DAS 2021: Could DeFi Make Savings Accounts Obsolete?

With offerings such as yield farming, Vesper’s Matthew Roszak said DeFi could usher in a new era of financial optimization where many people will no longer only use third party intermediaries like retail banks to store their savings

article-image

Source: SHutterstock

share

key takeaways

  • US savings accounts earn an average APY of around 0.06%, according to the FDIC
  • DeFi currently has a total value locked of over $177 billion, according to DeFiLlama

As centralized and decentralized financial markets converge, traditional financial service offerings such as savings accounts could become obsolete, Vesper Finance Co-founder Matthew Roszak said during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit Wednesday.

Roszak said DeFi could usher in a new era of optimization where many people will no longer solely use third-party intermediaries like retail banks to store their capital for an annual percentage yield. (Specifically, savings accounts earn an average APY of around 0.06%, according to the FDIC.)

“I see DeFi as a treadmill for your capital. Your money is always working for you,” Roszak said, citing offerings such as yield farming. “So your capital is always running efficiently based on your risk profile.” 

Roszak described the two coalescing as an “opportunity that’s just too great to dismiss,” but also said the surface area between decentralized finance and traditional finance has “a lot of bridges, roads and tunnels that need to be built.”

“DeFi looks at CeFi and says, ‘Look at all that liquidity.’ Then traditional finance looks at [DeFi] and says ‘20%, 30% yields and it’s sheltered from inflation?’” he said, during the panel. “This is a perfect combo of things to come together.”

The decentralized financial ecosystem still has a ways to go until it significantly changes traditional financial services, said CoinFund’s Head of Growth Vanessa Grellet.

“I want to stress the gap between the two before we try to combine them,” she said in the panel. “On one side, you have open software with developers who are creating innovation and access and in a totally decentralized and permissionless way, and then you have traditional finance who is looking at [DeFi] and saying, ‘Hey, how can I capture those returns? [Those returns] are pretty extraordinary.’”

In August, MetaMask, a popular wallet used by DeFi traders, surpassed 10 million monthly active users, growing 19X in a year. With a total value locked of over $177 billion, capital flowing into the DeFi ecosystem has exponentially grown in recent months.


Are you a UK or EU reader that can’t get enough investor-focused content on digital assets?Join us in London on November 15th and 16th for the Digital Asset Summit (DAS) London. Use code ARTICLE for £75 off your ticket. Buy it now.


Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Nillion_DeSci_Report_Template.png

Research

Nillion’s Monad Integration is poised to catalyze the next phase of DeSci’s evolution by eliminating key privacy bottlenecks. This synergy allows researchers, institutions, and DAOs to exchange sensitive data and insights securely while managing governance and payments onchain.

article-image

Sui Foundation told Blockworks it’s not currently supporting Seed, and Mysten Labs only helped Seed with its smart contracts.

article-image

Bitcoin hit this little-known milestone days before Pizza Day

article-image

Blockworks Research also thinks that net new assets (NNAs) are a metric to keep an eye on

article-image

The Republican-sponsored GENIUS Act has passed a key procedural vote in the US Senate. 

article-image

Cash enables law evasion at a small scale and crypto enables it on a large scale

article-image

Vibe coders are shipping faster than you think