Institutions Back DeFi but Reject Pool and Hub Models

Institutional investors continue to back decentralized finance while expressing a loss of trust in pool and hub models, statements from Morpho co-founder Paul Frambot and an April Bitcoin Suisse report said. The comments followed the KelpDAO exploit and a wave of withdrawals from DeFi.

The KelpDAO hack caused about $292 million in initial losses and triggered more than $15 billion in outflows from DeFi in the days after the incident. Those movements included large withdrawals from some protocols and assets exiting the sector entirely.

Paul Frambot said he contacted major institutions and found broad confidence that assets, payments and loans will move on-chain. He added that institutional players and distributors want control “over the code, over the risk, over the compliance,” and that they have “completely lost trust in pool/hub models.”

The Bitcoin Suisse report, published in April 2026, covers Hyperliquid data from November 2024 through February 2026 and provides market-structure and volume estimates. The 10-page analysis reported about $820 million in revenue for Hyperliquid in 2025 and found the protocol accounted for roughly 41% of open interest in decentralized perpetual futures markets in the covered period. Bitcoin Suisse estimated Hyperliquid processed between 5% and 7% of the total volume handled by centralized exchanges during that timeframe, ranking it behind Binance, OKX and Bybit and ahead of Coinbase.

Industry data cited in the report shows Hyperliquid’s share of open interest has since risen to more than 50%. The protocol recorded a single-month peak of $2.3 billion tied to real-world-asset trading on its HIP-3 market. Hyperliquid is planning an upgrade called HIP-4 to add prediction markets and other products to expand the platform beyond a decentralized exchange, which would place it in direct competition with established prediction-market operators.

DeFi total value locked stabilized in the $83 billion to $85 billion range after the initial panic. The DeFi United recovery fund has recorded roughly 102,646 ETH donated toward a 116,500 ETH goal and has attracted close to $250 million in ETH commitments from cross-protocol stakeholders. Justin Sun announced a joint commitment by the Tron network and HTX exchange of $20 million in USDT to Aave V3 markets. Other public donors include Arbitrum DAO, Mantle, Aave DAO, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Kelp, BGD Labs, LayerZero and Ethena.

Bitcoin Suisse, founded in 2013 and an early participant in Ethereum’s development, also offers trading services for Hyperliquid and other protocol clients. The firm said the report provides a snapshot of market positions through February 2026, with revenue and market-share estimates used by institutions assessing infrastructure and counterparty exposure.

The KelpDAO exploit, the recovery-fund donations and the institutional outreach described by Frambot are recent developments in ongoing capital flows and governance changes within DeFi. Market participants will continue to track total value locked, institutional commitments and protocol roadmaps as the sector develops.