John Wu, President of Ava Labs the Avalanche developer, discusses the need to break down silos for digital assets in this opinion piece.
In financial services, innovation often stalls not because of technological limitations, but because of a reluctance to change a widely entrenched mindset. While institutional adoption of blockchain and digital assets is now rapidly picking up pace, this challenge has been present since the outset. The barriers aren’t purely technological – they’re conceptual. To fully realize the promise of crypto, financial institutions must confront a fundamental operational shift: moving from an account-based world to a wallet-based one.
In traditional finance, everything is account-based. Your Apple stock sits in one brokerage account. Your checking and savings live in a bank account at J.P. Morgan. Your mortgage is serviced through yet another portal. Each of these accounts is a silo, tied to an institution, managed through centralized infrastructure. We’ve learned to navigate this fragmented world by stringing together middleware, APIs, and reconciliation tools. But the user experience – both retail and institutional – remains cumbersome, opaque, and slow.
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