Marco Santori, former legal chief at Kraken, says DeFi — not CeFi — is the future: 'Let's burn it all down'

Speaking at the Digital Assets Innovation Summit in London on Wednesday, Marco Santori, general partner at Pantera and former chief legal officer at Kraken, said if you asked the crypto exchange whether CeFi or $DeFi was the future, the centralized platform would say "$DeFi is the future — let's burn this all down."

Reflecting on his years at Kraken, Santori explained that while CeFi and $DeFi serve different roles — with CeFi providing speed, fiat integration, and customer support, and $DeFi offering trustless, onchain infrastructure — the ultimate goal was always to replace centralized intermediaries.

"There was no question in our mind that that is the goal," he said, calling it a "MacGuffin" that keeps the industry moving forward, even if it takes years to achieve.

Santori argued that the most significant convergence of $DeFi and traditional finance will come through crypto treasury companies, which he described as "publicly traded vehicles whose sole reason for being is to accumulate digital assets." He pointed to Michael Saylor's Strategy as the archetype, and to his own $DeFi Development Corp. — a Nasdaq-listed real estate tech firm bought by a group of former Kraken executives, including Santori — as proof of the model's potential.

After acquiring the company and pivoting its strategy to accumulate the native cryptocurrency of "Ethereum killer" Solana, in Santori's words, $DeFi Development Corp. raised $45 million and saw its stock price surge from $3 to $24 in a single day, eventually climbing more than 2,400%.

"If you want exposure to that underlying asset, historically it's been proven that investing in a treasury company will accumulate more of that asset than just buying it outright," he said, adding that while these stocks trade at a premium to NAV, "you're paying for the work of the management team to go out and get more of the thing."

Santori noted this was the first deal he brought to Pantera as a general partner, and the firm has since launched a dedicated fund to invest in crypto treasury companies, recognizing their potential to outperform simple asset exposure.

Asked how stablecoins were important in connecting the TradFi and crypto worlds, Santori described stablecoins as "technology on which everything will be built," comparing them to transformative innovations like GPS or email, in contrast to "iconic but standalone" inventions like the Sony Walkman.

By wrapping fiat in a blockchain-compatible, permissionless format, stablecoins enable decentralized, unstoppable "money Legos" that allow familiar dollars to flow into $DeFi and power composable applications, while resisting interference and central points of failure, he said.

Finally, responding to a question about the impact of upcoming crypto legislation on the space, Santori said the current U.S. policy environment marks a historic turning point, crediting the Trump administration for removing the legal and political constraints that left the crypto economy "like an increasingly compacted coiled spring" under the prior Biden administration.

After 12 years in law and policy, he said he left the legal profession because "this is the environment I want to invest in." He called the SEC's shift to a more constructive stance and Congress's move toward CFTC-led, principles-based regulation "a better investor environment than I could have sculpted from raw clay," adding that crypto's lobbying clout — now outstripping even the NRA — has cleared the path for growth.