Institutional DeFi is no longer a slide deck. Tokenized deposits, on-chain repo, cross-border settlement, tokenized bonds and funds, atomic on-chain FX,…
Ask ten bankers what DeFi is and you get ten different answers, most of them defensive. Half describe it as anonymous gambling. The other half describe it as something that will never touch a regulated balance sheet. Both answers are wrong, and increasingly out of date.
While the retail conversation moved on to memecoins, a quieter, far more consequential shift happened: regulated banks began settling real instruments on public and permissioned chains. Not in a sandbox. In production, on real balance sheets, against real capital requirements.
This article is a plain-language walk through the institutional DeFi use cases banks are already running, why they matter, and what "institutional DeFi" really means once you strip away the marketing.