Eric Waisanen Outlines Cardano PRIME Plans for DeFi, Insurance and AI Agents

Eric Waisanen of AlphaGrowth presented plans for Cardano PRIME during an October 29 appearance on Cardano Over Coffee. His discussion covered the program’s first wave of DeFi infrastructure and potential products for institutional investors and AI agents.

Waisanen addressed how lending markets could work with decentralized exchanges, why insurance matters to some investors and how Cardano applications could connect with assets on other networks.

Building the Cardano PRIME DeFi Foundation

Waisanen explained that PRIME’s first wave focuses on developing and connecting infrastructure needed for Cardano DeFi. He identified decentralized trading, isolated lending markets, liquidation systems, automated liquidity management and vault frameworks as core components.

The program targets more than $200 million in additional total value locked, or TVL, in Cardano DeFi. Waisanen linked that goal to strategies designed for family offices and investment funds, including products built around assets they already hold and returns they consider attractive.

One area he highlighted was the proposed connection between decentralized exchanges and lending markets. The design would make capital available for both trading and lending, creating the potential to combine trading fees with lending interest.

Waisanen also discussed concentrated liquidity, which allows providers to place assets within a selected price range. Automated tools could manage those positions through a vault strategy rather than requiring users to adjust each position themselves. He identified Steer Protocol as a team working on that infrastructure and explained that AlphaGrowth has used Steer’s tools on other blockchain networks.

Steer founder and CEO Derek Barrera later joined the discussion and described the team’s work on market infrastructure and a vault standard. Steer’s Cardano plans include automated liquidity management for SundaeSwap V4 and infrastructure that other protocols could use.

Insurance and Institutional Access

Waisanen described security as a central consideration for institutions assessing DeFi products. According to him, some investors have expressed a preference for a lower insured return on Bitcoin over a higher return without insurance against smart contract risks.

Vaults could make those strategies easier to access by packaging them into defined products. Waisanen also discussed isolated lending markets, where different assets can be placed in separate pools with their own risk settings. He connected that structure to potential markets for real-world assets.

AlphaGrowth’s insurance work includes a goal of bringing premiums below 2% annually. When another participant suggested that this level had already been reached, Waisanen clarified that it had not yet been achieved.

He identified a potential Cardano integration with security platform Hypernative as part of the work and discussed insurance provider Native as a possible route to coverage for liquidity providers. The objective is to explore whether coverage can be offered at a cost that leaves enough return for investors.

The discussion also covered assets that institutions may want to use in DeFi, including Bitcoin, gold and tokenized stocks. Waisanen described an ambition to bring assets such as Nvidia shares on-chain and develop strategies around them.

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Cross-Chain Access and AI Agent Payments

Waisanen identified VIA Labs as another project contributing to PRIME’s plans. VIA’s proposed AnyToAny tool would bring bridge and swap routes together, helping users move assets into and out of Cardano without navigating each service separately. He also discussed future opportunities involving Bitcoin bridges and the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol, or IBC, including Cardano’s connection with Injective.

Beyond financial infrastructure, Waisanen outlined a direction for AI agents to use wallets and DeFi products. One concept involves vaults that could provide computing resources and AI inference instead of a conventional annual return. Inference refers to running an AI model to respond to a request or perform a task.

Under the approach he described, agents could use wallets they manage to obtain resources needed for their own operations. Waisanen also discussed agents hiring and paying one another, with transactions settled as they interact. He identified x402 and MPP as starting points for agent payments and expressed interest in supporting Patrick Tobler’s team’s existing work on agent infrastructure.

Waisanen named Dial among the projects connected to this direction. He described potential links between phone numbers and Cardano wallets, including payment rules for unwanted SMS messages and phone numbers for groups of AI agents.

Dial was previously named among Cardano PRIME’s first group of product builders. Its announced work includes an open-source programmable invoicing layer designed for wallets, organizations, marketplaces and software agents to create, verify and settle invoices on-chain.