Crypto has a chance to court traditional finance players, who are already looking at non-traditional financial technology after being let down by banks, says Aave Labs founder Stani Kulechov.
“Thanks to horrible banking experiences, we’ve seen a lot of finance coming into fintech, and fintech applications [have been] able to capture a lot of market share,” Kulechov said onstage at EthCC 2025.
He added that Aave Labs, which develops the decentralized lending and liquidity platform Aave Protocol, and other decentralized finance projects have been “working on how to actually get all this utility into more decentralized mediums.”
“Over 60% of the population has some sort of a digital wallet. It’s not onchain, but they have some sort of a digital means of interacting with certain transactions,” Kulechov said.
“A lot of the adoption has happened in digital finance at the moment, and the continuation is how to bring this mass onchain.”
Tokenized real-world assets can pull in TradFi
Kulechov said that the tokenization of real-world assets is a “multi-trillion-dollar opportunity” for the crypto sector to engage with traditional finance.
“There’s real estate, there’s government bonds, there’s equities, corporate bonds, and there’s a bunch of other categories of assets out there that could be more efficiently handled on a transparent ledger and a more programmable environment,” he added.
Kulechov said that if the crypto sector is “able to get all this legacy stuff onchain,” it could create a more efficient environment for the assets and could “build beyond” and create assets that “could exist that [don’t] exist because of these inefficiencies.”
“DeFi is the only technology that actually can do that in a borderless way,” he added.
DeFi needs to be “10 times better” for mass adoption
Kulechov, however, acknowledged that decentralized finance “is not really known publicly” and many protocols, including Aave, are “not even close” to having the same number of users as some fintech apps.
He said DeFi needs to present “a clear value proposition” and needs to solve “real problems and have good solutions” to have a chance at mass adoption, adding:
“If we want to compete with traditional finance, if we want to change the world, we want to do things 10 times better.”
“Your product needs to be 10 times better,” he said.
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“When we bring the traditional assets, the traditional value chain, we have to offer something that is much better. There needs to be a better value proposition: Simplicity and accessibility,” he added.
TradFi has started to use blockchain
Some financial tech companies have started to use blockchain technology, including BlackRock, which launched an Ethereum-based tokenized money market fund in March 2024 that has grown to over $2.8 billion in total value.
The company also filed in April to create a share class based on a digital ledger for its Treasury Trust fund, which will use blockchain to record share ownership.
Asset manager Libre Capital said in April that it would tokenize $500 million in Telegram debt, which is available to accredited investors and usable as collateral for onchain borrowing.
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