Maple Finance CEO Sidney Powell says that it could take just a decade for decentralized finance (DeFi) to explode 100x in size while replacing traditional finance (TradFi) companies along the way.

In a new interview with Scott Melker, the co-founder of the DeFi lending platform says that the decentralized finance sector could grow exponentially by creating more financial products and adding real-world assets as collateral.

“When I look at DeFi, we’re a really small rounding error on the total financial system at the moment of just the US, let alone the world. How does DeFi chart a path to take over most of the financial system? It needs to have a greater variety of products. So you can’t just only rely on over-collateralized lending, because then it’s constrained by the market cap of all of the crypto assets.

That’s where things like real-world assets come into it, because then if you could lend in DeFi but collateralized with something in the real world, you can then write a $10 million loan without needing $10 million of Bitcoin or ETH (Ethereum) pledged against it. That’s one thing that helps.”

He also says that regulatory clarity and guidelines on how to operate in DeFi could open up the space to large traditional financial institutions, which could spark massive DeFi growth.

“Banks and other large financial players that are continually reluctant to use smart contracts, touch crypto assets, because of what they perceive as this kind of regulatory sword of Damocles hanging over their head if they do. If they were to use it, then it’s not hard to see a world in which DeFi is 100 times larger in the next 10 years in terms of who’s participating in it.”

Powell predicts that DeFi companies will ultimately flourish and replace legacy financial institutions, who will not have the ability to adapt to the innovation of the crypto space.

“Those [Tradfi] incumbents are so tied to the way that things are done, they’re so deeply invested, that now there’s this new kind of infrastructure, I can’t see them transitioning and just wholesale replacing their systems. I think you’d have new players who grow, they might buy the legacy players as they start to take up more market share. But I do think that you need a business model that’s oriented around using a new type of infrastructure or technology and the ultimate thing is that this is going to take over the financial system.”

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