The Future of Blockchain with Monica Singer

In this Sybrin Game Changers conversation, Prof Monica Singer, Africa lead for ConsenSys and former CEO of Strate, tells Colin Iles why she left the company she built to run South Africa's central securities depository for a technology she believes will replace it. Singer separates cryptocurrency speculation from blockchain infrastructure, argues the real signals of maturity are accounting and regulatory change rather than coin prices, and predicts DAOs will eventually replace limited liability companies as the default way people organise work.

The Bitcoin white paper moment: why Singer left the company she built

Singer spent 20 years building and running Strate, the central securities depository that moved South African share trading from paper certificates to electronic settlement, taking the market from roughly 4,000 trades a day in 1995 to around 350,000 a day in equities by the time she left. Two goals at Strate proved structurally impossible: real-time visibility for issuers of who was buying and selling their shares, and one screen for investors showing all their holdings across every intermediary. In 2015 she read Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper and concluded the fix for financial markets wasn't a better centralised intermediary like Strate, it was removing intermediaries altogether; she says she cried reading it, because a peer-to-peer, cryptographically secured ledger solved exactly the problems she'd spent two decades unable to solve from inside a centralised model. She left to become Africa lead for ConsenSys, where she has now spent five years at what she describes as the biggest blockchain company in the world.

Separating the coin price from the technology: why her passion hasn't dimmed

Singer draws a hard line between cryptocurrency speculation, which she says is driven by the same fear and greed as traditional markets and includes "hundreds of new cryptocurrencies, some of them are absolutely rubbish," and blockchain and DeFi as infrastructure. She points to two regulatory shifts as the real markers of progress: South Africa classifying crypto as a financial instrument, removing the need for new legislation on how it's accounted for, and the US Financial Accounting Standards Board letting crypto be measured at fair value instead of only written down, never up, which she says previously punished large holders like MicroStrategy every time the price fell. On energy, she argues Bitcoin mining largely uses stranded renewable sources such as Icelandic and Salvadoran volcanic geothermal and Chinese hydroelectric power, and cites Ethereum's Merge from proof of work to proof of stake as cutting that network's energy use by 99.9%.

The Aave example: how DeFi lending actually works

Singer explains decentralised finance through Aave, one of the largest DeFi lending protocols, where a borrower deposits crypto worth more than the loan they want and receives funds without any identity check, credit history, or income verification, only the collateral value matters. She contrasts this with Celsius, a centralised crypto lender that collapsed because client funds passed through a centralised custodian rather than an auditable smart contract, the failure mode DeFi is designed to prevent. To separate credible protocols from scams, ConsenSys runs ConsenSys Diligence, auditing smart contracts and publishing reports, and has built MetaMask for Institutions, a self-custody wallet variant with built-in controls, reporting, and KYC so banks can invest client funds into DeFi on their behalf.

The DAO thesis: why Singer thinks limited liability companies get replaced

Singer's central prediction is that decentralised autonomous organisations, DAOs, will replace limited liability companies as the default vehicle for organising productive work, arguing a DAO needs no buildings, shareholders, board, or employees, just a smart contract and a community that opts in and gets paid in tokens. Her live example is Uniswap, an automated market maker DAO whose trading volumes exceeded Coinbase's despite having no listing costs, offices, or real staff, while Coinbase carried the full cost of a public listing and regulatory compliance. She points to the JSE's shrinking listings, from around 670 companies five years ago to just over 300 today, as an early sign issuers are voting with their feet toward DeFi liquidity outside a single currency and jurisdiction, and cites JP Morgan tokenising a traditional instrument to use as Aave collateral as evidence large institutions are already inside this system, not just watching it.

What business leaders should actually do: Singer and Marius Mare's shared takeaway

Prompted by Sybrin CEO Marius Mare on what leaders across industries should be doing now, Singer argues the disruption isn't blockchain as a technology, it's a coming shift in how work itself gets organised, toward contribution-based, token-compensated participation with no traditional employment relationship. She rejects assigning blockchain to a small specialist team, comparing it instead to email: nobody is exempted from learning email, and blockchain literacy should be treated the same way, with each function learning the part relevant to its own work. Mare's own takeaway, offered in the same exchange, is that organisations are heading toward far fewer direct employees and far more people contributing work through open marketplaces for code and services.

Is DeFi safe to use?

Singer says the main risk isn't DeFi itself but poorly written or malicious smart contracts, including rug pulls where a protocol's creators vanish with deposited funds soon after launch. She points to ConsenSys Diligence's audits and the rule that older, more decentralised protocols are safer bets as the homework users should do first.

What is Regulation 28 and why does Singer call it a problem for South African investors?

Regulation 28 governs how South African pension funds can allocate investments and has historically restricted exposure to assets like crypto in favour of JSE-listed shares. Singer calls this an asymmetric missed opportunity, since a small crypto allocation carries potential for much faster value growth than an equivalent JSE allocation, and argues the rule has protected the JSE rather than the investor.