ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood says decentralized finance (DeFi) could threaten the supremacy of financial institutions.
In a recent conversation with Miami Herbert Business School, the hedge fund founder discusses the bourgeoning sector’s potential impact on traditional finance.
“The financial revolution is DeFi and really, it’s just taking all the middlemen out of the financial ecosystem. A real threat to all of us… We know that the combination of digital wallets and DeFi is going to hollow out a lot of financial institutions. It may already be [happening] because a lot of lending and saving is taking place on DeFi because it offers lower loan rates and higher saving rates, so that’s a compelling combination.”
Wood says DeFi is “scaling enormously” and has already had its resilience tested by past market developments. Wood points to DeFi users leveraging Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) during recent market stumbles as evidence that the DeFi ecosystem is still going strong.
“May of [2021], we had Bitcoin cut in half, Ether cut by more than half. I was waiting for the leverage in the DeFi system to topple it, and it didn’t. And whatever doesn’t kill [these networks] is making them stronger.”
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