From early Bitcoin mining dreams to trillion-dollar blockchain settlements, the crypto journey has been turbulent. At Sibos 2025, Rik Coeckelbergs, founder and managing director of The Banking Scene, and Co-Pierre Georg, professor at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, unpacked how Web3 is moving from its “wild west” beginnings toward a more mature, though still uncertain, future.
Coeckelbergs kicked of the session “Crypto & Web3: From wild west to settled environment?”, by recalling the early days: “It was a time where gamers and coders would be mining Bitcoins with the idea to completely replace the world of payments. That didn’t happen.” Instead, blockchain’s potential took centre stage. “On a daily basis, we hear new news items about how financial services are embracing blockchain technology in their lives,” he said.
Concrete examples include Broadridge settling “six trillion dollars per month in repo transactions on blockchain technology” and BlackRock’s tokenised money market fund already managing half a billion dollars today. The direction, Coeckelbergs suggested, is clear: “It will be hybrid. All these things will coexist.”
Control
Georg shifted the conversation to data, challenging one of finance’s core assumptions: “I would like to challenge the idea that privacy is a good idea.” He argued for moving beyond the disclose-or-conceal model, stressing instead: “We shouldn’t strive for privacy, we should strive for control: control over data, control in the sense that we can determine how information is processed, with what code, by whom, how often and in which context. There is a much stronger sense of control over information than privacy could ever achieve.”
On the question of stability, Georg struck a cautious note. He pointed out that today’s trajectory could lock the industry into an overly frictionless model, shaped by past technological choices rather than deliberate design. To move beyond that risk, he highlighted “one thing is making sure that everyone can talk about data in the same language, the other thing is the computational power of making sure that that data becomes relational and something useful.” At the core, he argued, lies the importance of challenging long-standing assumptions, especially around concepts such as privacy, instead of simply accepting them as given.
Sibos 2025 plays out in Frankfurt from 29 September to 2 October, with about 12,000 registered delegates. We are there, overview our coverage here.
