We are born coded to grow both sceptical and risk averse. We often mistake the two for wisdom and call it attitude. Yet it’s not risk aversion that limits us, but scepticism and entitlement. Scepticism breeds unhelpful conservatism that blinds us to opportunity and turns us into our own worst enemy. So, age is a factor because comfort and vested interests tend to come with it.
In the late 1800s, the first combustion engines convinced few people of their vast potential to reshape individual agency and productivity. A century later, the early internet was similarly misunderstood, dismissed as a marginal technology rather than the foundation of a new social and economic order. Sceptical that change can benefit us within our lifetime, we choose not to learn, and not to grow. Unsettled, we often respond with ill-informed criticism and aversion.
Over the past fifteen years, another transformative opportunity has been unfolding before our eyes. A new engine of trust has emerged - public, decentralised, transparent, and self-enforcing - redefining how value moves peer-to-peer. Not trivial. Among all the systems it touches, finance stands out along with the very rules of who gets to participate.
For the first time, thanks to public blockchains, trust is enabled not through institutions but by decentralised consensus where collective, mathematical validation is replacing hierarchical permission. Based on that trust, sets of interoperable smart contracts bring real-time determinism, executing agreements exactly as coded without friction, bias, or delay. They become fast, convenient and impartial service providers.
Yet, what makes decentralised consensus a valuable public utility, conveniently usable by all, is privacy-preserving digital identity. It enables individuals and businesses to prove instantly the credentials required for a transaction and comply without surrendering what should remain private.
A growing network of trusted issuers will help individuals digitise their basic identity credentials, making them selectively readable by smart contracts and spendable to access essential financial services.
The ease of proving one’s basic verifiable credentials digitally will redefine the scope of financial inclusion.
Legislators and regulators should acknowledge that deterministic trust technology fundamentally changes how compliance can be delivered. It turns verification from a periodic, manual, and institution-dependent process into a continuous, automated, and cryptographically enforced one. This makes compliance portable and interoperable across platforms and jurisdictions, and enforceable at the time a transaction occurs. By embedding core consumer-protection and market-integrity requirements into credential standards and smart-contract logic, policymakers can reduce friction, remove arbitrary barriers to entry, and extend regulatory protection to participants who have historically been priced out or excluded. The result is a safer system with broader reach, not despite innovation but because of it.
Combined, three crypto-enabled utilities - decentralised consensus, deterministic execution, and privacy-preserving verifiable credentials - form the backbone of the new trusted peer-to-peer transactional infrastructure: open by design, inclusive by nature, and global by reach.
Financial inclusion is no longer a moral aspiration or policy objective. It is an inevitability driven not by charity but by yet another unsettling and transformative technology.
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