From the first banks, to our current banking system and now crypto. We’re on the frontier of changing the relationships we have with banks but we still have a lot to figure out.

The streamlining and accessibility of banking is the ultimate crypto end game.

Crawl: Institutions with large brick & mortar foot prints, overhead, and complicated ways of working.

Walk: Fintech mobile apps have made it easier to use and access banks across the world but still retain the toxic legacy dynamic of “depositors” as customers first and not owners of the deposits.

Run: Smart contracts on the blockchain introduced fully permissionless banking and this trustless system keeps spinning for as long as the blockchain exists.

Crawl: Many small banks would default or have bank runs every year and in times of extreme uncertainty the large institutions would require bailouts since they are “too big to fail”.

Walk: Fintech had many pseudo banks and the ability to withdraw deposits online made the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023 happen quicker than normal.

Run: Smart contract security puts extra accountability on the depositor to check, not trust, that their funds will be there when they need them in 1 hour or 1 year.

Nascent stages of the crypto adoption curve means there are still many vulnerabilities in the system and users must be infinitely cautious when interacting with anything that can access their tokens.

In the long run this is a positive innovation for banking and will only improve as it gets more battle tested.