Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, emphasizes the cost efficiency of DeFi lending, attributing it to the restructuring of cost structures through smart contract automation, transparent pricing, and permissionless capital aggregation. This approach allows on-chain lending to achieve financing costs of approximately 5%, significantly lower than the 7%–12% range of centralized institutions. Kulechov identifies the current bottleneck as a shortage of high-quality collateral rather than capital. He anticipates that as crypto-native and real-world assets are tokenized, lending processes will become fully software-driven, positioning DeFi as a lower-cost financial infrastructure.