Nicolas Bertrand on DeFi
From A 20 Year Financial Crypto Revolution · · Gamma Prime
“I think we're still pretty early in the story — maybe you would peg the start of this story as 2020, let's call it DeFi and sort of like on-chain capital markets broadly, so we're sort of five years into that.”
On , Nicolas Bertrand, CEO at Komainu, spoke about DeFi during A 20 Year Financial Crypto Revolution on Gamma Prime.
About Nicolas Bertrand
Nicolas Bertrand, CEO of Komainu, has recently spoken about the long-term trajectory of tokenization and digital assets. In a November 2025 interview, he described the current phase as "still in the early innings" of a "two decade story," comparing the development to an S-curve where the exponential portion has not yet begun. He noted that programmable blockchains with low cost and high throughput have only emerged in the last few years, and suggested that the timeline for meaningful financial activity on-chain began around 2020 with DeFi and on-chain capital markets. Bertrand has also discussed the importance of revenue as a measure of product-market fit in the crypto industry, stating that "revenue is a good shorthand" for evaluating whether businesses have real demand. He cited Tether as an example of a highly efficient company with strong revenue per employee. In a March 2025 speech at QUANT 2025, he argued that tokenization will not be fully realized in 2025, but predicted significant progress within five to ten years. He emphasized the need to distinguish between fraud and legitimate digital assets, and called on the industry to educate both the public and regulators. Bertrand expressed confidence that regulatory mindsets can evolve, drawing on his past experience at Borsa Italiana and the London Stock Exchange.