Headline: DeFi is finally getting more like TradFi — steadier, bond-like returns are arriving, say Aave and Ethena founders
DeFi is shifting away from pure yield-chasing and toward products that mirror traditional finance’s steadier returns, according to Aave Labs founder Stani Kulechov and Ethena CEO Guy Young. Speaking on a panel at Digital Asset Summit (DAS) in New York, they argued the sector is beginning to offer instruments closer to bonds or savings accounts — options that deliver more predictable income streams for crypto users.
“Most fixed income is like the distribution of risk in different formats … basically just slicing and dicing and distributing risk,” Young said, adding that this corner of DeFi “was probably the least featured two years ago.” Where early DeFi focused heavily on token trading and borrowing against volatile collateral, new protocols are enabling users to lock in returns or choose between steadier and variable payouts.
Young pointed to Pendle as an example of the new tooling: “What you’re doing with Pendle is providing a fixed-to-floating rate swap,” letting users effectively pick between fixed or adjustable interest — a familiar choice in legacy finance. He noted the difficulty of doing that in crypto: “It’s very difficult to know three months out what the market is actually going to look like.”
Kulechov said Aave has played a key role in enabling this evolution by serving as a major source of liquidity for emerging products. “Aave is sort of acting as a liquidity sink,” he said, helping to “bootstrap a lot of the new coming products in DeFi.”
That said, the current DeFi yield profile still depends heavily on trading mechanics and leverage. “A lot of DeFi yield … is largely still based on … leverage,” Kulechov observed. Over time, however, the sector could see more yields sourced from tokenized real-world assets: “A lot of the yields and a lot of the economics will come from the traditional finance,” he said, as more TradFi assets migrate onchain.
Context: Ethena recently launched suiUSDe on Sui with a $10 million yield vault, an example of the firm’s push into more predictable, scaled yield products.
The takeaway: DeFi’s next phase looks less like a wild yield race and more like an expanded financial system that blends crypto-native innovation with traditional fixed-income characteristics — provided liquidity infrastructure and tokenization continue to mature.
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