DeFi isn't a speculative bet on the future. It's the inevitable evolution of finance, driven by a fundamental truth: financial autonomy is a right, not a privilege. And it's been a critical driver of Ethereum's growth and adoption.

We want to see DeFi thrive, but we're opinionated about what it should look like: permissionless, censorship-resistant, privacy-first, self-custodial, and open source. We recognize the challenges involved in fully getting to this point—our role is to advocate for these principles, support teams working toward them, showcase the ones doing it, and be clear about how to get there and why it matters.

The Ethereum Foundation believes in Defipunk: not finance that's marginally better than TradFi, but finance that couldn't exist without Ethereum.

The value of DeFi, today and tomorrow

DeFi protocols today give everyone access to savings, lending, risk management, and wealth-building tools that most of the world still can't touch: stablecoins anyone can hold, yield without a private banker, markets that never close and can't exclude you. This is the center of Ethereum’s push for financial sovereignty for all, especially those locked out of traditional finance or trapped in systems that can freeze their assets without warning. These tools already empower millions of individuals and thousands of institutions worldwide, and we want to help them become even stronger.

We also want to support DeFi as it will exist tomorrow. This means exploring radical ideas that challenge assumptions about what finance can be. This isn't N+1 financial improvement. This is where concepts like borrowing from smart contracts came from. This is where early DeFi was born. What if, instead of just building better stablecoins, we figure out some combination of user-controlled AI and high-throughput onchain futures markets to create a fundamentally different and better solution to the underlying problem of hedging against expected future expenses? What if we can build the world’s most effective futarchy DAO? What if we can combine DeFi with our work on ZK reputation, and make the world’s first implementation of privacy-preserving undercollateralized lending? Or entirely new financial primitives we haven't imagined yet.

Both types of DeFi push Ethereum forward. We want to support builders working across this entire spectrum, and for each individual use case that is currently “the DeFi of tomorrow” to progressively make its way to becoming part of “the DeFi of today”, live and mature on the Ethereum mainnet.

Who's doing this work

“Ethereum is poised to attract exponentially larger flows of capital, talent, and innovative energy. Growth, however, is often path-dependent: standards adopted in periods of chaotic rapid growth harden into legacy constraints, and designs that privilege transparency can lock in surveillance by default. Incumbent systems often exert subtle pressures that narrow the design space for novel DeFi primitives and constrain privacy-focused innovation. The Ethereum Foundation will defend against these pressures.” – Hsiao-Wei Wang - Co-Executive Director of Ethereum Foundation

Charles St. Louis (DeFi Protocol Specialist) and ivangbi (DeFi Coordinator) are leading the EF's DeFi efforts within the App Relations team. Together, they bring over a decade of experience building in DeFi.

Charles previously led DELV (formerly Element Finance), pioneering fixed-rate yield protocols and products (2021–2025). Before that, he contributed to the DAI stablecoin system and shaped MakerDAO's governance, with earlier work in the security token space (2018).

Ivan co-founded Gearbox Protocol (2021), a modular lending infrastructure focused on leverage. He came up through Ethereum's DeFi community, from summoning LobsterDAO in 2018 to DeFi Summer to shipping one of the ecosystem's most technically resilient protocols.

As TradFi and institutional adoption on Ethereum accelerate, we must not forget the core principles that built DeFi in the first place. Pragmatism is necessary, but our mission is to scale cypherpunk values alongside market growth. We see ourselves as the essential glueing piece between these two worlds. We are ready to listen and adapt; you know where to find us! - ivangbi

What we're focused on

To start 2026, we're focusing on a core set of priorities. There's more we want to tackle, but we believe in starting focused and expanding deliberately. What comes next will be shaped by what we learn and what the ecosystem tells us matters most.

Builder relationships — Creating clear channels for DeFi teams to connect with the EF and each other: sharing news about protocol upgrades, surfacing application-layer needs to core developers, and supporting teams building on Ethereum.

Security — Supporting work that makes DeFi more secure by default. Taking a critical eye to points of failure: interfaces, oracles, upgrade mechanisms, admin keys, and the discretionary multisigs that many protocols still depend on as a transitional crutch. Exploits don't just hurt individual protocols; they set back the entire ecosystem. We want to support better auditing practices, runtime protections, and architectures that trend toward trustlessness over time.

Decentralization and openness — Advocating for open source, composable, and verifiable code as the baseline. Code that can be read, audited, and built on is code that can be trusted. Encouraging teams to move away from direct control and toward decentralized governance, experimenting with models beyond the defaults. Openness is a strength, not a vulnerability.

Privacy — Working with the EF's Privacy cluster to support privacy-preserving DeFi. We don't believe in "building a private stablecoin." We believe in privacy as base infrastructure: first for payments of all tokens, then for more complex use cases like trading and lending. Privacy should be the default, not a feature you opt into.

Standards and risk clarity — Pushing for consistent standards across vaults, tokenization, RWAs, and disclosure formats. Supporting shared risk frameworks the ecosystem can rely on: clear taxonomies, honest assessments of what "low-risk" actually means, and coordination with wallets, explorers, and infrastructure teams to reduce friction.

Research and content — Creating and curating serious DeFi content: mechanism research, data analysis, supporting DeFi-focused events, and accessible explanations that help people navigate what's happening in DeFi and how to use it.

We'll be sharing concrete outputs throughout the year. Frameworks, research, events, and more as this work develops.

On the horizon

A few areas we're watching closely: DeFi × AI, institutional adoption of DeFi, stablecoins & payments, and new financial primitives that don't fit neatly into existing categories. We're preparing content and thinking through what meaningful support in these areas could look like. More to come.

Connect with us

The App Relations team will be at Digital Asset Summit (March 24–26) and EthCC (March 30-April 2nd) speaking about these efforts. If you're building DeFi on Ethereum and will be at either event, come find us.

How to reach us:

• Email: defi@ethereum.org
• X: @CharlieStLouis and @ivangbi_

Looking for a different path?

• Founders and early-stage projects: Founder Success team
• Institutional inquiries: Enterprise team

For a full view of EF teams, see our organization chart.

The Ethereum Foundation exists to support Ethereum's long-term success. DeFi is central to that mission. We're here to ensure DeFi builders have the coordination, visibility, and connectivity they need to keep pushing open finance forward.

All roads lead to Ethereum.

Learn more about other EF initiatives: Privacy commitment · Protocol · Ecosystem Support Program