[tornato7]

For better or worse, Crypto is legitimately the easiest way to create a financial application, derivative, exchange etc... any programmer can create interesting, useful, and novel financial instruments like Squeeth, crvUSD, PoolTogether, etc in short order. Good luck recreating those in TradFi in under a decade, let along making them interact with each other in atomic transactions.

Of course, some people see this as a bad thing because it enables scammers to create all sorts of new and improved ponzi schemes. Others think it's a good thing because it speeds up financial innovation and levels the playing field between big banks and small startups.

Some might argue that crypto is only useful for building apps insofar as it avoids regulation, but you also can't convince me that Wells Fargo is the future of finance. Banks could never create a financial playground that works as well as Ethereum, even using their centralized database.

IMO, so many of the projects that have come out of the crypto space are awesome and promising, but investment in the space grew faster than projects could mature. Unfortunately that leads to users losing $100M when Joe Schmo's cross-chain bridge gets hacked, when it should have never had that much TVL.

Just my 2c.

[Vespasian]

I'd argue that the difficulty in banking is not to get the technology working.

Financial software is regular software with additional audits and checks to make sure it's safe against the flood of attacks it will receive. With the kind of money we are talking about, you can hire people with the expertise to reasonably protect you against bugs and software exploits (something most traditional financial companies have a close to 100% track record in but many crypto projects failed).

But after that you have a mountain of issues to consider that have little to nothing to do with software:

- financial logical holes like flash loans being used to extract money "democratically"

- people committing age old scams "but on the block chain"

- founders not understanding problems such as that you cannot secure one unsecured coin with another one no matter the algorithm.

- all sorts of unpleasant people using your "financial playground" to do things society frowns upon.

All of these are solvable but not by choosing a better technology stack. Look at how much traditional institutions are spending on compliance and realise that you probably won't be able to cut that by an order of magnitude.

Crypto is learning very quickly that most regulations do not exist to "keep the little man down" but because having regular people get fleeced over and over by charismatics liers/fools can have a devastating effect on any community.

[tornato7]

If technology is not the problem then why is technology in traditional banking so bad? I do banking operations as a big part of my job, and can tell you that there are close to zero banks today that have even heard of APIs. The only ones that did were Silvergate, SVB, and Signature, and those were singled out and shut down by tradfi.

If banks had good technology then companies like Plaid and Modern Treasury wouldn't exist. MT starts off at $70k/yr, but in crypto land I could replicate their entire product with 5 lines of JavaScript.

Moving money via USDC on Polygon/Ethereum is far and away the easiest and most secure banking experience. I can do things that are simply impossible with regular banks, like write custom logic to determine how many approvers a transaction requires, or use an escrow contract to ensure both parties deliver on a promise with no middleman.

[peyton]

Banks suffer breaches all the time. They’re insured. The community bank down the street probably does not have the greatest opsec.