Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski said at a U.S. CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee meeting that DeFi has long been misunderstood and should not be viewed as an adversary of regulators. According to Foresight News, he said transactions are recorded on ledgers in a verifiable way, which can help regulators work on transparency, consumer protection, and fairness.

Novakovski said decentralized, verifiable finance will become an important part of future U.S. financial infrastructure, especially in cybersecurity and operational resilience, and that more technology should move toward open-source, verifiable stacks. He also said AI could help democratize finance by allowing users to build baskets of trades or strategies based on their views of macroeconomic, economic, or industry conditions, something that was mainly available to high-net-worth individuals and professional asset managers a few years ago.

He said the main risk from AI is consumer protection, including cases where users do not understand what a model does or where its capabilities are described misleadingly. He added that it is important to create sandboxes for models and verify their effectiveness and formal verifiability before large-scale consumer use.