Aave Founder Stani: DeFi Wins Through Popularity

Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of the decentralized lending protocol Aave, commented after the failure of the CLARITY Act vote, stating, "The CLARITY Act has failed, and now DeFi needs to win through its own level of popularity."

According to previous reports, the CLARITY Act indeed failed to pass in the Senate that day—investment bank TD Cowen had predicted a 60% chance of the bill failing, and Senator Cynthia Lummis had warned that if the bill failed, it would be "over" for the U.S. Meanwhile, the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, French Hill, and the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, had expressed optimism about the vote, which ultimately contradicted their expectations.

Kulechov suggested that the DeFi industry should shift its focus from "waiting for clear legislation" to "creating products that millions truly need." Once DeFi products become "important enough to be ignored," regulation will naturally be forced to catch up.

He compared this approach to the "Uber path"—where Uber initially operated in a legal gray area or even directly violated taxi regulations in multiple cities, rapidly expanding its market through user scale and product stickiness, ultimately forcing regulatory agencies to adjust or redefine ride-hailing regulations to legalize it.

From a market mechanism perspective, Kulechov's statement effectively provides an alternative funding and development narrative for the DeFi industry following the failure of the CLARITY Act—if the path to regulatory clarity is blocked, the next allocation logic for industry capital and development resources will shift from "betting on regulatory dividends" to "betting on the established barriers created by user scale and product stickiness"; under this path, leading DeFi protocols that can quickly accumulate large numbers of real users and transaction volumes will gain a first-mover advantage, as once the user scale is large enough, the political cost of regulators actively halting or strictly limiting operations will also rise. Who benefits: leading DeFi protocols with a large user base and liquidity scale can continue to expand during periods of regulatory uncertainty with a "user scale as a moat" approach; who is under pressure: emerging protocols and compliance service providers that originally hoped to enter the market after the CLARITY Act passed, lacking prior user accumulation, may need to readjust their market entry timelines based on the previous expectation of "regulatory clarity."

Source: Public Information