Cointelegraph Consulting survey: Mass DeFi adoption is 3–10 years away

The majority of DeFi projects believe the industry is far away from maturity, but they are sure that mainstream adoption is likely to occur. This was disclosed on Sept. 21 when Cointelegraph Consulting released the results of a DeFi survey in “DeFi Adoption 2020: A Definitive Guide to Entering the Industry.”

The survey showed that 48% of the top projects in the DeFi space expect mainstream adoption to arrive after three to five years, while 8% believe it might take longer than 10 years.

Of all the respondents, 89% agreed with the idea that DeFi is broadly scalable and would eventually achieve mainstream adoption, with another 8% answering that they somewhat disagree with the statement.

The idea that established projects are working under long-term timelines should ease concerns that DeFi is merely a temporary trend. Despite the many quick hard forks and opportunistic developers seeking to capitalize on the recent market frenzy, sustainable progress is still the focus for the larger players in the space.

To further illustrate the infancy of the industry, the survey also revealed that 32% of the DeFi projects earned less than $100,000 in revenue in 2019, with another 24% at a pre-revenue phase. This leaves room for growth as products and platforms become more user-friendly and efficient.

One more critical planning trend involves targeting B2B business models. Although the DeFi industry is mostly adopted by retail users in the current phase, 36% of projects believe institutions will be a crucially important segment for them.

While only a third of the survey’s respondents are planning to remain in the retail segment, other platforms are heading to launch services for institutions (48%), small and medium-sized enterprises (35%), and large enterprises (28%). Moreover, 30% of the DeFi projects are looking to offer services for several segments simultaneously.

The surveyed respondents were executives from the top 50 projects involved with lending, portfolio management, decentralized exchanges, wallets, synthetic assets and more. They were located in 11 countries with 38% in Europe, 33% in North America, and 29% in Asia–Pacific regions, showing a distributed growth pattern in the DeFi industry.

For more insights, download the full report here

The report also covered a number of aspects including leading use cases, platforms and key metrics to follow, helping to raise awareness and provide more educational materials on the emerging industry.