In XT Exchange’s X Space “From Big Capital to Everyday Wallets with Folks Finance,” held in July 2026, the opening question carried weight: most DeFi lending protocols that launched with big numbers and bigger promises wound down a cycle later. Folks Finance launched its mainnet right after Terra Luna collapsed, and kept shipping. Four years, eight chains, and backers including Coinbase Ventures, Jump, and ParaFi later, the team is now building in two directions at once: institutional-grade infrastructure and a mobile app for everyday users.

The conversation explored why a protocol that survived the hardest possible launch window thinks the next phase requires serving both ends of the capital spectrum, and how those two paths converge into one system.

Hosted by Theo (@BitHermitage), with Claudio Sura (@suraclaudio, Marketing at Folks Finance), the conversation surfaced a clear thesis: the protocols that matter next won’t choose between institutions and retail. They’ll build the infrastructure that connects both.

Survival as credential

Folks Finance started on Algorand in 2022, became the leading DeFi protocol on that chain, and then expanded cross-chain, allowing users to lend and borrow across eight networks without manual bridging. The cross-chain mechanics are the product. But the more revealing story is what kept the team building when the market gave them every reason to stop.

Claudio was direct about the lesson:

“We launched the first mainnet right after the Terra Luna crash. That taught us to focus on putting resources into building instead of wasting them on hype. That has always been the most important thing for us.”

In a space where most projects optimize for attention first and product second, Folks Finance inverted the order. Four years of continuous development through a full bear market is the kind of track record that makes the next phase, pointing at institutional capital, credible rather than aspirational.

Two doors, one machine

The next phase has two products. Folks Finance V2 targets institutions. Folks Mobile targets everyone else. They sound like opposite bets. They’re designed to be the same system.

V2 addresses what institutions actually need before they’ll move capital on-chain: control over where their assets go, fixed-rate lending instead of variable, and compliance-ready infrastructure. Current DeFi protocols pool deposits into shared strategies that no institutional mandate would approve. V2 gives allocators the ability to decide, at any moment, what happens with their capital. Fixed rates, a feature institutions take for granted in traditional finance but DeFi has barely explored, are part of the build, alongside protocols like Morpho pursuing the same gap.

Folks Mobile solves the opposite problem. DeFi today is built for power users, the few thousand people worldwide who understand the mechanics deeply enough to use protocols directly. Everyone else is locked out by complexity. The mobile app strips that complexity away: yield access, collateral-backed card spending, and fiat on-ramping, designed to feel closer to Revolut than to a DeFi dashboard.

The connection between the two is the lending infrastructure itself. Institutional capital deposited through V2 generates yield. That yield flows into the mobile app, where retail users access it without needing to understand the plumbing underneath. As Claudio put it, V2 and Mobile are not two separate directions. They’re two doors into the same building.

The balance that decides adoption

The hardest question in the conversation was also the most consequential: how do you add institutional trust features without gutting the decentralization that makes DeFi worth building?

Claudio rejected the binary:

“We can still keep all the benefits, like self-custody and decentralized smart contracts, but we also need to add features that make institutions feel safer. Neither on its own works. You need both.”

The recent wave of DeFi hacks made the argument concrete. More control mechanisms could have prevented some of them. That doesn’t mean reverting to centralized banking. It means building safety features on top of decentralized rails. The institutions evaluating on-chain deployment aren’t philosophically opposed to decentralization. They need to satisfy compliance, risk management, and fiduciary standards that current DeFi simply doesn’t accommodate.

This framing matters beyond Folks Finance. The entire DeFi sector faces the same question as institutional capital approaches: can protocols add the control layer without losing the properties that attracted builders in the first place? The answer will likely decide which protocols survive the next phase and which get bypassed by institutions building their own infrastructure from scratch.

The on-ramp problem no one has solved

Asked what single product experience needs to be reimagined for crypto to reach everyday users, Claudio didn’t hesitate: on-ramping. Getting from a bank account, or even from cash, to crypto remains slow, expensive, and intimidating. Every other UX improvement compounds on top of that first step. If the entry is broken, nothing downstream matters.

Folks Mobile plans to offer direct fiat-to-crypto on-ramping inside the app. It’s not a novel idea. But bundling it with yield access, card spending, and cross-chain lending in a single mobile interface, where users never interact with a DeFi protocol directly, is the kind of full-stack approach that could turn “simpler UX” from a conference talking point into an actual product.

What to watch

Folks Finance V2 is in development. The mobile app waitlist is live. A new institutional landing page is expected in the coming weeks. The broader question the conversation raised isn’t whether institutions will come on-chain, because the capital efficiency argument is too strong to ignore. The question is whether existing DeFi protocols will build the infrastructure those institutions require, or whether the institutions will build it themselves and leave current projects behind.

Claudio’s answer, after four years of building through the worst market conditions DeFi has seen: the future isn’t a war between DeFi and traditional finance. It’s a combination. The protocols that build both doors, for the biggest allocators and the person opening their first app, are the ones worth watching.

Speakers

• Claudio Sura (@suraclaudio), Marketing at Folks Finance. Four years with the project through multiple market cycles. Focuses on how protocol infrastructure connects institutional and retail use cases.
• Theo (@BitHermitage), Host. | Listen to the full Space

About XT Exchange

Founded in 2018, XT Exchange is a leading global digital asset trading platform, serving over 12 million registered users across more than 200 countries and regions, with an ecosystem reach exceeding 40 million. XT Exchange supports 1,300+ tokens and 1,300+ trading pairs, offering a wide range of trading options, including spot, margin, and futures, alongside a secure RWA (Real World Assets) marketplace. Guided by the vision “Xplore Crypto, Trade with Trust,” the platform strives to provide a secure, trusted, and intuitive trading experience.

Join the XT Exchange Community: X (Twitter) | Telegram | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Medium | YouTube

Disclaimer: XT Exchange reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify, amend, or cancel this announcement at any time for any reason without prior notice.