We met with Neil May, CEO of defi.com, during EthCC last week to discuss how user-owned identity is transforming decentralised finance and making crypto accessible for the next generation.
Neil has over 25 years of experience building and commercialising technology ventures across global markets. At defi.com, his team is addressing the fragmented wallet experience by building a unified, cross-chain identity layer. He leverages his extensive background to translate complex technology into practical, real-world solutions.
Read more about his vision for bringing human identity to decentralised finance in the interview below.
You acquired defi.com back in 2018, before most people even knew what DeFi was. What made you hold onto it for seven years before going public?
Our Founder, Daniel Allen, acquired the domain with a clear understanding of what decentralised finance could evolve into. He rejected numerous eye-watering offers because he wanted to build something visionary and responsible. Decentralised finance needs responsible practices before it can become mainstream.
We waited for the market to mature properly. Today, the infrastructure is highly developed, and stablecoins are experiencing widespread adoption. With Visa alone settling billions on stablecoin networks last year and passkeys becoming standard, everything about the infrastructure is ready for everyday users.
Defi.com believes that identity is the missing fundamental in DeFi. What failures in the market convinced you that this was the right problem to focus on?
We closely examined the intense friction hindering mainstream adoption. The onboarding process is daunting for newcomers. We plunge users into a labyrinth of complex jargon and expect them to secure 24-word seed phrases perfectly, which understandably causes massive anxiety.
Furthermore, the ecosystem is highly fragmented for existing users. Arriving as an anonymous stranger at every new protocol creates a terrible user experience. Building a unified, responsible identity layer has become our top priority to address this fragmentation and connect Web3 with the broader internet.
The founding team brings together various backgrounds, including telecom infrastructure and enterprise software. How has this blend of experiences influenced the architecture and strategic direction for defi.com?
We are bringing operational excellence to an environment that has historically operated without it. In the past, the Web3 space often lacked clear fallback plans, service level agreements, and recovery paths.
Our background drives us to implement enterprise-grade governance and accountability. We have integrated essential features, such as social recovery for wallets, directly into the architecture. The aim is to provide a highly robust, dependable infrastructure that performs flawlessly for users worldwide.
The identity layer you are focused on includes user-owned, privacy-preserving ID across chains. What sits at the core of this model, and how does it avoid becoming just another KYC wrapper?
Our model starts with a DeFi ID, providing everyone with a clear, human-readable handle like sebastian.defi.com. We designed this to serve as a comprehensive foundation. Your profile comes natively equipped with advanced features such as account abstraction and stealth addresses.
At its core, this is a trusted identity layer powered by selectively disclosable proofs. You demonstrate your regulatory compliance while retaining complete control and confidentiality over your personal data. It offers an ideal balance of total privacy and strict regulatory adherence.
The fragmented wallet problem is well-documented but notoriously hard to solve without introducing new trust assumptions. How does defi.com unify the cross-chain experience without centralising the critical path?
It begins by providing you with a single core identity. From there, you can securely manage multiple addresses and sub-wallets. Your DeFi ID and your defi.com wallet operate seamlessly across different service providers simultaneously, all while maintaining complete decentralisation.
You can deposit funds into best-in-class yield protocols like Aave, trade tokenised stocks, spend through integrated payment rails, and learn as you go, with every service accessible through the same trusted identity and none of the usual friction between them. The wider ambition is to make that feel as natural as any financial app people use today, without stripping out the ownership and transparency that make Web3 worth building on.
The only limitation concerns older wallets, such as MetaMask. Since those wallets have an immutable on-chain history, we cannot retroactively apply our DeFi ID privacy guarantees to them. Nevertheless, crypto-native users still enjoy all their usual flexibility and benefit from a completely secure, fresh start for their privacy going forward.
Privacy-preserving identity and regulatory compliance are often seen as opposing forces. How does defi.com navigate these challenges?
Traditional finance recognises the inevitability of decentralised finance and is actively adapting. We are seeing regulators open the door to technology-based answers, and verifiable credentials are now overwhelmingly accepted by major financial institutions.
You can absolutely preserve a user's privacy while retaining the ability to disclose specific information when it is legitimately required. We are aligning DeFi ID directly with major standards like W3C Verifiable Credential standards, NIST Digital Identity standards, and Passkey’s rising mainstream adoption to ensure seamless compliance across the board.
The “earn/spend/trade” blurb in the project’s X bio suggests that it is building toward a full financial interface. Can you share more details about that?
We utilise a progressive trust score based on your onchain activity and offchain attributes. Completing KYC through a certified provider cryptographically verifies your identity documents and raises your score. As you deposit, earn, swap, and trade, you build a highly trusted profile.
When top-tier DeFi providers see users with verified profiles, they can offer improved collateralised loan rates and lower fees. We also feature a Visa-integrated credit card programme for collateralised card services wherever Visa is accepted.
Who is the primary user targeted by defi.com, and what does successful adoption look like when it launches?
We are developing solutions for both consumers and businesses across the entire spectrum. Retail users seek simplicity, while institutional players and vault curators urgently require privacy on public blockchains. They want to enjoy the advantages of public infrastructure without revealing their treasury flows.
Success means making decentralised finance easy to understand, relatable, and completely non-intimidating. We aim to remove the Wild West nature of Web3 and create a responsible, secure ecosystem for the traditional web world.
You have said that technology only succeeds when people trust it. Has DeFi earned that trust yet?
The industry has not yet earned that trust. To gain trust in Web3, you must demonstrate that every claim you make actually works in real-world use. You can't rely on hackathon experiments. Hope is never a valid strategy.
We are adopting a humble, methodical approach to ensure our infrastructure is thoroughly proven before making bold claims. Building secure, reliable technology is the only way to achieve genuine mainstream adoption.