In his latest YouTube release titled “The obsoletion of legacy systems“, Andreas Antonopoulos talked about where he thinks the Ethereum project is going and what may happen to legacy banking institutions.

Ethereum’s killer application

The open blockchain enthusiast said: “To me, the killer app is simple: governance.”

“Ethereum is about reinventing the modern corporation. It is about reinventing human organisation. Not commerce, not trade, and not money.”

Antonopoulos thinks that the Ethereum project can disrupt the geographically-rigid concept of corporations that exists today.

According to him, the current set-up of shareholders and boards of directors can be replaced “with a model of governance where decision-making can happen in ad hoc collaborations between people, that can emerge and dissolve very rapidly. A system like this can truly have fair, transparent, and open governance.”

Today, we see a number of projects looking to scale the governance concept. A notable example is the MakerDAO (MKR) project that uses a decentralised governance model (hosted on the Ethereum network) to control the stability and growth of the DAI stablecoin.

A personal relationship with your banker

Antonopoulos has always been an advocate of self-sovereignty and holding your own private keys. In another segment in his Q&A, he made the prediction that in the future, a personal relationship with bankers (and banking institutions) will become a thing of the past.

He said: “The idea of having a fixed relationship with a centralised institution that holds your money for you will eventually be one of those obscure, weird, elitist things that old rich people do.”

“They will have a personal relationship with their banker; they are the only people to have a personal relationship with their banker to start with, but in the end, they will be the only people left who have that.”

He thinks the rest of us will be “debanked” as the world moves towards a peer-to-peer economy, through the disintermediation of the current banking industry.

Seeing a new decentralised future

Antonopoulos says that today, great people work for banks but the “greatest of those great people will quit and do a start-up in the cryptocurrency space.”

According to him, this won’t happen initially, but the workers who see a peer-to-peer banking future emerging “will spend the first couple of years trying to persuade everyone around them that they have seen the future and it is not this system we’ve put together from ’70s technology transaction mainframe’ that is slow, inefficient, and insecure.”

The self-professed ‘disruptarian’ said that after realising what can be done on open and permissionless blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum), any legacy employee will see an unparalleled opportunity to move away from “old-style batch payments” to a new digital economy built on an ability to instantaneously stream the smallest amount of value across the world.

Antonopoulos concluded by speculating that these bankers are likely to go on to take any end-of-year bonus paid to them (by these legacy institutions) and use that money to fund their own competing ventures that will fit into a new decentralised banking future.