The Ethereum Foundation made its position clear on February 23, 2026. DeFi is not a speculative experiment. It is, the Foundation said in an official blog post, the inevitable evolution of finance.
Financial autonomy is a right, not a privilege. That framing sits at the center of everything the Foundation is now pushing for.
The "Defipunk" Doctrine Nobody Saw Coming
Charles St. Louis and ivangbi are leading the DeFi push inside the Foundation's App Relations team. St. Louis previously led DELV, once known as Element Finance, where he built fixed-rate yield protocols from 2021 through 2025. Before that, he shaped MakerDAO's governance and worked on the DAI stablecoin system.
Ivangbi co-founded Gearbox Protocol in 2021. He came up through Ethereum's DeFi community, going from summoning LobsterDAO in 2018 straight through DeFi Summer. The Foundation is calling this approach "Defipunk," meaning finance that could not exist without Ethereum at all.
Not finance that is slightly better than traditional banking. Completely different.
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Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, warned in the official post that incumbent systems quietly narrow the design space for new DeFi tools. Standards adopted during periods of rapid growth, she said, tend to harden into legacy constraints. Designs that privilege transparency can lock in surveillance by default. The Foundation said it would defend against those pressures.
Ivangbi addressed the tension between institutional adoption and cypherpunk values directly. "As TradFi and institutional adoption on Ethereum accelerate, we must not forget the core principles that built DeFi in the first place," ivangbi wrote, as published on the Foundation's blog. Pragmatism is necessary, but the mission is to scale those values alongside market growth. He described the Foundation as the glueing piece between both worlds.
On X, @ivangbi_ has been publicly engaged with the DeFi community around exactly these tensions. And @CharlieStLouis has been accessible via the Foundation's own channels for builder outreach.
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Privacy as Infrastructure, Not a Feature
Six priorities define the Foundation's 2026 DeFi focus. Builder relationships. Security. Decentralization. Privacy. Standards and risk clarity. Research and content.
The privacy angle is the sharpest break from current norms. The Foundation does not want a private stablecoin. It wants privacy baked into payments for all tokens first, then extended to trading and lending. Privacy as base infrastructure, not something users opt into after the fact.
Security gets equal weight. The Foundation pointed to interfaces, oracles, upgrade mechanisms, admin keys, and discretionary multisigs as points of failure. Exploits don't only hurt individual protocols. They set back the whole space.
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The Foundation also flagged DeFi cross AI, institutional adoption, stablecoins, and entirely new financial primitives as areas on its radar. What if user-controlled AI combined with high-throughput onchain futures markets could solve hedging against future expenses differently? What if privacy-preserving undercollateralized lending becomes real? These are live questions the Foundation is treating seriously, according to the official blog post.
The App Relations team will appear at Digital Asset Summit from March 24 through 26 and at EthCC from March 30 through April 2nd. DeFi teams building on Ethereum can reach the team directly at defi@ethereum.org.
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Open source, composable, verifiable code is the Foundation's baseline standard. Code that can be read, audited, and built upon is code that earns trust. That position alone puts the Ethereum Foundation DeFi investment stance at odds with how most institutional-grade products get built today.
