The New Crypto Middlemen: Who Controls the Infrastructure Behind Decentralized Finance?

The arrival of DeFi was heralded with the promise of decentralization and the absence of intermediaries. The reality of the situation is that a whole new set of intermediaries came to take the place of the old ones, and most people do not even realize their existence. Each transaction between wallets, trading on decentralized exchanges, or betting on a crypto casino, goes through an infrastructure owned by just a few companies.

Stablecoins: The Plumbing Everyone Depends on

Stablecoins are perhaps the closest thing DeFi has to a regular currency, as these are 1-to-1 tokens that are pegged against the dollar, thus providing cryptocurrency with the speed of the blockchain and without the volatility. The total market capitalization of stablecoins reached over $310 billion by early 2026, and the distribution of the supply is anything but equal: Circle and Tether are the leaders of the market, and the rest struggle for their own niches rather than competing with each other.

Ethena’s synthetic dollar, called USDe, was issued via a completely different approach to stablecoins, as USDe uses delta-neutral crypto positions instead of having dollar reserves, but nevertheless managed to exceed the mark of $3 billion in 2025. The question here, however, is not who issues these tokens.

The parts of the stack that feel replaceable often aren’t, and the parts that feel neutral often carry the most lock-in.

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RPC Providers: The Gatekeepers Nobody Votes For

Most DeFi protocols do not run their own blockchain node; instead, applications make calls to the chain via RPC (Remote Procedure Call) providers – companies running the nodes and offering access to them. While it is just a technical feature, one needs to understand its implications, which involve a small number of RPC providers deciding when and even if your transactions will be processed, how to route them in order to bypass front-running, and whether your application will be down during peak traffic times.

Base, the current L2 environment leader, demonstrates the magnitude of this issue. It controls approximately 48.5% of rollup TVL, which is almost twice as much as its direct competitor has, with billions of dollars being held on hundreds of protocols. All these protocols depend on RPCs, which they do not own. As far as stablecoin issuers are concerned, providers have developed separate pricing tiers tailored specifically to the calls made by issuers for compliance and monitoring purposes.

Oracles: The Single Point of Truth, and Failure

Without help, smart contracts cannot perceive anything that happens in the external world. Price oracles are price feeds through which contracts get information about the current value of an asset. Chainlink is currently the leading price feed provider, and there is a simple explanation for this fact.

Liquidations, lending systems, and derivatives are entirely based on the accuracy of this information. If there’s a delay, manipulation, or inaccuracy in the feed, liquidations can fail. This may lead to unliquidatable positions being closed. It is this very dependency that makes oracle security such a hot topic. A protocol can be perfectly written but fail due to the manipulation of the price feed.

What This Concentration Actually Means

All this doesn’t make DeFi fraudulent or deceptive. The blockchains are still open, transactions are still verifiable, and everyone still has a chance to maintain their own node or their own oracle. But interacting with DeFi usually involves middlemen. These companies have their own interests, pricing systems, and risks.

The industry focuses on increasing transparency rather than removing intermediaries. It aims to ensure uptime, proof-of-reserves, and many service providers. This helps avoid any single point of failure. This is a more accurate characterization of the present situation in DeFi than the initial slogan of “no middlemen.” The middlemen didn’t go anywhere; they only transformed into something different.

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Becky

Meet the award-nominated UK lifestyle blogger behind Spirited Puddle Jumper – a mum of three living in South East London! Becky shares the real ups and downs of family life, parenting tips, and lifestyle inspiration, proving that being a mum doesn’t mean you stop being fun or having other interests! Follow along for honest insights into UK family life and opinions on a whole range of topics, from travel and food, to beauty reviews, home and DIY, business and health and wellness.