Chain Street (Part 4) - The DeFi Mullet

Part 4 of the five-part Chain Street series tackles Chain Street’s user problem. Roughly 562 million people own cryptoassets but only 60 to 100 million actually use Chain Street’s native services, with most being ideologues or speculators rather than normal users who just want better, faster, and cheaper finance. The early playbook of bootstrapping users with token incentives is over. The path forward is the DeFi Mullet, where fintechs and forward thinking financial services firms close the convenience gap on the front end while Chain Street’s composable, open API protocols power a cheaper, faster, always-on backend. This is already happening at scale across settlement and payments (Visa, Mastercard, Wise, with stablecoin transfer volumes hitting $10T in January 2026), lending and credit (Coinbase routing BTC-backed loans through Morpho, Aave’s Horizon for institutions, JPMorgan accepting BTC and ETH as collateral), yield and savings (BlackRock’s $1.8B BUIDL fund, Nubank, PayPal’s PYUSD vault on Spark), and distribution (Robinhood building on Arbitrum Orbit, Revolut, Coinbase’s Base Pay and Echo). The deeper investment question is whether protocols become TCP/IP, indispensable but uncompensated, or AWS, invisible to users but capturing enormous value through usage based fees. The answer comes down to protocol design, fee mechanisms, defensible liquidity moats, and governance capable of pricing utility, which is the subject of Part 5.