Federal Reserve Governor Waller: Smart contracts, DLT and other technologies still cannot fully achieve financial decentralization

Federal Reserve Governor Paul Waller, speaking at the Vienna Macroeconomics Symposium at the Institute for Advanced Study in Vienna, Austria, said that distributed ledger technology (DLT) could be an efficient and fast way to record transactions in a 24/7 world; instead of relying on each party to execute a transaction individually, smart contracts can effectively consolidate multiple aspects of a transaction into a unified behavior executed by smart contracts.
However, DLT, tokenization, and smart contracts, among others, are just trading technologies that can be used for DeFi or to increase the efficiency of centralized finance. Over time, these technologies will almost certainly increase efficiency. Can financial decentralization really be achieved completely with the use of these technologies? The answer is obviously no. Intermediaries are still valuable to ordinary people, as can be seen from the existence of trading exchanges in the crypto world. All of these platforms involve the custody of an individual's crypto assets to an intermediary, who transacts on behalf of their customers, which once again raises the need for trust in these platforms, just as trust is required in a modern banking system.