Their conversation centered around the theme of “Building Infrastructure Fundamentals,” which focused on traditional financial institutions’ perception and adoption of digital assets. “BlackRock’s involvement was a big moment,” Long said. Many financial institutions have been slowly adopting crypto tech, acknowledging it as a contemporary financial framework, Long said. When talking about the real-world uses of digital assets, Long emphasized the advantages of institutional decentralized finance (DeFi) in basic banking transactions.
“Basic financial services like deposits, payments, lending, credit, and capital markets can benefit from a more global, open, and efficient system,” Long said, comparing blockchain’s potential impact on finance to the internet’s impact on communication. “Entering the U.S. market through the SEC doesn’t sound like a door that’s going to have a friendly, friendly entryway for us,” Long said. Long expressed cautious optimism about regulatory clarity in the U.S., noting that stablecoin legislation could be a positive step. For instance, Société Générale issued the first euro stablecoin on a public ledger.
“To clarify, as an industry, there’s fraud, which is what happened in the case of FTX finance. There are blatant violations of compliance, violations,” Long said. “But it’s not that the technology is bad or that all players paint us all with a broad brush of fraudsters and criminals.” FTX’s collapse and fraud do not reflect the whole crypto industry—positive blockchain applications do remain, Long stressed. “There’s a hangover from those events, but it’s important to separate fraud from the legitimate applications of the technology,” she said.
