DeFi is starting to look a lot more like traditional finance, industry founders said at the Digital Asset Summit in New York — with products that prioritize steadier, bond-like returns over the high-volatility yields that defined crypto’s early era.
Speaking on a panel, Ethena CEO Guy Young said the sector is finally building the plumbing for predictable income: “Most fixed income is like the distribution of risk in different formats … basically just slicing and dicing and distributing risk.” He noted that fixed-income style products were “probably the least featured two years ago,” but new primitives now let users lock in returns or choose between stability and variability. Young pointed to Pendle as an example of infrastructure that enables a fixed-to-floating rate swap, letting savers opt for fixed or adjustable yields — a useful tool in a market where “it’s very difficult to know three months out what the market is actually going to look like.”
Aave Labs founder Stani Kulechov said Aave has played a key role in this transition by supplying deep pools of capital other projects can draw on. “Aave is sort of acting as a liquidity sink,” he said, helping to bootstrap many of the new DeFi products emerging today.
That said, Kulechov cautioned that most DeFi returns still stem from trading activity and leverage rather than traditional lending. The landscape could shift further, he added, as more real‑world assets are tokenized and brought onchain — at which point much of the sector’s yield profile and economics could start to mirror traditional finance.
Related: Ethena-backed suiUSDe stablecoin goes live on Sui with $10 million yield vault launch.
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