Book Review: “The New Intersection of Money – Where TradFi and DeFi Converge”

Author: Scarlett Sieber (with Ian Fong, Tina Loncaric, Dhanum Nursigadoo, Virginia Pereira Alvarez, Kinga Swiderska)

Published by: Routledge (an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business), New York and London, May 2026   

“Intersection” or “Inflection Point”? This is the question I kept asking myself as I read this very timely and thoughtful book on the current interplay between traditional banking and financial services (TradFi) and decentralized, disintermediated peer-to-peer (P2P) networks built on open-source, permissionless, cryptographically-enhanced and blockchain-enabled networks (DeFi).

First, this is not a detailed history of blockchain technology, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies or digital assets. In fact, “Bitcoin” barely gets a mention in the 200 pages here. The focus is very much on stable coins, and the foundational role they play in bringing TradFi on-chain, and how banks, regulators and service providers are connecting their legacy plumbing to the wider blockchain infrastructure. This suggests that stable coins are now just one sub-set of this new financial universe (to extend the Venn Diagram metaphor), albeit a very important part of the eco-system.

Second, this is neither a technical manual nor an academic treatise – which means it should appeal to a wide audience, especially those crypto-sceptic readers who might think that blockchain and digital assets have nothing to do with their lives.

Third, the “Inflection Point” at the heart of this book is not just the banking sector’s engagement with fiat-backed stable coins (which has only taken 8-10 years, since the launch of USDT and USDC…); it is also the rapid rate of new legislation (especially in the USA and EU) that has brought some long-needed regulatory clarity to the broad spectrum of DeFi activities. The chapter on these regulatory developments is essential reading for anyone wanting to navigate the rules of engagement in this new “TradFi meets DeFi” reality, and is refreshingly free from legalese. The book also helpfully sets out the likely next stages in DeFi’s evolution and absorption into the mainstream, and identifies the key opportunities for TradFi incumbents and DeFi upstarts alike – in core banking, e-commerce and cross-border payments. There is some discussion of real world asset tokenisation (RWAs) and security token offerings (STOs), but given the book’s genesis is the program of international conferences and events hosted by Money 20/20 (like Routledge, also an Informa business), it’s understandable that the author’s principle theme is “money and payments”.

From Early Beginnings

One topic I totally concur with the author is the essential use case of DeFi – P2P financial transactions. My own first exposure to Bitcoin was at a 2013 pitch night in Melbourne’s silicon alley: Asher Tan, co-founder of Coinjar, used the example of a tourist in Japan needing to get some cash out over a long weekend. As anyone who has been to Japan will know, it’s still largely a cash society, but as a foreigner, not many ATM’s accept overseas bank cards. Crypto’s 24/7, “always on”, near-instantaneous P2P settlement and low transaction fees make for a very compelling use case in that context. 

Where I tend to differ from the author is her broad thesis that “crypto” is merely a speculative asset, subject to scams, exposed to technical vulnerabilities, and displaying a lack of accountability. I would like to offer a more constructive viewpoint, drawing on a decade of working with Brave New Coin, and our sibling company, Techemy Capital. 

Overall, the book appears to totally ignore utility tokens. Largely, I suspect, because the author equates utility tokens with Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), and as such, puts them in the bucket marked “scams”. It’s true that many ICOs failed, and a lot of people lost a lot of money. But let’s consider why ICOs were a critical part of crypto’s development. 

From ICOs to NFTs

ICOs were an important proof of concept in decentralized financial services. Quite apart from being much cheaper than an IPO (since ICOs did not bring the same level of compliance costs), ICOs were probably the first example of a new asset class that was “retail first”. In other words, any buyer with a digital wallet and some Bitcoin or Ethereum could participate. They could commit as little as $10, didn’t have to have a brokerage account, and they had direct custody, control and ownership of the tokens – whereas, many IPOs have much larger minimum subscriptions, are subject to brokerage and other intermediary fees, and usually have significant underwriting costs which only investment banks and major fund managers can facilitate. In an ICO, any unsold tokens simply remained unminted, or were locked pending some future event, or were listed on exchanges as secondary markets. 

I’m not saying that the ICO model was perfect, and I don’t deny that some ICOs should never have gone ahead. At Techemy Capital, between 2017 and 2019, we worked on around 30 different ICO projects (and turned down approaches to work with many dozens more). Our first task as consultants was to ask each ICO project team, seeking our help, the following questions: 1) Why does your project need to be on the blockchain? 2) Why do you need your own native chain? 3) Why do you need your own native token?

The vast majority of these ICOs were utility tokens – i.e., the tokens acted as software licenses or SaaS-type subscriptions. As such the tokens were the cost of entry to access and use the services provided by the network or protocol. I can think of three ICOs in particular that we worked with, that were extremely prescient, and all of which are perfect use cases for blockchain and utility tokens:

Chainlink solves the problem that on-chain smart contracts still need access to off-chain data in order to function. For example, if an on-chain derivatives contract depends on the price of gold, it needs real-time, on-chain data from off-chain commodities markets. Chainlink brought the concept of on-chain data “oracles” into wider application. Now, of course (and this is mentioned in the book), Chainlink has evolved into a significant piece of “DeFi meets TradFi” infrastructure, with services such as CCIP (Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol – the “TCP/IP of the blockchain world”). The LINK token is part of the cost of entry to use Chainlink services, and acts rather like a SaaS transaction fee.

Salt Lending was one of the first blockchain projects to accept cryptocurrencies as collateral for fiat-denominated loans. Although Salt had to deal with some early regulatory issues, it continues to offer personal and business loans backed by Bitcoin. The SALT token was similar to a membership fee, giving users access to things like loan application services, reduced origination fees, and “loyalty” discounts on lending terms, for example. However, it was deemed to be a security, either because of the potential distribution to token holders part of the interest earned from its lending activity, or because of expectations from secondary trading. But the SALT token could also have been an example of a hybrid token – that combines utility, a potential store of value, and as a vehicle for distributing commercial profits. And now that borrowers can use Bitcoin as collateral for mortgage downpayments, it’s obvious how ahead of TradFi a project like Salt Lending was.    

Aventus was an on-chain ticketing and event management platform. It enabled event organisers, venues, promoters, sporting bodies and artists to control the sale, distribution, re-sale and verification of concert and game tickets. It addressed issues of counterfeits, scalping, over-selling, and dynamic pricing – all of which continue to be major headaches for the entertainment industry. The utility token was designed to capture both the platform (origination) costs and the transaction (distribution) costs, as well as serving as the authentication and validation layer at the point of redemption. The token may also have appreciated with network adoption, event add-ons and other premium packages, and secondary market sales – but at heart, it wasn’t a security token, because of the direct utility it provided. Of course, Aventus was launched before the advent of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and a concert ticket is just one example of an NFT.

NFTs themselves also get dismissed in this book as a scam – with the author singling out Bored Ape Yacht Club as the NFT project to taint all others. I think NFTs will yet prove to be an important economic tool for authors, musicians, artists and other creatives, to help them protect, license and monetise their intellectual property. Imagine if a streaming service like Spotify was on-chain, and every uploaded song was treated like an NFT – not to denote or bestow ownership on listeners, but to provide transparency on how many times a song is played (and by how many different people), and to charge listeners micro-payments each time they play it. Musicians could also limit where, how often and by whom a song could be played. (Now think of how I could tokenise this review as an NFT, and charge AI tools when they train their LLMs on my article, and each time they draw on that content in response to search queries and AI prompts.)

Although agentic AI gets a mention in the book, it’s in the context of things like corporate treasury and balance sheet efficiency: e.g., using AI to find the best yield for your stable coin holdings. Elsewhere, there is a discussion of AI in the use (or misuse) of identity management, trust, zero-knowledge proofs and verification. But there is no discussion of things like wallet-enabled agentic AI, which is where we are probably heading with things like portfolio construction and rebalancing, for example.

Thinking back to the ICO era, one of the recurring themes that Techemy Capital frequently engaged with was the idea of tokenising decentralized computing networks – using distributed CPU and GPU capacity to model organic compounds, render complex graphics for Hollywood films, or to process unstructured databases. Rather like AI platforms charging tokens for each prompt…. and of course, many Bitcoin miners have pivoted to being data centres to meet the demand for cloud computing and AI processing.    

Two other noticeable omissions (and one surprising mention) in this book: 

Hyperledger – the early DLT/blockchain solution for the logistics and supply chain industry. Given the importance of trade finance to the global economy, and the role that banks play in underwriting the sale, movement and delivery of goods (letters of credit, factoring, invoice financing, set-off and forex transactions), I would have expected to see a project like this come up.

ASX CHESS replacement – no mention of the $250m spent on a failed project to replace the Australian Securities Exchange’s legacy equities clearing and settlement system (CHESS) with a DLT solution from Digital Asset Holdings. The failure of this project was probably a key reason why institutional adoption of blockchain and digital asset capabilities in Australia stalled.

R3 Corda – surprised to see this name in print, as I thought this project was long gone. At one time a consortium of leading banks and financial institutions formed to explore blockchain and DLT opportunities, I recall speaking to one Australian bank in around 2017 that had recently left the project because it was going nowhere, and not getting any traction. Seems like Corda has reinvented itself as an RWA yield vault on Solana.  

Finally, I often think about how different the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) might have been (or might never have happened) if Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (RMBS) had been on-chain. Instead of RMBS investors having relatively little transparency on the quantity, quality and performance of underlying loan portfolios, imagine if they had access to real-time data about the on-chain mortgages within each RMBS on issue – including Loan-to-Value ratios, interest rates, payment rates, arrears, redemptions and foreclosures. Rather than having to rely on historic (monthly or quarterly) reporting, that was also opaque and not easily interrogated, access to on-chain data might have meant they were better informed, and better able to identify red flags when portfolios went bad.

The New Intersection of Money – Where TradFi and DeFi Converge is available now.