DeFi’s next institutional wave may come from users who never see “behind the scenes” – CEO of Katana
Katana CEO Matt Fisher says DeFi’s next wave may come from products that hide the protocols underneath.For years, DeFi's growth strategy was to pull users on-chain, and the next institutional wave is testing where users may never know they're touching DeFi at all.
Matt Fisher, CEO of Katana, shared with CryptoSlate how the front end owns the user. If a credit card, a fintech app, or an exchange routes deposits into Morpho or another lending protocol, the customer remembers the card.
The credibility problem underneath the optimism
Fortune reported that Morpho closed a $175 million raise on June 9, backed by Paradigm, a16z crypto, Ribbit Capital, VanEck, Apollo Global Management, and Circle Ventures, among others spanning crypto-native funds and traditional finance.He was referring to the Drift and KelpDAO exploits, which TRM Labs linked to North Korean state actors and which together accounted for roughly 76% of 2026's hack losses through April.
The KelpDAO hit was estimated at around $290 million, built on unbacked rsETH used as collateral across Aave, Compound, and Euler. The episode resulted in $200 million in bad debt on Aave, which demanded a joint effort from protocols and retail users to cover.
Composability, which makes DeFi efficient by enabling capital to move faster via shared liquidity and cross-protocol collateral, was the cause of the bad debt.
A failure in one corner of the system cascades through markets with no direct exposure to the original problem.