21 years ago, I ran a small telecom operator in Paris, France. After prototyping what was probably one of the first video-on-demand services called Move.tv, my team and I were innovating within the telecom space and media. We managed to interconnect a web server with an interactive voice response system and a telecom switch to create and pilot video on demand services years before Netflix through a simple user experience on the web. But as we have learned the hard way, timing is everything.

Luckily, one of my business partner’s sisters was married to Niklas Zennström, one of the two Skype founders. We met in Biot, in the south of France, so I could demo our service. It was not live yet, and the first comment from Niklas was: “Just ship. Don’t wait for it to be perfect. You will improve it with your users.”

I was fascinated by peer-to-peer architectures and decentralized technologies. Skype was really what got me deep into these technologies. I was researching and learning about distributed hash tables (DHT), decentralized storage and routing, self-healing overlay networks, how messages and calls could be dynamically routed even without centralized knowledge of the entire network.

This was still years before Ethereum and Bitcoin was invented. Encryption was managing trust.

As Niklas and I were about to end our meeting, he mentioned: “Do you know anyone who could help us open the service of Skype Out to route calls from Skype to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) to enable Skype users to terminate calls to landline and mobile phones?” 
Telecom routes leveraging VoIP were my bread and butter at the time, and the way I was financing all my research and development.

I replied to Niklas: “If that’s what you need, I can enable it tomorrow.” Then he asked, “Can you be in our London office next week?” 
I flew to London the following Monday and after meeting with the Skype team, signed the first telecom agreement to route all their calls to the PSTN.

Back in 2004, Skype was perceived as a foe to the whole telecom industry and no incumbent wanted to let them operate and capture the value provided by regulated telcos. Each country has its own regulator, its own set of rules and the government directly captures a share of the value by leasing wireless spectrum or numbering resources. I didn’t care about any of that, began setting up the switch and a few years later even applied to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU in Switzerland) to get my own country code.

In just 10 years, Skype’s market share of global PSTN traffic went from less than 3% to 40% of all international calls worldwide at its peak.

My experience with Skype wasn’t just a career milestone — it was a front-row seat to how decentralized technologies can transform an entire industry. Today, I’m witnessing the same patterns emerge in finance, with blockchain technologies poised to create an equally dramatic shift in how we exchange value.

Let me explain below what are the similarities and why the timing is now for a new generation of applications to take over global finance by storm.

Decentralized technologies, blockchain scalability and security

Skype was able to scale and experience a peak with 34 million concurrent users being online in 2012.

Scalability

Despite the resistance from the financial industry and many critics to adopt blockchain technologies and arguing that it can’t handle the necessary volume of transactions, Ethereum layer 2 and zero knowledge proofs (“ZKPs”) are demonstrating that there is practically no limit today. 
Visa’s actual TPS (transaction per second) is around 1,700 (not the often claimed 24,000 TPS)*, Mastercard processes approximately 5,000 TPS**. 
Polkadot throughput is currently around 1,000 TPS, but recent tests have demonstrated over 100,000 TPS. And, ZK Rollups (Layer 2) with solutions like Polygon zkEVM or like ZKsync Era are expected to reach between 2,000 and 3,000 TPS later this year. 

The big plus is blockchain technology offers advantages beyond raw transaction speed, including programmability, accessibility, and reduced intermediaries.

Why Zero Knowledge Layer 2s are as significant as P2P was for the telecom industry

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology revolutionized telecommunications by eliminating the need for centralized infrastructure to connect calls. Before Skype, international calls required a complex network of physical switches, copper wires, and satellite connections — all controlled by telecom operators who charged hefty fees for access. P2P allowed calls to route directly between users over the internet, bypassing this expensive infrastructure entirely.

Zero-knowledge proofs are significant as they allow one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement is true without revealing any additional information beyond the validity of the statement itself. For blockchain transactions, this means a complex calculation can be verified as correct without redoing the entire calculation. In the world of business and finance, this means unmatched scalability and speed.

Zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain represent a similar paradigm shift for finance for several key reasons

1. Elimination of Trust Requirements
   Just as P2P eliminated the need to trust telecom operators to connect your call, ZKPs and blockchain eliminate the need to trust financial intermediaries to verify transactions.

2. Dramatic Cost Reduction
   P2P reduced the cost of international calls by 95%+. Similarly, ZKPs reduce the cost of financial transactions by allowing thousands of transactions to be verified for the cost of a single verification on traditional systems.

3. Scalability Without Centralization 
   P2P allowed Skype to scale to tens of millions of concurrent users without building massive central infrastructure. ZKPs allow blockchain networks to scale to thousands of transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization.

4. Privacy Preservation
   P2P with encryption allowed private communications that couldn’t be easily monitored by governments or companies. ZKPs allow financial transactions that preserve privacy.

5. Composability 
   P2P enabled new services to be built on top of the basic communication layer (video, file sharing, etc.). ZKPs and blockchain enable complex financial services to be built on top of the basic transaction layer without compromising performance (Smart Contracts, Transactional Ai Agents, Trading bots, etc.)

The significance cannot be overstated: just as P2P technology made international communication accessible to everyone regardless of location or income, ZKPs and blockchain are making sophisticated financial services accessible to everyone regardless of their access to traditional banking infrastructure.

Security

Most financial institutions would argue that it is not secure to let users hold their funds. If this used to be a valid argument, one could argue that nonetheless blockchains do enable an easier traceability of payments and money movements since records are public and verifiable by anyone. The recent tragic event I describe below explains why this traceability of funds is now making it almost impossible for attackers to steal the money on your crypto wallet.

In January 2025, Balland (Ledger co-founder) and his wife were kidnapped from their home in France. The kidnappers demanded approximately 100 BTC (valued at $100 million) and sent a video showing Balland’s injured finger to another Ledger co-founder, Eric Larcheveque. Despite executing on their demand, authorities were able to trace, freeze, and seize “almost all” of the cryptocurrency that was paid as part of the ransom negotiations:

1. The recovery involved blockchain analysis to track the movement of funds.

2. Cooperation with cryptocurrency exchanges was crucial to freeze the assets before they could be accessed by the kidnappers.

3. The rapid response by authorities (within 24–48 hours) was instrumental in recovering the funds before they could be moved through multiple wallets or mixing services.

This case demonstrates that while cryptocurrency transactions are pseudonymous, they are not anonymous, and authorities have increasingly sophisticated tools to track and recover illicit funds when working with exchanges and blockchain analytics companies.

Financial institutions that fall within local regulations are making it easier to interact with their systems

Visa and Mastercards make it possible for any cryptocurrency wallet to issue a virtual or physical credit card that acts as a debit card as long as the user has performed a KYC check. The first initiatives came from players like Crypto.com, Coinbase and more recently Metamask. The latter is the most interesting as compared to centralized exchanges, Metamask doesn’t hold users’ funds and a user is free to dispose and spend its holdings at any point of sale that supports Mastercards. 

Many other financial intermediaries are making it easier to on ramp users money onto their cryptocurrency wallets and are including support for Apple and Google Pay.

Users holding stable coins are now able to receive a yield and some banks will soon make it easy to open a bank account linked to a blockchain wallet, enabling anyone to open a US dollar account and receive payments in stable coins on their mobile wallet from any place in the world.

These rapid changes reflect well what happened at the time when Skype opened Skype-Out and Skype-In which enabled users to terminate calls to landlines, mobile phones and even receive calls directly on their computer or mobile on a local phone number of their choice. 
The intermediaries or local telcos providing the service were subject to local regulations but in the end Skype was the one capturing most of the value coming from the volumes of minutes or subscriptions generated by the service. While gathering users from around the world, Skype was not subject to any regulation, was operating its decentralized infrastructure and focusing on maintaining its scalability and quality of service. Each time there was a call placed outside of the Skype network, they were relying on local telcos and partners to deal with the regulation and provide the necessary compliance.

This is how the financial industry could be quickly disintermediated and disrupted

1. A user in a small African town, a South American city or a nomad worker can perform a KYC online and open a US bank account to receive payments in USD.

2. As the funds are received, this same user could have the funds automatically sent to their mobile wallet in the form of stable coins with their balance recorded on the blockchain.

3. They can now spend this money at any merchant using a virtual credit card issued by their mobile wallet application and they can store it on their Apple or Google Pay wallet.

4. In traditional finance, getting a loan typically requires one of two things: either significant collateral (often 100% or more of the loan value) or a good credit score. It allows for undercollateralized loans but requires sharing your entire financial history with credit institutions and lenders. Zero-knowledge proofs make it possible to privately store on-chain credit scoring and therefore enable undercollateralized lending.

5. In early DeFi (Decentralized Finance), loans were almost exclusively overcollateralized — you needed to deposit more value than you borrowed, which defeats the purpose of a loan for many users. This was necessary because there was no way to assess creditworthiness without revealing sensitive financial information. With zero-knowledge proofs, a new model has emerged:

   • A user can prove they have a history of repaying loans on time without revealing which loans or the specific details of their financial history.

   • They can prove their income exceeds a certain threshold without revealing exactly how much they earn or where it comes from.

   • They can prove they have maintained certain balance levels in their accounts without revealing the exact balances.

   • They can prove they haven’t defaulted on previous loans without revealing any details about those loans.

   All of this can be cryptographically verified on-chain without any of the underlying data being exposed. This allows for truly undercollateralized lending in a decentralized environment — something that was impossible before ZKPs.
   Protocols like Aave and Compound are exploring ZKP-based credit delegation systems that would allow for undercollateralized loans based on verifiable but private financial history.

   This represents a fundamental shift in how payments and credits can be extended globally and made accessible to people who have been excluded from traditional banking and lending markets. Just as Skype made international communications accessible to people who could hardly afford traditional international calling rates and spend hours on a call with their families.

The technical foundations of financial disruption are in place

Twenty one years ago, I stood in a London office signing an agreement that would help Skype connect to the traditional telephone network. That signature was more than a business deal — it was my unwitting participation in a revolution that would fundamentally transform global telecommunications. What began as a peer-to-peer application for your computer with a handful of users grew to capture 40% of international calls worldwide, dramatically reducing costs and democratizing global communication.

Today, as I witness blockchain technology and zero-knowledge proofs reshaping finance, I’m struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. The patterns are unmistakable: the initial resistance from incumbents, the technical breakthroughs enabling scalability, the gradual integration with traditional systems, and the dramatic reduction in costs. We are standing at the same inflection point for finance that telecom faced in 2005 — the early adopters are here, the technology is maturing, and the regulatory environment is beginning to adapt.

I believe this disruption will be even more profound. While Skype revolutionized how we communicate, blockchain is revolutionizing how we store and exchange value — a fundamental aspect of human civilization that has remained largely unchanged for centuries. The ability to transfer value instantly across borders without intermediaries, to access sophisticated financial services without a traditional bank, and to prove creditworthiness without revealing personal data will unlock economic potential for billions of people currently excluded from the global financial system.

The incumbents who adapt will survive, just as some telecom companies eventually embraced VoIP technology. Those who resist will find themselves increasingly irrelevant, like the international calling card companies that have all but disappeared. 
The financial institutions currently experimenting with blockchain integration are the equivalent of the forward-thinking telecom operators who partnered with Skype in its early days.

What makes this moment particularly powerful is that we can see the future by looking at the past. The disruption of telecom provides a roadmap for what is coming in finance. If the pattern holds — and all evidence suggests it will — we can expect blockchain-based financial services to capture a significant portion of global transactions within the next decade, following a similar S-curve adoption pattern to what Skype experienced.

I have had the rare privilege of not just witnessing but participating in two of the most significant technological disruptions of our time. The lesson I have learned is that when decentralized technologies meet essential human needs — whether it is our need to communicate or our need to exchange value — the resulting transformation is not just inevitable, it is exponential.

The question is no longer whether blockchain will disrupt finance, but how quickly and how completely.

For individuals, this is a moment to embrace the new tools becoming available. For businesses, it is a time to adapt or risk obsolescence. And for society as a whole, it is an opportunity to create a more inclusive, efficient, and accessible financial system.

Twenty years from now, we will look back at this moment as the beginning of a financial renaissance — a time when the walls between people and their money began to crumble, just as Skype once tore down the barriers to global communication. I was fortunate enough to play a small role in the first revolution.

“Now, I invite you to join in witnessing — and perhaps like me participating in — the second revolution.”

*https://www.spglobal.com/_assets/documents/ratings/research/100495128.pdf
**https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/financial-stability-publications/macroprudential-bulletin/html/ecb.mpbu202207_2~836f682ed7.en.html