66% of Wall Street is Already in DeFi | Paradigm’s 2025 Survey with Dan Robinson & Justin Slaughter
Episode publishedPodcast: BanklessBankless
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DeFi is a concept of something that does not exist in TradFi, which is the idea of permissionless peer to peer engagement and networks. That is something that there is nothing that's analogous for in analog. TradFi, they see this as more than just a tokenization machine. They seem pretty open to the whole panoply of what DeFi can offer. Welcome
to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. And today, we're exploring a survey done by the Paradigm policy team, which investigated exactly where institutions are on that frontier of Internet money and finance. 300 TradFi professionals were polled by Paradigm and asked questions about their engagement level with crypto. Are they just researching or are they actively getting involved? If they are getting involved, how? Tokenization? Stablecoins? Leveraging DeFi infrastructure like dexes and borrowing and lending apps? Why are they getting involved? To cut
to be here. Good
to be back.
So you guys released this report called that you guys called TradFi tomorrow, DeFi and the rise of extensible finance. And this is a report, and we haven't done a report episode on Bankless in a while, but I always thoroughly enjoy these. Kind of just giving the sit rep of TradFi's relationship with crypto, their level of interest in it, and what they are doing in our industry. And I think we're gonna go through some of the big takeaways and findings and share some of the charts on the screen throughout this episode. But before we get into the nitty gritty details, I wanna just talk about some
for that, David. Let me know to the start. So I've gotta give this disclaimer. To be clear, any partisan views that I or Dan express are are owned today. They're not an official position of the firm. Paradigm has experienced Republicans and Democrats on the team. We focus on what's best for crypto, not what is best for one party or another. With that out of the way, here's what drove us to do this report. We have seen for the last several years that there's a lot of discussion in TradFi circles, but often behind the scenes about DeFi. And we've consistently seen a lot of people saying, okay. B
So that was a a little bit of the data collected, but there's some nuances with some of the words that I'd like to really parse out here. So especially in that one line, more than two thirds of TradFi firms are currently looking into DeFi. What constitutes a TradFi firm? What constitutes DeFi? And what constitutes looking into? Because all of these terms, I think, are pretty squishy. So maybe we could, like, provide a little bit more color and and prioritize each of these terms. So
the way to think about this, and you've got the slide out that kind of explains what we did in terms of distribution. So this is global. You can see on the right. It's not quite majority American. I think if you add in The US and The UK, it gets to as well Ireland. It gets to about two thirds. We had a substantial amount of participants from other markets. This included asset managers. About a little under a third of the participants in the survey were asset managers. About, I think, 20% were retail banks or credit unions. A smaller number were corporate banks. We had IBanks. We had payments c
Okay. And then also what constitutes looking into? Because I think that's a pretty easy thing to state from a from an institution that, oh, yeah. We're totally looking into that, without that actually being materially serious. Yeah.
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