Updated on:11/30/2025 02:43 PM 
Mukaya "Kadai" Panich, the Managing Director of Digital Asset Investment at SCB 10X, the venture arm of Thailand's oldest bank, Siam Commercial Bank, envisions a future where Decentralized Finance (DeFi) serves as the foundational backend for traditional financial institutions.
In an exclusive interview with CryptoSlate, Panich detailed why Siam Commercial Bank is taking a bullish stance on DeFi. She explained how its digital asset investment division, which selectively backs DeFi projects "with a global mindset focused on driving mass adoption," plans to bridge the gap between the emerging world of DeFi and established traditional finance.
Our primary motivation for investing in DeFi and becoming an active part of the ecosystem is to deeply understand and capitalize on its potential to fundamentally reshape the financial industry.
This conviction is why we hosted our second annual ReDeFiNE Tomorrow virtual conference last week. The event brought together industry luminaries like Stani from Aave, Jeremy from USDC, Rob from Compound, and Michael from Fireblocks to discuss the latest innovations and developments in the sector.
I can foresee a future where DeFi protocols power the entire backend infrastructure of traditional finance companies. In this model, legacy financial firms would focus on their strengths: customer-facing activities like client acquisition, providing a seamless user experience, and delivering integrated services.
DeFi would handle the backend, dramatically reducing transaction times, lowering operational costs, enhancing efficiency, and speeding up settlement cycles. For this vision to become a reality, it's crucial that traditional finance companies like us actively explore, invest in, and integrate with DeFi. Simultaneously, DeFi projects should seek strategic partnerships with traditional financial institutions to leverage their scale, user base, and regulatory expertise.
Regarding our DeFi investment strategy, we are focusing on two primary areas.
First, we invest in projects that parallel traditional financial services. This allows us to learn how to replicate these services in a decentralized manner while also introducing best practices from the traditional finance world to the Web3 space.
This approach is reflected in our investments in Alpha Finance Hub and MEND Protocol. Alpha Finance is a decentralized lending and yield protocol with leverage capabilities. MEND Protocol is set to disrupt the fixed income market, a massive asset class in traditional finance with a market capitalization of $128 trillion.
Second, we are heavily investing in the infrastructure of DeFi. I have always been a firm believer in investing in the 'picks and shovels' of any burgeoning industry. While DeFi applications have been innovating at an incredible pace, the underlying infrastructure needs to evolve and scale to support this growth.
Currently, I am particularly interested in cross-chain communication and interoperability between different blockchains, blockchain network infrastructure—such as effective data monitoring—and runtime security for DeFi protocols to proactively prevent attacks and exploits.
