Giancarlo: Wall Street finance will fully move to digital rails by 2040

Giancarlo says Wall Street's move onchain is inevitable by 2040

Chris Giancarlo, former CFTC chairman, told Bankless he believes the entire financial system will shift from analog infrastructure to distributed ledger technology and tokenization within "the next 12 to 15 years by the year uh 2440," which he clarified as 2040. He points to the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation's experiment with over 50 major financial institutions tokenizing collateral as an early proof point, arguing the efficiency gains will make the shift demand-driven as much as supply-driven.

He frames this as a new wave of the internet finally reaching finance, banking and money itself, comparable in scale to the first internet wave's impact on information and commerce. "This is a new wave of the internet," he said, arguing none of the current structures survive unchanged.

He blames Sam Bankman-Fried's collapse for making crypto political

Giancarlo argues crypto was not partisan until FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried embarrassed Democrats who had taken his campaign contributions. He says this pushed Elizabeth Warren's camp into "attack mode" rather than admit the association, and that Donald Trump then seized the political opening by backing crypto. He stresses this is an overgeneralization of the Democratic party as a whole, naming Kirsten Gillibrand and others as crypto-friendly exceptions.

He says the SEC under Gensler engaged in unprecedented "norm breaking"

Giancarlo details what he calls abuse of the Wells notice process, used to halt firms' business even without intent to prosecute, plus refusal to write rules or work with Congress, and debanking of crypto executives.

"The norm breaking that took place at the SEC under Gary Gensler is unprecedented and needs to be held to account." — Chris Giancarlo

He suggests Gensler's hostility was tied to a strategic bet to win Warren's support en route to a possible Treasury post, while crediting the industry for surviving the pressure and emerging stronger.

He revisits 2008, arguing blockchain transparency could have prevented the crisis

Giancarlo recounts being at GFI Group during the 2008 crisis, where the Federal Reserve estimated aggregate payouts from a Lehman Brothers failure at $400 billion. Research he later commissioned at the CFTC under economist Bruce Tuckman found the real net payout would have been less than $9 billion. He argues this opacity, not the underlying exposure, caused the panic, and that a shared ledger across Wall Street would have prevented it.

"If all of those swaps had been on a blockchain, we would have known." — Chris Giancarlo

He calls the CFTC's approval of Bitcoin futures a success and downplays the leap to perpetuals

Giancarlo defends his approval of the first Bitcoin futures contract during his CFTC tenure, saying the resulting market today is "deep," "liquid," and well policed against fraud. He says Wall Street banks, not politicians, were the ones most annoyed at the time, running to the Futures Industry Association to pressure Congress. On perpetual futures, he argues the CFTC will not struggle with rolling settlement dates, calling decentralized venues like Hyperliquid a bigger "intellectual and policy bridge" to cross than onshore perpetuals.

He warns that both stablecoins and CBDCs are currently headed the wrong way on privacy

Giancarlo rejects the framing that CBDCs are inherently worse for privacy than stablecoins, noting stablecoins are already "fully subject to government surveillance under the Bank Secrecy Act." He criticizes the IRS's demand that Coinbase turn over customer data without probable cause, and argues the US financial system is "completely surveiled" already, no less than China's. He calls for Congress to encode a privacy-law enforcement balance into any dollar instrument, public or private.

Open questions and disagreements left unresolved

Giancarlo does not specify what regulatory framework Congress should pass beyond referencing the stalled Clarity bill, and leaves open whether the US will "regain the right balance" on privacy given current trajectory. He also hedges on whether traditional share certificates and analog instruments disappear entirely, saying the new system will be "built on top of" the old one, similar to how "Rome was built on top of the cities that came before."