The following is a guest post from Ben Mills, co-founder of Meso.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission blessed Ether It is Bitcoin ETFs and the US House passed FIT-21 with bipartisan support. The perception is that these are the next steps in the ongoing experiment to see if regulation can reduce the risks inherent in crypto and tame the wild digital asset sector.

But what if I told you that, by nature, cryptography has the potential to be much more secure than the existing financial system?

The salient concept here is “custody”, or more specifically, “self-custody” – the ability for people to maintain control over their own assets and data during financial transactions, without intermediation from third parties such as banks, exchanges or web companies,

Let’s be honest. Most people who pay attention to cryptocurrencies probably have their opinions shaped by headlines about catastrophes like the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX or the conviction of Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao on money laundering charges.

However, these scandals had much more to do with human nature than the nature of cryptography.

Looking back at the 2019-2020 crypto bull market, developers were trying to build sophisticated crypto-powered applications that were simple for neophyte traders and investors. In many cases, simplicity has been achieved by sacrificing self-custody and relying on the responsible management of huge centralized exchanges like FTX.

Consumers were presented with a combination of the worst risks of fintech Web2 and the unresolved problems of Web3. This shortcut led to disaster for companies, their investors and their customers.

But we don’t need to go back to Lehman Brothers to show that crypto doesn’t have a monopoly on spectacular financial failures.

Consider, for example, the ongoing case of Sinapse Financial Technologiesa non-crypto company whose platform is an intermediary that allows financial technology companies to provide bank-like services (such as checking accounts, credit cards, and debit cards).

Issues of trust and custody are at the heart of the implosion of the banking-as-a-service pioneer, once touted as the vanguard of financial technology and now teetering between bankruptcy and liquidation. U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Martin R. Brash said “tens of millions” of individual “depositors” are subject to losses worth “potentially hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to a report from the Forbes.

Speaking as a developer and former product specialist at companies like Braintree, Venmo, and Paypal who has since seen the light of blockchain payments, I can say that the true strength of crypto, compared to traditional fintech, is that it allows developers build in a much faster and leaner way. This is because the underlying blockchain technology is already responsible for fintech issues such as data security, payment integrations and – as mentioned above – fund custody.

The new generation of cryptography-based applications has the advantage of new technology that abstracts complex details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces. At the same time, it preserves self-custody, so it does not run the same risk that centralized entities posed during the last cycle.

In other words, while public attention has focused on putting out the fires that were lit during 2019-2020, the cryptographic infrastructure has matured to the point where we can get the best of both worlds: a friendly Web2 user experience with applications developed by developers who don’t no need to worry about taking custody of user data or funds, making it safer for all participants.

This is what makes crypto developers and entrepreneurs excited about digital assets. Cryptography is becoming more secure, faster and easier – ultimately refining itself from the average user’s experience. This intentional invisibility is a key goal at the end of crypto’s journey to becoming a significant component of the mainstream financial system and people’s everyday lives.

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