Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, is looking at ways to shift "trillions of dollars" onto the blockchain, according to Aly Madhavji, founder of Blockchain Founders Fund.
"You’ve got Larry Fink of BlackRock talking about how do you move trillions of dollars over into the blockchain," Madhavji said. "Making sure that we can actually democratize this effectively — this is actually very exciting to see this type of technology really come into the market."
Roundtable host Rob Nelson noted how people have become comfortable with middlemen in finance, from ETFs to centralized exchanges. But can direct control become the norm?
Jack Knutson, head of BD at Symm Protocol, believes traditional finance is structured in a way that forces users to opt-out rather than opt-in to control their assets.
"Everything is opt-out when it should be opt-in. You should be opting in to the privacy policies or terms of service that you want to participate in," he said.
For Knutson, the advantage of on-chain finance is that market makers can create their own trading environments rather than follow rigid rules dictated by platforms like DYDX, GMX, or Hyperliquid.
"When they come and create markets for us, they get to decide how much collateral they want upfront, the amount of margin, what markets, if they want to offer Perpetuals, if they want to offer options—it’s totally open for the solver to decide what they want to offer traders. No one else in the space does this," he explained.
Nelson compared this shift to platforms like Airbnb and Turo, which disrupted traditional rental markets by allowing direct transactions between users. But why is finance lagging behind?
Madhavji believes the industry was simply too early to fully embrace tokenized assets but is now reaching a tipping point.
Symm’s Knutson sees this as the start of “open finance.”
"These markets are going to be 24/7. We're going to see stocks, FX, and options moving on-chain. It’s only a matter of time before major players like JP Morgan come online," he said. "The future of finance is moving on-chain, and Symm is a big step toward that."
