I noticed an interesting trend lately — more and more people from the crypto community are starting to seriously discuss how DeFi can finance real-world infrastructure. The founder of Aave recently shared calculations that make you think.

The point is, if you look at the capital expenditures needed to transition the world to renewable energy sources, automation, and space infrastructure, the figure comes to around 100–200 trillion dollars. For comparison — the ten largest banks in the world manage about 13 trillion. So, the potential market is 15 times larger.

Let’s look more specifically. Only solar energy will require funding of 15–30 trillion dollars. This is not just a number in the air — these are real investments that need to be allocated across projects. Simultaneously, data centers and GPUs are also in demand — another 15–35 trillion. Robotics, electric transportation, water desalination, mineral extraction, carbon capture, nuclear energy, and space infrastructure — each category demands serious funding.

Why is this important for DeFi? Because traditional financial systems handle capital allocation inefficiently. DeFi offers an alternative — liquidity can be programmatically redirected to where it yields the maximum return considering the risk. Aave has already demonstrated its ability to attract hundreds of billions of dollars in liquidity thanks to accumulated trust and low operational costs.

As for returns — they are sufficient. The average internal rate of return across infrastructure sectors ranges from 9% to 18%, depending on the asset type. Solar energy yields about 10%, batteries — 12%, data centers — 13%, space infrastructure — around 18%. These are higher than the current cost of capital in DeFi, which is around 4–5%, creating cyclic arbitrage opportunities.

There are two main ways this can work. The first — through income-generating stablecoins that distribute off-chain income to users on-chain. Examples already exist: sUSDe from Ethena shows an annual yield of 10–15% on staking. The second — direct marginalization via tokenized infrastructure as collateral. Both approaches make sense depending on the user type and asset.

The most interesting part — this opens opportunities for fintech companies and banks. They can become distribution channels, providing access to infrastructural capabilities through DeFi. Such integration could accelerate the transition to an economy of abundance by 10–15 years. This is not just a theoretical exercise — it’s a real revaluation of how the finance of the future should operate.

The big opportunity isn’t in tokenizing traditional assets like treasury bills, but in becoming the financial infrastructural layer for assets related to the future we are building. Assets focused on tomorrow, not yesterday. That’s exactly what sparks interest in RWA in the context of DeFi.