The Ethereum Foundation has announced the formation of a new DeFi team within its App Relations division, dedicated to advancing privacy-focused and permissionless protocols. The team will be led by Charles St. Louis, former CEO of DELV and ex-MakerDAO governance architect, who joins as a DeFi protocol expert. Ivan, co-founder of Gearbox Protocol, will serve as the DeFi coordinator.
The new cluster's mission is to support projects aligned with the "DeFipunk" philosophy, emphasizing censorship resistance, self-custody, and open-source development. The team will provide research support, networking, and showcase platforms for ecosystem projects. Key focus areas include user-controlled AI, high-throughput on-chain futures, futarchy DAOs, and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) private credit lending. This initiative will collaborate closely with the Ethereum Privacy Cluster, which was reorganized last year.
In parallel, major established DeFi protocols demonstrated significant growth and institutional traction throughout February 2026. Uniswap (UNI) launched seven new AI "Skills" for agent integration and saw its v4 hook with Bankr achieve $100 million in volume within two weeks. The protocol also attracted institutional attention, with BlackRock reportedly purchasing UNI tokens.
Aave (AAVE) surpassed a major milestone by integrating over $1 billion in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) into its lending ecosystem. It also completed its fourth security audit, strengthening its appeal to institutional players looking at blockchain-based credit markets.
Chainlink (LINK) focused on regulatory engagement and RealFi integration, contributing to policy discourse in the U.S. and helping form a RealFi-specific alliance aimed at standardizing cross-chain data and compliance frameworks.
Looking ahead, Ethereum developers have announced plans for the FOCIL protocol upgrade, expected in the second half of 2026. This upgrade is designed to enhance censorship resistance by requiring blocks to include validated transactions from randomly chosen validators. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also proposed user experience enhancements, including a "transaction simulation" feature for wallets and expressed a vision for more integrated "native rollups" to address Layer 2 fragmentation.
