DeFi won’t replace banks — it will merge with them, experts say (5:53)
Not long ago, the dominant narrative in financial services was a battle between traditional banks on one side, and crypto and DeFi upstarts on the other.
That framing, it turns out, was wrong. What's actually happening is a convergence, and the people who saw it coming early are now the ones shaping how it unfolds.
In an interview on TheStreet Roundtable, Cody Carbone, CEO of The Digital Chamber and Scarlett Sieber, Chief Strategy Officer at Money20/20, explained where this industries are colliding and how businesses and investors can position themselves to take advantage of this convergence.
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Crypto needs to educate, not just build
For Carbone, the turning point came in how the crypto industry talked about itself. Years of walking into congressional offices and explaining blockchain technology got nowhere.
The pivot was simple. Stop leading with the tech and start leading with the use case. Sending money to a grandmother overseas, instantly, at a fraction of the cost of a wire transfer.
"Once we had that shift in how we educated, it made a world of difference," Carbone said.
The room changes when the conversation shifts from consensus mechanisms to real human problems that DeFi actually solves.
DeFi's rise will mirror neobanks
Sieber watched the neobank era unfold from inside several banks and fintechs. Everyone thought it was a fight to the finish. It wasn't.
"I remember sitting at events with fintechs saying they were going to eat all the banks' lunch, and the banks saying 'you don't have any scale, we still run the town.' And then over time, you saw a lot of scale happen in different places," Sieber explained.
She sees the same pattern unfolding now with DeFi, and her advice to financial institutions is to stop treating adoption as an all-or-nothing decision.
The institutions best positioned to win are the ones that move first, based on who their customers actually are and what their risk profile allows.
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That convergence is showing up in the data. Over 312 million active DeFi users were counted globally in Q2 2025, and US crypto transaction volume rose roughly 50% between January and July 2025 compared to the same period the year prior.
At Money20/20 Europe, crypto and DeFi ranked as the third most searched topic among 8,000-plus attendees, behind only banking and payments. The curiosity is broad and it is growing.
The finish line, as both Carbone and Sieber describe it, is the moment when nobody calls it DeFi anymore.
When a transaction settles on a blockchain and the user never knows or cares, that is when mass adoption has actually arrived.