ARK Invest Rebuts a16z's View, Claims Traditional Finance's Future Depends on DeFi Infrastructure

ARK Invest's research director, Lorenzo Valente, has countered a16z Crypto's assertion that "traditional finance needs blockchain, not DeFi," arguing that financial institutions are more likely to be built on open DeFi infrastructure in the future. He pointed out that public blockchains have proven their advantages over private blockchain solutions, with the growth of tokenized assets on open networks like Ethereum demonstrating that public blockchains possess stronger network effects and scalability potential. Valente believes that the builders of the next generation of financial infrastructure may be crypto-native companies such as Circle and Coinbase. In contrast, a16z Crypto contends that traditional financial institutions have not truly embraced DeFi, but are selectively adopting blockchain technologies that align with existing compliance, governance, and operational requirements, and will build "programmable financial infrastructure" that maintains permissioned management and institutional control. Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder of Sentora, also disagreed, suggesting that financial institutions may ultimately adopt DeFi's underlying infrastructure and layer compliance, custody, and enterprise-level control mechanisms on top of it. As RWA tokenization, on-chain settlement, and institutional-level financial applications rapidly develop, the debate over the future dominance of "open DeFi architecture" versus "permissioned blockchain systems" is heating up.