(Bloomberg) -- Mary-Catherine Lader had been on the job for all of two weeks at BlackRock Inc. when she decided she had a difference of opinion with Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink. This was in the fall of 2015 and Lader, then 30, was a recent dual graduate of Harvard’s business and law schools — with a firm conviction in the power of crypto.

Lader heard Fink express what she interpreted as skepticism about blockchain at a town-hall meeting, prompting her to fire off a memo to the head of her group defending the technology and explaining how she thought BlackRock should take advantage of its strengths. The missive got noticed and soon after, she was named co-head of BlackRock’s first blockchain working group — a position that made her both an advocate and an architect for the technology within the firm.

It was a big step, one that eventually helped lead to roles as chief of staff to the global chief operating officer and a leader at BlackRock Digital Wealth, among other positions at the asset-management giant. Lader’s blockchain efforts “were an important early step to where we are as a company,” Rob Goldstein, BlackRock’s COO, said in an interview.

Perhaps more stunning, though, was Lader’s decision last June to leave her high-flying career at BlackRock to become COO of Uniswap Labs, the creator of the world’s biggest decentralized exchange protocol and a key player in the free-wheeling world of DeFi — crypto’s largely unregulated answer to traditional finance. The way she saw it, the game-changing potential meant “it felt riskier to stay in a traditional institution than to jump into crypto full time,” Lader said.

She now faces a formidable challenge: convincing Wall Street and more mainstream consumers to have the confidence to start using Uniswap — a must step to expand the company beyond the crypto world. And it’s become even more daunting after the collapse last month of the TerraUSD stablecoin and its sister token Luna, which highlighted just how high the risks are in an industry that remains under threat from regulators and is likened by critics to a house of cards.

Lader believes Terra’s implosion, which destroyed tens of billions of dollars in market value, will actually speed up changes that will ultimately pave the way for decentralized finance.

“The tragic outcomes of Terra and Luna do demonstrate that we do need rules for the road, whether they come from regulators or the investment community, so the investors know the risks they are taking,” Lader, known as “MC,” said.

Where skeptics see danger in the wild swings, scams and hacks that are still all too common in DeFi, believers like Lader continue to see promise in a financial system that is intended to be more inclusive, where users are meant to be in control and the lack of middlemen can allow for potential efficiencies like faster transaction times and lower costs. 

Uniswap is a four-year-old effort governed by a community of holders of its token, Uni — regular folks as well as Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz. Token holders have a say in everything from the project’s fee structure to possible new features. The project’s code is freely available and has been copied, creating rivals like SushiSwap. The Uniswap protocol’s daily trading volume has already roughly matched that of Coinbase Global Inc., the U.S.’s biggest crypto exchange, according to Uniswap’s own data and CoinMarketCap.

Lader sees Terra’s collapse as an opportunity to make DeFi — which she admits is imperfect — better. Developers at Uniswap Labs are tinkering with their existing warning system, aiming to flag the hundreds of coins traded on the exchange with color codes in red, yellow or green depending on their level of risk, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Even before the Terra collapse, regulators frowned upon decentralized exchanges’ anonymous trading and easy token listings, which can enable scams. A recent class-action lawsuit alleges unlawful sale of unregistered securities through Uniswap, which last year axed some tokens meant to mimic stocks, and there have been reports of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. A spokesman for Uniswap Labs said the company is “committed to complying with the laws and regulations governing our industry and to providing information to regulators that will assist them with any inquiry.” 

Despite crypto’s bouts of upheaval, the market has continued to grow and gain adherents. Now, Lader — whose resume also includes a stint at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — thinks that after years of alternating between fearing and dismissing crypto, Wall Street is ready to engage. In his most recent annual shareholder letter, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon — who once called Bitcoin “worthless” — noted that “decentralized finance and blockchain are real, new technologies.” In April, BlackRock invested in Circle, which is behind popular stablecoin USDC that’s widely used in DeFi. And Jane Street recently started borrowing from a DeFi app. 

Read more: Wall Street Firms Make Crypto Push to Catch Up With ‘Cool Kids’

“The level of interest that’s been piqued on Wall Street, it’s not going to go away,” Lader said in the aftermath of Terra. Traditional financial players “are no strangers to high-risk financial products and unfortunate outcomes.”

Hiring Push

Over the past year, Lader has led a hiring push at Uniswap Labs, growing the team from 17 to 61 people, with 50% of employees now women, up from 24% previously. About 40% of the staff are also people of color. The diversity is an anomaly in the tech world and especially crypto, dominated by men. And the spree is set to continue, even as some rivals such as Coinbase and Gemini Trust Co. are freezing hiring or even cutting staffs.

Uniswap’s new hires include some high-profile additions: former Federal Reserve economist Gordon Liao was brought on to lead research, and former Snap Inc. senior director of engineering Chad DePue to lead engineering. Salman Banaei recently became head of policy; in the past he held various roles at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Lader’s team is talking with major investors to bring them to DeFi; it’s considering special institutional interfaces, according to two people familiar with the work. It’s also looking into offering tools for trading in traditional assets like fiat currency and commodities, one of the people said.

“Given her background at Goldman and BlackRock and given that she understands traditional finance and also understands crypto, she is really bridging those two worlds,” Ben Forman, founder of ParaFi Capital, an investor in Uniswap, said. “One of her focuses will be on bringing traditional financial institutions into DeFi in a way that makes sense to them.”

Widgets and More

To rev up its presence on consumer sites and apps, Uniswap in April unveiled a venture arm, widening its influence throughout the crypto world. It also pushed out a “widget” — a piece of code that any website can embed to let users swap tokens without leaving a site — that could ramp up its usage. 

Lader imagines many uses for DeFi and Uniswap, including in developed markets. Back in 2011, she worked on promoting a mobile-money service in Kenya, pitching grocery stores and micro-lenders to use it to reach more rural communities that otherwise might not have access to their services. Partly because her father, Philip Lader, was U.S. ambassador to the UK under former President Bill Clinton, she has lived in six countries and traveled to 87.

Read more: Crypto’s Top Decentralized Spot Market Aims to Dominate Web3 

“She was always someone who found herself right at the epicenter of figuring out how to democratize finance, new technologies and how do we not talk about them as concepts but actually figure out practical applications,” Goldstein said. 

Lader moved to Uniswap in the middle of the pandemic, which she mostly spent in New York. She also volunteered for Crisis Text Line, a free mental-health counseling service started by a friend.

“I was surprised by the move,” BlackRock’s Goldstein said. “At the same time, I think that she is really passionate about this whole concept of mission and democratization of finance.”

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.