I think three years is a max cup. Let's come back here three years from now and have this exact panel again. We'll do it. Sounds good.

Okay. Thank you guys. This This is great.