Lighter CEO: DeFi Should Not Be Seen as an Adversary of Regulators; AI May Drive Financial Democratization

Odaily Planet Daily News: Vladimir Novakovski, CEO of Lighter, stated at the first meeting of the U.S. CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee that DeFi has long been misunderstood and should not be viewed as an adversary of regulators. DeFi transactions are recorded on-chain in a verifiable manner, helping regulators carry out their work in areas such as transparency, consumer protection, and market fairness. Vladimir Novakovski said that decentralized, verifiable finance has the potential to become an important part of the future U.S. financial infrastructure, particularly in terms of cybersecurity and operational resilience, and that the industry should push more technologies toward open-source, verifiable technology stacks. He also stated that AI has the opportunity to drive financial democratization, allowing users to build a basket of trading or investment strategies through AI based on their own judgments on macroeconomic and industry trends—capabilities that were previously primarily 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, such as 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 effectiveness and formal verifiability of the models.