Miami – Decentralized finance (DeFi) is not dying, but moving deeper into the financial mainstream along with the rise of artificial intelligence agents, crypto executives who participated in the Securing the Next Decade of Decentralized Finance panel on Thursday at Consensus Miami 2026.
“Cryptocurrencies are absolutely going 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 exploits by North Korean DeFi hackers, including Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO, that resulted in losses of approximately $600 million, sparking criticism over the security of the sector.
DeFi is “an inevitable future,” said Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, dismissing claims that DeFi is fading, let alone dead. He argued that the technology underlying lending protocols and smart contracts is already proving effective on a large scale.
“There is $100 billion or more in the credit markets,” Assia said. “The technology is amazing and is tested all the time.”
AI agents are accelerating 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 “literally like DeFi or very much like DeFi.”
“If we believe that AI agents are going to be economically important players, we need a financial system built for them,” Wuollet said.
Assia described experimenting with AI agents capable of independently opening wallets, pooling assets, researching trades, and executing transactions 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. “You might think that DeFi enables many financial services for AI agents,” he said.
Executives also agreed that institutional attitudes toward cryptocurrencies and DeFi are changing rapidly.
Horsley said Bitwise, which manages approximately $15 billion in assets, is now receiving requests from fintech companies and regulated neobanks looking for compatible ways to offer DeFi-related products to customers.
“Institutions and businesses are coming,” Horsley said. “They finally feel able to interact with the 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 core ledger with a 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 operating on-chain.
