Sky and Ethena founders discuss the maturity of Decentralized Finance, AI agents, and the competition for customer acquisition.

Gate News bot message, Rune Christensen, the founder of Sky (formerly MakerDAO), and Guy Young, the founder of Ethena, recently participated in The Big Brain Podcast, discussing how the DeFi ecosystem is maturing, why centralized trade-offs are no longer taboo, and how AI agents and protocol generalization are changing the future of finance.

Rune believes that the fervent ideological era of DeFi is long gone. Once driven by lofty visions and decentralization supremacy, DeFi has now evolved into a solid, value-based industry. "In the past, you would raise a large amount of funds through high subscription rights, leading to market crashes. The key now is: if you want to change the world tomorrow, can you run a sustainable business today?" The real-world assets that were once mocked have now become crucial in achieving this goal.

Guy attributes Ethena's meteoric rise to prominence due to its keen insight and willingness to embrace pragmatic trade-offs. Unlike DeFi purists, he doesn't see decentralization as an either/or trait. "As long as you're honest and transparent about risk, users can handle it, and it's important to create a product that's scalable like software." He argues that Ethena's success doesn't stem from reinventing the wheel, but from building existing financial opportunities into more practical, composable forms – such as bringing fixed income strategies on-chain and turning them into collateral.

Both founders believe that the future of Decentralized Finance will no longer be dominated by human users, but rather by artificial intelligence agents. Rune envisions a shift towards "super-rationality, focused on capital," where intelligent agents will optimize across protocols at machine speed. "You will exhaust those inexperienced humans," he joked. His protocol Sky is preparing for this, supporting agent-driven applications and a universal framework that can aggregate data and dynamically adapt to changing incentive mechanisms for different user types.

As traditional finance shifts to on-chain, the complexity of regulation is inevitable. Guy predicts that a divergence will occur: some protocols will need KYC front-ends for asset classes such as credit or stocks, while others will advance towards a more open model.

Rune added that the ultimate competition is liquidity and trust, not ideology. "The value of blockchain lies in transparency and composability—this is the only factor that creates true global liquidity," he stated. Both sides believe that hybrid stablecoin products like USDS and ENA will be the biggest drivers of RWA demand in the future cycle.

Source: The Block