We've been building DeFi infrastructure in Istanbul since 2022. The ecosystem when we started looked very different from what it looks like now. Some things grew faster than we expected. Some things still haven't happened at all.
This is an honest account from inside the ecosystem — not a PR piece about how Turkey is becoming a blockchain hub. Some of it is genuinely encouraging. Some of it is a reminder of how much work is still left.
What has actually grown
Developer talent
Istanbul has a real engineering talent base now. When we hired in 2022, finding engineers with meaningful Solidity experience and an understanding of protocol design was extremely difficult. We spent four months filling two roles. In 2025, the pipeline is meaningfully better. Several universities have introduced blockchain and distributed systems curricula. The annual Istanbul Blockchain Summit has become a serious technical conference, not just a networking event.
The talent quality is competitive. Engineers here are building things that would be valued anywhere. The salary arbitrage that used to make Istanbul attractive for foreign companies hiring remotely has compressed significantly — which is a good sign for the local market, even if it complicates our own hiring economics.
Institutional interest
The major Turkish banks have moved from "we're monitoring the space" to active internal projects. Three of the five largest banks in Turkey have working groups on digital asset custody or tokenization. None of them are public yet, but the activity is real. We've had conversations with all three.
The interest is driven partly by client demand — high-net-worth clients asking about digital asset access — and partly by competitive pressure from regional banks in the UAE and Bahrain that have moved faster. Nobody wants to be the last major bank in the region to have a digital assets strategy.
Regulatory engagement
The BDDK and SPK (Capital Markets Board) have both increased their engagement with the industry since 2023. The Q4 2025 BDDK guidance we've written about separately is a direct output of that engagement. It's regulatory involvement that some operators find constraining, but we find it genuinely constructive. Regulators who are engaged are regulators who can be influenced. Regulators who aren't engaged eventually produce rules that make no operational sense.
What's still missing
Institutional-grade custody
There is no Turkish-regulated qualified custodian for digital assets with multi-chain DeFi connectivity. International custodians cover major chains — Ethereum, BNB Chain — but coverage for smaller chains used in Turkish-specific DeFi applications is incomplete. Any institution that wants to participate in DeFi through regulated channels currently has to work around this gap with creative structuring.
The custody gap is probably the biggest single infrastructure gap in the market. Everything else is improvable. The custody question requires a licensed entity to build a product, and that takes time.
Cross-border crypto payment infrastructure
Turkey's remittance market is substantial — Turkey has diaspora communities across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Crypto-based remittance corridors should be a natural application. But the regulatory environment for crypto payments in Turkey remains restrictive. The 2021 payment prohibition has been somewhat relaxed but not reversed. This leaves a significant use case underdeveloped.
Local DeFi protocols
Most DeFi applications used in Turkey are built elsewhere and used here. There are very few DeFi protocols that were designed for Turkish users or Turkish regulatory requirements from the ground up. Defimec is one of the few. The gap matters because protocols built for other markets often have assumptions baked into them that don't hold in Turkey — different regulatory frameworks, different user behavior, different liquidity patterns.
Why it still matters
Turkey processes roughly $10 billion in annual crypto volume through licensed exchanges. The population has one of the highest rates of crypto ownership in any large economy — estimates put it at 16-19% of adults. The appetite is clearly there.
The gap between that user base and institutional-grade DeFi infrastructure is what makes this market interesting to build in. It's not a market that needs to be convinced of crypto's value — that work is done. It's a market that needs proper infrastructure and clearer regulatory pathways to realize the institutional tier of that appetite.
We're still early. But the direction is right, and the pace has accelerated noticeably over the past 18 months.
