Frederik Gregaard, the current CEO of the Cardano Foundation, shared with Cointelegraph his views on the competitive landscape of fintech and major technology trends.
When talking about competition, Gregaard said that Cardano’s biggest rival does not come from the blockchain field:
“I think Cardano’s biggest competitor is actually today’s largest technology company, large technology platforms like Google, Amazon, Tencent, and Alibaba.”
Gregaard believes that large social media-based technology providers have shifted from providing meaningful tools to their customers to fundamentally owning and manipulating their users. He even called them “an addictive, spiritual, and manipulative technological environment-this is where social media is. It is not just a tool waiting to be used, it has its own goals.”
In his view, distributed technology is the opposite. Blockchain enables users to control their data and identity:
“You can’t really feel what is happening on the Internet today. But everything you do is monetized. Now the things in front of you are slowly pushing you in a certain direction. I think that when society When they discover that there is nothing free in this world, they suddenly turn to blockchain.”
Gregaard believes that blockchain technology can build a society in which individuals do not need to exchange their digital sovereignty for the services provided by technology companies. In addition to “liberating” individuals from technology giants, he also believes that the large-scale application of blockchain technology may help bring people closer to the world.
He believes that in order to stimulate this change, major blockchain protocols such as Cardano, Algorand and Tezos should put aside their differences and work together. Gregaard believes that the real danger is not that one of these platforms will lose to competitors, but that the entire blockchain space may never be adopted on a large scale:
“I think this market is very large. If we start arguing about which technology stack one or two companies choose to use for DApps, I think we have missed a good opportunity. We need to start thinking about the entire human race and the entire economic system: how we should build it ?”
Gregaard admits that decentralized disruptors may have a great chance of winning. Tech giants have trillions of dollars in disposable assets, and he said: “We are likely to miss that goal.” But Gregaard still believes that the technology Cardano is developing is strong enough to have a chance to win.
