Ark Invest’s analysis suggests that the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) space is undergoing an "unbundling-rebundling" cycle similar to those seen in the SaaS and fintech industries. This process is driven by "composability"—the ability of different protocols to integrate and build upon one another like Lego bricks.

The Unbundling Phase
Early DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave emerged as vertical applications focused on singular functions such as trading or lending. Gradually, they became modularized, relying on external infrastructure like aggregators, oracles, and multi-chain deployments to achieve composability. This allowed other protocols to integrate their functionalities, expanding their ecosystem influence.

The Rebundling Phase
As they scaled, leading protocols began returning to vertical integration to enhance user experience, capture more value, and reduce external dependencies. For example:

• Uniswap evolved from an automated market maker (AMM) into a trading super app by launching its own wallet (Uniswap Wallet), aggregation service (Uniswap X), and application chain (Unichain).

• Aave expanded from a lending market into a credit ecosystem by issuing its native stablecoin GHO and exploring integrations with social identity protocols like Lens Protocol, reducing reliance on external protocols like MakerDAO.

Core Drivers
DeFi’s permissionless nature, rapid capital flow, and global market access accelerate this cycle. Ultimately, successful protocols must balance modularity with vertical integration—controlling key stack components (e.g., chains, wallets, stablecoins) to deliver seamless experiences while retaining composability advantages.

This trend indicates that DeFi super apps will emerge through "selective rebundling," mirroring the evolution of platforms like Airbnb and Robinhood in traditional sectors.

Summary
Author: Lorenzo Valente

As the crypto market matures, investors are drawing insights from past technology booms to predict the next major trend or inflection point. Historically, digital assets have been difficult to compare directly with previous technology cycles, making it challenging for users, developers, and investors to forecast long-term trajectories. However, this dynamic is now shifting.

Our research indicates that the "application layer" of the crypto space is evolving much like the unbundling and rebundling cycles experienced by SaaS and fintech platforms.

The Concept of Composability
"Composability" is key to understanding these cycles. This term, used widely in fintech and crypto communities, refers to the ability of financial or decentralized applications and services—especially at the application layer—to interact, integrate, and build upon one another seamlessly, like Lego bricks. With this concept as a foundation, we describe the shifts in product structure below.

From Vertical to Modular: The Great Unbundling
In 2010, Andrew Parker of Spark Capital published a blog post illustrating how dozens of startups were capitalizing on the unbundling of Craigslist—a "horizontal" internet marketplace offering everything from apartments and gigs to merchandise sales.

Parker concluded that many successful companies—Airbnb, Uber, GitHub, Lyft—started by focusing on and vertically refining a small subset of Craigslist’s broad functionality, dramatically improving it. This trend marked the first major phase of "marketplace unbundling," where Craigslist’s fully bundled, multi-purpose platform gave way to single-purpose applications. These newcomers didn’t just improve Craigslist’s user experience (UX)—they redefined it.

This unbundling was enabled by fundamental shifts in technical infrastructure, including APIs, cloud computing, mobile UX, and embedded payments, which lowered the barrier to building focused applications with world-class user experiences.

A similar unbundling occurred in banking. For decades, banks offered a bundled suite of financial services—from savings and loans to insurance—under a single brand and application. Over the past decade, however, fintech startups have systematically dismantled this bundle, each focusing on a specific vertical.

Traditional banking bundles included:

• Payments and remittances

• Checking and savings accounts

• Interest-bearing products

• Budgeting and financial planning

• Loans and credit

• Investments and wealth management

• Insurance

• Credit and debit cards

Over the past ten years, this bundle has been decomposed into a series of venture-backed fintech companies, many now unicorns or decacorns:

• Payments and remittances: PayPal, Venmo, Revolut, Stripe

• Banking accounts: Chime, N26, Monzo, SoFi

• Savings and yield: Marcus, Ally Bank

• Personal finance and budgeting: Mint, Truebill, Plum

• Loans and credit: Klarna, Upstart, Cash App, Affirm

• Investments and wealth management: Robinhood, eToro, Coinbase

• Insurance: Lemonade, Root, Hippo

• Cards and spend management: Brex, Ramp, Marqeta

Each company focused on a service it could refine and deliver better than incumbents, combining its skill set with new technological leverage and distribution models to offer growth-oriented, niche financial services in a modular fashion. In SaaS and fintech, unbundling not only disrupted incumbents but also created entirely new categories, ultimately expanding total addressable markets (TAMs).

From Modular to Bundled: The Great Rebundling
Recently, Airbnb introduced new "Services & Experiences" and redesigned its app. Users can now not only book accommodations but also explore and purchase add-ons like museum visits, food tours, dining experiences, gallery walks, fitness classes, and beauty treatments.

Airbnb—once a peer-to-peer accommodation marketplace—is now evolving into a vacation superapp, rebundling travel, lifestyle, and local services into a single, cohesive platform. Over the past two years, the company has expanded beyond home rentals, integrating payments, travel insurance, local guides, concierge-style tools, and curated experiences into its core booking service.

Robinhood is undergoing a similar transformation. Having disrupted the brokerage industry with commission-free stock trading, it is now aggressively expanding into a full-stack financial platform, rebundling many verticals previously unbundled by fintech startups.

In the past two years, Robinhood has:

• Launched payment and cash management features (Robinhood Cash Card)

• Added cryptocurrency trading

• Introduced retirement accounts

• Rolled out margin investing and credit cards

• Acquired Pluto, an AI-driven research and wealth advisory platform

These moves indicate that Robinhood, like Airbnb, is bundling previously fragmented services to build a comprehensive financial superapp. By controlling more of the financial stack—savings, investments, payments, loans, and advisory—Robinhood is reinventing itself from a broker to an all-in-one consumer finance platform.

Our research shows that this dynamic of unbundling and rebundling is also impacting the crypto industry. In the remainder of this article, we present two case studies: Uniswap and Aave.

DeFi’s Unbundling-Rebundling Cycle: Two Case Studies
Case Study 1: Uniswap—From Monolithic AMM to Liquidity Lego and Back to Trading Super App
In 2018, Uniswap launched on Ethereum as a simple yet revolutionary automated market maker (AMM). In its early stages, Uniswap was a vertically integrated application: a small smart contract codebase with an official frontend hosted by its team. The core AMM functionality—swapping ERC-20 tokens in constant product pools—existed within a single on-chain protocol, accessed primarily through Uniswap’s web interface. This design proved highly successful, with cumulative on-chain trading volume exploding to over $1.5 trillion by mid-2023.

With its tightly controlled tech stack, Uniswap delivered a smooth user experience for token swaps, bootstrapping DeFi in its infancy. Uniswap v1/v2 implemented all trading logic on-chain, requiring no external price oracles or off-chain order books. Prices were determined internally via liquidity pool reserves (the x*y=k formula). The Uniswap team developed the main user interface (app.uniswap.org), which interacted directly with Uniswap’s contracts. Most users accessed Uniswap through this dedicated frontend, resembling a proprietary exchange portal. Beyond Ethereum itself, Uniswap relied on no other infrastructure.

As DeFi expanded, Uniswap evolved into a composable liquidity "Lego" rather than a standalone app. Its open, permissionless nature meant other projects could integrate Uniswap’s pools and build layers atop it. Uniswap Labs gradually ceded control over parts of its stack, allowing external infrastructure and community-built features to play larger roles:

• DEX aggregators and wallet integrations: By late 2022, an estimated 85% of Uniswap’s swap volume was routed through aggregators like 1inch, as users sought best prices across multiple exchanges. Wallets like MetaMask also integrated Uniswap liquidity into their swap features.

• Oracles and data indexers: While Uniswap’s contracts didn’t require oracles for trading, the broader ecosystem did. Other protocols used Uniswap’s pool prices as on-chain oracles, and Uniswap’s frontend relied on external indexers like The Graph for subgraph queries.

• Multi-chain deployments: Uniswap expanded beyond Ethereum to Polygon, Arbitrum, BSC, Optimism, and others, treating each blockchain as a base-layer plugin for Uniswap liquidity.

Recently, Uniswap has been returning to vertical integration, aiming to capture more of the user journey and optimize its stack:

• Native mobile wallet: In 2023, Uniswap launched Uniswap Wallet—a self-custody mobile app—followed by a browser extension, enabling users to store tokens and interact directly with Uniswap’s products.

• Integrated aggregation (Uniswap X): Uniswap introduced Uniswap X, an built-in aggregation and trade execution layer that sources liquidity from various AMMs and private market makers, settling trades on-chain.

• App-specific chain (Unichain): In 2024, Uniswap announced Unichain, a Layer 2 blockchain tailored for Uniswap and DeFi trading, aiming to reduce user fees by ~95% and latency to ~250ms.

This full-circle transformation has turned Uniswap from an Ethereum-dependent dApp into a vertically integrated platform with proprietary UI, execution layer, and dedicated blockchain.

Case Study 2: Aave—From P2P Lending Market to Multi-Chain Deployment and Back to Credit Super App
Aave’s origins trace back to ETHLend in 2017, a self-contained lending application that later pivoted to a decentralized peer-to-peer lending market renamed Aave. The team developed smart contracts for lending and provided an official web interface. Initially, ETHLEND/Aave matched lenders and borrowers via order books and handled everything from interest rate logic to loan matching.

As it evolved toward a pooled lending model similar to Compound’s, Aave became vertically integrated. Aave v1 and v2 contracts on Ethereum included innovations like flash loans—uncollateralized borrowing repaid within the same transaction—and interest rate algorithms. Users primarily accessed the protocol through Aave’s web dashboard. The protocol managed key functions internally, with minimal reliance on third-party services.

Aave was part of a broader DeFi symbiosis, integrating MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin as key collateral and borrowing asset from the start. Even in its "vertical" phase, Aave benefited from another protocol’s product—the stablecoin—to operate.

As DeFi grew, Aave unbundled and adopted a modular architecture, outsourcing parts of its infrastructure and encouraging others to build on it:

• External oracle networks: Aave adopted Chainlink’s decentralized oracles for collateral valuation, outsourcing pricing infrastructure to a third-party network.

• Wallet and app integrations: Aave’s lending pools became building blocks for other dApps. Portfolio managers like Zapper and Zerion, DeFi automation tools like DeFi Saver, and yield optimizers integrated with Aave’s contracts via its open SDK.

• Multi-chain deployments and isolated modes: Aave deployed on multiple networks—Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism—and introduced features like isolated markets for certain assets in Aave v3.

Recently, Aave has shown signs of returning to vertical integration by developing internal versions of key components it previously relied on others for:

• Native stablecoin (GHO): In 2023, Aave launched GHO, an over-collateralized, decentralized, dollar-pegged stablecoin. Users can mint GHO using their deposits on Aave V3, allowing Aave to control stablecoin issuance—a vertical previously outsourced to MakerDAO.

• MEV recapture: Aave is leveraging Chainlink’s Smart Value Routing (SVR) or similar mechanisms to recapture MEV for Aave users, blurring the lines between the Aave platform and underlying blockchain mechanisms.

Though Aave hasn’t launched its own wallet or chain like Uniswap, other ventures by its founders—such as Lens Protocol for social networks—suggest a goal of building a self-sustaining ecosystem. Architecturally, Aave is moving toward offering all key financial primitives: lending, stablecoins (GHO), and potentially decentralized social identity (Lens), rather than relying on external protocols.

In summary, Aave has evolved from a closed-loop lending dApp to an open Lego integrated into DeFi and dependent on others like Chainlink and Maker, and is now returning to a more expansive, vertically integrated financial suite. The launch of GHO, in particular, highlights Aave’s intent to reintegrate the stablecoin layer it once outsourced to MakerDAO.

Conclusion
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The crypto space is humming a familiar tune. Much like the SaaS and marketplace revolutions of the past decade, DeFi and application-layer protocols are navigating trajectories of unbundling and rebundling, driven by new technical primitives, evolving user expectations, and the desire for greater value capture.

In the 2010s, startups focused on specific segments of Craigslist’s vast marketplace effectively atomized it into distinct companies. This unbundling gave rise to giants—Airbnb, Uber, Robinhood, Coinbase—all of which later embarked on their own rebundling journeys, integrating new verticals and services into cohesive, sticky platforms.

The crypto space is following the same path at revolutionary speed.

What began as tightly scoped vertical experiments—Uniswap as an AMM, Aave as a money market, Maker as a stablecoin vault—modularized into permissionless Legos, opened liquidity, outsourced critical functions, and let composability flourish. Now, with scale achieved and markets fragmented, the pendulum is swinging back.

Today, Uniswap is becoming a trading superapp with its own wallet, chain, cross-chain standards, and routing logic. Aave is issuing its own stablecoin and bundling lending, governance, and credit primitives. Maker is building a new chain to improve governance for its monetary ecosystem. Jito unites staking, MEV, and validator logic into a full-stack protocol. Hyperliquid merges exchange, L1 infrastructure, and EVM into a seamless on-chain financial operating system (OS).

In crypto, primitives are unbundled by design, but the best user experiences—and most defensible businesses—are increasingly rebundled. This is not a betrayal of composability but its fulfillment: building the best Lego bricks and using them to construct the best castles.

DeFi is compressing entire cycles into mere years. How?

• Permissionless infrastructure reduces experimentation friction: any developer can fork, replicate, or extend existing protocols in hours, not months.

• Capital formation is instantaneous: with tokens, teams can fund new projects, ideas, or incentives faster than ever.

• Liquidity is highly fluid: TVL moves at the speed of incentives, enabling new experiments to gain traction quickly and successful ones to scale exponentially.

• The potential market size is larger: protocols tap into a global, permissionless pool of users and capital from day one, often scaling faster than Web2 counterparts constrained by geography, regulation, or distribution channels.

DeFi’s super apps are scaling rapidly in real-time. We believe the winners will not be the protocols with the most modular stacks, but those that know exactly which parts of the stack to own, which to share, and when to pivot between the two.

Ark Invest’s analysis suggests that the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) space is undergoing an "unbundling-rebundling" cycle similar to those seen in the SaaS and fintech industries. This process is driven by "composability"—the ability of different protocols to integrate and build upon one another like Lego bricks.

The Unbundling Phase
Early DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave emerged as vertical applications focused on singular functions such as trading or lending. Gradually, they became modularized, relying on external infrastructure like aggregators, oracles, and multi-chain deployments to achieve composability. This allowed other protocols to integrate their functionalities, expanding their ecosystem influence.

The Rebundling Phase
As they scaled, leading protocols began returning to vertical integration to enhance user experience, capture more value, and reduce external dependencies. For example:

• Uniswap evolved from an automated market maker (AMM) into a trading super app by launching its own wallet (Uniswap Wallet), aggregation service (Uniswap X), and application chain (Unichain).

• Aave expanded from a lending market into a credit ecosystem by issuing its native stablecoin GHO and exploring integrations with social identity protocols like Lens Protocol, reducing reliance on external protocols like MakerDAO.

Core Drivers
DeFi’s permissionless nature, rapid capital flow, and global market access accelerate this cycle. Ultimately, successful protocols must balance modularity with vertical integration—controlling key stack components (e.g., chains, wallets, stablecoins) to deliver seamless experiences while retaining composability advantages.

This trend indicates that DeFi super apps will emerge through "selective rebundling," mirroring the evolution of platforms like Airbnb and Robinhood in traditional sectors.

Summary
Author: Lorenzo Valente

As the crypto market matures, investors are drawing insights from past technology booms to predict the next major trend or inflection point. Historically, digital assets have been difficult to compare directly with previous technology cycles, making it challenging for users, developers, and investors to forecast long-term trajectories. However, this dynamic is now shifting.

Our research indicates that the "application layer" of the crypto space is evolving much like the unbundling and rebundling cycles experienced by SaaS and fintech platforms.

The Concept of Composability
"Composability" is key to understanding these cycles. This term, used widely in fintech and crypto communities, refers to the ability of financial or decentralized applications and services—especially at the application layer—to interact, integrate, and build upon one another seamlessly, like Lego bricks. With this concept as a foundation, we describe the shifts in product structure below.

From Vertical to Modular: The Great Unbundling
In 2010, Andrew Parker of Spark Capital published a blog post illustrating how dozens of startups were capitalizing on the unbundling of Craigslist—a "horizontal" internet marketplace offering everything from apartments and gigs to merchandise sales.

Parker concluded that many successful companies—Airbnb, Uber, GitHub, Lyft—started by focusing on and vertically refining a small subset of Craigslist’s broad functionality, dramatically improving it. This trend marked the first major phase of "marketplace unbundling," where Craigslist’s fully bundled, multi-purpose platform gave way to single-purpose applications. These newcomers didn’t just improve Craigslist’s user experience (UX)—they redefined it.

This unbundling was enabled by fundamental shifts in technical infrastructure, including APIs, cloud computing, mobile UX, and embedded payments, which lowered the barrier to building focused applications with world-class user experiences.

A similar unbundling occurred in banking. For decades, banks offered a bundled suite of financial services—from savings and loans to insurance—under a single brand and application. Over the past decade, however, fintech startups have systematically dismantled this bundle, each focusing on a specific vertical.

Traditional banking bundles included:

• Payments and remittances

• Checking and savings accounts

• Interest-bearing products

• Budgeting and financial planning

• Loans and credit

• Investments and wealth management

• Insurance

• Credit and debit cards

Over the past ten years, this bundle has been decomposed into a series of venture-backed fintech companies, many now unicorns or decacorns:

• Payments and remittances: PayPal, Venmo, Revolut, Stripe

• Banking accounts: Chime, N26, Monzo, SoFi

• Savings and yield: Marcus, Ally Bank

• Personal finance and budgeting: Mint, Truebill, Plum

• Loans and credit: Klarna, Upstart, Cash App, Affirm

• Investments and wealth management: Robinhood, eToro, Coinbase

• Insurance: Lemonade, Root, Hippo

• Cards and spend management: Brex, Ramp, Marqeta

Each company focused on a service it could refine and deliver better than incumbents, combining its skill set with new technological leverage and distribution models to offer growth-oriented, niche financial services in a modular fashion. In SaaS and fintech, unbundling not only disrupted incumbents but also created entirely new categories, ultimately expanding total addressable markets (TAMs).

From Modular to Bundled: The Great Rebundling
Recently, Airbnb introduced new "Services & Experiences" and redesigned its app. Users can now not only book accommodations but also explore and purchase add-ons like museum visits, food tours, dining experiences, gallery walks, fitness classes, and beauty treatments.

Airbnb—once a peer-to-peer accommodation marketplace—is now evolving into a vacation superapp, rebundling travel, lifestyle, and local services into a single, cohesive platform. Over the past two years, the company has expanded beyond home rentals, integrating payments, travel insurance, local guides, concierge-style tools, and curated experiences into its core booking service.

Robinhood is undergoing a similar transformation. Having disrupted the brokerage industry with commission-free stock trading, it is now aggressively expanding into a full-stack financial platform, rebundling many verticals previously unbundled by fintech startups.

In the past two years, Robinhood has:

• Launched payment and cash management features (Robinhood Cash Card)

• Added cryptocurrency trading

• Introduced retirement accounts

• Rolled out margin investing and credit cards

• Acquired Pluto, an AI-driven research and wealth advisory platform

These moves indicate that Robinhood, like Airbnb, is bundling previously fragmented services to build a comprehensive financial superapp. By controlling more of the financial stack—savings, investments, payments, loans, and advisory—Robinhood is reinventing itself from a broker to an all-in-one consumer finance platform.

Our research shows that this dynamic of unbundling and rebundling is also impacting the crypto industry. In the remainder of this article, we present two case studies: Uniswap and Aave.

DeFi’s Unbundling-Rebundling Cycle: Two Case Studies
Case Study 1: Uniswap—From Monolithic AMM to Liquidity Lego and Back to Trading Super App
In 2018, Uniswap launched on Ethereum as a simple yet revolutionary automated market maker (AMM). In its early stages, Uniswap was a vertically integrated application: a small smart contract codebase with an official frontend hosted by its team. The core AMM functionality—swapping ERC-20 tokens in constant product pools—existed within a single on-chain protocol, accessed primarily through Uniswap’s web interface. This design proved highly successful, with cumulative on-chain trading volume exploding to over $1.5 trillion by mid-2023.

With its tightly controlled tech stack, Uniswap delivered a smooth user experience for token swaps, bootstrapping DeFi in its infancy. Uniswap v1/v2 implemented all trading logic on-chain, requiring no external price oracles or off-chain order books. Prices were determined internally via liquidity pool reserves (the x*y=k formula). The Uniswap team developed the main user interface (app.uniswap.org), which interacted directly with Uniswap’s contracts. Most users accessed Uniswap through this dedicated frontend, resembling a proprietary exchange portal. Beyond Ethereum itself, Uniswap relied on no other infrastructure.

As DeFi expanded, Uniswap evolved into a composable liquidity "Lego" rather than a standalone app. Its open, permissionless nature meant other projects could integrate Uniswap’s pools and build layers atop it. Uniswap Labs gradually ceded control over parts of its stack, allowing external infrastructure and community-built features to play larger roles:

• DEX aggregators and wallet integrations: By late 2022, an estimated 85% of Uniswap’s swap volume was routed through aggregators like 1inch, as users sought best prices across multiple exchanges. Wallets like MetaMask also integrated Uniswap liquidity into their swap features.

• Oracles and data indexers: While Uniswap’s contracts didn’t require oracles for trading, the broader ecosystem did. Other protocols used Uniswap’s pool prices as on-chain oracles, and Uniswap’s frontend relied on external indexers like The Graph for subgraph queries.

• Multi-chain deployments: Uniswap expanded beyond Ethereum to Polygon, Arbitrum, BSC, Optimism, and others, treating each blockchain as a base-layer plugin for Uniswap liquidity.

Recently, Uniswap has been returning to vertical integration, aiming to capture more of the user journey and optimize its stack:

• Native mobile wallet: In 2023, Uniswap launched Uniswap Wallet—a self-custody mobile app—followed by a browser extension, enabling users to store tokens and interact directly with Uniswap’s products.

• Integrated aggregation (Uniswap X): Uniswap introduced Uniswap X, an built-in aggregation and trade execution layer that sources liquidity from various AMMs and private market makers, settling trades on-chain.

• App-specific chain (Unichain): In 2024, Uniswap announced Unichain, a Layer 2 blockchain tailored for Uniswap and DeFi trading, aiming to reduce user fees by ~95% and latency to ~250ms.

This full-circle transformation has turned Uniswap from an Ethereum-dependent dApp into a vertically integrated platform with proprietary UI, execution layer, and dedicated blockchain.

Case Study 2: Aave—From P2P Lending Market to Multi-Chain Deployment and Back to Credit Super App
Aave’s origins trace back to ETHLend in 2017, a self-contained lending application that later pivoted to a decentralized peer-to-peer lending market renamed Aave. The team developed smart contracts for lending and provided an official web interface. Initially, ETHLEND/Aave matched lenders and borrowers via order books and handled everything from interest rate logic to loan matching.

As it evolved toward a pooled lending model similar to Compound’s, Aave became vertically integrated. Aave v1 and v2 contracts on Ethereum included innovations like flash loans—uncollateralized borrowing repaid within the same transaction—and interest rate algorithms. Users primarily accessed the protocol through Aave’s web dashboard. The protocol managed key functions internally, with minimal reliance on third-party services.

Aave was part of a broader DeFi symbiosis, integrating MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin as key collateral and borrowing asset from the start. Even in its "vertical" phase, Aave benefited from another protocol’s product—the stablecoin—to operate.

As DeFi grew, Aave unbundled and adopted a modular architecture, outsourcing parts of its infrastructure and encouraging others to build on it:

• External oracle networks: Aave adopted Chainlink’s decentralized oracles for collateral valuation, outsourcing pricing infrastructure to a third-party network.

• Wallet and app integrations: Aave’s lending pools became building blocks for other dApps. Portfolio managers like Zapper and Zerion, DeFi automation tools like DeFi Saver, and yield optimizers integrated with Aave’s contracts via its open SDK.

• Multi-chain deployments and isolated modes: Aave deployed on multiple networks—Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism—and introduced features like isolated markets for certain assets in Aave v3.

Recently, Aave has shown signs of returning to vertical integration by developing internal versions of key components it previously relied on others for:

• Native stablecoin (GHO): In 2023, Aave launched GHO, an over-collateralized, decentralized, dollar-pegged stablecoin. Users can mint GHO using their deposits on Aave V3, allowing Aave to control stablecoin issuance—a vertical previously outsourced to MakerDAO.

• MEV recapture: Aave is leveraging Chainlink’s Smart Value Routing (SVR) or similar mechanisms to recapture MEV for Aave users, blurring the lines between the Aave platform and underlying blockchain mechanisms.

Though Aave hasn’t launched its own wallet or chain like Uniswap, other ventures by its founders—such as Lens Protocol for social networks—suggest a goal of building a self-sustaining ecosystem. Architecturally, Aave is moving toward offering all key financial primitives: lending, stablecoins (GHO), and potentially decentralized social identity (Lens), rather than relying on external protocols.

In summary, Aave has evolved from a closed-loop lending dApp to an open Lego integrated into DeFi and dependent on others like Chainlink and Maker, and is now returning to a more expansive, vertically integrated financial suite. The launch of GHO, in particular, highlights Aave’s intent to reintegrate the stablecoin layer it once outsourced to MakerDAO.

Conclusion
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The crypto space is humming a familiar tune. Much like the SaaS and marketplace revolutions of the past decade, DeFi and application-layer protocols are navigating trajectories of unbundling and rebundling, driven by new technical primitives, evolving user expectations, and the desire for greater value capture.

In the 2010s, startups focused on specific segments of Craigslist’s vast marketplace effectively atomized it into distinct companies. This unbundling gave rise to giants—Airbnb, Uber, Robinhood, Coinbase—all of which later embarked on their own rebundling journeys, integrating new verticals and services into cohesive, sticky platforms.

The crypto space is following the same path at revolutionary speed.

What began as tightly scoped vertical experiments—Uniswap as an AMM, Aave as a money market, Maker as a stablecoin vault—modularized into permissionless Legos, opened liquidity, outsourced critical functions, and let composability flourish. Now, with scale achieved and markets fragmented, the pendulum is swinging back.

Today, Uniswap is becoming a trading superapp with its own wallet, chain, cross-chain standards, and routing logic. Aave is issuing its own stablecoin and bundling lending, governance, and credit primitives. Maker is building a new chain to improve governance for its monetary ecosystem. Jito unites staking, MEV, and validator logic into a full-stack protocol. Hyperliquid merges exchange, L1 infrastructure, and EVM into a seamless on-chain financial operating system (OS).

In crypto, primitives are unbundled by design, but the best user experiences—and most defensible businesses—are increasingly rebundled. This is not a betrayal of composability but its fulfillment: building the best Lego bricks and using them to construct the best castles.

DeFi is compressing entire cycles into mere years. How?

• Permissionless infrastructure reduces experimentation friction: any developer can fork, replicate, or extend existing protocols in hours, not months.

• Capital formation is instantaneous: with tokens, teams can fund new projects, ideas, or incentives faster than ever.

• Liquidity is highly fluid: TVL moves at the speed of incentives, enabling new experiments to gain traction quickly and successful ones to scale exponentially.

• The potential market size is larger: protocols tap into a global, permissionless pool of users and capital from day one, often scaling faster than Web2 counterparts constrained by geography, regulation, or distribution channels.

DeFi’s super apps are scaling rapidly in real-time. We believe the winners will not be the protocols with the most modular stacks, but those that know exactly which parts of the stack to own, which to share, and when to pivot between the two.