The book Beyond Bitcoin is subtitled “The End of Banks”. This is metaphorical — it really means the end of banks as we know them. Banks and other financial institutions will have to wrench themselves out of the comfort of the past, where innovation has been slow and the money has been easy and the computers whirr quietly in large data centres. Some will make it and some others, we predict, will not. There is a train coming at these companies, fuelled by blockchain and the invention of the smart contract.

Very few services offered by these companies in their present form can survive, particularly given the large supporting infrastructure required. A large slice of the TradFi industry will be shown up by DeFi as slow, inflexible, expensive, unfair, opaque and inefficient. ..

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