DeFi shouldn’t fear ‘suitcoiners’

DeFi’s future depends on embracing institutional investors, whose capital, credibility and demand for stability are shifting DeFi from a speculative playground into a mature, trusted financial ecosystem.

Opinion by: Kevin Rusher, founder of RAAC

Crypto is a movement born from a cultural rejection of traditional finance, driven by the belief that transparency, decentralization and code can build a better financial system than the one that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Indeed, for many, the creation of Bitcoin was a rebellion against the traditional financial gatekeepers that siphoned all value out of the market.

That foundational spirit still matters for crypto, but the landscape has changed drastically after 15 years. Today, BlackRock is the second-largest holder of Bitcoin (BTC), beaten only by its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. At the same time, almost every major traditional asset manager has some interest in the industry through BTC, Ether (ETH) and real-world assets (RWAs) like tokenized private credit and treasuries.

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