Ledger Enterprise's Alex Zinder is all about blockchain, crypto and the future of finance

2022/05/07 12:03

Alex Zinder, a capital markets veteran who jumped on the blockchain train last year, attended the Paris Blockchain Week Summit where he sat down with Cointelegraph to discuss blockchain projects, crypto adoption and the traditional financial world’s necessary embrace of digital assets.

After almost two decades in capital markets technology, Alex Zinder joined Ledger Enterprise in March 2021. He previously worked at Nasdaq, where he was the global software development director and associate vice president of enterprise architecture.

Zinder now leads Ledger Enterprise, a suite of solutions that allow businesses to manage interactions in smart contract-enabled protocols that support staking, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and other decentralized finance (DeFi) possibilities.

"Being on the Nasdaq side of things that was very much more involved in the distributed ledger ecosystem of the DLT platforms and looking at that from a more traditional financial services perspective," Zinder said, adding: "There was a tremendous amount of interest activity experimentation happening in the space, but not a tremendous amount of adoption from real use cases."

Zinder was asked whether cryptocurrency must develop even further for it to be considered a viable alternative by the traditional sector. According to him, it's not a "requirement or a prerequisite" since traditional players are "smart business companies" and they see opportunities. He stated that what he thinks is happening currently, is that "these opportunities are of sufficient scale" for the traditional players to want to participate.

He pointed out that now "it's no longer can we kind of play around and really understand the space to make sure we don't miss it, and now it's more actually have a financial opportunity here that we can monetize and grow and scale our businesses, which is a very different dynamic."

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Zinder also highlighted three primary factors that align well with Ledger Enterprises' overall strategy. As per him, the scales of value, complexity and operations are much greater in the enterprise space. He added that:

"The demand is definitely coming, but I think we're literally just at the preference of what's coming because the growth is going to continue exponentially for a significant period of time."

Zinder addressed corporate crypto adoption and custody solutions by explaining that the issues aren't technological in nature but rather about processes, organizations and business model innovation because traditional firms must adapt to new models.

For years, government regulation has been a major topic in the crypto space. Zinder summarized his thoughts on enterprise blockchain, cryptocurrency adoption and regulation as follows:

"So regulation is a factor, we've been having a lot of conversations with regulators. [...] We actually have several customers that are fully regulated entities. So several are well-known custodians, custodians are fully regulated in their regions."