SHARE
SHARE
The Guest Chair is where we share what we learn from inviting industry specialists into Eleven’s weekly meetings – practitioners who spend every day inside the markets and sectors we are building conviction in.
Our latest guest is Marin Konjari, Solutions Architect at LimeChain, one of Europe’s leading blockchain development companies. DeFi is not a space we have historically focused on at Eleven. But the deeper we go into fintech, payments, and financial infrastructure, the more we see it coming up in the conversations that matter. So we invited Marin in for a practitioner-level view on what DeFi is, how the money works, and where it is going.
Here is what he told us.
First Things First: What Is DeFi?
Strip away the buzzwords and DeFi (decentralized finance) is straightforward: it is traditional finance (banking, lending, borrowing, trading) without the heavily institutionalized middlemen.
Instead of a bank deciding who gets a loan and processing it over three to five business days, software systems called smart contracts handle the entire flow. They are transparent, the code is fully visible and auditable. They run 24/7. And they are fast: what used to take up to an hour per transaction now takes around 400 milliseconds.
"A bank decides who gets money. There is risk analysis, documentation, lots of steps. In DeFi, algorithms check your collateral, your entire on-chain asset history, money in, money out, and make that decision intelligently. No hand-wringing, no ability to maneuver around it."
Marin Konjari
Solutions Architect at LimeChain
The scale might surprise you. Since Bitcoin launched in 2008, roughly $97 trillion in total transactions have passed through blockchain networks. Last year alone: around $4 trillion.
The Three Pillars of DeFi
DeFi comes down to three core mechanisms. Understand them, and the rest makes sense: a place to exchange assets, a place to borrow and lend them, and a stable currency to do it all in.
1. Trading Pools
Imagine a currency exchange booth that runs on software, never closes, and charges a fraction of the fee. You put in one asset, you get another out, and a small fee goes to the people who supplied the liquidity.
The scale is worth pausing on. Uniswap generates about $1 billion a year in trading fees alone. Daily trading volume across DeFi exchanges sits around $5 billion. This is not a niche experiment.
2. Lending Protocols
Think of this as a bank where the rules are written in code and applied to everyone equally, no exceptions.
To borrow, you put up more than you want to take out: if you want $100, you lock up $125 in assets as collateral. If that value falls too far, the protocol sells it automatically to cover the loan. No missed calls, no grace periods, no negotiation.
Why borrow against assets you already own? The same reason someone takes out a loan against their house rather than selling it: you believe the asset will be worth more later but need liquidity now. The numbers show this is a real business. Aave holds approximately $27 billion in deposits and generates $15 to 25 million in fees per month. Morpho makes around $150 million a month, with a team of seven people.
3. Stablecoins
Crypto prices move fast, which makes them poor candidates for everyday transactions. Stablecoins solve this by pegging value to something predictable, usually the US dollar, so money can move across the system without the exchange rate shifting mid-transfer.
The simplest version is fully backed: deposit $1, get one digital dollar. USDT (Tether) and USDC (Circle) together hold around $300 billion this way. The business model is straightforward: the dollars sit in government treasuries earning 4 to 6%, and that yield is the revenue.
Not all stablecoins carry the same risk. USDC publishes daily audits; USDT reports quarterly with considerably less detail. If you are building on top of these rails, that distinction matters.
Then there are algorithmic stablecoins, which try to maintain their peg through software mechanics rather than real reserves. Regulators have largely restricted them, and for good reason. When Luna lost its peg in 2022, $18 billion in value was wiped out in under 24 hours.
Institutional Adoption: It Is Already Happening
BlackRock currently holds around $5 billion in tokenized assets and is growing aggressively. JP Morgan processes between $3 to 5 billion in intrabank settlement daily on public blockchains. Franklin Templeton became the first major financial institution to deliberately target a wider on-chain market with their Benji token. Citi is building atomic settlement infrastructure. Goldman Sachs is working on tokenized money market funds with BNY Mellon.
The pattern across all of them – fast settlement, tokenized real-world instruments, and stablecoins as the underlying plumbing.
At the start of 2025, total value locked across DeFi was $225 billion. Despite a price correction triggered by political volatility, institutional capital did not move out – it increased. Real-world assets on-chain, real estate, credit, receivables, sit at about $33 billion, up 260% in six months.
Does DeFi Actually Create Value?
One of the more honest questions that came up – does DeFi create economic value, or does it just redistribute existing value faster?
Marin walked through a use case he is actually building – connecting farmers, liquidity providers, and raw materials suppliers through a shared on-chain system. A farmer needs fertilizer before harvest. A buyer wants grain futures. Using tokenized stablecoins, the entire receivable is created today. Money flows to the right parties immediately, the farmer starts working, the buyer locks in a price, the materials provider gets paid.
The Stripe example makes this concrete for founders: a buyer in New York pays a seller in Kenya. Traditional routing takes 3 to 5 business days through multiple correspondent banks. The DeFi version converts to stablecoins, moves via blockchain in 400 milliseconds, and converts to local currency on the other side. A fraction of the cost. Minutes, not days.
"You can do the same with traditional banks. It is just going to cost you more and take longer."
Marin Konjari
Solutions Architect at LimeChain
The value creation argument is the same one that justified banks, clearinghouses, and payment rails. Infrastructure that reduces friction enables more activity, and that activity creates value. DeFi is a faster, cheaper, more transparent version of the same infrastructure.
Where This Is Going
Marin’s read on the next few years is methodical, not hype-driven.
The 2026 to 2028 window is about infrastructure buildout. Major banks are not experimenting anymore. One bank Marin mentioned recently launched eight or nine parallel teams to aggressively explore DeFi integration after years of small-scale testing. The wild west phase is over. The institutional infrastructure phase has started.
The verticals attracting the most capital right now:
- On-chain derivatives (futures, swaps, receivables): Up 654% in the last year, now at $18.9 billion
- Tokenized real-world assets (bonds, real estate, credit): $33 billion today, projected $2 to 4 trillion by 2030
- AI and DeFi (Agentic Finance): AI agents can hold crypto wallets and operate in payment networks today, in ways they cannot with credit cards due to identity regulations. Streaming payment protocols, paying per second rather than per month, are being built now. The rails exist. The packaging is the remaining challenge.
Consumer adoption will follow institutional adoption, not lead it. Once large banks lock trillions into these ecosystems, the barriers for everyone else drop. Institutional money de-risks the infrastructure and builds the trust.
The regulatory picture has also shifted meaningfully. The EU’s MiCA framework and the US Genius Act have established clear rules, reducing the legal uncertainty that kept serious builders on the sidelines. Transaction costs have dropped from $50 per transaction a few years ago to fractions of a cent on many networks today.
The Bottom Line
"DeFi is institutional infrastructure. At its core, it is exchanging things and lending money, the fundamentals of finance. The revenue models are proven. The risks are manageable with the right practices. And it is a winner-take-all game."
Marin Konjari
Solutions Architect at LimeChain
For founders building in fintech, payments, or any kind of financial infrastructure, the question is no longer whether DeFi is real. It is whether you are building with or without an understanding of the rails that are being laid underneath your market.
The quality of projects is higher than it has ever been. The engineering talent has caught up. The regulatory framework is finally in place.
“It is not too late,” Marin said. “But it is the time to be very aggressive.”
Why We Are Paying Attention
As we said earlier, DeFi is not a space we’ve historically focused on. But when the infrastructure of finance starts moving at a fundamentally different speed, and when the founders we back in fintech and payments are increasingly building on top of or alongside these systems, it is worth understanding it properly.
If you are a founder building in this space, we would love to exchange notes and hear from you.
