Not too long ago, bankers and asset managers could ignore the tribal warfare that marks much of crypto’s governance. Arcane debates were best left to Crypto Twitter.
This is no longer the case: not if your firm is embracing tokenization of real-world assets, from cash (ie, stablecoins) to credit, real estate, or securities. The settlement blockchain now matters a lot.
Ethereum accounts for about 75 percent of the market cap of assets, or about $17 billion, that have been tokenized. It remains the go-to chain for most TradFi projects that seek distribution beyond clubby, permissioned DLT.
But there is a lot of change happening within the developer community that ultimately decides what Ethereum is, and how it works - including issues around throughput, gas fees, privacy, resilience, and more.
In March, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and an influential voice within the Ethereum community - and crypto broadly – threw his weight behind a new “Mandate” to make Ethereum a robust digital infrastructure for the long term. It has many admirable qualities. But it also moves Ethereum Foundation into a lesser role, particularly by stepping back from business development.
The Mandate has been praised by some, and criticized by others for abandoning the tokenomics required to incentivize miners and validators to keep the system running. Meanwhile, Ethereum has keener competition, both from faster, cheaper blockchain environments like Solana, and from better designed but permissioned DLTs like Canton Network.
With all of this happening, I thought it would be helpful to get a take from Ethereum Foundation, and invited Tiena Sekharan to discuss these trends. Tiena is APAC enterprise lead at Ethereum Foundation. Among her other career highlights, she also served in business development at J.P. Morgan’s Onyx Coin Systems, so she has first-hand knowledge of what large financial institutions are after.
Timecodes:
0:00 - Introduction; explaining Ethereum Foundation and the new Mandate
06:17 - Is there a contradiction between EF’s Mandate and business development relevant to banks and asset managers?
9:13 - Backlash against “ideologues” and keeping Ethereum competitive
13:03 - Frontrunning problems in blockchain Proof of Stake systems
14:52 - Censorship-resistance and privacy versus institutions’ need for compliance
20:03 - What tokenization projects meet the needs of issuers and investors?
25:59 - What’s next for Tiena and EF
