Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman discusses the untapped potential of DeFi

Arthur Breitman, the co-founder of layer-1 protocol Tezos (XTZ), spoke with Cointelegraph's Jackson DuMont at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS) last week about what it would take to unlock the true potential of decentralized finance, or DeFi. Breitman delivered a keynote speech following this interview about the company's strategy.

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According to Breitman, "people haven't really tapped into DeFi for real-world assets being tokenized." When he says real-world assets, he means stocks, real estate, digital art or "anything you can think of." While calling for a merge of traditional financial securitization and DeFi applications, Breitman also believes that the financialization of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) "is going to be a big thing."

He added that due to the considerable hype around DeFi and NFTs at the moment, it's hard to determine what will actually be sustainable. The hype needs to settle before DeFi's true power can be unlocked because "The point of DeFi cannot just be to trade DeFi tokens," he said.

Additionally, Breitman affirmed that the consolidation of layer-1 technologies is coming: "There's a gigantic untapped universe out there and everyone has a lot of room to grow. We are going to see a lot of convergence in the design of blockchains." 

When asked about the scalability, decentralization and security trilemma, Breitman is sure it can be solved. He stated that Tezos' approach to scaling involves Optimistic Rollups, a layer-2 solution that supports very high-throughput use cases. Breitman said that Optimistic Rollups may offer the key to both the horizontal and the vertical scalability of blockchain networks.

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At the end, Breitman pointed viewers who are interested in learning more about Tezos' scaling efforts to its 2022 roadmap. He also expressed his excitement for the gaming sector and Tezos' blockchain gaining initiatives.