The Ethereum Foundation's Commitment to DeFi
The Ethereum Foundation's Commitment to DeFi: Scaling Cypherpunk Values
DeFi, or decentralized finance, has been a critical driver of Ethereum's growth and adoption. It's not just a speculative bet on the future; it's the inevitable evolution of finance, driven by a fundamental truth: financial autonomy is a right, not a privilege. The Ethereum Foundation believes in DeFi, and we're committed to supporting its development and growth.
The Value of DeFi, Today and Tomorrow
DeFi protocols today give everyone access to savings, lending, risk management, and wealth-building tools that most of the world still can't touch. Stablecoins, yield without a private banker, and markets that never close and can't exclude you are just a few examples of the many benefits of DeFi. This is the center of Ethereum's push for financial sovereignty for all, especially those locked out of traditional finance or trapped in systems that can freeze their assets without warning.
These tools already empower millions of individuals and thousands of institutions worldwide, and we want to help them become even stronger. We're not just focused on buildingYes, we want to support DeFi as it will exist tomorrow. This means exploring radical ideas that challenge assumptions about what finance can be. What if, instead of just building better stablecoins, we figure out some combination of user-controlled AI and high-throughput onchain futures markets to create a fundamentally different and better solution to the underlying problem of hedging against expected future expenses? What if we can build the world's most effective futarchy DAO? What if we can combine DeFi with our work on ZK reputation, and make the world's first implementation of privacy-preserving undercollateralized lending? Or entirely new financial primitives we haven't imagined yet.
Who's Doing This Work
The Ethereum Foundation is committed to supporting builders working across this entire spectrum. We're not just talking about theory; we're talking about real-world applications and practical solutions. Our team is led by Charles St. Louis, a DeFi Protocol Specialist, and ivangbi, a DeFi Coordinator. Together, they bring over a decade of experience building in DeFi.
Charles previously led DELV (formerly Element Finance), pioneering fixed-rate yield protocols and products (2021–2025). Before that, he contributed to the DAI stablecoin system and shaped MakerDAO's governance, with earlier work in the security token space (2018).
Ivan co-founded Gearbox Protocol (2021), a modular lending infrastructure focused on leverage. He came up through Ethereum's DeFi community, from summoning LobsterDAO in 2018 to DeFi Summer to shipping one of the ecosystem's most technically resilient protocols.
What We're Focused On
To start 2026, we're focusing on a core set of priorities. There's more we want to tackle, but we believe in starting focused and expanding deliberately. Here are some of the key areas we're focused on:
Builder Relationships
Creating clear channels for DeFi teams to connect with the EF and each other: sharing news about protocol upgrades, surfacing application-layer needs to core developers, and supporting teams building on Ethereum.
Security
Supporting work that makes DeFi more secure by default. Taking a critical eye to points of failure: interfaces, oracles, upgrade mechanisms, admin keys, and the discretionary multisigs that many protocols still depend on as a transitional crutch. Exploits don't just hurt individual protocols; they set back the entire ecosystem. We want to support better auditing practices, runtime protections, and architectures that trend toward trustlessness over time.
Decentralization and Openness
Advocating for open source, composable, and verifiable code as the baseline. Code that can be read, audited, and built on is code that can be trusted. Encouraging teams to move away from direct control and toward decentralized governance, experimenting with models beyond the defaults. Openness is a strength, not a vulnerability.
Privacy
Working with the EF's Privacy cluster to support privacy-preserving DeFi. We don't believe in "building a private stablecoin." We believe in privacy as base infrastructure: first for payments of all tokens, then for more complex use cases like trading and lending. Privacy should be the default, not a feature you opt into.
Standards and Risk Clarity
Pushing for consistent standards across vaults, tokenization, RWAs, and disclosure formats. Supporting shared risk frameworks the ecosystem can rely on: clear taxonomies, honest assessments of what "low-risk" actually means, and coordination with wallets, explorers, and infrastructure teams to reduce friction.
Research and Content
Creating and curating serious DeFi content: mechanism research, data analysis, supporting DeFi-focused events, and accessible explanations that help people navigate what's happening in DeFi and how to use it.
On the Horizon
A few areas we're watching closely: DeFi × AI, institutional adoption of DeFi, stablecoins & payments, and new financial primitives that don't fit neatly into existing categories. We're preparing content and thinking through what meaningful support in these areas could look like. More to come.
Connect with Us
The App Relations team will be at Digital Asset Summit (March 24–26) and EthCC (March 30-April 2nd) speaking about these efforts. If you're building DeFi on Ethereum and will be at either event, come find us.
How to reach us:
Email: defi@ethereum.org
X: @CharlieStLouis and @ivangbi_
Looking for a different path?
Founders and early-stage projects: Founder Success team
Institutional inquiries: Enterprise team
For a full view of EF teams, see our organization chart.
The Ethereum Foundation exists to support Ethereum's long-term success. DeFi is central to that mission. We're here to ensure DeFi builders have the coordination, visibility, and connectivity they need to keep pushing open finance forward.
All roads lead to Ethereum.
Learn more about other EF initiatives: Privacy commitment · Protocol · Ecosystem Support Program
Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2026/02/23/commitment-to-defi
