Svmuu News: Lorenzo Valente, Head of Research at ARK Invest, recently publicly refuted a16z Crypto’s view that “traditional finance needs blockchain, not DeFi,” arguing that financial institutions are more likely to be built on open DeFi infrastructure in the future.Public blockchains have already demonstrated their advantages over private blockchain solutions, and the growth of tokenized assets on open networks—such as Ethereum—illustrates that public blockchains possess stronger network effects and scalability potential.
Lorenzo Valente pointed out that the builders of the next-generation financial infrastructure may not be traditional financial institutions, but rather crypto-native companies such as Circle and Coinbase.
Previously, a16z Crypto had put forward a different perspective, arguing that traditional financial institutions are not truly embracing DeFi, but rather selectively adopting blockchain technologies that align with existing compliance, governance, and operational requirements.In the future, banks and asset management firms will build “programmable financial infrastructure,” drawing on core blockchain capabilities such as tokenization and atomic settlement, while still maintaining a permissioned model and institutional control.
Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder of Sentora, also took issue with this view, arguing that financial institutions may ultimately adopt the underlying DeFi infrastructure and layer compliance, custody, and enterprise-grade control mechanisms on top of it.
With the rapid development of RWA tokenization, on-chain settlement, and institutional-grade financial applications, the debate over which will dominate the future—"open DeFi architectures" or "permissioned blockchain systems"—is heating up. (Cointelegraph)