‘Tis the season for “biggest story of the year” articles and, when it comes to crypto, the choice in 2025 was not hard. The obvious pick is Wall Street’s full-on embrace of crypto, which saw banks and big companies tripping over each other to show they are down with stablecoins and tokenized assets. But look a little closer and you’ll see 2025 featured another major, but more subtle, trend: the ongoing expansion of DeFi and decentralized technology.
This has been reflected in the huge growth of DeFi platforms like Hyperliquid, and in Coinbase’s decision last week to add Jupiter, a leading aggregator for decentralized Solana trading, to its app. Such developments have helped decentralized exchanges nab a bigger share of overall crypto trading volume, with degens now accounting for a double digital share of the spot trading market.
The CEO of Maple Finance, one of the leading players in the decentralized space, this week went so far as to claim “DeFi is dead”—implying that on-chain trading has become so big that it is poised to swallow conventional systems altogether. I wouldn’t go that far (at least not for a few years), but you get the point.
The CEO’s remark also highlights how, in coming years, we are likely to face confusion over what exactly the term decentralized means. For longtime blockchain enthusiasts, the term implies using blockchain technology to build more democratic alternatives to powerful institutions—including big banks, but also the likes of Google and Facebook. But if this is the promise of crypto, what should we make of JPMorgan and BlackRock launching new on-chain money market funds available to those with $5 million or more to trade? It’s a win, of course, that blockchain technology has proved so good that the most respected names in traditional finance are using it. Still, it’s hard to get excited about giant corporations using blockchains to sling commercial paper when the original goal was to democratize large sections of society and the economy. The situation is reminiscent of the quip “They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Jeff John Roberts jeff.roberts@fortune.com @jeffjohnroberts
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