[Recap] How Institutions Engage with DeFi: Custody, Access and Opportunity

On February 11th, 2026, The Tie hosted an Innovator Series webinar on how institutional capital is moving from DeFi experimentation to active deployment. Sacha Ghebali, Chief Strategy Officer at The Tie, moderated a panel featuring Griffin Peer, Head of Business Development and Strategy at Reserve; Chris Matta, CEO of Liquid Collective; Matthew Pinnock, COO at Altura; and Ayham, Founding Contributor at Silo Finance. The discussion came hours after BlackRock announced its first DeFi integration through Uniswap, setting the stage for a conversation about custody, capital efficiency, and what institutions actually need to participate.

Watch the full Webinar here:

From Proof-of-Concept to Portfolio Allocation

The panelists separated institutional experimentation from genuine adoption. Matthew described the past three years as institutions "launching a lot of experimentation and research in the direction that isn't necessarily (related to) capital allocation, rather than (institutions) putting (their) money where (their) mouth is." The shift now is uplifting existing instruments by putting them on-chain rather than building isolated proofs-of-concept. Ayham put it simply: institutions typically begin with stablecoins as settlement rails, but true adoption occurs when on-chain activity becomes "a line item in their portfolio treasury management." Chris said the space remains early despite recent momentum. "2025 was a bit of an inflection point with some additional regulatory clarity and some use cases really starting to emerge," he noted.

Custody as the Critical Access Point

The panelists agreed that custody is the main entry point for institutional DeFi participation. Griffin explained that institutions "already have their custody provider, they've done all that work already, and they're largely just looking for a way to interface with these DeFi products through their qualified custodian." Chris described how qualified custodians are integrating DeFi solutions directly into their infrastructure. This integration drives Liquid Collective's strategy: the protocol started as a collaboration between Coinbase, Kraken, and Figment, and has since expanded to include Anchorage and Galaxy. Matta noted that ETF issuers currently stake only fifty to sixty percent of their assets due to liquidity requirements. Liquid Collective aims to unlock full staking participation while maintaining the liquidity these products demand.

Managing Risk Beyond Smart Contracts

Matthew challenged the assumption that technical solutions can address all institutional concerns. "The problem with DeFi a lot of the time is we believe, because we are a community of engineers, there's a technical solution for everything. For some things, there just isn't," he said. Counter-party risk "cannot be put into a smart contract." Source of funds verification remains a basic hurdle: "If we can't prove source of funds, then we won't be able to invest in the majority of institutional-grade products." Silo Finance takes a different approach. Ayham explained that the protocol creates separate lending markets for each asset rather than pooling them together. The upcoming V3 release introduces an unwind mechanism to handle bad debt situations where collateral becomes stuck, which is a problem shared-pool models cannot easily resolve.

Staking, Yield, and Capital Efficiency

Liquid staking protocols are trying to solve the yield-versus-liquidity tradeoff that limits institutional participation. Chris called ETF staking "the largest addressable market for liquid staking protocols" but noted that current products sacrifice yield for redemption flexibility. Griffin described Reserve Protocol as a DeFi-native alternative to traditional fund structures. "The easiest way to think about that is like ETFs but on-chain," he explained. Reserve enables indexes that blend yield-bearing DeFi positions and stablecoins with programmable rules around buying and selling. Matthew noted trade financing as an underexplored opportunity. "We've effectively tokenized trade financing and made it permissionless," he said. "If you have a strategy that can genuinely generate yield, then you should have the capital to execute on that strategy."

Infrastructure Requirements for Scale

Ayham said Silo V3 can create lending markets for assets without existing liquidity or instant redemption mechanisms: "Tokenized gold can immediately have a lending market" due to redesigned lender protections and liquidation mechanisms. The panelists also identified gaps in risk frameworks, oracle reliability, transparency tooling, and circuit breakers. Chris wants deeper integration across the custody and DeFi stack. "There's a lot of friction that still needs to be removed to get real integration for institutional participants," he said.

Conclusion

The webinar showed institutional DeFi moving past experimentation toward operational deployment, with custody integration as the primary adoption path. BlackRock's same-day entry into Uniswap made the panel's central argument concrete: institutional capital follows infrastructure. Liquid staking consortiums are growing and lending markets are improving risk isolation, while vault structures bring traditional asset classes on-chain, narrowing the gap between what DeFi can do and what institutions require.

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