Author: Guy Wuollet

Translator: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

As someone who considers themselves part of the "crypto circle," I have always found it hard to understand: why do Wall Street and an increasing number of politicians in Washington insist on using the term "digital assets"?

Most of the assets I deal with daily are almost all digital.

I can't even remember the last time I went out with cash. From bank accounts to brokerage accounts, all personal finances are online. Even physical credit cards are rarely taken out. After discussing with peers, I realize I am not an exception.

For most people in developed countries, the only truly non-digitized assets left are physical items like houses and cars. These things are referred to as "real assets," but this term rather confuses matters, as it implies that stocks, bonds, digital tokens, and derivatives are, to some extent, not "real".

However, they are certainly real.

Yet, over the years, in investing and building systems in the financial technology field, I realized one thing: most areas of finance are not as digitalized as we think.

Most other industries in the economy, from media and retail to logistics, have been completely restructured around software. Finance seems similar to them, but at the core, it hasn't changed much—the wave of digitalization brought by mobile internet and cloud computing has nearly bypassed the financial industry.

This is finally starting to change.

The Coordination Problem in the Financial Industry

Financial institutions are still stuck in the past in many ways.

They operate on a range of disconnected systems, relying on documents and repeated reconciliations to maintain operations. Just figuring out "who holds what," "when settlements occur," "how transactions are ordered," and "which rules apply" consumes a tremendous amount of time.

Theoretically, a shared database could solve the problem. But in practice, more challenging issues quickly arise: who controls this database? Who has the authority to make changes? What happens when participants distrust each other?

This is why blockchain is gaining popularity in places that seem completely different from the early crypto circle.

Crypto culture initially revolved around concepts like "decentralization" and "financial sovereignty," which remain important today. However, what is pushing large financial institutions toward this technology is not ideology, but rather practical coordination issues.

The logic of Wall Street has always been more practical than ideological.

Each trading firm's sensitivity to counterparty default risk is akin to each startup's sensitivity to platform risk (for example, projects built on Facebook could be kicked off at any time).

Counterparty risk must be managed, censorship resistance must be maintained, and fair order and best execution must be ensured. Wall Street may not call these "decentralization," but what it seeks to solve is essentially the same thing.

In my view, blockchain is the first time these long-standing issues have been offered a decent answer.

It provides a neutral system that allows multiple parties to coordinate without having to give control to any single owner. The ownership of assets is directly embedded in the software, eliminating the need for a separate ledger to reconcile, and there is no external record to adjudicate who owns what.

The assets themselves are the records.

This is the true reason Wall Street is starting to seriously embrace blockchain: not because they suddenly believe in decentralization, but because blockchain provides a shared "default option" among multiple counterparties, enabling everyone to upgrade their respective backend systems.

This is what the term "digital assets" truly aims to convey—it represents the digital transformation of financial services, just as cloud services represented the digital transformation of large enterprises back in the day.

What Moving On-Chain Means

As the crypto industry moves toward Wall Street, it is also shedding some of its rebelliousness, entering a world full of collared shirts, compliance checks, and various compromises.

However, as Wall Street uses blockchain for digital transformation, it unknowingly inherits the strongest capability from the crypto field—one that has been possessed by the software industry for decades: composability.

When financial assets operate on shared, programmable infrastructure, they can be composed, extended, and integrated without starting from scratch every time.

Some benefits are obvious, such as faster settlements and lower costs. But a deeper change is structural: developing applications on top of this system will become much easier.

In other words, when crypto technology enters financial institutions, it does not disappear; it is merely repackaged.

This movement is transforming into infrastructure. And when Wall Street begins to utilize this infrastructure, the crypto spirit it ultimately inherits may be much greater than originally anticipated.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。