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SAT 4-3: Trust and Culture
Time:
Saturday, 06/Dec/2025:
10:50am - 11:45am
Presentations
From CeFi to DeFi: What does Investors (Mis)trust?
Shaokai Ding1 , Wenzhi Ding 2 , Chen Lin3
1 Manchester University, Manchester (U.K.); 2 The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China); 3 The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China)
A prevailing narrative of the rise of Bitcoin and DeFi is they provide a trustless solution to the trust-vulnerable centralized financial institutions (CeFi). The bankruptcy of the leading cryptocurrency exchange FTX severely impacted the trust of global cryptocurrency investors in centralized exchanges. Countering prevailing narrative, our research on this trust failure reveals that users did not subsequently adopt trustless decentralized alternatives. Instead, they chose seemingly more reliable centralized exchanges or quit the cryptocurrency market. We further find that users with experience or knowledge related to decentralized finance are more likely to choose decentralized finance after the event. This indicates that the reason most users do not opt for decentralized solutions is their lack of awareness or understanding of this option. This study reveals the importance of popularizing knowledge about decentralization and strengthening the regulation of centralized financial institutions.