Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski said DeFi (decentralized financial services without central intermediaries) should not be viewed as an opponent of regulators. Speaking at the first meeting of the CFTC (U.S. derivatives regulator) Innovation Advisory Committee on Aug. 21, he said DeFi transactions are recorded in verifiable form on on-chain ledgers, which could 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 in cybersecurity and operational resilience, and called for more technology to move toward open-source, verifiable technology stacks. He also said AI could broaden access to finance by allowing users to build trading or investment strategies based on their views of macroeconomic and industry conditions, capabilities that have historically been available mainly to high-net-worth individuals and professional money managers. He identified consumer protection as the main risk, warning that users may not understand what an AI model actually does or may be misled by claims about its functions. He said sandbox mechanisms should be established and models’ effectiveness and formal verifiability tested before consumer-facing AI is deployed at scale.