DeFi will survive efforts to make it a walled garden — Fold CEO

Permissionless financial protocols will survive government and corporate efforts to impose traditional financial controls on DeFi.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols will survive government and corporate efforts to impose traditional financial regulations designed to create a walled garden of permissioned digital systems, according to Will Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Bitcoin (BTC) rewards company Fold.
Reeves told Cointelegraph that regulatory proposals requiring DeFi protocols to embed biometric identity checks within smart contracts, or other similar traditional financial (TradFi) regulations, will backfire, as did efforts to control the spread of information on the internet.
He also warned that governments and legacy financial institutions will use TradFi incentives to drive people to permissioned custody through traditional investment vehicles like exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which have benefits over holding crypto directly, including use as collateral for loans. He added:
Source: Cointelegraph →Related News
- Feb 24, 2026
Ethereum Foundation starts staking ETH as client diversity concerns persist
- Feb 24, 2026
‘Bitcoin scarcity is dead’: Crypto executives push back on viral claim
- Feb 24, 2026
Solo Bitcoin miner bags over $200K block reward using rented hashrate
- Feb 24, 2026
Vitalik sells 17K ETH in one month after earmarking $45M for privacy
- Feb 24, 2026
Stablecoin stagnation, tariffs a headwind for Bitcoin prices, analysts say
