Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz argued that large internet companies will inevitably adopt blockchain-based finance, contending that decentralized infrastructure is arriving “at the right place at the right time” to meet needs that legacy rails struggle to serve. The remarks came in Episode 1 of Ripple’s new Onchain Economy video series, published on September 25. In the segment, Schwartz frames decentralized finance as a practical response to unmet enterprise demand rather than a speculative detour.

Ripple CTO Foresees DeFi Eating Into TradFi

“Tech is coming for finance with or without blockchain. It was what was going to happen,” Schwartz says, singling out hyperscalers and platform companies: “New corporations, companies like Amazon and Uber need more financial services than the current system is able to provide them. And the blockchain technologies are in the right place at the right time.” He presents the thesis bluntly: this is less about converting traditional banks to crypto orthodoxy and more about meeting the operational realities of software-driven businesses that require programmable money, continuous settlement, and composable workflows.

Schwartz also distances his argument from the narrower, speculative corners of crypto. “It can’t just be collectibles and it can’t just be… seeking very high reward at very high risk,” he cautions, before asserting that DeFi—broadly defined to include smart contracts and the infrastructure around them—will “take a huge bite out of TradFi over the next couple of years.” The condition, in his telling, is straightforward: the blockchain sector must ship services people actually want from a financial system, and do so with institutional-grade guardrails.

That bridge between decentralization and compliance is the crux of the episode. “I don’t think there’s a tension betwee

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Author: Jake Simmons