In a conversation with CFO journal editor, Digital Asset Holdings Chief Executive Officer Blythe Masters during Wall Street Journal’s CFO Network on Tuesday told that digital currencies are a response to financial crisis.

In a video posted by Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Johnson posed question to Masters asking whether the rise of cryptocurrency is a sort of an activist response to the financial crisis. Masters replied to it saying that the rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is a “principled” response to the financial crisis and privilege direct financial deals among individuals.

Transferring “instruments of value,” however, requires “centralized institutions” to prevent money laundering and terrorism funding, Ms. Masters said.

She finally said that, “All of those things which are not features of the public bitcoin blockchain, but are the features of the new technologies that have been inspired by that are now being redeployed in different context to actually help financial institutions to provide a better service to their customers rather than put financial institutions entirely out of business.”

In September, Masters promoted the blockchain and its digital ledger software code that powers bitcoin. It was reported that she planned to offer banks and other financial players both options: Digital Asset is creating an off-the-shelf private blockchain product and developing ways to connect its customers to the existing bitcoin system.

Blythe Masters is the financial engineer who helped develop the credit-default swap and bring to life a market that peaked at $58 trillion, in notional terms, in 2007. She is an economist and former executive at JPMorgan Chase. She is currently the CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, a start-up providing settlement and ledger services for both digital and mainstream assets.