Electronification, Trading, and Crypto

Brendan Malone, Austin Adams, and Maher Latif argue that technology is inevitable and that public blockchains can help reengineer finance to be more open, fair, and efficient, with market change arriving in compounding steps often catalyzed by crises. They support this with the late-1960s Paperwork Crisis, which prompted the 1973 founding of the Depository Trust Company, and the post-9/11 adoption of Check 21, which allowed clearing of check images. They also propose a four-layer trading stack (network, custody and settlement, coordination and process, and price discovery) for analyzing how technology shapes market structure.