DeFi

DeFi is the category of financial applications built directly on blockchain smart contracts, with no traditional financial intermediary in between. The big DeFi primitives are decentralised exchanges (Uniswap, Aerodrome, Curve), lending markets (Aave, Compound, Morpho), perpetual derivatives (dYdX, Hyperliquid, GMX), stablecoin protocols (MakerDAO, Frax), and yield aggregators (Yearn, Beefy). Each one replaces a service that used to require a bank, broker, or exchange with code that anyone can call directly from a wallet.

The defining feature of DeFi is that it’s permissionless. There’s no application form, no KYC for most protocols, no jurisdiction to qualify in. If your wallet has the right token, you can use the protocol. This is genuinely new in financial history. It’s also why DeFi has had such a complicated relationship with regulators: traditional finance assumes there’s an entity to license and supervise, and DeFi is structurally designed to not have one.

DeFi matters for DeAI in two ways. First, many DeAI projects use DeFi infrastructure for their tokenomics: liquidity pools on Aerodrome and Uniswap, lending markets for staked tokens, yield-bearing wrappers like ERC-4626 vaults. Second, the mental model of DeFi (composable open protocols that anyone can build on) is the same model DeAI is trying to apply to AI infrastructure. Decentralised inference, decentralised training, decentralised compute marketplaces — all of them borrow the architectural idea of “permissionless protocols that anyone can use” from DeFi.

The honest framing is that DeFi has had one full cycle of mania and collapse since 2020, and the survivors today are the ones with real product-market fit. The same will happen to DeAI. Most DeAI projects in 2026 will not exist in 2030, just as most DeFi projects from 2020 don’t exist now. The OYM Freedom and Returns scoring framework was built partly to help readers identify which projects in the current DeAI cycle have the foundations to make it through.