Building a DeFi-Native Chain w/ Justin Havins (Katana)

What does it actually mean to build a chain around DeFi—not just host DeFi apps, but bake decentralized finance into the architecture itself?Justin Havins spent 13 years in traditional banking before joining Polygon's DeFi team, and now he's helping lead Katana, a new L2 that's trying something different: sharing chain revenue directly with users who put their assets to work in DeFi protocols.In this conversation, Rex and Justin get into the mechanics of Katana's "DeFi flywheel"—vault bridge yields, chain-owned liquidity, VE tokenomics that span the whole chain—and what they learned from earlier experiments like Canto and Blast. They also talk honestly about where DeFi innovation has stalled since 2022, why regulatory uncertainty may have pushed us toward memecoins, and what it might take to get real momentum back.The second half gets more speculative: prediction markets, consumer apps, the role of abstraction in onboarding, and whether the intersection of AI and crypto is mostly hype or genuinely important. Justin walks through the risk stack of using DeFi on an L2 with vault bridge exposure, and they close with a look at what Katana is prioritizing in its grants program.