“DeFi is dead.” It’s a provocative line — and Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell doesn’t mean decentralized finance is disappearing. He means the label “DeFi” will disappear as a distinct category, swallowed by traditional markets that move onto blockchain rails. Powell told CoinDesk that in a few years institutions “won’t distinguish between DeFi and TradFi at all.” His thesis: blockchains will become the plumbing for capital markets the same way the internet became the platform for commerce. Just as online shopping didn’t end retail but changed how it’s done, onchain finance will quietly become the default infrastructure for trading, clearing and settlement. Why Powell thinks TradFi will go onchain - Efficiency and economics: Public ledgers can reduce frictions and costs across payments, settlements and securitization. Powell points to examples such as BTC-backed mortgages, asset-backed securities built on crypto loans, and securitized receivables from crypto card issuers as signs of that shift. - Institutional adoption: The primary holders of this “onchain paper,” Powell says, will be sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, insurers and large asset managers — the “managerial class that controls the world’s financial markets.” - Stablecoins as the onramp: The rapid institutional embrace of stablecoins is already reshaping the market. PayPal’s PYUSD, Société Générale’s euro- and dollar-pegged coins, and Fiserv’s FIUSD are concrete steps. Major banks including Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo have signaled interest, while Visa and Mastercard are building stablecoin settlement rails (even if they aren’t issuing coins themselves). A near-term reckoning: merchants, margins and $50 trillion Powell makes a bold near-term prediction: stablecoins could process $50 trillion of transactions in 2026, potentially eclipsing major card networks. His logic rests on merchant economics. Retailers pay roughly 2–3% to card networks; stablecoin settlement can dramatically cut those costs and return margin to merchants. That incentive, Powell argues, will drive rapid adoption by small businesses, neobanks and eventually traditional banks issuing and supporting stablecoins. He also describes large stablecoin issuers as having a “negative cost of capital”: deposits collected as coin reserves can be parked in safe assets (Treasuries) earning yields while issuers pay little or no interest on the liabilities — a model he likens to insurance float used by Berkshire Hathaway. Regulation and the timeline Powell stresses that a proper regulatory framework is essential before onchain markets fully replace legacy systems. But regulatory progress and market moves — including the passage of what the article calls the GENIUS Act and corporate stablecoin launches — are nudging the industry in that direction. What this means for DeFi today If Powell is right, the current perception of DeFi as a separate corner of crypto will fade into the background. He expects total DeFi value to potentially reach $1 trillion within a few years, up from a current total market cap of around $69 billion (CoinMarketCap). In his view, DeFi’s growth is tightly linked to the market cap of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets: as those expand, so will total value locked onchain. Bottom line Powell’s prediction reframes the debate: it’s not crypto versus TradFi, but TradFi becoming crypto-native. “DeFi is dead,” he says, not because blockchain finance fails, but because it will be so thoroughly integrated into mainstream markets that the label becomes obsolete — blockchain simply becomes the infrastructure underpinning global capital markets. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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