A consumer-targeted “revolutionary app” is needed to bring the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry to a level that appeals to the general publicsaid Ripple Lab’s head of DeFi markets Boris Alergant.
Alergant made the comments during a panel at the Blockchain Futurist Conference titled “The Future of Decentralized Finance” on August 9.which was covered by Cointelegraph reporters in Toronto, Canada.
In addition to Alergant, Aventus Ventures CEO Kevin Hobbs, FLUIDEFI Co-Founder and CEO Lisa Loud, and Teller Finance CEO and Co-Founder Ryan Berkin also participated in the panel.
The general sentiment among the panelists was that centralized financial institutions will eventually get the general public to adopt DeFi. Alergant suggested that growth will likely come from a user-friendly CeFi app that offers exposure to DeFi services:
“For an average user, you tell your mother how to stake Aave or ETH […] and this is a process. She doesn’t know how to use MetaMask, but she wants to generate that performance somehow. She wants to trade, but she doesn’t know how to do it.”
“So I guess there will be an institutional adoption, and that the institutions are the ones that are going to create […] that revolutionary app aimed at consumers, which will take crypto and DeFi to the next level.”
The co-founder and CEO of FLUIDEFI expressed a similar opinion, noting how the average citizen ended up adopting the Internet despite not understanding the Internet protocol suite, also known as TCP/IP.
“We all use the internet, right? The Internet was a paradigm shift for us, but we don’t know how to use TCP/IP. Right now everyone using DeFi knows how to use the protocols, it’s not sustainable, it’s not a good adoption model.”
“In two years, I think institutions will invest more in DeFi, and companies will make user experiences simpler,” he added.
The Ripple executive also outlined that the DeFi sector will soon work hand in hand with the CeFi sector to offer financial services to customers.
“DeFi will eventually complement and supplant CeFi. In the end you don’t really care if a trade is done through decentralized means on a centralized exchange. You just want best execution,” he said.
The Blockchain Futurist Conference is the largest annual blockchain and cryptocurrency conference held in Toronto, Canada, and runs through August 10. 2022 marks the fifth year of the event. This year Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is expected to speak there despite appearing at Korea Blockchain Week just two days ago.
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