VIDEO - Stani Kulechov (Aave): "Traditional financial institutions will continue to flock to DeFi"

16.09.2024
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As part of our "season" devoted to the state of play of the leaders in decentralised finance (Aave, Maker, Uniswap, etc.), we spoke to Stani Kulechov, founder of the Aave protocol.

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Spearheading innovation during the previous bull run, the major decentralised finance protocols (DeFi) have spent the last few months structuring themselves to better meet institutional demand. This week, The Big Whale takes a look at the key developments in this sector since it took off in 2020.

In this context, we spoke to one of its leading figures, Stani Kulechov. Founder of ETHLend (renamed Aave in 2018), he is also CEO of Avara, the parent entity of the ecosystem comprising Aave, Lens (a decentralised social networking protocol), and GHO (Aave's decentralised stablecoin).

"When ETHLend was launched, explaining DeFi to institutional investors was a challenge. Today, all of them have teams dedicated to digital assets and the pace of change is accelerating," he recalls.

"We are talking to many traditional players who will continue to flock to DeFi. Those who can position themselves quickly, as BlackRock is doing now, will be able to grab the biggest market shares," predicts the Finnish entrepreneur.

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Louis Tellier

Louis Tellier is Lead Institutional Research at Blockstories, where he focuses on developing the institutional offering for digital assets. He joined Blockstories in April 2025. Blockstories was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in Berlin, with presence in France and Switzerland.

Prior to joining Blockstories, Tellier worked as a crypto journalist at The Big Whale from August 2023 to January 2025, covering crypto and blockchain topics. Before that, he was a journalist at L'AGEFI from May 2022 to July 2023, specialising in cryptocurrencies. Earlier in his career, he worked as a web and video journalist at BFM Business and as a video journalist at Le Figaro. He also taught journalism at IICP in Paris for three and a half years, with a focus on web video journalism. Tellier is a graduate of Sciences Po Grenoble and the University of Lille.

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