CoinDesk | Crypto for Advisors
Q. Decentralized finance (DeFi) has experienced explosive growth, hype cycles, and is now pushing toward maturity. From your perspective, what’s the biggest gap still holding DeFi back from mainstream adoption?
DeFi has proven that trustless code can automate financial services at scale. But code alone isn’t enough. Even in a “trustless” system, participants constantly rely on trust: that smart contracts are secure, that oracle data is accurate, that a counterparty isn’t malicious, and that audits address the right risks. Because on-chain transactions are irreversible, failures in those trust assumptions can be catastrophic.
What DeFi lacks is a trustful interaction layer to complement trustless execution. Protocols are blind to who’s on the other side of a transaction and whether their information is credible. There’s no native way to verify identity, reputation, or track record in a structured, verifiable format. This leaves users vulnerable, prevents protocols from assessing creditworthiness, and deters institutions.
Closing this gap requires infrastructure that makes information itself verifiable and composable. At Intuition, we’re building exactly that: a trust and reputation layer for DeFiand the broader information economy.
Q. A lot of people talk about how DeFi needs better ways to handle reputation, creditworthiness, and trust. What do you see as the most promising approaches for solving those challenges?
Attestations have been part of Ethereum’s DNA from the start, the original white paper even highlighted identity as a core use case. For more than a decade, builders have experimented with attestations, or signed on-chain statements, to capture trust. Yet so far they’ve been limited to narrow flows: proving a single credential or verifying one fact at a time.
What’s missing is making attestations usable at scale in richer contexts. Instead of just asking, “does this address hold this credential?”, we should be able to analyze thousands or even millions of claims to understand an entity’s reputation. That’s the missing layer.
At Intuition, we’re building exactly that: an attestation graph that makes verifiable data portable and usable. By connecting attestations into a graph, smart contracts and AI agents can reason about history, context, and reputation, unlocking credit scores, undercollateralized lending, access control, and permissionless reputation markets.
Q. Looking ahead, what kinds of DeFi applications or innovations do you think will define the next wave of growth, and how might infrastructure like verifiable data or reputation systems play a role?
The next wave of DeFi won’t just be about moving capital faster; it will be about moving trust faster. Smart contracts gave us trustless execution, but the missing piece is verifiable context about who and what we’re dealing with.
When attestations and reputation can reliably exist on-chain, DeFi evolves beyond being purely collateral-based. Undercollateralized lending becomes possible, pool access can be gated by reputation rather than arbitrary whitelists, and governance can reward real contributions instead of idle token balances. Entire markets for reputation itself open up, where the credibility of an address or dataset can be priced, traded, or staked against outcomes.
This is also what AI agents will need as they move from executing swaps to making complex decisions under uncertainty. A verifiable trust and reputation graph provides the foundation.
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