The asset itself is represented purely in code. Fintech companies like Stripe are building value-added features on top of the same banking system that everyone uses, essentially integrations on top of integrations.
A digital asset like Bitcoin is a completely different thing and requires no licenses, permissions, or anything whatsoever to write software that manipulates it.
Requires is doing a lot of work in that last sentence.
There's all sorts of situations where anyone can do a thing, but the government has stepped in and said that only licensed individuals can do it legally. What's to keep the same thing from happening to bitcoin?
And banks, payment processors and other fintech companies hire tens of thousands of employees each to maintain business as usual. Considering that bitcoin itself is a ledger and payment processor it makes me wonder if it could be an Avenue to free up human capital in the future for bigger and better things.
Except of course, that the Bitcoin ecosystem also uses human capital to write payment processing infrastructure and attracts people that like to make money by writing trading algorithms, and the "actually we don't need to pay people to secure our storage or monitor our transactions" approach is a bug rather than a feature of crypto exchanges, which is why they lose people's money so often. The unique thing about proof of work isn't the lack of human capital, but the enormous energy requirements
A digital asset like Bitcoin is a completely different thing and requires no licenses, permissions, or anything whatsoever to write software that manipulates it.