The State of DeFi in 2026: Protocols, Infrastructure, and What Changed

Sending money internationally costs an average of 6.3% in fees and takes 3-5 business days. Borrowing against your own assets requires a credit check, a bank appointment, and weeks of waiting. Trading securities means routing through brokers who close at 4 PM on weekdays. Traditional finance operates on infrastructure built decades ago - permissioned, siloed, and slow.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an ecosystem of financial applications built on public blockchains that replaces intermediaries like banks and brokers with smart contracts. Self-executing code handles lending, borrowing, trading, and yield generation - accessible to anyone with a wallet and an internet connection, 24/7, without KYC approval or geographic restrictions.

Those were the promises when DeFi first gained traction. In 2026, they are no longer hypothetical. DeFi protocols hold over $130 billion in total value locked, the stablecoin market has surpassed $312 billion, and perpetual DEXs process over $10 billion in daily volume. Institutions like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are tokenizing real-world assets on-chain. AI agents are beginning to execute DeFi transactions autonomously. And the regulatory frameworks that will shape the next decade - MiCA in Europe, the GENIUS Act in the US - take effect within months.

This guide maps the current state of DeFi: how it works, where the capital sits, what changed over the past year, and the infrastructure that makes it all function. Whether you are building a DeFi product, evaluating the landscape for investment, or deepening your technical understanding, every section aims for concrete data over abstraction.

What Is DeFi?

DeFi stands for decentralized finance - a broad term for financial services and instruments that run on permissionless blockchains instead of through centralized institutions. Where traditional finance (TradFi) relies on banks, exchanges, and regulators to mediate transactions, DeFi protocols use smart contracts to automate the same functions without human intermediaries.

The distinction matters. In traditional finance, a bank decides whether you qualify for a loan. An exchange decides which assets you can trade. A payment processor decides whether your transaction goes through. In DeFi, smart contracts encode the rules and execute deterministically. Meet the collateral requirements, and you get the loan. The liquidity pool has depth, and your swap executes. No approval needed.

Five principles define DeFi:

• Permissionless - Anyone can participate. No account applications, no minimum balances, no geographic restrictions.
• Trustless - You do not need to trust a counterparty. Smart contract code enforces agreements.
• Composable - Protocols interact with each other. Output from one protocol becomes input for another.
• Non-custodial - You retain control of your assets. No third party holds your funds.
• Transparent - All transactions and contract code are publicly auditable on-chain.

Smart Contracts and Composability

Smart contracts are programs deployed to a blockchain that execute automatically when predefined conditions are met. A lending protocol's smart contract accepts deposits, calculates interest rates algorithmically, and handles liquidations - all without human intervention. Their critical property is determinism: given the same inputs and blockchain state, a smart contract always produces the same outputs.

Composability - often called "money legos" - is what makes DeFi more than a collection of isolated applications. You deposit ETH into Aave, receive an interest-bearing aToken, use that aToken as collateral on another protocol, then feed the resulting position into a yield optimizer. Each step builds on the previous one, and shared standards like ERC-20 ensure any DeFi protocol can interact with any compliant token.

This composability creates an infrastructure dependency. Each protocol interaction requires blockchain reads and writes through RPC endpoints. If one RPC call fails mid-chain, the entire "money lego" operation can break. Production DeFi applications treat RPC reliability as a core architectural concern, not an afterthought.

DeFi in 2026: A Market Snapshot

Before diving into protocol categories and recent developments, here is where the numbers stand.

The broader DeFi market is valued at $238.5 billion with projections reaching $770.6 billion by 2031. Mobile DeFi wallet usage grew 45% in 2025, now accounting for 58% of total users - a signal that DeFi is no longer a desktop-only activity.

Major DeFi Protocol Categories

DeFi protocols span several categories, each addressing a different financial function.

Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs)

Decentralized exchanges allow you to swap tokens directly from your wallet without depositing funds into a centralized platform. The dominant model is the automated market maker (AMM), pioneered by Uniswap.

Instead of matching buyers and sellers through an order book, AMMs use liquidity pools - smart contracts holding reserves of two tokens. Pricing follows a mathematical formula: Uniswap V2 uses x * y = k, where x and y represent the reserves of each token and k remains constant. When you buy token A, you add token B to the pool, shifting the ratio and the price.

Uniswap V3 introduced concentrated liquidity, allowing liquidity providers to allocate capital within specific price ranges rather than across the entire curve. This delivers up to 4,000x capital efficiency for narrow positions. Beyond Ethereum, DEX ecosystems have grown across chains. PancakeSwap dominates BNB Chain with $2.3-2.56 billion in TVL and roughly 29.5% DEX market share. Jupiter aggregates liquidity on Solana, integrating 120+ AMMs and capturing 95% of the Solana aggregator market.

Lending and Borrowing

Lending protocols like Aave ($27 billion TVL) and Compound allow you to deposit crypto assets to earn interest or borrow against your deposits as collateral. Interest rates adjust algorithmically based on supply and demand for each asset.

DeFi lending uses overcollateralization - you must deposit more value than you borrow. A typical loan-to-value (LTV) ratio is 66-75%, meaning you deposit $150 in collateral to borrow $100. If your collateral value drops and your Health Factor falls below the liquidation threshold (roughly 120% collateral-to-loan ratio), anyone can liquidate your position to repay the debt. This seems inefficient compared to traditional loans, but it enables lending without credit checks, identity verification, or trust.

Stablecoins

Stablecoins solve a fundamental problem in DeFi: you need a price-stable unit of account to denominate loans, settle trades, and measure returns. The stablecoin market has surpassed $312 billion - USDT holds roughly 60% market share, USDC sits around 25%, and DAI/USDS (following MakerDAO's rebrand to Sky) at 1.5%.

Stablecoins use different mechanisms to maintain their peg:

• Fiat-backed (USDC, USDT) - Each token is backed by reserves held in bank accounts. Centralized issuers manage minting and redemption.
• Crypto-collateralized (DAI/USDS) - Backed by crypto assets locked in smart contract vaults at 150%+ overcollateralization. The Sky protocol (formerly MakerDAO) oversees $7.8 billion in stablecoin liabilities across both DAI and USDS.
• Algorithmic - Use supply expansion and contraction to maintain peg without direct collateral backing. The 2022 Terra/UST collapse ($18 billion wiped out) remains the starkest reminder of this model's risks.

Yield Tokenization and Farming

Yield farming - deploying crypto assets across DeFi protocols to maximize returns - remains a core DeFi activity. But the space has matured beyond simple LP staking.

Pendle emerged as the defining protocol of yield tokenization, averaging $5.7 billion in TVL through 2025 (up 76% YoY) with a peak of $13.4 billion. Pendle allows you to split yield-bearing assets into their principal and yield components, then trade each separately. The protocol settled $58 billion in fixed yield (up 161% YoY) and launched Boros, a yield-trading platform that reached $6.9 billion in open interest within four months.

Realistic yield expectations in 2026: conservative strategies on major pairs (ETH/USDC, BTC/USDT) generate 5-15% APY, while more aggressive strategies on volatile or newer pairs can reach 20-30% APY. Anything substantially higher warrants skepticism about sustainability.

Derivatives and Perpetuals

Perpetual futures (perps) are the most actively traded DeFi derivative. Unlike traditional futures, perpetuals have no expiration date. Traders can go long or short with leverage, and a funding rate mechanism keeps prices aligned with spot markets.

The perpetual DEX landscape shifted dramatically in 2025. Hyperliquid commands roughly 80% of decentralized perpetual contracts market share, processing $357 billion in monthly derivatives volume. Its infrastructure handles up to 200,000 orders per second with sub-second block times. On February 5, 2026, Hyperliquid generated a record $6.84 million in daily revenue. dYdX maintains over $1 billion in TVL with $2.8 billion in daily trading volume across 220+ markets. Synthetix operates as the canonical perpetuals DEX on Ethereum mainnet.

Liquid Staking and Restaking

Liquid staking solves a fundamental trade-off in proof-of-stake networks: staked assets secure the network but become illiquid. Protocols like Lido ($27.5 billion TVL) issue derivative tokens (stETH) representing your staked ETH. You earn staking rewards while using the derivative token across DeFi - as collateral on Aave, in liquidity pools on Curve, or as a yield-bearing base asset. Lido holds 24.2% of the total Ethereum staking market.

Restaking extends this concept. EigenLayer has scaled to $25 billion in TVL, commanding 85%+ of the restaking market. Restaking allows staked ETH to simultaneously secure additional protocols (called Autonomous Verifiable Services) and earn supplementary yield. A liquid restaking ecosystem has emerged around it: Ether.fi leads with $3.8 billion in deposits, followed by Renzo ($2.9 billion TVL) and Puffer Finance ($1.3 billion TVL).

Prediction Markets

Prediction markets allow users to trade on the outcomes of real-world events. Polymarket processed $33.4 billion in volume during 2025, reaching an $8 billion valuation, and recently acquired a CFTC-licensed exchange to enable its re-entry into the US market.

What Changed: Key Developments in 2025-2026

The DeFi stack is not static. Several developments over the past year reshaped how protocols operate, who participates, and where capital flows.

The Fee Switch Era

For years, DeFi governance tokens had no direct claim on protocol revenue. That changed in late 2025.

Uniswap activated its long-awaited "fee switch" through the UNIfication proposal on Christmas Day 2025. Protocol fees now flow to a "token jar" - UNI holders can burn their tokens to withdraw an equivalent share of accumulated fees. Governance also created an annual growth budget of 20 million UNI, distributed quarterly starting January 1, 2026.

Aave launched a structured buyback program, allocating $1 million per week over a six-month pilot for AAVE token repurchases (over $26 million total). Repurchased tokens are distributed to stakers through a new fee-switch mechanism, directly linking token value to protocol revenue for the first time.

These moves signal a broader shift: DeFi protocols maturing from "governance tokens with no cash flows" to "productive assets with transparent revenue sharing." For builders and investors, the fee-switch trend fundamentally changes how to evaluate DeFi protocol economics.

Bitcoin DeFi Goes Live

Bitcoin is no longer just a store of value sitting outside DeFi. Bitcoin DeFi (BTCFi) has reached approximately $7 billion in TVL, with only 0.79% of Bitcoin's total supply currently locked in DeFi protocols - suggesting significant room for growth.

Babylon Protocol dominates the BTCFi landscape with $4.29 billion in TVL (80% of the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem), enabling trustless native Bitcoin staking with over 57,000 BTC staked from 140,000+ unique stakers. Babylon has partnered with Aave Labs to extend its Trustless Bitcoin Vaults to Aave V4, letting users borrow USDC against native BTC.

Bitcoin L2 networks are developing their own DeFi ecosystems. Merlin Chain holds over $1.7 billion in TVL with 150+ dApps. Core surpassed $400 million TVL. Stacks saw its TVL surge after the Nakamoto upgrade, with sBTC now offering 1:1 finality with the Bitcoin mainnet. Lending represents the largest DeFi category on Bitcoin L2s at 47.6% of TVL.

AI Agents Enter DeFi

The convergence of AI and DeFi - sometimes called "DeFAI" - moved from concept to deployment in early 2026.

ERC-8004, the Ethereum standard for trustless AI agents, went live on mainnet on January 29, 2026. Created by contributors from MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, Google, and Coinbase, ERC-8004 establishes on-chain registries for AI agent identity, reputation, and validation. Agents can discover each other, build verifiable track records, and collaborate across organizations without centralized intermediaries.

Projects like Autonolas (Olas) enable developers to create and monetize autonomous on-chain agents. Coinbase launched Payments MCP, giving AI agents direct on-chain rails to control wallets and execute transactions independently. Autonomous wallets have emerged as a defining trend of Q1 2026 - AI agents that can monitor DeFi positions, execute trades, and rebalance portfolios without human intervention.

The infrastructure implications are significant. AI agents interacting with DeFi protocols generate RPC calls at machine speed, potentially orders of magnitude more than human users. This drives demand for high-throughput, low-latency RPC infrastructure that can handle sustained bursts of automated queries across multiple chains simultaneously.

Non-EVM Chains Gain Ground

The Move-based chains emerged as credible DeFi ecosystems. Sui reached an all-time high TVL of $2.6 billion (160% YoY growth), roughly double that of Aptos at $1 billion+. Move's resource-oriented programming model treats assets as values that cannot be copied or discarded, eliminating several classes of smart contract bugs common in Solidity.

Aptos has committed over $200 million in grants for DeFi growth and plans MonoMove - a complete VM redesign bringing parallelism improvements - on its 2026 roadmap. Sui's 2026 roadmap pivots toward privacy-focused features including confidential transactions and feeless stablecoin payments.

TON (Telegram's blockchain) presents an interesting contrast: 100 million wallet sign-ups and access to Telegram's 1 billion monthly active users, but DeFi TVL has dropped to $142-300 million. Cross-chain bridges like TON Teleport (targeting mid-2026) aim to unlock that user base for Bitcoin and Ethereum DeFi.

Account Abstraction and Intent-Based Trading

Account abstraction removes one of DeFi's largest UX barriers. Over 40 million smart accounts have been deployed, processing more than 100 million UserOperations. EIP-7702, included in Ethereum's Pectra upgrade (May 2025), allows existing wallets to temporarily behave like smart contracts - enabling gas sponsorship, transaction batching, and social recovery without deploying a new contract. Unlike ERC-4337, which relies on external bundlers, EIP-7702 is integrated directly into Ethereum's core protocol.

Intent-based trading complements this UX shift. Users express desired outcomes ("swap 1 ETH for the maximum USDC"), and specialized solvers compete to fill orders at the best rate. CoW Swap hit $9 billion in monthly volume. UniswapX and 1inch Fusion offer similar execution with built-in MEV protection and zero slippage for users.

Real-World Asset Tokenization

Tokenized real-world assets have reached $35.9 billion on-chain, with projections of $2 trillion by 2030. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan have launched tokenized fund products spanning treasury bills, corporate debt, real estate, and commodities.

RWA tokenization brings traditional financial assets into DeFi's composable infrastructure. A tokenized treasury bill can serve as collateral in a lending protocol, earn yield in a liquidity pool, or trade 24/7 on a DEX. This convergence of traditional and decentralized finance represents the most significant growth vector for the DeFi ecosystem. With 78% of institutional investors reporting interest in regulated staking derivatives, the institutional demand pipeline is clear.

How DeFi Transactions Work Under the Hood

Every swap, loan, and yield farm operation follows the same fundamental infrastructure flow.

Transaction Lifecycle

1. User signs a transaction in their wallet (a swap on Uniswap, a deposit on Aave, a borrow on Compound)
2. Transaction hits an RPC node - the bridge between the application and the blockchain network
3. RPC node validates and submits the transaction to the mempool (the waiting area for unconfirmed transactions)
4. Validators select the transaction for block inclusion, typically prioritizing higher gas fees
5. Smart contract executes - for a swap, this means pulling input tokens from the sender, calculating the output amount via the AMM formula, and sending output tokens to the receiver
6. Transaction is confirmed and state changes become permanent

Why RPC Infrastructure Matters

Every DeFi interaction depends on RPC (Remote Procedure Call) endpoints. Reading pool states, submitting swaps, monitoring collateral positions, checking liquidation thresholds - all require communication between your application and the blockchain through an RPC node.

The infrastructure requirements break down into two categories:

• Full nodes provide real-time blockchain state. They are what your application queries to display current prices, balances, and protocol states.
• Archive nodes store historical state at every block height. They power analytics, backtesting, and any query that needs to read past blockchain states.

For DeFi applications, latency directly affects execution quality. A 50ms delay can mean the difference between a profitable arbitrage and a missed opportunity. One quantitative trading operation found that 400ms of RPC latency cost them 40% of potential captures. Even outside trading, slow RPC responses degrade user experience - a wallet that takes 3 seconds to display your portfolio balance feels broken.

RPC providers serve as the connective tissue between DeFi frontends and the smart contracts they interact with. Dwellir operates dedicated infrastructure across 140+ blockchain networks, running both full and archive nodes that DeFi applications depend on for reading on-chain state and submitting transactions. Because DeFi composability chains multiple protocol calls together in sequence, a single degraded RPC response can cascade into a failed transaction or missed liquidation. Dwellir's flat-rate pricing model is particularly relevant for DeFi workloads, where a single user action like a leveraged yield farm position can trigger dozens of RPC calls across price checks, allowance verifications, and multi-step contract interactions.

The emergence of AI agents in DeFi amplifies these infrastructure demands. Autonomous agents executing strategies across multiple protocols and chains generate RPC traffic at machine speed - sustained bursts of hundreds or thousands of calls per second, 24/7, with no tolerance for degraded responses. Flat-rate pricing becomes essential here, because compute-unit billing turns unpredictable agent activity into unpredictable costs.

Here is a practical example of reading a Uniswap V3 pool's state through Dwellir's Ethereum RPC endpoint using ethers.js:

import { ethers } from "ethers";

// Connect to Ethereum via Dwellir's RPC endpoint
const provider = new ethers.JsonRpcProvider(
  "https://api-ethereum-mainnet.n.dwellir.com/<YOUR-API-KEY>"
);

// Uniswap V3 Pool ABI (simplified - key read functions)
const poolABI = [
  "function slot0() view returns (uint160 sqrtPriceX96, int24 tick, uint16 observationIndex, uint16 observationCardinality, uint16 observationCardinalityNext, uint8 feeProtocol, bool unlocked)",
  "function liquidity() view returns (uint128)",
  "function token0() view returns (address)",
  "function token1() view returns (address)",
];

// USDC/ETH 0.3% pool on Ethereum mainnet
const POOL_ADDRESS = "0x8ad599c3A0ff1De082011EFDDc58f1908eb6e6D8";

async function readPoolState() {
  const pool = new ethers.Contract(POOL_ADDRESS, poolABI, provider);

  // Each call below is an RPC request routed through Dwellir's infrastructure
  const [slot0, liquidity, token0, token1] = await Promise.all([
    pool.slot0(),
    pool.liquidity(),
    pool.token0(),
    pool.token1(),
  ]);

  // Calculate raw price from sqrtPriceX96 (adjust for token decimals in production)
  const sqrtPrice = Number(slot0.sqrtPriceX96);
  const price = (sqrtPrice / 2 ** 96) ** 2;

  console.log("Current tick:", slot0.tick);
  console.log("Active liquidity:", liquidity.toString());
  console.log("Price (token1/token0):", price);
  console.log("Pool unlocked:", slot0.unlocked);
}

readPoolState();

This example makes 4 RPC calls in parallel. A production DeFi application monitoring multiple pools across protocols can easily generate thousands of calls per second.

DeFi Risks You Need to Understand

DeFi's permissionless nature means no guardrails exist beyond what protocols build into their smart contracts.

Smart Contract Risk

Smart contracts are immutable once deployed. A bug in the code is a permanent vulnerability until the contract is upgraded or deprecated. Reentrancy attacks alone have caused $420 million in losses through Q3 2025, and total smart contract exploits have drained over $1.8 billion.

The $1.5 billion Bybit hack accounted for 44% of the $3.4 billion stolen across the industry in 2025 - and it involved compromised operational security, not a smart contract flaw. The $223 million Cetus Protocol exploit (May 2025) demonstrated a different class of risk: a subtle arithmetic overflow bug in a third-party math library allowed an attacker to drain the Sui-based DEX. Around $162 million was frozen and recovered, but the incident highlighted how shared library dependencies create systemic risk across protocols.

Mitigations include professional audits (multiple independent auditors), circuit breaker mechanisms that pause contracts when anomalies are detected, and using battle-tested libraries like OpenZeppelin for standard functionality. Security firm Certora secured nearly $200 billion in DeFi value during 2025, preventing over 700 vulnerabilities.

Impermanent Loss

Impermanent loss reduces your position's value when deposited token prices diverge from their ratio at deposit time. If ETH doubles while you provide ETH/USDC liquidity, your pool position is worth less than simply holding the tokens. The loss is "impermanent" because it reverses if prices return to the original ratio. In practice, for volatile pairs during trending markets, the loss can be substantial and only partially offset by trading fees.

Oracle Risk

Smart contracts cannot access external data natively. Oracles bridge this gap by feeding real-world prices into on-chain contracts. Single-source oracles are vulnerable to manipulation - oracle attacks caused $403.2 million in losses in 2022 alone. Chainlink mitigates this by aggregating data from multiple independent sources. Time-weighted average price (TWAP) oracles reduce short-term manipulation risk but introduce lag.

MEV (Maximal Extractable Value)

MEV refers to profit that validators and searchers extract by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions within a block. The most common form is the sandwich attack: a bot detects your large swap in the mempool, front-runs it (pushing the price up), then back-runs it (selling at the higher price). Protection strategies include private order flow services like Flashbots Protect, batch auctions (CoW Swap), and careful slippage controls. For a deeper technical breakdown, see Dwellir's MEV infrastructure guide.

Flash Loan Attacks

Flash loans allow borrowing any amount of tokens with zero collateral, provided the loan is repaid within the same transaction. While flash loans enable legitimate use cases like arbitrage and collateral swaps, they also enable attacks at scale - an attacker can borrow millions, manipulate a price oracle, exploit a vulnerable protocol, and repay the loan in a single atomic transaction. Flash loan exploits accounted for 83.3% of eligible exploit types in 2024.

Regulatory Risk

The regulatory landscape for DeFi reaches critical deadlines in 2026. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation has an enforcement deadline of July 1, 2026, imposing licensing and compliance requirements on crypto-asset service providers operating in Europe. In the United States, the GENIUS Act requires implementing regulations by July 18, 2026, shifting the approach from enforcement-based regulation toward legislative frameworks.

Permissioned DeFi variants like Aave Horizon create pools where only KYC-verified participants interact, balancing decentralization with regulatory requirements. For developers, the legal status of protocols you build on - and the applications you build - may change. Monitoring regulatory developments in your target markets is a necessary part of DeFi product planning.

The Multi-Chain DeFi Landscape

DeFi is not an Ethereum-only phenomenon. Activity spans multiple chains and Layer 2 networks, each with distinct characteristics.

Ethereum

Ethereum holds approximately 68% of all DeFi TVL, exceeding $70 billion. It remains the institutional hub - hosting the largest lending protocols, the deepest DEX liquidity, and the most battle-tested smart contract infrastructure. Gas fees are higher than alternative chains, but Ethereum offers maximum security and composability.

Dwellir provides both full and archive node access for Ethereum mainnet, along with testnets like Sepolia and Holesky, via endpoints at api-ethereum-mainnet.n.dwellir.com. For DeFi builders on Ethereum, this covers the full range of use cases from reading Uniswap pool states to submitting complex multi-step transactions.

Layer 2 Networks

Ethereum Layer 2s collectively hold $9.05 billion in DeFi TVL. Base leads with 46.6% of Layer 2 market share, followed by Arbitrum at 30.9%. L2s inherit Ethereum's security while offering roughly 90% gas savings compared to L1.

The trend is consolidation. Most smaller L2s risk becoming "zombie chains" as activity concentrates on the few with critical mass of users, liquidity, and developer tooling.

Dwellir supports the major L2 networks where DeFi activity concentrates, including Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, each with archive node access. DeFi applications deployed across L2s can use a single provider and API key for all their RPC needs rather than managing separate infrastructure per chain.

Solana

Solana's DeFi ecosystem holds $9.2 billion in TVL - rivaling all Ethereum L2s combined. Solana generates $1.03 million in daily fees compared to $182,000 for the entire L2 basket, reflecting higher economic activity per dollar locked. Jupiter dominates as the primary aggregator, and Solana's high throughput makes it well-suited for high-frequency DeFi operations and orderbook-style DEXs.

Solana uses a distinct RPC interface from EVM chains. Dwellir does not currently offer Solana RPC endpoints, so teams building on Solana will need a separate provider for that chain.

BNB Chain

PancakeSwap anchors BNB Chain's DeFi ecosystem. Lower transaction costs and strong retail adoption in Asia make BNB Chain popular for applications targeting cost-sensitive users and high-frequency micro-transactions.

Dwellir supports BNB Chain (BSC) with full node access on both mainnet and testnet, making it straightforward to serve DeFi applications across both Ethereum and BNB Chain from a single provider.

Dwellir's Role Across the Multi-Chain DeFi Stack

Building across multiple chains requires infrastructure that supports each network's RPC interface, data formats, and performance characteristics. Dwellir covers 140+ networks from a single platform, including the EVM chains where the majority of DeFi TVL sits: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and many others. All endpoints share the same API key and follow a consistent URL pattern (api-{network}-{variant}.n.dwellir.com), which simplifies multi-chain configuration in production DeFi applications.

For teams running DeFi aggregators, portfolio trackers, or cross-chain yield optimizers, this consolidation reduces operational overhead. Instead of managing credentials and billing across multiple providers, a single Dwellir account covers the infrastructure layer. The flat-rate pricing model removes the unpredictability of compute-unit billing, where a spike in DeFi activity would otherwise translate into unexpected cost overruns. Dwellir's network directory provides a full list of supported chains and endpoint details.

Getting Started as a DeFi Developer

If you are building DeFi applications, your toolchain directly impacts development speed and reliability.

Development Frameworks

• Foundry - Rust-based Solidity development toolkit. Compiles and tests 2-5x faster than JavaScript alternatives. Tests are written in Solidity, which means you test in the same language as your contracts. Forge, Cast, and Anvil cover testing, on-chain interaction, and local node simulation respectively.
• Hardhat - JavaScript/TypeScript framework with extensive plugin ecosystem and superior debugging tools. V3 adds Solidity-native testing alongside its existing JS test support. Many teams use Hardhat and Foundry together in the same project.

Web3 Libraries

• ethers.js - Lightweight, well-documented library for blockchain interaction. The standard choice for frontend DeFi applications.
• web3.js - The original Ethereum JavaScript library. Broader API surface but larger bundle size.
• viem - TypeScript-first library designed for performance and type safety. Increasingly popular for new projects.

Wallet Integration

• MetaMask - Browser extension wallet with the largest install base. The default wallet integration for most DeFi applications.
• WalletConnect - Protocol connecting 700+ wallets to 70,000+ applications. Essential for mobile wallet support.

RPC Infrastructure

Your application's connection to the blockchain is only as reliable as your RPC provider. Key factors to evaluate:

• Uptime SLAs - Production DeFi cannot afford downtime. Look for providers offering 99.9%+ uptime guarantees.
• Latency - Affects everything from user experience to trade execution quality. Sub-100ms response times should be the baseline.
• Multi-chain support - If you are building across Ethereum, L2s, and alternative L1s, managing separate providers for each chain adds operational complexity.
• Pricing predictability - Compute-unit pricing charges different rates per RPC method, making costs hard to forecast. Flat-rate models offer more predictable pricing for teams scaling to millions of requests.
• Redundancy - Multiple RPC providers prevent a single point of failure. Circuit breaker patterns should route around degraded endpoints automatically.

Conclusion

DeFi in 2026 is no longer an experiment. With $130-149 billion in TVL, institutional participation from firms like BlackRock, fee-switch mechanisms finally linking protocol revenue to token holders, and AI agents beginning to execute on-chain autonomously, decentralized finance is an established and growing layer of the financial system.

The past year brought structural changes. Uniswap and Aave activated fee switches, creating transparent revenue-sharing for the first time. Hyperliquid captured 80% of the perp DEX market. EigenLayer scaled restaking to $25 billion. Bitcoin DeFi emerged with Babylon Protocol staking $4.29 billion in native BTC. And ERC-8004 laid the groundwork for AI agents to participate in DeFi trustlessly.

For developers and builders, the opportunity lies in understanding both the financial primitives and the infrastructure layer beneath them. The multi-chain landscape continues to fragment across Ethereum, L2s, Solana, BNB Chain, and emerging Move-based chains like Sui and Aptos. Regulatory frameworks take effect within months. And underneath it all, reliable RPC infrastructure determines whether your application performs or fails.

For teams building DeFi applications that need reliable multi-chain RPC infrastructure, explore Dwellir's supported networks or contact the Dwellir team to discuss your requirements.