The Disrupted Trustee
DeFi, acronym for Decentralised Finance, aims to expand the monetary freedom offered and inspired by Bitcoin, and introduce these features throughout the crypto ecosystem.
DeFi is an umbrella term for peer-to-peer financial services on public blockchains, primarily Ethereum.
Most people who buy, sell and maintain their long-term assets use a centralised entity and expose themselves to risks such as fractional reserves, hacking or insider trading.
DeFi offers a more reliable alternative by using programmable smart contracts.
Crypto assets are digital and, as such, programmable. DeFi platforms use pre-programmed contracts to perform tasks that were previously only available through centralised entities such as swaps, margin trading, lending or betting.
By eliminating centralised intermediaries - without the associated costs- and instead using publicly visible contracts, DeFi provides a revolutionary financial layer for the crypto ecosystem.
How likely is the trustee’s industry to be disrupted?
From my point of view, the future trustee would have to create and implement crypto structures that guarantee non-custodial hardware wallets and own full nodes to keep assets and verify transactions without relying on third parties.
In this new context, the role of trustees will change forever. Trustees will become pure crypto assets custodians pushed to allocate most of their resources to set up and develop their own systems to hold and manage crypto assets.
