Alex Zinder, a capital markets veteran who jumped on the blockchain train last year, attended the Paris Blockchain Week Summit, where he sat down with Cointelegraph to discuss blockchain projects, crypto adoption and the traditional financial world’s necessary embrace of digital assets.

After almost two decades in capital markets technology, Alex Zinder joined Ledger Enterprise in March 2021. He previously worked at Nasdaq, where he worked as the global software development director and associate vice president of enterprise architecture.

Zinder now leads Ledger Enterprise Interact, a suite of solutions that allow businesses to manage interactions in smart contract-enabled protocols that support staking, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and other decentralized finance (DeFi) possibilities.

"Being on the Nasdaq side of things that was very much more involved in the distributed ledger ecosystem of the DLT platforms and looking at that from a more traditional financial services perspective," Zinder said, adding: "There was a tremendous amount of interest activity experimentation happening in the space, but not a tremendous amount of adoption from real use cases."

Zinder was asked whether cryptocurrency must develop even further for it to be considered a viable alternative by the traditional sector. According to him, it's not a "requirement or a prerequisite" since traditional players are " smart business companies" and they see opportunities. He stated that what he thinks is happening currently, is that "these opportunities are of sufficient scale" for the traditional players to want to participate.

He pointed out that now" it's no longer can we kind of play around and really understand the space to make sure we don't miss it, and now