Why Blockchain Must Outpace TradFi to Dominate Finance by 2025

The race is on—and legacy finance isn’t going down without a fight.

Blockchain’s promise? To dismantle the slow, opaque machinery of traditional finance (TradFi). But speed alone won’t win this war. Here’s what will.

The TradFi Wall: More Than Just Red Tape

Banks move at the pace of regulatory molasses. Blockchain cuts through it—when it’s fast enough to matter. Settlement times? Crypto does it in minutes. TradFi still counts days like it’s 1999.

Liquidity Showdown: Pools vs. Pitfalls

Decentralized exchanges flip the script: no gatekeepers, no ‘accidental’ trade halts during volatility. (Looking at you, Robinhood.) But can DeFi handle Wall Street’s trillion-dollar tantrums?

The Adoption Endgame

Retail’s hooked. Institutions are dipping toes. But until blockchain runs circles around SWIFT—without breaking a sweat—TradFi’s ‘too big to fail’ club keeps laughing all the way to the (bailout) bank.

Final thought: Maybe banks love blockchain. It’s the only tech that makes their infrastructure look fast.

The Chains We Have Today Don’t Cut It

Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency in existence. This is largely because it was the first one, inspiring the idea of an internet-native system of exchange not tied to any one government or nation. However, despite its international renown, builders still can’t ignore that Bitcoin has a 10-minute block time and can handle only 10 transactions per second.

Ethereum marginally improves upon this, but its average of 14 transactions per second is still incredibly slow compared to centralized payment processors. ethereum transactions can also carry high gas fees, which are a major barrier to widespread adoption. When compared to the NASDAQ, which processes 20,000 stock-market transactions per second on average, it’s clear how egregiously blockchain-based systems fall behind.

Additionally, while blockchain’s principles of decentralization and trust are important, outside crypto-native circles most people do not care as much about decentralization as they do about performance. Many users prefer centralized systems, like traditional banks or exchanges, because they are faster, cheaper, and much more efficient.

Despite Ethereum’s decentralized trust, its slow speed and high costs are a serious drawback. Simply put, the most widely used chains are not even close to competing with traditional offerings. This means users will have to look to faster, more centralized offerings to help close the gap.

Speed Is the Killer Feature

Right now, even the most crypto-native circles are starting to sacrifice decentralization for speed. For example, performance-focused chains like Solana, with 400-millisecond block times, support up to 3,000 transactions per second—bringing us closer to traditional offerings. The rise of centralized platforms such as Hyperliquid further bolsters this trend.

In May 2025 alone, Hyperliquid’s trading volume surged by 50%, according to DeFiLlama, highlighting the increasing number of traders who are prioritizing speed over a decentralized ethos.

But even with its incredible momentum, Hyperliquid is still not the endgame. It relies too heavily on infrastructure that isn’t open or composable, and it serves only a small portion of DeFi traders’ needs. The platform lacks the extensibility and interoperability needed to support the transition of modern finance into digital assets on a global scale.

To strike a balance between performance and decentralization, projects can adopt best practices such as batching transactions to reduce on-chain load, using off-chain order books for faster execution, and optimizing state differences to minimize gas costs and latency.

The real killer app for blockchain technology will be a platform that combines decentralization with performance and that’s as fast, smooth, and cheap as centralized alternatives like Revolut. Once that happens, there won’t be any more conversations about “DeFi vs. TradFi” or “centralization vs. decentralization.”

Instead, we’ll simply have a new standard for the financial industry that operates as fast and as seamlessly as the internet itself.

History is unequivocal: the fastest networks become the default. For blockchain, trust alone isn’t a moat—latency is. The builders who deliver Web2-grade speed without sacrificing openness will own the next decade of finance.