The founder of DeFi platform Synthetix said that projects built on Ethereum can finally deliver on many of the promises that fintech failed to.
Despite ten years of development, Warwick said the fintech sector has been hamstrung by “trying to build overlays for the legacy infrastructure.”
They faced issues with a lack of interoperability between the “siloed” systems of financial institutions, regulatory barriers to innovation, and the vast expenses associated with mainstream compliance regimes. He said:
“The promise of fintech over the last ten years has run up against all of these impediments and barriers to entry, and Ethereum really removes those.”
In contrast to the fintech sector, Warwick said Ethereum comprises an open-permissionless platform boasting inherent interoperability — where “once someone deploys some new piece of infrastructure, it is, by default, accessible to everyone else.”
Noting that the popular browser extension Metamask has seen over four million downloads, Warwick describes its adoption as “amazing from a crypto perspective,” but is still “tiny” in terms of “real-world” engagement.
