Just reading an interesting piece of news about how the Ethereum Foundation is taking DeFi seriously. They’ve created a specialized team to promote what they call “DeFipunk”—a concept that DeFi should be fundamentally different from traditional financiality.

It’s interesting who they appointed to it. They hired Charles Saint-Louis as DeFi Protocol Specialist—he previously was the CEO of DELV, a company that developed the governance architecture for MakerDAO. The person clearly has serious experience in this area. Working alongside him will be Ivan (ivangbi), one of the founders of Gearbox Protocol, who has taken the position of DeFi Coordinator. Jason Chaskin will provide overall leadership for this work.

The point is that true DeFi, in the Foundation’s view, should be permissionless, resistant to censorship, privacy-focused, self-custodied, and open source. These aren’t just nice words—they indicate that they will support projects that genuinely adhere to these principles, not just pose as decentralized.

Saint-Louis shared an interesting opinion: DeFipunk isn’t about making traditional financiality better with blockchain. It’s about creating a financial system that can exist exclusively on Ethereum, which requires decentralization as its foundation, not as an added feature. It sounds ambitious, but that’s exactly the direction in which DeFi should be developing.