A quiet fight between two of the most powerful names in finance burst into the open last week. In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Citadel Securities complained that crypto interests are poised to damage the U.S. stock market and harm consumer protections with a pell-mell rush into decentralized finance (DeFi). The firm didn’t directly say who it regards as responsible for this state of affairs—but it’s enough to guess from the footnotes, which refer to the venture giant Andreessen Horowitz more than 10 times.
The source of the dispute is the fast-growing world of tokenized equities, which let users trade shares of popular companies but in a blockchain wrapper. The likes of Robinhood, Kraken, and even BlackRock are all dabbling in this technology, whose advantages include easy 24/7 trading and instant settlement. Holding stock on a blockchain also reduces middlemen, and expands opportunities to deploy equity-based collateral.
