Miami — Decentralized finance (DeFi) is not dying, but rather moving deeper into the financial mainstream alongside the rise of AI agents, with crypto executives participating in the Securing the Next Decade of Decentralized Finance panel Thursday at Consensus Miami 2026.
“Crypto is breaking into the mainstream,” said Hunger Horsley, co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Asset Management. “Stablecoins, tokenized assets and DeFi are some of them.”
The panel came weeks after a series of exploits by North Korean DeFi hackers, including Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO, that resulted in losses of around $600 million, sparking criticism of the sector’s security.
DeFi is “an inevitable future,” said Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, rejecting claims that DeFi is disappearing, let alone dying. The technology behind lending protocols and smart contracts is already proving itself at scale, he argued.
“There’s $100 billion or more in the lending markets,” Assia said. “The tech stack is mind-blowing and it’s constantly battle-tested. »
AI agents accelerate interest
Much of the discussion focused on how AI agents are accelerating interest in crypto-native financial infrastructure.
Guy Wuollet, general partner at a16z Crypto, argued that autonomous AI systems will ultimately require financial rails that look “either literally like DeFi or a lot like DeFi.”
“If we think AI agents are going to become economically important players, we need a financial system designed for them,” Wuollet said.
Assia described experimenting with AI agents that can independently open wallets, link assets, search for trades, and execute trades in prediction markets and DeFi protocols. “Both DeFi and AI are native to each other,” he added.
Horsley compared DeFi’s role for AI agents to the rise of APIs and open source software in traditional internet infrastructure. “One could think of DeFi as enabling many financial services for AI agents,” he said.
The executives also agreed that institutional attitudes toward crypto and DeFi are evolving rapidly.
Horsley said Bitwise, which manages around $15 billion in assets, is now receiving inquiries from regulated fintech companies and neobanks seeking compliant ways to offer DeFi-related products to customers.
“Institutions and businesses are coming,” Horsley said. “They finally feel able to interact with space.”
Wuollet said many large financial companies are initially approaching blockchain infrastructure less for crypto speculation and more for operational efficiency.
“Finance is going through a digital transformation,” he said. “Institutions want to replace their backend and main ledger with blockchain.”
Panelists said the convergence between traditional finance, tokenized assets, DeFi and AI agents is likely to accelerate in the coming years as institutions become more comfortable with their on-chain operations.
