<\/p>\n
a16z crypto says Wall Street is adopting blockchain less for ideology than for efficiency, risk control and programmable market infrastructure that makes assets composable.<\/p>\n
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a16z crypto general partner Guy Wuollet says the financial industry is undergoing a digital migration in which blockchain is becoming core infrastructure, much as cloud computing became the backbone of modern enterprise software. In his essay, Wuollet argues that \u201cdigital assets\u201d are not mainly about ideology or decentralization, but about upgrading the architecture of finance itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cWall Street is beginning to adopt blockchains with zeal: Not because it\u2019s fixated on the idea of decentralization, but because blockchains create a Schelling point amongst counterparties to upgrade existing backend systems,\u201d Wuollet wrote. He added that \u201cdigital assets\u201d represent \u201cthe digital transformation for financial services in the same way that cloud services once represented the digital transformation for large enterprises.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n The argument is blunt and basically correct. Traditional finance still runs on fragmented databases, delayed reconciliation and institution-specific ledgers, so blockchain\u2019s appeal is not philosophical purity but shared infrastructure that can improve settlement, ordering and coordination across firms.<\/p>\n Wuollet argues that most of finance is not truly digital in the modern software sense because assets still move through siloed systems that require constant reconciliation between counterparties. By contrast, blockchains provide a common, programmable infrastructure where multiple institutions can coordinate on a single source of truth, reducing operational complexity and counterparty exposure.<\/a><\/p>\n That shift, in a16z\u2019s framing, matters because it changes what financial products are made of. \u201cWhat follows when financial assets live on shared, programmable infrastructure is that they can be combined, extended, and integrated without rebuilding everything from scratch,\u201d Wuollet wrote, describing composability as crypto\u2019s \u201cbiggest superpower.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In practical terms, composability means tokenized assets can be used like software building blocks. Instead of forcing every bank, broker or exchange to build isolated products and custom integrations, shared blockchain rails could let developers and institutions combine custody, settlement, collateral, lending and trading functions more cheaply and quickly.<\/p>\n a16z has been making this case more aggressively as traditional financial firms accelerate tokenization efforts. In a separate April essay, the firm wrote that \u201cWall Street isn\u2019t just exploring blockchain anymore. It\u2019s migrating to it,\u201d pointing to exchanges, clearinghouses and electronic trading platforms moving on-chain to lower costs and shorten settlement cycles.<\/a><\/p>\n That view lines up with recent moves across Europe and the U.S. B\u00f6rse Stuttgart\u2019s Seturion platform is being developed as a blockchain-based settlement layer for tokenized securities, while Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale-FORGE is supplying regulated stablecoins such as EURCV and USDCV to support on-chain settlement. The same institutional logic is also visible in products such as Bitwise\u2019s Hyperliquid ETF and the broader expansion of tokenized financial infrastructure beyond\u00a0bitcoin\u00a0and\u00a0ether.<\/p>\n The deeper point in Wuollet\u2019s essay is that finance is moving from a closed reconciliation model to an on-chain coordination model. That is a structural change, not a branding exercise, and if it plays out the way a16z expects, blockchain will stop being treated as an alternative financial system and start being absorbed as a standard layer of financial infrastructure.<\/p>\n That thesis has also echoed through recent crypto.news reporting on\u00a0tokenized securities,\u00a0on-chain settlement, and the broader push by institutions toward\u00a0digital asset infrastructure.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" a16z crypto says Wall Street is adopting blockchain less for ideology than for efficiency, risk control and programmable market infrastructure that makes assets composable. Summary Guy Wuollet compares blockchain\u2019s role…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29356,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29355\/revisions\/29356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}From closed ledgers to shared infrastructure<\/h2>\n
Wall Street\u2019s on-chain logic<\/h2>\n