Why Centralized Exchanges Keep Building Their Way Into DeFi

For most of the last decade, centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized finance sat on opposite sides of a line. One side custodied your funds and asked for KYC; the other handed you a seed phrase and told you not to lose it. That line has been getting blurrier for a while, and 2026 is shaping up to be the year several major exchanges stop treating DeFi as a feature request and start treating it as core infrastructure.

Three examples worth looking at side by side: LCX, Coinbase, and Kraken. Each is approaching the same problem: how does a licensed, centralized business plug into non-custodial, on-chain finance from a different angle?

LCX: building its own chain

LCX, a Liechtenstein-based exchange operating under Liechtenstein's Blockchain Act and pursuing MiCA authorization in the EU, recently consolidated its on-chain efforts under a single banner called LCX Liberty, hosted atdefi.lcx.com. Rather than a...

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