'DeFi is not dead,' it’s going mainstream with AI agents, crypto executives agree

Miami — Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is not dying but instead moving deeper into the financial mainstream alongside the rise of AI agents, crypto executives participating in the Securing the Next Decade of Decentralized Finance panel Thursday at Consensus Miami 2026.

“Crypto is absolutely hurtling 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 DeFi North Korean hacker exploits, including Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO, which resulted in roughly $600 million in losses, drawing criticism over the sector’s security.

DeFi is “an inevitable future," said Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, dismissing claims that DeFi is fading, much less dead. The technology underpinning lending protocols and smart contracts is already proving itself at scale, he argued.

“There’s $100 billion on lending markets or more,” Assia said. “The technology stack is mind-blowing, and it’s being battle-tested all the time.”

AI agents are speeding up 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 DeFi or a lot like DeFi.”

“If we believe AI agents are going to be economically important actors, we need a financial system built for them," Wuollet said.

Assia described experimenting with AI agents capable of independently opening wallets, bridging assets, researching trades and executing transactions across prediction markets and DeFi protocols. “DeFi and AI are both 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 could think of DeFi as enabling a lot of financial services for AI agents,” he said.

The executives also agreed that institutional attitudes toward crypto and DeFi are changing quickly.

Horsley said Bitwise, which manages roughly $15 billion in assets, is now receiving requests from regulated fintech firms and neobanks looking for compliant ways to offer DeFi-related products to customers.

“The institutions and corporates are arriving,” Horsley said. “They finally feel able to interact with the space.”

Wuollet said many large financial firms 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.”

The panelists said the convergence between traditional finance, tokenized assets, DeFi and AI agents is likely to accelerate over the coming years as institutions become more comfortable operating onchain.