Looking back at the end of 2025, the crypto market has long shed its label as purely speculative and has entered a true era of asset integration. Today, I want to discuss a somewhat bold but data-supported view: in the next few years, new Web3 financial platforms may incorporate traditional small and medium financial institutions into their ecosystems through acquisitions and other methods.

Why am I so confident? It’s not just hype; the underlying logic of finance is being redefined.

Let's start with the most glaring issue—settlement costs. The most valuable assets of traditional financial institutions are not their office buildings but their backend systems accumulated over half a century. Want to transfer money across borders? You have to go through SWIFT, intermediary banks, and clearinghouses—this process takes at least a few days, sometimes up to a week, with exorbitant fees. In other words, we are still using courier services to send messages in the internet age.

In contrast, new on-chain financial platforms operate with a completely different architecture. By connecting liquidity pools directly with automated smart contracts, they achieve settlement efficiency improvements by several orders of magnitude. According to on-chain data from Q3 2025, transaction confirmation times for these platforms have stabilized at seconds, and settlement costs have significantly decreased.

Finance is fundamentally about capital flow and risk management. When code can solve these problems more cheaply, faster, and more transparently, the traditional methods will struggle to keep up. This is not just competition; it’s a dimensionality reduction attack.