MIAMI — Decentralized finance (DeFi) is not dead but moving further into the financial mainstream with the rise of artificial intelligence agents and cryptocurrency executives at Consensus Miami 2026 on Thursday.
“Cryptocurrencies are definitely entering the mainstream,” said Hunger Horsley, co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Asset Management. “Stablecoins, tokenized assets and DeFi are all part of it.”
The panel came just weeks after a series of DeFi hacks in North Korea, including the Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO, caused an estimated $600 million in losses and sparked criticism of the industry’s security.
eToro co-founder and CEO Yoni Assia said DeFi is the “inevitable future,” dismissing claims that DeFi is in decline, let alone dying. He believes that the technology underpinning lending protocols and smart contracts has proven itself at scale.
“There’s $100 billion or more in the loan market,” Arciya said. “The technology stack is amazing and continues to be battle-tested.”
AI agents are accelerating interest
Much of the discussion focused on how artificial intelligence agents can accelerate interest in crypto-native financial infrastructure.
Guy Wuollet, general partner at a16z Crypto, believes that autonomous artificial intelligence systems will eventually require financial trajectories that look “either literally DeFi, or very much like DeFi.”
“If we believe that AI agents are going to become economically important players, we need to build a financial system for them,” Wallet said.
Assia described experiments with AI agents capable of independently opening wallets, bridging assets, researching trades, and executing trades across prediction markets and DeFi protocols. “DeFi and AI are both made in nature,” he added.
Horsley compared DeFi’s role for artificial intelligence agents to the rise of APIs and open source software in traditional internet infrastructure. “You can think of DeFi as providing a lot of financial services to AI agents,” he said.
Executives also agreed that institutional attitudes toward cryptocurrencies and DeFi are changing rapidly.
Horsley said that Bitwise, which manages about $15 billion in assets, is currently receiving requests from regulated financial technology companies and new banks to seek compliant ways to provide DeFi-related products to customers.
“Institutions and businesses are coming,” Horsley said. “They finally feel like they can interact with the space.”
Wuollet said many large financial firms initially approached blockchain infrastructure less for cryptocurrency speculation and more for operational efficiency.
“The financial industry is undergoing a digital transformation,” he said. “Institutions are looking to replace their backend and core ledgers with blockchain.”
Panelists said the convergence between traditional finance, tokenized assets, decentralized finance and artificial intelligence agents is likely to accelerate in the coming years as institutions become more accustomed to operating on-chain.
