Lighter's CEO: DeFi should not be at odds with regulatory authorities, AI could drive financial democratization

Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski stated at the first meeting of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Innovation Advisory Committee that DeFi has long been misunderstood and should not be viewed as an adversary of regulators. He noted that DeFi transactions are recorded on-chain in verifiable ways, which helps regulators advance work on transparency, consumer protection and market fairness. Novakovski added that decentralized, verifiable finance is poised to become a key component of America’s future financial infrastructure, especially in areas like cybersecurity and operational resilience, and the industry should push more technologies toward open-source, verifiable tech stacks. Additionally, he said AI has the potential to drive financial democratization: users can build trading packages or investment strategies via AI based on their own judgments of macroeconomics, industries and other fields—capabilities that were previously mostly limited to high-net-worth individuals and professional fund managers. Novakovski pointed out that the main risk AI faces in finance is consumer protection issues, such as users not understanding the actual functions of AI models or misleading promotion of model capabilities. Therefore, before AI models are widely applied to consumers, it is necessary to establish corresponding sandbox mechanisms to verify the models’ effectiveness and formal verifiability.