Galaxy’s Max Bareiss says DeFi is built for agentic trading

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Galaxy Digital's head of lending argues AI agents can borrow, trade, and repay onchain without ever needing a human on the other side

Mon 9 Nov 2026 · 10:05 EST · 3 min read

In Crypto

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The future of trading may not involve a trader at all. That’s the pitch from Max Bareiss, Head of Lending at Galaxy Digital, who says decentralized finance is positioned to lead the rise of agentic trading.

His reasoning is simple. Software agents can borrow, trade, and repay onchain without a human counterparty approving each step. Traditional finance, with its phone calls, credit desks, and business hours, was not designed for customers who never sleep and never pick up the phone.

Why agents and DeFi fit together

Agentic trading refers to autonomous, AI-driven trading carried out by software agents. Bareiss made his comments in a conversation on November 9, 2026. He pointed to a specific set of capabilities. Agents can borrow assets, execute trades, short positions, and handle repayments without human oversight.

What makes this work is how DeFi lending is structured. Liquidation thresholds are set in advance and coded into the protocol. Liquidity sits onchain, available to anyone who meets the collateral rules.

Compare that with a traditional prime brokerage relationship. There, a human usually sits somewhere in the chain, approving terms and making margin calls. For an AI agent, that human is a bottleneck with a lunch break.

Galaxy’s own onchain playbook

Bareiss isn’t speaking purely in hypotheticals. Galaxy Digital has been using DeFi platforms for its own operations for some time.

The firm has used Aave since at least September 2025. Through the protocol, Galaxy borrows stablecoins against high-value collateral such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Galaxy’s DeFi integration now supports its treasury, trading, and structured product functions. The appeal is round-the-clock access to liquidity. It also reduces the firm’s dependence on traditional intermediaries.

The timing of Bareiss’s comments lines up with a busy stretch for the firm. Galaxy recently made a $100 million allocation into the Sky ecosystem, announced around November 6, 2026.

A day earlier, on November 5, 2026, the firm’s Galaxy Onchain Financing Rate, or GOFR, was providing institutional access to onchain capital markets. GOFR aggregates borrowing rates across multiple platforms, including Aave, Morpho, and Spark.

Galaxy is also positioning itself as a risk buffer. The firm offers institutional clients first-loss capital protection and advanced execution services within onchain money markets.

What this means for institutions and DeFi

For investors, the most immediate takeaway is about where automated trading activity could concentrate. DeFi offers programmable leverage and atomic settlement, meaning a trade and its settlement happen together or not at all.

There’s a competitive angle too. Galaxy is building several pieces at once: a rate benchmark in GOFR, a sizable Sky allocation, and first-loss protection for clients.

The risks deserve equal attention. Agents that borrow and trade without human oversight depend entirely on how well their parameters are set. Pre-set liquidation thresholds are a feature when they work and an accelerant when many automated positions hit them at once.

What to watch from here: adoption of GOFR as a reference rate across Aave, Morpho, and Spark, the deployment of Galaxy’s Sky allocation, and whether other institutional lenders start describing AI agents as clients rather than tools.

Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.