66% of Wall Street is Already in DeFi | Paradigm’s 2025 Survey with Dan Robinson & Justin Slaughter
In this episode, we unpack Paradigm’s groundbreaking 2025 report, “TradFi Tomorrow: DeFi and the Rise of Extensible Finance,” with Paradigm’s Dan Robinson and Justin Slaughter.
We explore the stunning stat that 66% of traditional financial institutions are actively engaged with DeFi—and what that really means. From tokenization and stablecoins to regulatory clarity and decentralized exchanges, this conversation dives deep into how Wall Street is already integrating with crypto.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
7:10 What Constitutes a TradFi Firm
10:13 TradFi Firms with Defi
12:16 What's Exciting about this Report?
13:53 Stablecoins, Tokenization & More
18:54 Public Blockchains & TradFi?
21:05 “Tokenize The World” Moment?
27:47 TradFi’s Long-Term Outlook
33:19 The Formal Rejection of Private Blockchains
38:31 What’s Left for Regulation &Compliance
45:04 DeFi vs TradFi
48:07 User Value
50:55 Closing & Disclaimers
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RESOURCES
Paradigm Report
https://www.paradigm.xyz/2025/03/tradfi-tomorrow-defi-and-the-rise-of-extensible-finance
Dan Robinson
https://x.com/danrobinson
Justin Slaughter
https://x.com/JBSDC
Paradigm
https://x.com/paradigm
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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
The New DeFi Meta with Paradigm’s Head of Research, Dan Robinson
Dan Robinson is GP and Head of Research at Paradigm. He, over the years, has done a lot of deep thinking about markets, auctions, and liquidity in DeFi, with a particular focus on Uniswap and Uniswap V3. Recently, Uniswap Labs released UniswapX, a new dutch auction mechanism, that Dan thinks changes the meta for swapping assets in DeFi, MEV, chain interoperability, and much more.
The last time Dan was on Bankless was September 2020…almost 3 years ago! If you have ever heard Ryan or I say the phrase “Ethereum is a dark forest”...it came from that episode.
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------ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro 6:00 Why UniswapX is Needed 11:09 What’s New About UniswapX? 14:00 Intents 16:25 The Magic Behind MEV Reduction 20:00 Order Flow Auctions 26:25 It’s Still Early 33:05 Who Are the Nanobots? 37:42 How Rollups Will Change 42:22 How Bridges Will Change 49:55 UniswapX Complements Uniswap v4 53:30 What Uniswap v4 Do for LPs? 59:15 LPing with Uniswap v4 vs. v3 1:04:11 Uniswap’s App Layer & Yields 1:06:05 Why Be Excited About Suave 1:09:55 Closing & Disclaimers
------ RESOURCES
Dan Robinson https://twitter.com/danrobinson https://twitter.com/danrobinson/status/1681061703818305536
------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
SaaStr 663: 9 Things I Wish I Would Have Told My 2013 Self: Lessons Learned from 9 Years with Heap's Former CTO, Dan Robinson
You'll never truly understand how to lead a SaaS company until you've done it firsthand. But it always helps to get advice from someone with experience.
Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap, shares nine essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business.
Watch the video: https://youtu.be/FXdPe6tGE3A
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"V3 is Winding Back a Bit of the Uniswap Revolution; It's Going to be Very Influential:" Dan Robinson
In this week’s episode we speak with Dan Robinson, a research partner at Paradigm, one of the most active VC funds in DeFi and crypto. One of the fund’s investments is Unsiwap, where Dan also had a central role in the design of v3, the latest version of DeFi’s most popular decentralized exchange. Dan talks about why Uniswap was so exciting as an investment, and about what drove the change to v3. He believes the new design will impact DeFi and crytpo, while rolling back the very revolution Uniswap itself prompted by creating a more hybrid model.
** Because of connectivity issues, the sound cuts off at times – huge apologies for that. We're providing a public transcript to make up for it.
Big thanks to our sponsors:
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Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!
Enzyme provides an easy way to build, scale and monetize DeFi investment strategies
Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi
Aave, an open source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets
SotN#16 - EXPLORING w/ Dan Robinson (Mempool Monsters, Optimism Launch, MEV, ETH/BTC Correlation with legacy, KuCoin Hack, FEW, Spinalda)
Fill out the questionnaire! https://forms.gle/aiWfvAvePx5qGJkC9 ----
🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: 🌐 UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS - HUMAN READABLE ETHEREUM & CRYPTO ADDRESSES https://bankless.cc/unstoppable 🌈 ZAPPER - ULTIMATE HUB FOR DEFI - ZAP INTO DEFI http://bankless.cc/zapper 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 🌈AAVE - LEND & BORROW YOUR CRYPTO W/O A BANK https://bankless.cc/aave ------ State of the Nation is EXPLORING, special guest Dan Robinson of Paradigm. 1) ETHEREUM'S DARK FOREST Short article from Dan: https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ecc5f0505dff Unofficial Part 2 From samczsun https://samczsun.com/escaping-the-dark-forest/ 2) OPTIMISTIC ROLLUPS LIVE! Launch post!https://medium.com/@optimismPBC/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-c390a05bbcb8 3) LIGHTNING ROUND - Why isn't crypto uncorrelated w/ stocks? - KuCoin hack showed who's centralized - $FEW and $EMN - Spinalda Testnet ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case.
Why Decentralized Trading Has 10Xed in a Few Months - Ep.188
Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, and Dan Robinson, research partner at Paradigm, discuss the explosion in decentralized exchange activity on automated market makers from $1 billion earlier this year to more than $10 billion in August.
Why trading in automated market makers has 8xed in a few months
how automated market makers work, and how specific dexes can specialize for the assets being traded on them
why traders would prefer to trade on a dex vs. a centralized exchange
how incentivized pools have drawn traders and liquidity
why trading on a dex seems can be more appealing than on a centralized exchange
why trading on dexes now mirrors trading on Binance in 2017
how "DeFi is the hottest coolest place where people are making a lot of money"
the difference between the metrics of liquidity, trading volume and total value locked for a dex
why AMMs are capital inefficient
what it means that fees paid on Uniswap are about half of those paid on Bitcoin
what the purpose of liquidity mining is
why Haseeb doesn't think that dexes have network effects and that once professional market makers come in the space, Uniswap will lose market share
whether users will use DeFi directly through the dexes or through another interface
why Dan thinks that DeFi is now comparable to financial investment in the 1970s
whether or not yield aggregators like yEarn make it harder for AMMs to compete
what happened with the CRV token launch
initial dex offerings or initial DeFi offerings, like the UMA token launch
whether, because of the high fees on Ethereum and the how long its transition to Ethereum 2.0 will take, DeFi activity could move to another blockchain such as Solana
where DeFi will go over the next few years
Thank you to our sponsor!
Crypto.com: http://crypto.com
Episode links:
Haseeb Qureshi: https://twitter.com/hosseeb
Dan Robinson: https://twitter.com/danrobinson
Haseeb’s post on the rise of AMMs: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/what-explains-the-rise-of-amms-7d008af1c399
Haseeb's post on how Uniswap could be un-bundled: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/unbundling-uniswap-the-future-of-on-chain-market-making-1c7d6948d570
Dex volume: https://defiprime.com/dex-volume
Trading volume on centralized exchanges: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/74539/july-by-the-numbers-a-look-at-crypto-exchange-volumes-open-interest-and-miner-revenue
Incentivized pools: https://pools.fyi/#/?tag=incentivized
Top dexes by trading volume: https://www.coingecko.com/en/dex
Ethereum transaction fees: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html
Uniswap website visits 15x in July: https://messari.io/article/uniswap-total-website-visits-grew-15x-in-july
Website traffic to DeFi platforms explodes in July: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/74231/defi-platforms-web-traffic-july
Fees paid to various crypto projects: https://cryptofees.info
Curve reaches $1 billion in TVL: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/75014/curve-becomes-third-defi-protocol-to-hit-1-billion-in-total-value-locked
The Block on dex aggregators: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/69468/dex-aggregators-user-experience
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User Analytics In Depth At Heap with Dan Robinson - Episode 36
Summary
Web and mobile analytics are an important part of any business, and difficult to get right. The most frustrating part is when you realize that you haven’t been tracking a key interaction, having to write custom logic to add that event, and then waiting to collect data. Heap is a platform that automatically tracks every event so that you can retroactively decide which actions are important to your business and easily build reports with or without SQL. In this episode Dan Robinson, CTO of Heap, describes how they have architected their data infrastructure, how they build their tracking agents, and the data virtualization layer that enables users to define their own labels.
Preamble
Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Dan Robinson about Heap and their approach to collecting, storing, and analyzing large volumes of data
Interview
Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you start by giving a brief overview of Heap?
One of your differentiating features is the fact that you capture every interaction on web and mobile platforms for your customers. How do you prevent the user experience from suffering as a result of network congestion, while ensuring the reliable delivery of that data?
Can you walk through the lifecycle of a single event from source to destination and the infrastructure components that it traverses to get there?
Data collected in a user’s browser can often be messy due to various browser plugins, variations in runtime capabilities, etc. How do you ensure the integrity and accuracy of that information?
What are some of the difficulties that you have faced in establishing a representation of events that allows for uniform processing and storage?
What is your approach for merging and enriching event data with the information that you retrieve from your supported integrations?
What challenges does that pose in your processing architecture?
What are some of the problems that you have had to deal with to allow for processing and storing such large volumes of data?
How has that architecture changed or evolved over the life of the company?
What are some changes that you are anticipating in the near future?
Can you describe your approach for synchronizing customer data with their individual Redshift instances and the difficulties that entails?
What are some of the most interesting challenges that you have faced while building the technical and business aspects of Heap?
What changes have been necessary as a result of GDPR?
What are your plans for the future of Heap?
Contact Info
@danlovesproofs on twitter
dan@drob.us
@drob on github
heapanalytics.com / @heap on twitter
https://heapanalytics.com/blog/category/engineering?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Parting Question
From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Links
Heap
Palantir
User Analytics
Google Analytics
Piwik
Mixpanel
Hubspot
Jepsen
Chaos Engineering
Node.js
Kafka
Scala
Citus
React
MobX
Redshift
Heap SQL
BigQuery
Webhooks
Drip
Data Virtualization
DNS
PII
SOC2
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
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