Nikolas Sargeant
The past eighteen months have produced an unlikely consensus within the realm of financial technology, i.e. dashboards are good. And, while this default interface is being used for everything (be it brokerage accounts or DeFi protocols), its design ceiling has started to be crafted. Consequently, the next phase of on-chain growth seems to be here and is being driven by text-based interfaces where users can literally talk to their platforms as they would another human being.
That shift is playing out across multiple verticals simultaneously as the AI agent economy(spread out across 150 active DeFAI projects) has already grown to become a $28 billion industry over the past year. Not only that, during Q1 alone, 68% of new DeFi protocols launched with built-in AI agent functionality, showing that the sector has settled on conversational interaction as the architecture most likely to bring the next cohort of users on-chain.
For crypto, this matters more given DeFi's long-standing adoption ceiling has never been a product-market fit problem in the abstract but rather an interface fit problem for the specific population that still needs to be reached. The user who already understands liquidity pools and manages a hardware wallet represents a small slice of the people with meaningful investable assets. Everyone else interacts with their finances through apps requiring nothing more technically demanding than a tap or a short text input.
Why Dashboards Have Hit a Wall in DeFi
A traditional brokerage's recurring investment function involves selecting an asset and a frequency, then stepping back while the platform executes. Replicating that behaviour in DeFi currently requires navigating multiple protocol interfaces, connecting a wallet from an EVM-compatible network, handling any cross-chain bridging if assets sit elsewhere, and even monitoring positions against sudden dislocations (such as the one that drove over $1.7 billion in liquidations across EVM-compatible networks last year).
For anyone not already comfortable with on-chain infrastructure, that is not a learning curve but a clear barrier. And the platforms that have tried to lower it through cleaner dashboards have found that simplifying the visual presentation of complexity does not resolve the underlying coordination problem.
What appears to solve this problem is removing the interface layer that requires users to understand the system they are interacting with, and replacing it with one that requires nothing beyond a plain-language instruction.
The Case for Conversational DeFi is Clear
Allaying many of the above-mentioned bottlenecks is CoinFello, a platform that connects to all EVM-compatible wallets and also allows account creation through email or phone number, removing a meaningful portion of the onboarding friction that has historically stopped non-crypto users at the first step.
From there, users can interact with the platform through a chat interface in which DCA instructions are processed as plain-language inputs. So, a prompt like "buy $100 of ETH every two weeks using my stablecoin balance" is treated as a structured instruction, with the full execution path presented to the user before anything touches their funds.
Importantly enough, custody remains with the user throughout the process. DCA automation here does not require open-ended wallet delegation, which has created significant risk exposure in other agentic architectures. Users retain visibility into exactly what is happening on-chain at each stage of execution, a design decision that reflects the founder Jacob Cantele’s background directly.
Cantele previously served as Lead of Operations at MetaMask with Consensys, bringing direct institutional experience with the specific points at which most crypto products lose the users who might otherwise benefit from them.
It is worth noting that DCA automation is currently the live capability on CoinFello, with the platform building toward a broader suite of automation tools as the product matures.
The Numbers Speak for Themselves
The market validation for conversational on-chain automation is no longer theoretical since Walbi, operating on a comparable interface model, has already processed 187,000 autonomous trades during a recent 14-week beta period.
What this means going forward is that the DeFAI category is not just a design trend but an attempt to close the structural reason most crypto users still manage positions manually despite the existence of the tools to do otherwise. CoinFello's model, built around a non-custodial execution architecture, sits at the centre of where the evidence suggests the next phase of on-chain adoption is most likely to happen. Interesting times ahead!
