1st Blog News(ish) Entry!!!

Turns out building a trusted network that bridges both DeFi and TradFi isn’t exactly a weekend project, hence the lack of interactivity here - my bad. The TradFi side has been a bit like wading through regulatory treacle, slow progress, but there are a few promising bites from some big fish (fingers firmly crossed 🤞). We’ll keep plodding away until a few of them land.

In the meantime, we’ve been diving deeper into the world of DeFi attempting to gain further traction and a larger customer pipeline. It’s wild how DeFi has managed to rebuild so many of the same pain points that plague traditional finance. They’ve nailed atomic settlement, moving money across the world in milliseconds, yet somehow recreated the same compliance chaos and mess that makes fiat systems so clunky. Every protocol, exchange, and custodian is doing its own KYC, AML, and sanctions/wallet screening in isolation. The same users and wallets are being verified again and again and again, across platforms that should be interoperable. The irony? DeFi runs on shared ledgers and distributed systems, yet compliance is still siloed, duplicated, and disconnected. Mind-blowing.

The good news for us, though, is that this is exactly where Block Infrastructure shines. All that duplication and inefficiency? That’s our playground. We’re evolving compliance itself, embedding it inside the transaction rather than awkwardly bolting it on at either end. Distributed technology was meant to eliminate duplication, not replicate it, and we’re here to make sure it finally lives up to that promise.

Sadly, it’ll probably be another month before I get around to posting again (crypto conference on Monday - yet another train to London, big sigh 😭). But in the meantime, here’s a great read on decentralisation and the eternal debate of Permissioned vs Permissionless networks. Enjoy!

https://www.omfif.org/2025/05/decentralised-finance-is-not-all-block-and-white/

Richard!! ✌️