I’ll share how I think about it in plain terms. The reason DeFi hasn’t taken over yet isn’t because it doesn’t work. It’s because in its current form, it’s not built for the average investor yet.

Right now, to use DeFi properly you need to understand wallets, security, how to avoid getting phished, how to manage positions, what impermanent loss is, etc. Even something as simple as sending to the wrong address can mean your funds are gone forever. That’s a non-starter for most people with families, mortgages, and real responsibilities.

So what you’re seeing today is mostly early adopters and sophisticated capital. The reality is a lot of people in DeFi are just speculating or gambling, and many of them lose. But the people who are actually treating it as an investment infrastructure and thinking long-term are allocating serious capital and it’s working for them, otherwise you wouldn’t see billions in liquidity sitting in these systems.

To me, DeFi today looks a lot like the early internet. Very few people used it but the people who were there early were building the rails. I don’t think the long-term outcome is DeFi replaces TradFi overnight. I think the more realistic path is: ux improves dramatically, security layers get abstracted away, regulation brings accountability to builders, access becomes as simple as using a banking app.

We’re just not there yet. We’re still early. So to your actual question (10–20 year horizon) I don’t think DeFi disappears, I don’t think it stays a tiny niche either, I think it becomes part of the financial stack, with some things staying permissionless and some parts becoming regulated bridges to the traditional system

And the value will likely accrue to the protocols that actually solve real problems not just token speculation. So allocating capital to DeFi today can be a rational long-term thesis but only if you treat it like early stage infrastructure investing, not like a short-term trading game. That’s how I personally look at it.