Consensus HK 2025 Roundtable Discussion: The Future of DeFi

Compiled by: Jinse Finance

On February 20, at the Consensus HK 2025 conference, Justin Kim, head of Ava Labs Asia, Kanny Lee, founder of SecondSwap, Daniel Oon, head of Polygon DeFi, and Bobby Ong, co-founder of CoinGecko, held a roundtable discussion on the topic of "The Future of DeFI".

Jinse Finance has compiled the content of the speech as follows for readers.

CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong:Hello everyone, welcome to the Consensus Conference, I am Bobby, co-founder of CoinGecko. I will host the next roundtable discussion. I'm really excited to talk to them. Let's quickly introduce ourselves and then jump right into the questions.

Justin Kim, Head of Asia, Ava Labs:I'm Justin, Head of Asia, Ava Labs, thank you for having me, I oversee Ava's business development and ecosystem. We already have over 15 people in Asia, and enterprises and financial institutions just use blockchain to improve their business.

Daniel Oon, Head of Polygon DeFi:I'm Daniel, Head of Polygon DeFi. We are developing the Polygon ecosystem and I'll introduce some of it.

Kanny Lee, Founder of SecondSwap:Hello everyone, I'm Kanny, Founder of SecondSwap. I've been working in the OTC market for about 7 years, we've been based in Hong Kong, and I'm very happy to see cryptocurrencies back in the spotlight.

Bobby:Let's start talking about the future of DeFi.

Daniel：What major opportunities will determine the future of DeFi? What innovations are you most interested in? So I think we have to meet the needs of the next generation of users, not all of whom are very sophisticated, and we have to analyze the user experience from different angles. Know what problems you really want to solve.

Justin：I think in the past five or six years, we have seen three stages of development, ICO, STO, RWA. Then we call RWA the right of ICO, and global capital is also showing potential. I think STO has its inherent potential and shows the potential of tokens and assets, but we have not yet found attractive assets to expand the market. Since large asset management companies such as BlackRock are best at finding the best assets in the industry, I think we will cooperate with them. By then, there will be real explosive growth. I think that this year, large institutions and large asset management companies will begin to introduce local services in the crypto industry, and the market of more than $200 billion has been favored by the market.

Kanny：I don't look at 3-5 years. In the crypto field, what can really be expected is 3-5 months. What excites me a lot is the consumer experience and how to make it better and better. The wallets in front of us have made leaps and bounds in integration, user features, permissions, protocols, the ability to trade through platforms, rather than trading primarily on centralized exchanges.

What makes me pessimistic about the future is the unlocking of tokens. There will be about $37 billion worth of tokens unlocked in 2025. It will cause a lot of price fluctuations. Recently, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase said that about 1 million tokens are minted every week. Now the issuance rate of tokens is twice as fast as before. There are a lot of tokens unlocked and entering the market. It's like a dam, pouring into the market, and the tokens are flooding.

There are some venture capital firms that are able to buy locked tokens at a discount, and they have the patience to wait for a year. Now, they may get up to 200% returns in 1 year. This is great for VCs. But what about retail investors? Imagine that all salon users, communities can participate in this. We democratize the benefits and benefit multiple users. It's much more sustainable and much more interesting. Imagine if everyone could get a sustainable yield of 10% to 12% or even 20%. Then you would have a really sustainable business model that can handle the speed and volume.

Daniel：On Coingecko's end, we track over 5 million tokens in the market right now. In 2024, an average of about 2,000 tokens were created per month, rising to 4,000 tokens per month in the fourth quarter, and 6,000 on January 20, 2025. So we're seeing more and more tokens being created. The crypto market is liberalizing, and we're starting to see more people selling tokens.

Bobby：So my next question is actually for Danny and Justin. As DeFi continues to expand to multiple blockchains, how do you envision the future of multi-chain? Do you think there will be more cooperation or more competition between blockchains in the coming years?

Daniel:On PolyCondex you're working on a universal neutral platform, which is what's called the aggregation layer. The goal is to hopefully become the liquidity hub for any supply chain. Essentially linking everything from L1 and L2. So we do envision a future where blockchain is also a feature that can attract users from different environments. If new problems can't be built on the Polygon CDK, they can't have their own user community. This is where Polygon is focusing on.

Kanny:We believe in chain abstraction, it's like a really huge driving force. In the next 6 months, 12 months, this chain abstraction is going to really take off.

Daniel:Essentially, we're going to have an environment where users can choose, and I think users are kind of deciding where they want to actually hold their assets. In fact, when the exponential boom came, the effect of where people hold assets changed. Even if the blockchain is affected, people will still choose to hold assets on certain blockchains.

Justin:The future of blockchain is multiple chains talking to each other. When DeFi really goes mainstream, you will be regulated by the government and have to follow the rules. But there is a problem: you are doing financial transactions for a lot of people, but you don't want the transactions to be verified by random people. In addition, you need a whitelist of people. You can deploy purpose-built blockchains, whether it is games or applications, which are consumed by enterprises.

Kanny:The future belongs to multiple chains, and when you launch blockchains, there will be large financially backed organizations that create market share around the world.

Over time, competition will be very fierce. If you use the terminology of life as an analogy, it's like what you see now. If banks do this today, you have your own customers, your own deposit customers. But when you look at how banks work together, you will find that they don't work together that much, and I think you will see them promoting some kind of industry alliance, promoting some kind of industry standards in order to work together. So I do see a lot of fierce competition today, but I want to be a part of it because I want to work with you. I want to build a new machine and connect this ecosystem.

Bobby:When Daniel joined Polygon, one of the things he talked about a lot was driving innovation at Polygon. So I'm curious, how would you define cutting-edge innovation at DeFi today? Are there any specific examples? I'd love to hear more about the highlights of your involvement.

Daniel:I think DeFi has always been special, it's the new fashion, the new idea. I'm focused on attracting more users to join, and I do see that innovation and collaboration are very important. For example, you need to issue a check, and you see 1 inch moving forward in this regard.

Bobby:Obviously, once something becomes mainstream, we all use it. Let's hear from the three of you. What do you think needs to be done to make DeFi mainstream? Let's hear from the three of you. What do you think needs to be done to make DeFi mainstream? Right? For example, what do you think we need for retail users, institutions, and everyone who is using DeFi?

Justin：I think when we think about the definition of decentralized finance, it's away from institutions, away from enterprises, away from centralized governments. But I think my perspective is a little different because I don't think about cloud services. When it first came out, my friends didn't like it until it was battle-tested, until it was proven to be usable by reliable enterprises, reliable governments. It's very important to really get government enterprises to understand decentralized finance, so I think this is also the direction we are working with institutions in Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong to really strive for approval.

Kanny：I want to add to that. I want to talk about cutting-edge type features. I think it's not just because these features are very attractive. It makes us very interested in DeFi. But I think the biggest factor is actually time, you see that adoption has been increasing in the past few years since the start of DeFi Summer. There will be more new technologies in the future that we don't know about, and the only important factor is the time it takes for retail investors to adopt new technologies.

Daniel：I think Solana has done a great job. From a wallet perspective, everything starts with the wallet. Plus the blockchain itself is very cheap. You can imagine that millions of people are using it to trade now, but a few years ago, trading 24/7 was not possible. Mainstream adoption and retail adoption on Solana are happening at the same time. I think it's just a matter of time before it spreads to other blockchains. In a few years, we start to see more of this. I think in the next few years, more and more companies will launch their own stablecoins. Imagine Amazon launches a stablecoin, like the Amazon dollar, and then now instead of paying with your credit card, you pay with Amazon dollars, you can get discounts on Amazon, and suddenly you start to see higher adoption. I think it's just a matter of time.

Bobby:Can DeFi develop in Asia? Are there any insights on developing DeFi in Asia that are different from the West?

Justin:I think the definition in Asia is a little different than what we see in the West because the challenges are mainly like agricultural farming. There will be more consumer-friendly assets in the definition in Asia, which is very interesting.

Daniel:I think there is a general pragmatism in Asia, especially in South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore. I think it's very important. If you are innovating in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore or even Indonesia, if you are doing the right thing, then you can continue to consult with regulators.

Kanny：If you talk to institutions over there, you will hear about RWA, which is the hottest topic among institutions. RWA puts real assets on the blockchain, which is actually easy for most people in Asia because regulations in different regions are different and asset pricing is different around the world. I think this is the next trend in the RWA industry.