Miami – Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is not dying out, but instead moving deeper into the financial mainstream, along with the rise of AI agents, crypto managers who will participate Thursday in the Securing the Next Decade of Decentralized Finance panel during Consensus Miami 2026.
“Crypto is absolutely rushing into the mainstream,” said Hunger Horsley, co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Asset Management. “Stablecoins, tokenized assets and DeFi are part of that.”
The panel came weeks after a series of North Korean DeFi hacker exploits, including Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO, that resulted in around $600 million in losses, sparking criticism of the sector’s security.
DeFi is “an inevitable future,” says Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, dismissing claims that DeFi is fading, let alone dead. The technology underlying credit protocols and smart contracts is already proving itself on a large scale, he argued.
“There is $100 billion or more in the credit markets,” Assia said. “The technology stack is amazing and constantly being tested.”
AI agents are accelerating interest
Much of the discussion focused on how AI agents are driving interest in crypto-native financial infrastructure.
Guy Wuollet, general partner at a16z Crypto, argued that autonomous AI systems will eventually require financial rails that “literally look like DeFi or look a lot like DeFi.”
“If we believe that AI agents will become economically important players, we need a financial system built for them,” Wuollet said.
Assia described experimenting with AI agents capable of independently opening wallets, bridging assets, researching transactions, and executing trades through prediction markets and DeFi protocols. “DeFi and AI both came from 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. “You might think that DeFi enables many financial services for AI agents,” he said.
The executives also agreed that institutional attitudes toward crypto and DeFi are rapidly changing.
Horsley said Bitwise, which manages about $15 billion in assets, is now receiving requests from regulated fintech companies and neobanks looking for compliant ways to offer DeFi-related products to customers.
“The institutions and businesses are coming,” Horsley said. “They finally feel able to communicate with space.”
Wuollet said many large financial companies are initially approaching blockchain infrastructure less for crypto speculation and more for operational efficiency.
“The financial sector is undergoing a digital transformation,” he says. “Institutions want to replace their backend and core ledger with a blockchain.”
The 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 operating on-chain.