Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski said decentralized finance, or DeFi (financial services built on decentralized networks), should not be treated as an opponent of regulators. Speaking at the first meeting of the CFTC (U.S. derivatives regulator) Innovation Advisory Committee, he said on-chain transaction records can support transparency, consumer protection and market fairness. Novakovski said decentralized, verifiable finance could become an important part of the United States’ future financial infrastructure, particularly for cybersecurity and operational resilience, and urged the industry to move more technology toward open-source, verifiable systems. He also said artificial intelligence could broaden access to financial strategy-building, while warning that consumer protection is the main risk when users do not understand an AI model’s function or when its capabilities are promoted misleadingly. He called for appropriate sandbox mechanisms and testing of models’ effectiveness and formal verifiability before large-scale consumer deployment.