Lighter CEO Says DeFi Should Not Be Viewed as an Adversary to Regulators, AI May Drive Financial Democratization

Odaily News: At the inaugural meeting of the U.S. CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee, Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski stated that DeFi has long been misunderstood and should not be viewed as an adversary to regulators. DeFi transactions are recorded on-chain in a verifiable manner, which helps regulators in areas such as transparency, consumer protection, and market fairness. Vladimir Novakovski noted that decentralized, verifiable finance has the potential to become an important part of the U.S. financial infrastructure in the future, particularly in terms of cybersecurity and operational resilience. He added that the industry should push for more technology to evolve toward open-source, verifiable tech stacks. He also stated that AI has the opportunity to drive financial democratization, allowing users to construct bundled trading or investment strategies through AI based on their own judgments about the macroeconomy, industries, and other fields—capabilities that were previously mainly available to high-net-worth individuals and professional fund managers.

Vladimir Novakovski pointed out that the main risk AI faces in the financial sector is consumer protection risk—for example, users not understanding how AI models actually function, or models being promoted with misleading claims. Therefore, before AI models are deployed at scale for consumers, it is necessary to establish appropriate sandbox mechanisms and verify the validity and formal verifiability of the models.