Multicoin’s Spencer Applebaum: DeFi’s Moats in the AI Era Are Distribution, Capital and Proprietary Data

The argument reframes DeFi competition around scarce, non-code assets rather than product innovation, which matters for founders and allocators who have priced projects on technical differentiation. If AI genuinely lowers the cost of replication, the premium shifts toward entities with existing users, balance-sheet capacity and data advantages — a structural tilt toward incumbents over new entrants. Whether capital and distribution actually prove stickier than code in DeFi, where composability and forking have historically eroded advantages, is the open question worth watching.