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rather than the revolution everyone was expecting ? Clara : I think we ' ll get two versions . I think we ' ll still see continuation of the more DeFi side which is completely trustless , it ' s just a bunch of smart contracts executing code and that doesn ' t require any centralised intermediary . But we ' re also going to see a permissioned version of decentralised finance that will be incorporated by these more institutional actors and this has to do with tokenisation . You can ' t really have the fully automated DeFi side when you ' re talking about traditional finance because there is the risk component , there ' s compliance , there ' s regulation , and so I think it will be a combination of both depending on what the actual use cases are .
Market events show that knowing and trusting who you work with is more important than ever . At Kaiko we offer a cryptocurrency exchange ranking that is designed to give investors a better idea of what is considered a safe and transparent exchange to transact on .
Abeetha : In order to have crypto assets and digital assets transacting seamlessly on a set of rails such as blockchain you need to have your security representation as well as a cash representation on-chain . At the moment you have your fiat payment routes driven by the SWIFT mechanism and then you have your stablecoins and so on . Crypto is an asset class on its own but there is a whole financial market that is currently on payment rails that are 30 , 40 years old . We see huge potential in technology that streamlines all that post-trade infrastructure .
Jenna : What this year has taught us is that being conservative is okay . Asking for clients to fund their account to trade is the right thing to be doing . We could all offer leveraged products or we could do it properly .
I think it is tough to sell at the beginning when it ' s so retail and we don ' t have the right players in the room . But now I think you ' re going to get the grownups collaboratively working together to try and come up with infrastructure . Up till now , you ’ d get offshore exchanges offering custody , prime brokerage every part of the system all in one and making loads of money from all the different elements of the services . Whereas if you break it all out and everyone owns their own part of the infrastructure and builds it in a way that institutional investors are used to , with the same plumbing that they would use for other asset classes , that helps to get them comfortable .
28 // TheTRADE // Q4 2022