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2025 was supposed to be the year of mass adoption. The Trump administration was billed as the first pro-crypto US government, and Bitcoin (BTC) reached an all-time high of $106,000. Despite this, the first quarter of the year has been characterized by stumbling financial markets in the face of impending trade wars and global political instability. Crypto, which has broadly positioned itself as a hedge against such concerns, has struggled in-step with traditional markets too.
Some may argue that this is a sign crypto isn’t meeting the tantalizing use case for cryptocurrency: a decentralized alternative that operates 24/7, unbound by the decisions of any single government, fund, or corporate actor. But while crypto has also struggled in-step with traditional markets, it has also shown resilience, on an upward trajectory in Q2, amid BlackRock’s investment in tokenized futures, and a multitude of emerging crypto ETF products.
However, we can concede that rather than taking full advantage of this moment, the uncomfortable truth is that crypto is still stuck in the blocks. Despite the clear product-market fit, today’s ecosystem remains a playground for enthusiasts and fund managers, with more proofs-of-concept than actual scalable infrastructure that you could reasonably expect the average Joe to use. Global DeFi is a long way off.
Crypto isn’t ready
Consider the scale of what’s at stake: the top five global asset managers oversee $30 trillion in assets. If they tokenized just 10% of their portfolios, crypto’s current market cap would double overnight, transforming the industry from a niche experiment into the backbone of mainstream finance. The question is how to onboard such a wealth of capital. Up until now, we have had institutional experimentation: hedge funds swooping in for fast gains with minimal capital. This is not real adoption; it’s still just “playing.”
In crypto’s supposed breakthrough year, the industry has been passing time with memecoin mania and neatly packaged ETFs, endless speculative trading fueled by retail hype. It should have been building for mass adoption; it is imperative to not just encourage institutions to onboard, but ordinary people, too. For DeFi to become mainstream, it needs retail investors who can act independently of institutional capital, with their vast numbers depegging it from the whims of policy and elite capital markets. If crypto fails to do this, or turns to the task too late, we will simply be left with “alt-Fi”: a speculative market for the same old investors to trade on a new generation of tech.
The talk of a return to fundamentals is promising; it squares us back with the original goal of building a unified network capable of seamlessly tokenizing, managing, and programming global assets. Within such a structure, not only would institutions lend the weight of their liquidity, but billions of everyday users could finally access a financial system without friction, gatekeeping, or mediation. By focusing on onboarding users to intuitive interfaces, backed up by hyperscalable L1s and robust infrastructure, DeFi could build the foundation for mainstream adoption and move past enthusiastic experiments towards a refuge from increasingly volatile global markets.
The road to success
So, how do we get there? DeFi needs three things to reach the critical inflection point for mass adoption: a UX that can streamline complex actions into manageable, intuitive systems, a backend that can sustain the demands of a global user base, and a legislative landscape that can enable innovation to flourish.
Utility
The biggest obstacle to mass adoption is currently UX. DeFi’s complex interfaces, or even lack of interfaces, make it unusable at times for a non-specialist user. Many premier asset holders are unable or unwilling to maximize their portfolio, with complex bridges, staking, and swap mechanisms acting as both a barrier to trust as well as ability. Interventions with AI-based projects that act upon users’ expressed goals (“swap assets cheaply”), and wallets with human-readable transactions instead of cryptic hashes, will make DeFi as intuitive as PayPal, and drive user onboarding to the moon. And once billions can engage without friction, demand will force infrastructure, both technical and legislative, to catch up fast.
Infrastructure
But of course, DeFi needs the pipes to work. It is not enough to build usable interfaces: the backend has to support them. When billions of users arrive, DeFi has to be ready. Next-gen L1s like Solana (SOL) and Aptos (APT) claim thousands of transactions per second, but Solana’s struggles under high demand during the $TRUMP episode exposed limits to both testing and scaling. Testing should be undertaken in real-world conditions with accurate transaction metrics like swaps per second (SPS). Increased focus on scaling solutions like state sharding and parallel processing will boost throughput while preserving decentralization. These innovations are necessary if we are going to get to true scalability: one million SPS is the goal. This is where we need to be to support DeFi at the global scale.
Inflection point
These impending UX and L1 improvements are just the lock gates opening: once intuitive systems and scalable networks are in place, capital will arrive in floods. The premise of DeFi isn’t a hard sell; everyone knows TradFi is only serving the few. The future of finance, a universal asset layer, needs accessible systems for everyday users and reliable infrastructure for the big players to act. This applies to the legislature as much as infrastructure. The legislative sandboxes recently announced for crypto exchanges in the US are fundamentally important: when demand improves, DeFi will reach an inflection point, one that it must be ready for, and the legislative trial period will have to be over; systems must already be in place to support it.
Conclusion
The current economic turbulence could be the catalyst crypto needs, making blockchain’s value proposition increasingly compelling. Yet without scalable solutions ready to handle massive capital inflows, this opportunity could slip away: the inflection point is looming.
However, once the capital and user base are there, and the safety nets are in place, the dominoes will fall. Investors and institutions will have the confidence they need to enter the market in a meaningful way, and their customers soon after. But to get there, L1 innovators must prioritize fundamentals now, crafting systems for institutions and everyday users, or DeFi will miss this historic wave. Following a roadmap for intuitive UX, hyperscalable L1s, and legislative clarity, DeFi can build the unified network it promised and avoid the trap of “alt-Fi” that lies waiting in the wings.
