Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has for years allowed pseudonymous users to automatically lend and borrow money. Now, it’s poised to bridge TradFi with an entirely new user base. According to Alchemy CTO Guillaume Poncin, DeFi's ability to operate "under the hood" with compliance guardrails can bring a whole new audience of users to conventional finance (TradFi). DeFi opens up decentralized finance to bad actors. It achieves this through universal programmable links, or APIs, data indexing, smart contract automation, and smart wallets APIs.

Poncin imagines a world where the technicalities and complexities of DeFi are abstracted from the user to the point that it’s intuitive and usable for large audiences. He’s confident that everyday users won’t need to know what’s going on under the hood with DeFi.

"The common pattern is best described as growing a “DeFi mullet,” - Guillaume Poncin

Poncin views some financial mega-institutions as trying to figure out the best ways to incorporate DeFi instruments into their ecosystems.

"I see firms like Fidelity, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Revolut and Robinhood, who are all at different stages of evolution, but who all want to allow their users to take their funds, like their USD or like fiat money funds, and then use DeFi tools," - Guillaume Poncin

Now, through DeFi’s seamless integration into crypto wallets, the process is all much easier and more intuitive.

"The old school way with blockchain wallets would involve installing Metamask, but that’s a very cumbersome process," - Guillaume Poncin

Poncin’s vision of tokenizing all of these assets while giving users utility and yield through DeFi would be a big step in that direction.

DeFi's capabilities extend to enabling new financial products and services.

"Now it should be possible for Fidelity to offer these types of margin loans against your money-market fund account, as an example," - Guillaume Poncin

Poncin suggests that tokenizing assets and providing users with utility through DeFi could be a significant development.

"I think a lot of fintechs are looking at that as a great proof of concept of what can be done. if you're tokenizing your money-market fund or tokenizing your other assets, private equity, whatever, eventually what you want is to give your users utility over that. And the utility vehicle is DeFi." - Guillaume Poncin