Empowering universal access to financial services. Your money, your rules.
Copyright© 2026 Anodos Labs Inc. - All Rights Reserved
Empowering universal access to financial services. Your money, your rules.
Copyright© 2026 Anodos Labs Inc. - All Rights Reserved
Articles
27 Feb, 2026
Anodos
Team
7 mins read
After years of innovations and shortcomings, the DeFi sector keeps celebrating record TVL numbers while quietly losing the people it's supposed to serve.
As long as Web3 apps are clunky and unintuitive, the average user simply won't touch them. At Anodos, we believe this divergence reveals DeFi's fundamental problem: the technology works brilliantly for sophisticated capital allocators while remaining impenetrable for everyone else. The industry optimizes for TVL when it should be optimizing for the average person, the usual “Joes”.
Let's talk about what actually happens when someone tries to use a DeFi application today. As of early 2026, unique wallet activity has continued robust growth with global participation expanding significantly, and engagement with decentralized finance protocols remains a core driver of blockchain usage. According to recent industry estimates, that figure is expected to increase to 28 million unique wallet addresses, reflecting continued growth in decentralized finance participation.
The total value locked sits at $130-140 billion in early 2026. At the same time, mobile wallets dominate access to DeFi and Web3, with mobile-first usage patterns now representing the majority of wallet interactions. Various industry reports show that a large share of active crypto users prefer mobile interfaces, and mobile-oriented wallets have seen significant adoption in the broader wallet ecosystem.
But while all that sounds impressive, until you remember that traditional banking serves billions. The gap isn't about awareness, but rather accessibility. Are you curious what makes DeFi so challenging for mainstream users? A Web3 user often needs multiple wallets, must manage complex seed phrases, and navigate interfaces filled with technical jargon that alienates non-experts. Complex financial concepts are difficult to visualize and understand, while multiple confusing options and settings deter engagement entirely.
Moreover, the fragmentation problem persists since different protocols on different chains require different wallet configurations. Then again, gas fees fluctuate unpredictably, and transaction times vary dramatically depending on network congestion. The whole experience feels less like using a seamless financial system and more like piecing together a complicated puzzle where the pieces keep changing shape.
As long as Web3 apps are clunky and unintuitive, the average user simply won't touch them. DeFi wallet addresses rose to 15 million in 2025, but this represents a tiny fraction of the billions who could benefit from superior financial infrastructure if only it were accessible.
And what about actual usage patterns? Over 6.3 million wallets have interacted with Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange, and the average user conducts nearly a dozen transactions monthly.
Here's what makes this particularly striking: while overall wallet counts grew, daily active participation dropped significantly. The data often suggests that fewer people are using DeFi, but they are locking in more money per user, signaling a shift toward larger, more sophisticated investors rather than regular retail participants.
However, this isn't necessarily negative. Have a different look at it: DeFi is maturing from a speculative playground into infrastructure that sophisticated capital allocators trust with serious money. Among all crypto wallet holders in 2026, users aged 18–24 now make up around 28% of the global owner base, signaling that Gen Z remains a strong driver of DeFi and Web3 adoption as accessibility increases.
However, the retail exodus reveals the core problem: current UX serves power users exceptionally well while failing ordinary people completely. Cross-chain DeFi activity increased significantly, but this growth came from experienced users navigating complexity, not from simplification attracting newcomers. The train of progress struggles to climb that mountain.
Perhaps most importantly, TVL itself is increasingly outdated as a metric. In December 2021, DeFi TVL hit an all-time high of $215 billion. Early 2026 figures are putting us 20-40% below that milestone. Yet by almost every other measure, like daily volumes, protocol revenues, and real economic activity, DeFi is far more productive than during 2021's peak!
As lending protocols advance toward unsecured or undercollateralized lending, expect even less capital to sit idle. That means even lower TVL may support even higher usage.
The new DeFis are leaner, faster, more distributed, and more experimental. Protocols generate revenue from actual economic activity rather than relying on perpetual token emissions to bootstrap liquidity. Since 2020, DeFi protocols have distributed $7 to $8 billion in fees directly to liquidity providers, alongside billions more in governance tokens. Uniswap alone has generated nearly $4.9 billion in user fees since 2018, with more than $4.8 billion already paid out to liquidity providers.
Here's where the story gets complex: the technology has matured dramatically while the user experience has barely evolved. While the active monthly user count stands at approximately 100.000 at well-known DeFi suite protocols, it’s pretty impressive in absolute terms, but really minuscule compared to traditional finance.
Are you curious why sophisticated protocols can't attract more users despite superior economics? The answer is user friction. Even tech-savvy millennials struggle with wallet management, gas optimization, and protocol risk assessment. In 2025, around 63% of DeFi borrowers are repeat users, showing sustained platform trust and retention. The industry excels at serving existing users, but it fails at onboarding new ones.
The formula for solving DeFi's UX dilemma isn't really that mysterious: abstract away complexity, remove unnecessary friction, and design interfaces for outcomes rather than mechanisms.
Account Abstraction: As of early 2026, integration between DeFi and traditional financial systems continues to deepen, but the share of DeFi platforms partnering directly with traditional banks for fiat on-ramps and off-ramps remains close to ~19 %, similar to 2025 figures, reflecting gradual but steady collaboration to improve liquidity access and regulatory alignment.
At the same time, true accessibility improvements are accelerating through account abstraction features, such as smart wallets that let users avoid managing seed phrases, enable social recovery options, and allow gas to be paid in any token or sponsored entirely by applications, which are key to lowering friction for mainstream users.
Intent-Based Architecture: Users should specify desired outcomes ("earn maximum yield on stablecoins") while solvers handle execution details (routing across protocols, optimizing gas, rebalancing positions). The technology exists. The adoption doesn't.
Chain Abstraction: Industry reports show cross-chain DeFi activity, driven by bridges and multi-chain support, grew about 52 % in 2025, underscoring the shift toward interoperable finance. However, users still typically have to manually bridge assets and manage wallets per chain, so the platforms most likely to win will make multi-chain interactions feel seamless or invisible to users.
Finally, custodial wallets are now offered by nearly half of the leading DeFi platforms in 2025, catering to institutional investors. This isn't a compromise, as developers are recognizing that different users need different security/convenience trade-offs. The key is offering choice without forcing everyone through the same technical gauntlet.
At Anodos, we've learned something crucial: the protocols winning in 2026 won't be those with the most sophisticated technology, as they'll be those that make sophisticated technology invisible.
When we launched Anodos Wallet with device biometrics via Passkeys, eliminating seed phrase management, we weren't dumbing down self-custody; we were making it accessible to everyone. When we integrated on/offramps on ANODEX, we weren't adding a feature, but removing friction from the user's workflow.
The upcoming integrations with neobank represent this philosophy fully realized: comprehensive financial services through one intuitive application built on blockchain rails for speed and cost-effectiveness. Users won't need to know they're using blockchain any more than they need to understand TCP/IP to browse the web.
The decentralized finance technology market is expected to grow at about 26.20% from 2026 to 2034. DeFi is no longer a niche as it's becoming a borderless, programmable infrastructure touching nearly every continent. However, reaching that potential requires solving the UX dilemma honestly. The divergence between record TVL and declining daily active users is a clear warning signal. DeFi built amazing infrastructure for sophisticated users while leaving everyone else behind.
The industry stands at a crossroads: one path leads toward increasing sophistication, serving an increasingly narrow user base, and the other leads toward genuine mainstream adoption by prioritizing experience over technical purity.
Our motto hasn’t changed: your money, your rules, but implemented through infrastructure so intuitive that the rules become invisible, the technology recedes, and users simply access superior financial services without needing to understand how.
There’s no way of compromising on decentralization. Making decentralization accessible is the only path forward, and accessibility is what transforms revolutionary technology into infrastructure that actually changes the world.
To learn more about how Anodos is solving the Web3 UX dilemma:
Experience XRPL-powered DeFi ANODEX | Learn more at docs.anodos.finance | Follow @AnodosFinance on X!
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