"I think $DeFi [...] is systematically dying out [...] other than the purists and criminals." 💀

- qt. @AndreCronjeTech

Disagreed, there is hope:

$DeFi's birth place is permissionless and unstoppable code that creates economic value, e.g. yield, trading opportunities etc.

This value creation offers arbitrage opportunities to regulated products.

Money flows where it gets treated best, hence a special type of finance professionals & institutions will close that gap.

Therefore, true $DeFi will either be used as the backbone of traditional finance with banks & user-facing institutions merely being the bridge.

Or arbitragers will constantly rebalance activity in regFi vs. DeFi.

HOWEVER, this will only be true for genuinely decentralized protocols without owners or external dependencies like Uniswap.

Those protocols offer the credible neutrality & reliability that all other actors can build upon.

Managed protocols like $AAVE can only succeed by entangling themselves with TradFi directly - a trend we can observe for years already.

There are two dominant survival strategies for $DeFi protocols:
1⃣Credible neutrality & censorship resistance (permissionless, ownerless, immutable)
2⃣Join TradFi.