TradFi will have to use public blockchains: FG Nexus CEO

Maja Vujinovic, CEO of FG Nexus, explains why institutions will have to tap into Ethereum or other public chains.

Across the world, financial systems are quietly undergoing one of the most significant disruptions in decades. Payments, settlements, and custody are slowly being rebuilt on programmable, blockchain-based rails. What is more, major institutions, not just crypto startups, are leading this transformation.

According to Maja Vujinovic, CEO and Co-Founder of the Ethereum (ETH) treasury firm Digital Assets FG Nexus, the next wave of finance is already here. In a compelling interview with crypto.news, she explains how and why institutions are transitioning to blockchain-based finance.

crypto.news: You’ve previously stated that blockchain and TradFi are increasingly going to merge together. What brought you to that conclusion?

Maja Vujinovic: I started getting involved in mobile payments in Africa in the early 2000s — really early, when we had just started texting. Mobile money wasn’t even a concept yet. I got exposed to a lot of serious companies that were curious about mobile payments.

We were acquiring broadband spectrum in telecom, packaging it as a license, selling it, disrupting monopolies across the continent, and launching peer-to-peer payments. That was my first exposure. Every time I went back to Europe or the US and told my friends about it, they didn’t get it — because they had a Visa and didn’t care.

But for me, it was a signal that the rest of the world needed this. There was a large need, and I saw large companies moving into Africa and Latin America to attempt this. That made me say, “Wow, this is interesting, let me stay close to it.”

Then I read the Bitcoin whitepaper. I understood peer-to-peer, and I never looked back. Where it really clicked was when I was at GE, and I used Ethereum smart contracts to launch pilots. When you’re at GE — a massive company with serious customers, from aviation to healthcare — and you launch smart contracts and they stick, and serious people are interested, that was it.

That’s when it all collapsed into clarity for me: Blockchain turns every payment, trade, and deposit into a programmable financial instrument. When corporates like GE and JPMorgan start realizing they can move cash, collateral, or data at the edge on a shared ledger — and we actually piloted that — I knew this was all going to merge.

JPMorgan has Onyx, Circle has USDC programmable rails, BlackRock has tokenized funds — it’s no longer about “crypto,” it’s programmable finance now.

As these companies adopt these technologies, what do you think the meaningful changes will be? Will it just be efficiency — firms cutting costs behind the scenes — or are we going to see real structural changes in the market or for users?

That’s a great distinction. Let me start broadly. Think of the blockchain collapsing that massive stack of payments, settlement, and clearing into something like a USDC transfer. And that USDC can carry an interest-bearing token.

A payment could instantly trigger a bond coupon or a margin call. Treasury functions, FX, and settlements could all run on-chain through the same rails. That’s about efficiency: cost, speed, accessibility.

But for corporates — especially in industries like aviation or healthcare — they don’t always care about speed. They care about trust. And honestly, that applies across the board — retail and corporate alike.

Yes, it starts with cost and efficiency: faster settlement, fewer intermediaries, better reconciliation. But the real shift is structural. Once transactions and assets are programmable, you can design entirely new markets. New collateral types. New ways for users to interact with finance.

So yes, it saves money. But more than that, it reshapes how money is handled, seen, and transmitted.

Can you give me some examples of what that means? What kinds of markets are opening up?

On the corporate side, we’re already seeing some serious change. Back when I was at GE, we were experimenting with on-chain treasury functions — and now it’s happening at scale. Imagine a multinational being able to instantly move idle cash into tokenized T-bills. There’s no middleman, no need to wire anything overnight. Liquidity is immediate. That’s real.

Another thing we did early at GE was to use programmable payments for aviation parts. A supplier payment could trigger the release of escrow, handle FX, and update the accounting system — all in one go. These aren’t ideas anymore, they’re in production now. Same with collateral.

Instead of locking up static assets, companies can tokenize and reuse collateral instantly. When we ran a pilot, we uncovered $5 billion in trapped cash just sitting idle due to invoice errors and settlement disputes. That’s massive.

And what about retail?

For retail, one of the clearest shifts is in access and ownership. People are starting to buy fractional shares of assets, whether that’s bonds or real estate. This was something that wasn’t feasible before. I gave a talk recently in Lugano to a group of wealthy family offices, and the number one question was how to buy fractional real estate or bonds. The demand is there.

There’s also embedded yield. Imagine having a stablecoin in your wallet that automatically sweeps into tokenized T-bills every night. You don’t need to do anything, but you’re getting Treasury-level yield passively. It changes how people save.

Even basic commerce is getting smarter. You could buy a car, and the payment instantly splits — part goes to the seller, part to the manufacturer, part to the tax authority. No intermediaries. No delays. Just clean programmable finance.

And globally, what excites me most is that the same financial instruments corporates use can now be accessed by individuals. You’re collapsing the gap between Wall Street and Main Street — and that’s powerful.

It appears that this technology will eliminate entire layers of middlemen, each one handling just a slice of the capital flow. Do you see this resulting in lowering the barrier to entry for fintechs, or does the scale end up favoring market consolidation?

This framing is right. We’re walking into what I often call a schizophrenic world when I talk to family offices. Both dynamics are happening at the same time.

On one hand, yes, this absolutely lowers the barrier for new entrants. I’ve seen it firsthand. A fintech today can plug directly into tokenized cash markets or collateral networks through APIs. They don’t need a full bank stack, they don’t need decades of legacy infrastructure or cozy relationships with clearinghouses. The tech is here, and it’s open. And because of that, innovation is going to explode at the edge.

But on the other hand, the very same efficiencies that empower small players also drive consolidation at the infrastructure layer. Once value starts moving on-chain, scale comes not from the number of middlemen but from trust, regulation, and liquidity depth.

So, while you’ll see thousands of new front-end fintechs popping up with sleek interfaces, they’ll all be settling through a handful of global, regulated programmable networks — like Ethereum, Avalanche, or whatever the dominant public or hybrid chains become.

So yes, both things are true: more fragmentation at the edge, more consolidation in the rails. And it will play out differently depending on the use case and jurisdiction.

And do you see that settlement layer being built on public blockchains like Ethereum, or on private, bank-led infrastructure?

That’s the core debate, right? And if I say one thing, the crypto purists will come after me, and if I say another, the bankers will roll their eyes. But here’s what I really believe: it won’t be either-or. It’s going to be a hybrid.

The trustless public chains, like Ethereum, will anchor the liquidity layer. That’s where transparency, composability, and global interoperability live. You need that if you want a truly global, programmable financial system.

But you’ll also have permissioned chains and bank-led subnets — think of Avalanche subnets or tokenized bank ledgers — handling regulated assets like cash, compliance, and identity. These won’t be separate forever. They’ll increasingly bridge into public chains. Not because they want to, but because they have to. That’s where the liquidity and innovation are.

So in my view, we’re headed toward a hybrid stack where public and permissioned networks interoperate. Banks won’t be able to wall themselves off and win. They’ll have to plug into the open systems.

You mentioned regulation — what are the changes we still need to really unlock all of this?

What we’re still missing is a clear legal status for tokenized assets and ledger-based ownership. Without that clarity, most firms will remain hesitant to move meaningful parts of their balance sheet on-chain. I get calls from private credit firms all the time — they want to tokenize deals, but the regulatory uncertainty holds them back.

We also need rules around settlement finality and ledger interoperability — especially between permissioned systems and public blockchains. If that doesn’t get sorted, we’ll all be operating in disconnected silos, and the whole value of composability falls apart.

Another big one is leveling the playing field for non-banks. We need defined frameworks for custody, KYC, AML, and access to the financial system — like what Waller was suggesting. If a fintech wants to build in this space, they should know exactly what licenses or audits they need. Right now it’s all grey area.

And then there’s the question of liquidity regulation. Everyone wants to tokenize something, but there’s no guidance on secondary markets or two-sided liquidity. So we get these isolated tokenized assets with no volume or price discovery — it’s not real until there’s an actual marketplace.

Also, risk frameworks for programmable finance. Smart contracts, DeFi rails, tokenized treasuries — they all introduce operational risk. Who’s accountable if a smart contract fails or gets exploited? Who audits the flow of treasury funds on-chain? These are major concerns for institutions.

So do you support the kind of “sandbox“ approach that U.S. regulators have started arguing for? Is that the right way to move forward?

Yes, absolutely — I saw the value of it firsthand at GE. Sandboxes are great because they give you space to experiment safely. You need to see what breaks, what works, and how to learn from failure. But they can’t be the end state.

We can’t stay in pilot mode forever. Sandboxes are just step one — you also need clear pathways out of them, with licenses and rules for scaling. Otherwise, innovation stalls.

That’s why I like what places like Singapore and Switzerland are doing. They’re not afraid to experiment, but they’re also starting to build proper regulatory on-ramps beyond the sandbox.

You mentioned Bitcoin earlier. But recently, Ethereum actually overtook Bitcoin in terms of the percentage of total supply held by treasury firms. That’s pretty striking, considering the market cap difference isn’t that huge. Why do you think Ethereum is attracting so much more interest from treasuries?

And I say this as someone who came into the space because of Bitcoin. But I’m staying because of programmable finance — and that’s what Ethereum enables.

Corporations are drawn to Ethereum for a few core reasons. First, it’s yield-bearing. You can stake ETH and earn returns, which makes it a fundamentally different asset from Bitcoin in that regard. Second, Ethereum is programmable. It’s not just a store of value — it’s a platform. You get exposure to tokenized assets, to stablecoins, to DeFi, to real-world assets. All of that runs on Ethereum or is at least compatible with it.

For traditional finance people — especially those thinking in terms of optionality — that makes Ethereum incredibly compelling. They see it as the backbone of digital finance, something they can build on, not just hold passively.

And honestly, Ethereum’s team has done a great job of building credibility with Wall Street. Joe Lubin, in particular, has spent years cultivating relationships and helping institutions understand what Ethereum can do.

So while Bitcoin is still seen as digital gold — and it serves that role well — Ethereum is seen more as a dynamic part of the future financial stack. That’s why you’re seeing treasuries allocate more to ETH. They want to participate in that growth.

We’re seeing a lot of enthusiasm about tokenization and stablecoins from some segments of traditional finance. But do you think we’ll see pushback if this technology threatens to cut into their margins?

Yes and no. I’ve definitely seen some pushback — especially from banks here in Switzerland. Pension funds, too. You can’t even bring up digital assets in some circles without people calling it a scam. So the resistance is real.

But I also think that resistance is shifting. What we’re seeing now is more of an absorption than a rejection. Banks know stablecoins and tokenization threaten their margins — especially on the payment side. But they also know they can’t stop this. The train has left the station.

So instead of trying to block it, they’re adapting. They’re launching pilots. They’re integrating stablecoins. They’re exploring tokenized deposits. Some are even partnering with stablecoin issuers.

So yes, there’s a battle — but there’s also a merger of DNA happening. I see it at FG Nexus every day. We’ve got people from hardcore TradFi merging with people from deep crypto. It’s messy, but it’s happening.

And here’s the kicker — if a bank wants to launch a stablecoin today, they’ll need deep liquidity to make it work. Where’s that liquidity? It’s in DeFi. And DeFi isn’t TradFi. So they’re going to have to go there eventually.

We’ve seen this type of shift with governments when it comes to stablecoin adoption. Japan especially seems to be responding to the dominance of USDT and USDC. What does the rise of these dollar-backed stablecoins mean for other sovereign currencies?

Yeah, Japan’s a great example — just recently, they officially launched a framework for stablecoins after seeing how quickly USDT and USDC were gaining traction. What’s happening is that governments are starting to realize that if they don’t act, they risk losing control over parts of their monetary system.

Not every country will fight this. Some will embrace dollar stablecoins because they want that stability — especially if their own currency is volatile or inflation-prone. But others, like Japan, will move to defend their monetary sovereignty. The net result is that we’re moving toward a hybrid global ecosystem — not just one where the dollar dominates, but where private dollar coins and public fiat-backed stablecoins coexist and interoperate.

That said, the balance of power is shifting subtly. These private dollar coins — especially those with global liquidity like USDC — are influencing local economies. They’re used for savings, remittances, and commerce. It’s no longer just a U.S. story.

This is just starting. It’s just that people haven’t fully connected the dots yet. Everyone’s been so focused on the U.S. regulatory drama that they’re missing how much is happening globally.

Some countries will continue to resist — like Switzerland, for example, where they’re very protective of the Swiss franc. But others will move fast. We’re entering a world where many national digital currencies exist alongside private stablecoins. It won’t be CBDCs versus stablecoins. It’ll be CBDCs and stablecoins and DeFi liquidity pools — all interacting.

Before we wrap up, what are some of the major trends that we’ll be seeing in the future?

There are several trends: AI agents, blockchain interoperability. But the big one is energy. Yes. It’s foundational to everything: crypto, AI, water production, even national security. It underpins every digital and physical system we rely on.

I think we’re going to start hearing a lot more about the intersection of energy, AI, and blockchain — and not just in terms of ESG or mining narratives. I mean deeper conversations about infrastructure, sovereignty, and who controls the rails.

Right now we’re distracted by noise — market moves, ETF approvals, lawsuits — but the real structural conversations are just beginning. And energy is going to be at the center of them.