DeFi is optimizing for gas, not for markets

DeFi prioritizes gas efficiency over market resilience. Simplified financial logic fails under volatility due to computational constraints.

Opinion by: João Garcia, DevReal lead at Cartesi.

Decentralized finance presents itself as a transparent alternative to Wall Street. Yet, what it has largely reconstructed is a simplified version of finance, engineered less around market resilience than around the constraints of gas fees. That trade-off, once treated as a technical footnote, is increasingly shaping the limits of what DeFi can become.

So long as computational minimalism remains the overriding priority, financial robustness will remain secondary, and periods of market stress will continue to expose that imbalance.

DeFi has rebuilt the familiar architecture of finance, including exchanges, lending markets, derivatives and stablecoins. However, the way these systems function reveals how tightly they are bound by their execution environments.

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