The Future of Fintech
There's huge swaths of what we could do on the internet which we don't do yet. People don't think about this enough. For example, how many websites have you paid with your credit card? Thousands. Now, how many websites have you been paid by? One or two? Maybe? There's some enormous force inhibiting payouts on the internet.
Programming on the banking system is a little bit like programming information on the phone system. You can do it, and we did build the internet on retrofit phone lines for about 10 years early on. Fintech built on the banking system today is sort of like early internet programming on modems. You can do it, but it needs improving.
The jump from wire transfers to crypto (USDC or Ethereum) is roughly the same as the jump from physical mail to email. Speed goes from days to seconds. That's important because new second-order things become possible. The metabolism of business changes because money is settled in my account and spendable. I can do something with it instantly.
This starts to be a better analogy for what FinTech companies are currently: a fancy front end using the Internet to aggregate transactions. They make it seem like the antiquated backend system is actually functional. Now crypto is the new backend. This decade, we're finally going to get those two systems snapping together, with FinTech frontends crypto backends.
*Note: This is a bonus section from The Anthology of Balaji, which was edited out of the final published version. Enjoy this section and join the email list for updates, new material, and upcoming products.
