This one is a head scratcher to me. From what I’ve seen the only thing standing in the way of de-fi is proper architectural imagination and implementation. We have a piece of general purpose computing that can be programmed to do pretty much anything. There are a few things we still need exposed in motoko, but all the pieces are there. We need good tooling, standards, and patterns…but none of those require a new subnet at this time. Just hard work and imagination.
If you want transaction history, build it into your canister, merklize it, and publish an endpoint. If you want atomicity then create a canister where that can happen and interact with it.
If you want an EVM, build it. There are 0 impediments from building an EVM in a canister today. You just have to write keckkak in motoko, a Patricia tree in motoko, RLP encoding in motoko, write the op codes in motoko, and the precompiles. The list is long, but you can get paid to get started: ICDevs.org - Bounty #16 - EVM Witness Library - $8,000+
De-fi is coming. But what comes after will make you forget about it.