Big banks are interested in decentralized finance, but executives say the sector’s hacking record is keeping institutional adoption on hold. Speaking at the Proof of Talk conference in Paris, asset-management and banking leaders argued that DeFi’s long-term value is less about speculative trading venues and more about rebuilding bank back-office operations. The barrier is not curiosity, but trust, because lenders may want blockchain efficiency while still refusing infrastructure where bridges, modules or protocols can fail under capital-scale pressure.
The concern is not theoretical. April saw breaches reported on 27 of 30 days, a stretch described by CertiK’s CEO as DeFi’s worst month in four years. Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO were hacked by North Korean cybercriminals in exploits that drained nearly $600 million from the two lenders. Those numbers make security a board-level adoption problem, since a bank cannot treat DeFi as settlement infrastructure while losses keep arriving through bridges and external code paths.
Maja Vujinovic, CEO of investment and advisory firm OGroup, said DeFi growth will not arrive until the hacking problem is fixed, especially around bridges. Her view was blunt: DeFi may not expand beyond the “degen” community until the broader stack improves. Solstice co-founder and CEO Ben Nadereski has made a similar point, warning that developers often build innovative code without enough focus on the responsibilities of managing capital. The industry is being judged by operational discipline, not only by technical novelty.
Traditional finance players are also trying to shape the fix themselves. Stéphanie Cabossioras, chief strategy and global policy officer at Societe Generale Forge, said regulated banks can close structural gaps through tokenized assets and bank-issued stablecoins. She pointed to tokenized structured products and green bonds on public blockchains, plus EURCV and USDCV, stablecoins created after the bank found it had securities onchain but no cash leg. The institutional path looks more regulated than permissionless, because mainstream clients want safety, custody and trusted parties rather than open-source, non-custodial protocols. That does not make DeFi irrelevant, but it suggests big banks will adopt its rails only after security standards, cash settlement and custody expectations resemble the systems clients already trust. For now, the institutional answer is cautious patience, not rejection, while audits, bridges and controls catch up properly first.
