From TradFi to Internet Finance: A New Era of Global Capital | Felipe Montealegre
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We don't have Internet finance. We have finance inside of databases that communicate over the Internet occasionally. What we're seeing on the Internet financial system is a lot more innovation and experimentation than we've than we've seen in the in the legacy financial system over the last thirty years. Welcome
to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. Today on the show, we are going right to the heart of that exact subject. The Internet financial system is being built right before our very eyes. It's not crypto. It's not blockchain. It's not DeFi. It's all of those things, but the idea and the power behind all of those things are best expressed as the Internet financial system. Today on the show, I have Felipe Montiellegre who is driving this idea forward. The idea that we are all familiar with, but we need better words to express. And Felipe has those words.
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you for having me. And you nailed it on the name. Perfect.
Perfect. Felipe, I wanna start off this podcast, by reading off an excerpt from something I'm quite sure that you're familiar with since since you wrote it. You wrote in an article that I thoroughly enjoyed, we are collectively building the Internet financial system, a better financial system on the cloud that can hold the world's assets and provide financial services to 8,000,000,000 people. We believe the Internet financial system is a paradigm shift in global financial activity like Gutenberg's printing press was a paradigm shift in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Now I think
Absolutely. Good question. We've been pushing I mean, a few people have been pushing the name Internet financial system for for a while now. I think it it captures certain elements that that other names don't capture, like DeFi as an example. You know, decentralized finance is a good name, but it it really does limit the scope of what you're talking about. Because something like Circle's USDC, probably the best example of product market fit in the market. Is that decentralized finance? Or is that much more efficient, lower cost centralized finance happening in blockchains? Right? Other names,
So I'm gonna put on my Gary Gensler hat and say that even before Blockchain, we already had Internet finance. You can log into your Wells Fargo and access your bank account on the Internet. And so why why are we even invoking this new name in the year 2025? Why is this a even a post blockchain phenomenon in the first place? Can you unpack that part of the conversation?
Yeah. I would what I would respond to to Gary Gensler is that's like saying that you know, saying that your financial transaction in the legacy system is made on the Internet or happens on the Internet is akin to saying that the pizza you order through Grubhub is made on the Internet. It's not. The Internet is a communication mechanism for from you to the analog pizza shop that then kinda cooks your pizza, delivers it all in the analog world wi
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