From TradFi to Internet Finance: A New Era of Global Capital | Felipe Montealegre

We’re not building crypto. We’re building internet finance.

That’s the core idea behind Felipe Montealegre’s new essay—and today’s Bankless episode. Felipe, co-founder of Thea Capital, argues that the terminology we’ve used for over a decade—crypto, DeFi, blockchain—isn’t quite capturing what we’re actually building.

So what are we building? A new financial system, on the internet, governed by credible commitments and open participation.

In today’s world, finance runs on a tangled web of siloed, permissioned databases. Your Robinhood stock exists only on Robinhood’s servers. Your land title might be a rolled-up map in a dusty municipal office. Transferring assets across jurisdictions requires expensive middlemen, slow paperwork, and opaque gatekeeping. Capital gets trapped, opportunities go unfunded, and billions of people are locked out of modern finance.

Now imagine a unified database—open to everyone, with no gatekeepers—where asset ownership is governed by transparent, immutable code. That's what Felipe calls internet finance: a server with laws, not lawyers. A system where startups, banks, and users can plug in, transact, and innovate without waiting for permission.

The internet gave us free communication. Internet finance will give us free capital movement.

Felipe walks us through how this new paradigm solves key problems:

• ✅ High transaction costs from legacy infrastructure
• ✅ Barriers to entry for new banks and financial institutions
• ✅ Local banking oligopolies that extract rents and limit credit
• ✅ Weak property rights in much of the developing world

He also explains why we're finally ready. Blockchains are now credible commitment machines. Smart contracts let us build composable, permissionless financial products. And with regulatory momentum in the U.S. (hello, stablecoin and RWA bills), the stars are aligning for mass adoption.

Whether you’re a policymaker, a founder, or an investor—this episode is your primer on the next era of global capital markets.

"We're on the verge of compressing the world's siloed financial system into a single, open ledger. That’s not just a crypto use case—that’s a civilizational upgrade."
— Felipe Montealegre

🎧 Listen to the full episode for deep insights into the architecture, incentives, and power shifts of the internet financial system.