Building Credit Markets at Internet Speed I Stani Kulechov (Aave) at ETHConf

Hey everyone, I'm Stani. I've been building on Ethereum for pretty much a decade. It started as a small passion thinking about credit markets and lending. Before Ethereum, I had a fintech startup focusing on receivables. I realized how to connect credit globally and build at internet scale. Credit is the last chapter of the internet story and the most important one. Credit is hard because of coordination problems — it's very local with different participants, regulations, and localized capital and risk assessment. Ethereum acts as connective tissue and operating system for financial infrastructure that can power transactions, not just payments but credit and assets. The biggest trade-off is that siloing opportunities globally isolates markets and creates capital inefficiencies. Credit has backed opportunities throughout history, from the industrial revolution to today's AI and infrastructure. Onchain markets empower credit by reducing cost structure through programmability. Ethereum creates a platform where anyone can program functions that were manual or delayed, settling on an ongoing basis with full transparency and certainty. Aave has processed over 1 trillion in cumulative loans and 3.5 trillion in deposits, with a peak of 75 billion in net deposits, proving Ethereum and protocols built on it can scale. We learned that what works for native crypto assets can also work for all value in finance. Going forward, we need to manage capital efficiency and risk isolation. Aave v4 allows isolating risk while sharing liquidity across different pools in a controlled way. This helps bootstrap new opportunities like real world assets by sharing liquidity and reducing cost of capital. The utility of tokenization is taking tokenized assets and making them usable in an open financial system. Over time, the lowest cost of capital will come from DeFi because capital gets aggregated into the best risk-adjusted opportunities. Integrators benefit because every integration increases capital in the pools. For example, Woo e-commerce platform allows creators to earn on their balance via Aave. The infrastructure is modular and fits different use cases. DeFi has shown it can build resilient infrastructure for native assets and can be used for all assets coming on chain. Borrowing against securities and lending securities on chain will show the efficiency. Credit is a big opportunity; we are still very early on the spectrum. This is the beginning of a new financial world where infrastructure is run on permissionless networks scalable to billions of people. This infrastructure will fund future needs like AI data centers, solar energy, and everything the world needs. DeFi is in a good place to solve this because anyone can come assess risk, create markets, and eventually create opportunity for everyone. It's going to be an exciting few years as institutions look to benefit from tokenization and DeFi. Thank you everyone for coming to this talk. I'm very excited to see the conference here in New York.