Fed Up With Legacy Finance

I became a lawyer in the wake of the global financial crisis, and my career has been heavily influenced by it. Aside from a judicial clerkship, I’ve spent most of my professional life investigating and litigating disputes related to traditional financial services. Like a lot of lawyers in the District of Columbia, I’ve also navigated the myriad regulatory regimes that govern the financial system, and I’ve interacted with the various federal agencies in charge of administering them. My work gave me the chance to step into the kitchen of the legacy finance industry and see how the proverbial sausage is made.

I was not impressed.

At best, I would call our current financial system inefficient; at worst, malicious. You’ve likely seen or experienced this for yourself. Entrenched incumbents design business models that benefit their bottom lines at the expense of the public. Catastrophic risks are hidden from view, and bad actors who cause harm are rarely held to account. The system’s walled gardens exclude the people who need access the most, and the lucky few who are allowed to participate find the experience slow, expensive, and frustratingly complex. In short, the hulking machinery that powers legacy finance is plainly unfit for the digital age.

Enter crypto.

I’ll admit that it took me a while to wrap my head around Bitcoin, but once I did, I was blown away by its capacity to fundamentally reshape the global financial system. Here was an engineering solution to a problem that most financial institutions and political leaders seemed incapable of, or uninterested in, fixing.

I quickly became convinced that peer-to-peer electronic cash was the future: distributed software that allows anyone, anywhere, to conduct transactions at a distance almost instantly and almost for free without any intermediaries extracting rent or conducting surveillance in the process. Sound, censorship-resistant, trust-minimized, permissionless money for all.

Since then, I’ve strongly believed — and still do — that crypto’s core value proposition is its ability to bring about a revolutionary technological upgrade on money. But a new financial system needs more than just new money; it also needs to replicate and improve the full range of financial activities that support the modern global economy.

The open finance movement seeks to build that new financial system on top of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and any other cryptonetwork fit for the task.