Bankless · Friday, August 14, 2026
Mike Silagadze of EtherFi emphasizes that their new app is designed for mainstream users, requiring no prior crypto knowledge. Beyond just replicating traditional banking services, it leverages DeFi to offer capabilities unavailable in traditional financial institutions, aiming for broader crypto adoption by providing a clear 'why' for users to switch.
“And so what we're releasing now is not only is it the next generation of that, but more excitingly, the reason I'm excited about it is that it is much more normie friendly. So someone who, genuinely could not know anything about crypto and should be able to navigate it and get all the benefits without really having to have any familiarity with the underlying tech.”
“And secondly, it actually allows people to do stuff that they would not be able to do with their traditional financial institutions. So in other words, it's not just like recreating what existed before. It's actually using the power of DeFi to let you do stuff that, you know, you previously wouldn't have been able to do.”
“And B, there has to be like a why there, right? Like, OK, I'm pretty happy with, you know, my Chase account. Why do I need to use this thing?”