A tool, not a revolution

His claim is that blockchain is not a revolution at all — the revolution was the world's move to representing everything digitally, and blockchain is the governance tool that arrives afterwards, the way cities eventually needed legal systems. That reframe explains Nethermind's posture: instead of discarding traditional finance, it was built on the assumption that banks, institutions and governments would come to the chain and want engineering, research and consulting waiting for them there. Two things follow. First, the purist definition of a decentralised application — a smart contract free of any regulation — cannot carry institutional money; the design worth building is coexistence, where anyone can interact with the system while large institutional flows keep their oversight. Second, most of the use cases the industry advertises are the wrong ones: supply-chain traceability and medical records keep failing because the moment the chain has to touch the physical world someone can swap the item or peel off the tag, while assets that originate digitally can never be tampered with. He is just as blunt about the finance analogies. Asked whether an LP could finally see where a fund's money went, he says the trust problem there is human, not computational. What institutions actually arrive with is identity, reconciliation, and the dance between transparency and privacy — proving your income clears a threshold without revealing by how much. Behind the argument sits a 200-person team across 50 countries, all-remote since before the pandemic, now selling that guidance to corporates who often arrive with the most introductory question of all.