DeFi Infrastructure for Institutional Adoption | Igor Lilic - Veda

Hello, good afternoon. Um, my name is Igor Lilich. I am the data science lead at VETA and um, VETa builds vault infrastructure on Ethereum. Um, we have some of the largest vaults under TVL with some of the biggest partners in the in the industry. And I'm here to talk about ETH as infrastructure and why everything else is a meme.

Um, if you've ever been to one of my talks, I like to give history lessons or do historical comparisons. And um you know we like crypto, we like tokens, we like Ethereum, but honestly it is a technology at the end of the day and uh history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes. And so using uh comparatives, historical comparatives is a interesting way to think about how these technologies evolve. And so, you know, this little penguin here is uh the mascot for Linux, which is a operating operating system server infrastructure play. Um and in 1990 911 um Lionus to Tarvald the founder of Linux he posted saying I want to build an operating system hobbyist hobbyist project out of nowhere no hype no token just his community of builders um and as time progressed more and more people joined the cult more and more people started building and by today's standards Uh it's an overwhelming success.

Over 50 over 45% of all server infrastructure in the world runs Linux. Um if you watch Netflix, it'll be Linux machines. If you're on anything, you're probably using Linux. Um and so it's an infrastructure adoption story. Um from the institutional side, I don't think anyone here maybe maybe at ET Denver with builders people run Linux.

Uh but I don't know if anyone's actually running Linux on their desktop. Um, so it is an institutional adoption story. It's not a retail adoption story. Linux was able to win the institutional side without really even scratching the retail side. Okay, so how does that apply to Ethereum?

Well, before we go to Ethereum, I want to talk a little bit about Bitcoin. Um, and you know, I've gone back and forth between Bitcoin in my in my time. Uh, but I'm personally ready to call it, you know, call it for what it is. Bitcoin is a meme token. It's all it is.

It's a proofof work six fixed supply meme. And you know, my spicy take is it's actually holding the industry behind. And I won't go too deep into why I think that is, but if you catch me afterwards, I'll explain myself. But it is evident that Bitcoin is not a serious place to build. I think if you search something like lightning network volume on Google and you get the top result, I think Bitcoin magazine said in November of 2025 there was a billion dollars of volume on the lightning network.

Uh compare like Ether does you know hundreds of billions of dollars per month easily. At peak I think we've done half a trillion close to it. And so it's not even a comparable uh it's it's not even apples to oranges. It's just Bitcoin is a meme and Ether is actually real infrastructure. Um and so yeah, I am I am starting to lean back into my ETH acceleration arc.

Uh I won't even talk about agents, but you know, obviously I think we all know agents are just going to be a thing and they're going to be a thing on Ethereum. Um, and I'm definitely stepping into my ETH maxi. Uh, I think this is the cycle of the flipping and like, uh, I'm not shy about it anymore because, you know, anyways, I'll get off that soap box. Um, but why ETH? Why like why am I so, you know, uh, such an ETH maxi?

It's not ideology, it's engineering. Okay. Um, boring infrastructure sometimes is the most important infrastructure. Um, and you know, there's a couple of components that make Ethereum what it is, right? So, first of all, Ethereum isn't one spec.

Ethereum is a layered system of interfaces um and interfaces that are open. Like, uh, I've been here for a long time. I was joking. Uh, me and some of the friends, my friends are actually in the museum, uh, here at ETH Denver when you walk in the Ethereum Museum. um through the process of Ethereum's growth, you could participate in the governance.

You can propose things, you can make impact, you can actually create change. It's open, it's an open spec that continuously evolves. Uh which is one amazing and then two like how how technologies like this grow. Again, going back to the Linux thing, it was the same thing. Lionus said, "All right, if you want to write code, if you want to commit changes, like if it makes the thing better, you know, go for it."

Um, the second thing that makes Ethereum a true infrastructure and especially for institutions is it might be underrated uh for those that don't actually like build too often on Ethereum, but on Ethereum, you can reconstruct exactly what happened and why. So determin deterministic educ execution with full event logging. Um this is also like why I don't think Salana is a true long-term institutional play. Also maybe a spicy comment but if you've built on Salana you don't have the historical record of logs for the blockchain that you can just query on Salana. You can find thirdparty service providers that give you that data and charge you a fee for it.

But you cannot get it natively from the execution environment. And from an institutional perspective, this is a huge deal. Okay, it's a huge huge deal because uh when it comes to audit and compliance etc. uh you need that traceability. Um so the third thing it's a native rails for liquidity.

I mean stable coins were born on Ethereum. Ethereum created stable coins. It wasn't Bitcoin. It wasn't it wasn't anything else. It was Ethereum.

And the growth of stable coins uh is tremendous. I mean whatever the price is today of Ethereum doesn't matter. We're all-time highs in stable coin adoption volume etc. and continuously growing. Uh turns out that liquidity just wants to find places that it can flow.

You know, Bruce Lee always be like water, right? Well, if money and liquidity is like water, uh the place it wants to flow to are the rails that support it and that's Ethereum. And then finally, yeah, like the open foundation program programmability um you know the the Ethereum foundation is iterating and going through its growing pains etc. But it has remained an open place. Ethereum remains an open ethos um that anyone can build on.

Okay. So what are the practical adoption stories for this infrastructure? Um we're on the neo bank meta in February of 2026, right? So the first wave of metas were the exchanges and then the ETFs and then the third waves were the DATs. Going back to why I think Bitcoin is holding us back, I think DATs are a terrible idea.

Again, not too important for this talk. Current wave is neo banks. Um, neo bankanks are emerging and they're emerging onchain. So, VA provides infrastructure for all three of these partners. Um, EtherFi, the first uh non-custodial liquid staking and restaking tool with over 5 billion in TVL.

Um, we just launched vaults with Kraken here in January. Our Kraken vaults have steadily increased in TVL and they're currently over 70 million in TVL in about 3 weeks during a bare market. Um, you know, it's one of the growth stories of Q1 of 2026. And you know, Kraken is finding their liquid yield products to be a destination for their customers and creating new value for their customers. And Plasma we launched in Q4 of 2025.

Um, you know, and this is this is another example of a neo bank. You know, Plasma kind of leans into the neoank meta specifically, but it's one of these neo banks that's using Ethereum infrastructure to build next generation products for their users. And so, you know, going back to Veta and what we do, um, we we are building the plumbing for the Neoank era. So, we have over 120 volt deployments. Uh, we do crosschain yield routing.

are we are building compliance ready architecture with white labels for neo banks and this is all enabled by Ethereum and so going back to the analogy why is Ethereum going to win why do I not have any fears about the competitor chains why do I not worry about bare market prices well again you could use history as an analogy in 91 one, it was a uh Linux was a hobbyist project posted to a mailing list and then you know it took a long time to incubate. Community was building around it creating patches and new releases, forks, if you want to talk about forks, the Linux ecosystem has tons of forks, tons of L2s, tons of DRO they call them. Um, and it's a healthy competition. It makes the whole underlying infrastructure better to have people experiment and break off the main branch and create their own versions and you know some of them fail some of them succeed and that's like part of innovation. Um but yeah by 99 Red Hat which is a very large Linux distribution uh packages it sells it to enterprises um IBM and you know by 2010 it just becomes invisible.

We actually don't really talk about Linux anymore. Even like as engineers, it's just kind of like it's kind of just like disappeared. But uh it's still massively impactful and it's just become base layer infrastructure for the world's technology. And my argument is that Ethereum is going to go through the same path, right? So, the protocol origins, the white paper, um, you know, mailing list, I think back back in 2014, 2013, 2014, Skype was where everyone was hanging out.

There's a lot of Skype rooms. Um, but yeah, we we grow up, we go through the incubation phase, the ICO era, um, NFTTS, CryptoKitties. I remember when CryptoKitties came out, the doomers were saying, "Oh my god, Ethereum can't even handle digital cats or whatever. Uh, the cats are clogging Ethereum. Like, it's a failed project."

And it's like, "No, CryptoKitties was the first stress test. It's how technology works." Like, you need stress tests volume to see where the thing falls over. And then, you know what you do? You put your head down, you go to hackathons and you go to events and you just keep building and you keep building and you keep building and you keep innovating and you know, CryptoKitties, rest in peace.

You know, maybe maybe they'll make a comeback at one point, but it was this um initial testing ground and what did we get after? we got the NFT phase uh 3 years later and so you know we just continue to keep iterating and keep iterating and by 2024 you know the spot ETF was approved in 2015 the idea of a spot ETF was just unimaginable and then now you know we just take it for granted of course there's spot ETFs of course there's that and of course we can do you know we're fighting for legislation um you know the stable act obviously ly huge thing. The Clarity Act currently in progress will also unblock the next wave of innovation in the United States for for crypto adoption. And you know, like at some point, just like we don't talk about Linux anymore, I think we get to a point where we don't talk about Ethereum. I mean, we will because we're, you know, Ethmaxis and we're nerds and we like the culture and, you know, we like the other aspects of the Ethereum community, but the adoptions will just treat it as infrastructure.

Everyone will have an EVM indexing product. Everyone will have protocol bindings. Everyone will have, you know, alerting and monitoring and the boring stuff that you have to build um for the institutional adoption. And so, you know, if you use Linux as an example, it didn't win with hype. It wasn't about cultural wars and you know globe trotting superstars that are buying you know Linux swag and showcase.

No, it became it won by becoming the thing that every institution depended on and Ethereum is having that moment right now. And so that's it. Thank you.