“Why do we really want blockchain technology to grow? Why is it so important to build with it?” said Aishwary Gupta, Marketing and Operations lead at decentralized Ethereum scaling platform Polygon. He was speaking about building blockchain solutions to replace traditional financial systems with Orchid’s Derek Silva on this week’s episode of the Priv8 Podcast.

To answer this question, Aishwary spoke about what’s happening in his home country. “In India, digital payments have already existed on a very large scale for quite some time. And people are well aware of what digital payments are – so when blockchain comes in, we don’t have to educate them in a general sense about how digital payments work.

So why is it important to build blockchain alternatives to the digital payments ecosystem that exists today? “It’s about bringing clarity and transparency to India’s financial ecosystem,” Aishwary said.

“First of all, blockchain gives people the ability to really see what’s happening with their money – it gives them a level of transparency that ‘traditional’ digital payments can’t offer. Today, there are a lot of scams and money misappropriation incidents that happen in India’s payments ecosystem. Blockchain brings clarity in that you can see where money is flowing on-chain, which you can’t do with the current infrastructure that India has.

“Apart from that, a lot of the payment systems within India’s economy today operate in silos. For instance, the country has a ton of fintech companies that offer payment solutions – but none of them are compatible with each other.

“If you have money on one platform, you cannot move it to a second one. And if you have money on the second one, you cannot move it on the third one. So if I’m trying to pay someone who uses a different platform than me, I just have to keep installing more and more new payment apps.

“This kind of fragmentation is one of the biggest issues with India’s digital payments ecosystem. But blockchain could easily solve this.”

Check out the entire conversation with Aishwary. And don't forget to subscribe to Priv8 on your favorite streaming service.