According to Kava Labs CEO Brian Kerr, the major reason that decentralized finance, or DeFi, has not yet hit the mainstream is that “93% of holders are never gonna touch their own keys.”
Kava is a non-Ethereum-based DeFi platform that enables users to earn interest on the cryptocurrencies they hold. The investors Kerr hopes to reach are those who used an on-ramp like Coinbase or Binance to buy cryptocurrencies that are now sitting on the exchange. They are “worried about ‘fat-fingering’ and losing their funds in a transfer, or something like that,” he says. Being used to keeping their money in a bank account, these investors prefer to keep their cryptocurrencies on a crypto platform rather than in a hardware wallet.