Traditional wealth creation has always been associated with working hard, saving diligently, trusting institutions, and hoping the system rewards patience.
Salim Elhila, co-founder of Decentralized Master, believes adding a few more new-age strategies to the list can help prove more rewarding. He, in fact, stands at the vantage point of two of the most transformative forces shaping the modern economy - artificial intelligence and decentralized finance.
It's about being in the right place at the right time, he admits, yet his story is less about technology than it is about a lifelong fascination with systems.
From his childhood, Elhila has been intrigued by how things work, who controls them, and why so many people remain excluded from their benefits. No wonder he stands today in a position to make a lasting positive impact on people's lives.
Decentralized Masters, which he co-founded with Tan Gera, has emerged as a prominent educational platform helping people navigate new-age finance and wealth creation.
But Elhila’s journey began far from decentralized finance and blockchain protocols, with a young engineering student who discovered that security and fulfilment are rarely the same thing.
Looking back at his early years, Elhila does not see Decentralized Masters shaping up in his head, but admits having an intuitive itch of being destined for unconventional paths rather than a traditional career.
“I studied mathematical engineering at INSA Toulouse and specialized in AI and statistics. I went straight into corporate engineering work after graduating. It paid well, and it was a safe path. But before long, I knew I couldn't spend my life optimizing someone else's models. I left, started building online, and never looked back. The unconventional path wasn't a choice. It was the only one that fit how my brain works,” he says.
But Decentralized Masters remains the expression of his personal ambition, defining his relationship with risk, especially in a space like DeFi where uncertainty is almost a constant. Growing up in Paris in a Moroccan family, he did not find himself fortunate enough to be handed things on a platter.
“By the time I was 20, I'd already been scammed out of thousands of dollars trying to build my first online business. That was the lesson that stuck. Risk isn't something you avoid. It's something you understand and size. The people who survive in this industry are the ones who learned that math the hard way,” Salim recalls.
As if destined to meet Gera, their instant chemistry helped materialize the idea behind Decentralized Masters. At the time Elhila was going deep into digital assets, he felt the need to connect with someone who actually understood the markets, and someone introduced him to Gera.
“We met, we clicked, and we spent the next year trading knowledge. He brought financial markets discipline. I brought the engineering and the on-chain side. By the end of that year, the company wasn't just an idea we had. It was the natural output of how we worked together,” he says.
Operating at the intersection of AI and decentralized finance, Elhila personally sees ‘wealth’ more philosophically as an ‘optionality, rather than just ‘accumulation’ of value. For him, it means the ability to deploy capital into systems that compound without personal intervention, that work while you sleep, that don't depend on a single institution staying solvent. Real wealth, he says, is the freedom of not needing anyone's permission to grow it.
Salim admits that many people still see finance as something opaque or elite, and to break free from that mindset, they must stop thinking like a customer and start thinking like an owner before trying to understand DeFi. “In traditional finance, you trust a brand to manage your money. In DeFi, you read the code, verify the contract, and take responsibility. That shift from passive consumer to active participant is what locks most people out before they even start,” he says.
Admitting that trust is a major factor in people hesitating to adopt DeFi, Salim is optimistic that if traditional finance can be built on trust in institutions, they can also trust the math behind DeFi, instead of marketing. “Traditional finance asks you to trust that the bank's executives are honest and the regulators are watching. DeFi asks you to trust the code, the cryptography, and your own ability to verify both. It's a higher bar, but it's a more honest one,” he reasons.
The sector itself has grown rapidly in recent years. According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, decentralized finance has become one of the most significant segments of the digital asset ecosystem, supporting a growing range of lending, trading, staking, and liquidity-management activities. While adoption remains relatively early compared to traditional financial markets, DeFi continues to attract both retail participants and institutional interest as blockchain infrastructure matures.
Beyond the motivation to create something new, Salim also saw a glaring gap in the market to push ahead the idea behind Decentralized Masters.
The broader trend extends beyond decentralized finance. According to the World Bank's Global Findex Database, digital financial services have significantly expanded access to financial tools and payment systems worldwide over the past decade. However, gaps in financial literacy, investment access, and wealth-building opportunities continue to persist, particularly among underserved populations. Advocates of decentralized finance argue that blockchain-based financial infrastructure could help address some of these barriers by reducing reliance on traditional intermediaries.
He noticed that the world of decentralized finance had thousands of platforms teaching people how to trade and almost none teaching them how to think. “Most retail traders are losing money because they're being sold signals by people with no framework behind them. Decentralized Masters exist to fix that. We give members the tools to evaluate any opportunity in this space themselves,” he says.
Decentralized Masters being an education platform, Salim takes his own communication skills very seriously to ensure that he is able to convey the message in the simplest possible manner. So, to simplify concepts like blockchain, AI, and yield strategies for someone completely new but curious, he starts with what they already understand. In his vocabulary, a blockchain is a shared spreadsheet that nobody can edit alone, AI is a pattern recognizer that gets better with data, and yield is rent you collect for letting your capital do the work. Once those analogies land, the complexity stops feeling like a wall, he says. The result is that, besides real financial change, he also sees a bigger psychological shift in people. “People arrive at Decentralized Masters feeling like the system is rigged against them. They leave with frameworks, with conviction, and bond as a community that thinks at their level. That confidence changes how they make every other decision in their life,” Salim claims.
In his view, there’s an equal probability of AI democratizing opportunities in wealth creation and also of the risk concentration of power even further. “AI gives an individual analyst the firepower of a team. That's democratizing. But the largest models cost billions to train, which concentrates power in a handful of companies. The winners over the next decade will be people who use AI as leverage, not those who wait for it to be given to them,” he says.
The growing convergence between artificial intelligence and financial services is attracting increasing attention from policymakers and industry leaders. The World Economic Forum has noted that AI is expected to play a transformative role in financial services, improving decision-making, risk assessment, customer experiences, and operational efficiency across the sector. As AI adoption accelerates, questions surrounding digital ownership, data governance, and financial accessibility are becoming increasingly important components of the broader financial ecosystem.
Whatever the outcome, Salim believes AI and DeFi will be living together as inevitable forces, as AI agents will need to transact at machine speed without permission, and DeFi was built for it. He believes blockchain-based settlement systems could play an increasingly important role in supporting AI-driven economic activity.
The future of financial infrastructure is also evolving beyond traditional payment rails. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has highlighted the growing potential of tokenization and programmable financial assets to improve settlement efficiency, liquidity management, and cross-border transactions. Many industry observers view these developments as part of a broader shift toward more digitally native financial systems that could coexist alongside conventional banking infrastructure.
The promise of DeFi comes with volatility, but Salim has a simple way to navigate risk. “Risk isn't about avoiding losses. It's about sizing positions so no single loss ends the game. Most newcomers skip that math. They go in heavy when they're convicted and freeze when they're wrong. The discipline they lack is the simplest one. Decide your maximum loss before you enter, and respect it,” he says. Elhila believes the general public still holds a lot of misconceptions regarding decentralized finance, the biggest one being that DeFi is just about trading digital assets.
“It isn't. It's an entirely new financial infrastructure. The second misconception is that you need to be technical to use it. You don't. You need frameworks. Decentralized Masters exists because the gap between curiosity and competence in this space was being filled by influencers, not educators,” he says.
International organizations are increasingly examining how digital finance can support economic inclusion and growth. The International Monetary Fund has noted that digital financial services can expand access to financial products, reduce transaction costs, and improve economic participation, provided appropriate governance, consumer protection, and regulatory frameworks are in place. This balance between innovation and oversight is likely to remain a central theme as financial technology continues to evolve.
This may sound unrelated to the fast-moving and often abstract space occupied by DeFi that Salim deals with at Decentralized Masters, but he is equally serious about composing music.
“Composing forces me to spend hours on a single problem, with full attention, no distractions. That's the same discipline this work demands. The space moves fast, and the only way I stay grounded is by making time for things that don't move at all,” is how he puts his fascination with music.
Perhaps that fits his philosophy - innovation and disruption are the byproducts of the same creativity.
It may be difficult to measure his contribution to the DeFi and music world, but Salim is clear about his expectations. “The thing I want to be remembered for is harder to measure. We're giving people who were locked out of traditional wealth-building the tools to participate in what comes next. If ten years from now there are people from communities like the one I grew up in who are financially sovereign because of what we built, that's the legacy,” he concludes.
