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DeFi is facing a power-user problem.
Consider the numbers:
- On @Aave, the top 20 wallets drove 32.1% of all borrowing over the past year.
- On @Uniswap V3, the top 10 wallets generated over half of trading volume in just one week.
Robinhood’s early growth looked similar. By the end of 2020, only 13% of its users traded options, but they generated over 60% of the company’s revenue.
The difference?
Fintechs have regulatory moats. You can’t “fork” Robinhood overnight—it takes millions of dollars and months of licensing hurdles to replicate that business. DeFi, on the other hand, is open-source and forkable. Vampire attacks have shown how quickly liquidity can migrate to the next shiny protocol.
👉 Forkability makes DeFi fragile. But programmability provides a counterweight: distribution as a moat.
What costs fintechs hundreds of thousands in compliance and API integrations is, in DeFi, just a plug-and-play smart contract.
That’s why the @MorphoLabs x @coinbase partnership was so powerful. With a single integration, Coinbase embedded Morpho’s lending markets directly into its platform: Users didn’t need to set up wallets, manage gas, or move assets across chains.
The impact was immediate. Morpho’s TVL on Base surged as Coinbase’s massive user base flowed in, and it quickly surpassed Aave on the same chain.
But the real question is what happens when institutions start playing this game. Retail can be won with a smoother UX, but institutions demand something different.
The deeper story is how distribution becomes DeFi’s most powerful edge once tokenized assets meet institutional demand. That shift could completely redefine which protocols win the next chapter of onchain finance.
Read the full report👇:
messari.io/report/distrib…
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