Compiled: Golden Finance

On February 20, at the Consensus HK 2025 conference, Ava Labs Asia Head Justin Kim, SecondSwap Founder Kanny Lee, Polygon DeFi Head Daniel Oon, CoinGecko, CoinGecko Lianchuang Bobby Ong held a roundtable discussion on the topic of "The Future of DeFI".

Golden Finance compiled the speech as follows for readers.

CoinGecko Bobby Ong: Hello everyone, welcome to the consensus conference. I am Bobby, co-founder of CoinGecko. I will host the following roundtable discussion. I'm really happy to talk to them. Let's quickly introduce ourselves and then go straight to the question.

Ava Labs Asia Head Justin Kim: I am Justin, Asia Head Justin, Ava Labs Asia Head. Thank you for inviting me. I am responsible for overseeing Ava's business development and ecosystem. We already have over 15 people in Asia, and businesses and financial institutions only need to use blockchain to improve their business.

Polygon DeFi Director Daniel Oon: I am Daniel, head of Polygon DeFi. We are developing the Polygon ecosystem, and I will introduce some of them.

SecondSwap founder Kanny Lee: Hello everyone, I am Kanny, the founder of SecondSwap. I've been working in the OTC market for about 7 years and we've stopped in Hong Kong and I'm glad to see cryptocurrencies come back to sight.

Bobby: Let's start discussing the future of DeFi.

Daniel: What major opportunities will determine the future of DeFi? What innovation is most interested in? Therefore, I think we need to meet the needs of the next generation of users. Not all users are very experienced. We need to analyze user experience from different angles. Know what problems you want to really solve.

Justin: I think in the past five or six years, we have seen three stages of development, ICO, STO, and RWA. Then we call RWA the right to ICO, and global capital is showing potential. I think STO has its inherent potential, demonstrating the potential of tokens and assets, but we have not yet found attractive assets to expand the market. Since large asset management companies like BlackRock are best at finding the best assets in the industry, I think they will work with them. There will be a real explosive growth by then. I believe that this year's large institutions and large asset management companies will begin to introduce local services in the crypto industry, and the market of more than US$200 billion has been favored by the market.

Kanny: I haven't turned my attention to 3-5 years. In the field of encryption, what I can really look forward to is 3-5 months. What makes me very excited is the consumer experience progress and how to make it better and better. The wallets in front of us have made leaps and bounds in terms of integration, user functions, permissions, protocols, and the ability to trade through the platform, and are no longer mainly trading on centralized exchanges.

What makes me pessimistic about the future also unlock tokens. About $37 billion worth of tokens will be unlocked in 2025. It will cause significant price fluctuations. Recently, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase said about 1 million tokens are minted every week. The token issuance speed is now twice as fast as before. A large number of tokens were unlocked and entered the market. It's like a dam, pouring into the market, and tokens are flooding.

There are some venture capital firms who are able to buy lock-in tokens at discounted prices, and they have the patience to wait for a year. Now, they may get up to 200% in 1 year. This is great for VCs. But what about retail investors? Imagine that all salon users and communities can participate. We democratize our revenue and benefit multiple users. This is more sustainable and more fun. Imagine that everyone can get 10% to 12% or even 20% sustainable returns. Then, you will have a truly sustainable business model that can handle speed and quantity.

Daniel: On CoinGecko's terminal, we tracked over 5 million tokens on the market at present. In 2024, an average of about 2,000 tokens were created per month, rising to 4,000 tokens per month in the fourth quarter, and on January 20, 2025, this figure rose to 6,000. So we see more and more tokens being created. The crypto market is being liberalized and we are beginning to see more people selling tokens.

Bobby: So my next question is actually to ask Danny and Justin. As DeFi continues to expand to multiple blockchains, how do you envision a multi-chain future? Do you think there will be more cooperation or more competition among blockchains in the next few years?

Daniel: On PolyCondex you work on a universal neutral platform, which is called aggregation layer. The goal is to become a liquidity hub for any supply chain. Essentially link everything about L1 and L2. Therefore, we do envision the future, and blockchain is also a function that can attract users from different environments. If new issues cannot be built on the Polygon CDK, they cannot have their own user community. This is where Polygon is paying attention.

Kanny: We believe in chain abstraction, it is like a really huge push. In the next 6 months, 12 months, this chain abstraction willReally take off.

Daniel: Essentially, we will have an environment where users can choose, and I think that users determine to some extent where they want to actually hold assets. In fact, when the index boom comes, the effectiveness of people holding assets changes. Even if blockchain is affected, people will still choose to hold certain blockchain assets.

Justin: The future of blockchain will be for multiple chains to communicate with each other. When DeFi is truly mainstream, you will be regulated and must follow the rules. But there is one problem: you are doing financial transactions for many people, but you don’t want the transactions to be randomly verified. In addition, a whitelist of personnel is needed. You can deploy specially built blockchains, both games and applications are for the enterprise to consume.

Kanny: The future is a multi-chain future. When you publish a blockchain, there will be large-scale financially supported organizations to create market share globally.

The competition will be very fierce over time. If you compare the terms from life, it's like you see now. If the bank does this today, you have your own clients and your own deposit clients. But when you look at how banks work together, you see that they don't work that much together, and I think you'll see them pushing some kind of industry alliance, pushing some kind of industry standards, so that they can work together. So I do see a lot of fierce competition today, but I want to be one of them because I want to work with you guys. I want to build a new machine and connect this ecosystem.

Bobby: One thing that Daniel often talks about when she joined Polygon was to drive Polygon’s innovation. So I'm curious, how do you define the cutting-edge innovations in DeFi today? Are there any specific examples that I hope to hear more highlights of your participation.

Daniel: I think DeFi has always been special, new fashion and new creativity. I focus on attracting more users to join, and I do see that innovation and cooperation are very important. For example you need to issue a check and you see 1 inch moving forward in this regard.

Bobby: Obviously, once something becomes mainstream, we all use it. Let’s hear what the three of you think. What do you think needs to be done to make DeFi mainstream? Let’s hear the opinions of the three. What do you think needs to be done to make DeFi mainstream? Is it right? For example, what do you think we need for retail users, institutions and everyone who is using DeFi?

Justin: I think when we consider the definition of decentralized finance, it is away from institutions, away from enterprises, away from centralized ones. But I think my point is a little different because I don't think about cloud services. When it first appeared, my friends didn't like it until it was tested until it was a reliable enterprise, reliable proven to work.It is very important for enterprises to truly understand decentralized finance, so I think this is also the direction of our cooperation with institutions in Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong to truly strive for approval.

Kanny: I want to add. I want to talk about the features of the cutting-edge type. I think it's not just because these features are very attractive. It has given us a strong interest in DeFi. But I think the biggest factor is actually time, you see adoption has been increasing over the past few years since the beginning of DeFi Summer. There will be more new technologies that we don’t know about in the future. The only important factor is the time for retail investors to adopt new technologies.

Daniel: I think Solana is doing a good job. From the wallet perspective, it all starts with the wallet. In addition, blockchain itself is very cheap. As you can imagine, millions of people are using it to trade now, but a few years ago, trading around the clock was not possible. Mainstream adoption and retail adoption on Solana are happening simultaneously. I think it's just a matter of time, it will be generalized to other blockchains. A few years later, we start to see more of this. I think more and more companies will launch their own stablecoins in the coming years. Imagine Amazon launching stablecoins like Amazon Dollars, and then, then now instead of paying with your credit card, you can get discounts on Amazon and suddenly you start to see higher adoption rates. I think it's just a matter of time.

Bobby: Can DeFi develop in Asia? Are there any insights different from the West in developing DeFi in Asia?

Justin: I think the definition of Asia is a little different from what we see in the West, because the challenge is mainly like agricultural farming. There will be more consumer-friendly assets in the definition of Asia, which is very interesting.

Daniel: I think there is a widespread pragmatism in Asia, especially South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. I think this is very important. If you are innovating in South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and even Indonesia, if you are doing things right, then you can continue to consult with regulators.

Kanny: If you communicate with institutions over there, you will hear about RWA, which is the hottest topic of each institution. RWA puts real assets on blockchain, which is actually easy for most people in Asia, because different regulations in different regions and different global asset pricing is also different. I think this is the next trend in the RWA industry.