Twenty Years of Crowdfunding Led to a Key Question in Spain
A Provocative Question
“After 20 years of crowdfunding, one question keeps coming back: Are we transforming finance… or just digitising existing models?”
During an expert panel at the 5th International Conference for Alternative Finance Research (ICAFR) in Málaga, Ronald Kleverlaan posed this challenge – and it resonated across three days of discussions between 86 academics, platform leaders, regulators, and technology providers from across Europe and the USA.
The answer, it turns out, is both more interesting and more uncomfortable than the industry might want to admit.
The Mirror We Held Up
ICAFR brought together crowdfunding’s pioneers – the people who built the industry from scratch in the mid-2000s – for a rare moment of collective reflection. What they saw wasn’t quite what they expected.
Crowdfunding has scaled. Billions in capital raised globally. Established ecosystems across multiple jurisdictions. Professional operations replacing scrappy experimentation. Regulatory frameworks where once there was only uncertainty.
But Kleverlaan’s question, raised during the panel discussion “After 20 Years of Crowdfunding, What to Expect in the Next 20 Years to Come,” surfaced an uncomfortable truth: crowdfunding has grown by becoming more like traditional finance, not by replacing it.
As he put it: “Crowdfunding has scaled by adopting familiar models – lending structures from banks, equity models from venture capital. This has helped the industry grow. But it may also limit its future potential.”
The industry is still largely financing the old economy. Platforms haven’t adapted fast enough to support new types of organisations emerging in society – cooperatives, steward-owned businesses, community-owned enterprises, social enterprises. These organisations follow different lifecycles than traditional startups, yet crowdfunding platforms still evaluate them using venture capital logic.
The question Tim Wright posed to the panel cut deep: have we truly transformed finance, or have we simply digitised it?
What’s Actually Holding the Market Back
Andy Field, Karsten Wenzlaff, and Konstantin Boyko co-hosted GECA’s Platform Leaders Workshop at ICAFR, bringing platforms, technology providers, and ecosystem participants into focused discussions on operational realities.
The core challenges became clear quickly:
Trust and Deal Quality – Platforms still struggle to demonstrate governance and diligence standards in ways that travel across borders. Investors want assurance. Regulators want evidence. Platforms lack the shared infrastructure to provide either at scale.
Platform Economics – As Konstantin Boyko noted: “Raising from the crowd is often even more expensive and time-consuming than traditional methods, making long-term sustainability challenging.”
Liquidity – Secondary markets remain theoretical for most platforms. Investors are locked in, exit options are limited, and this fundamentally restricts who can participate and how much capital they’ll commit.
Cross-Border Friction – Every jurisdiction operates in isolation. Deals don’t travel. Investors can’t participate across borders. Platforms duplicate infrastructure rather than coordinate.
These aren’t new problems. What was apparent at ICAFR was the industry’s willingness to name them directly – and to acknowledge that technology alone won’t solve them.
The Community Power Gap
The most provocative insight came from examining what crowdfunding platforms aren’t doing.
Ronald Kleverlaan pointed to energy cooperatives across Europe successfully raising capital directly from citizens – without using crowdfunding platforms. “Somehow crowdfunding platforms are not able to offer the right services for them,” he observed.
Consider that. The organisations most aligned with crowdfunding’s original promise – citizen participation, community ownership, shared value creation – are bypassing the platforms entirely.
Why? Because platforms optimised for transaction efficiency, not community building. They replicated venture capital’s deal-by-deal model instead of building ongoing relationships between organisations and their supporters.
As Boyko reflected: “The real innovation would be to build a model where raising from the crowd is easier and more cost-effective. This should include building a community and leveraging its power long-term – not just during a campaign.”
Following the event, Barry James added momentum to this thread: “The energy revolution is a whole new canvas with huge potential to co-evolve with crowdfunding here in the UK, and, I suspect, elsewhere. Something worth some focus?”
The opportunity is significant. Climate infrastructure, renewable energy, community ownership models – these are exactly the kinds of projects where crowdfunding’s original promise of democratising access, engaging citizens, and distributing benefits should thrive. But platforms are structured for the wrong game.
Technology as Enabler, Not Solution
The Platform Leaders programme at ICAFR featured presentations and discussions on AI, tokenisation, and infrastructure – led by Neera Patel (DacxiChain, on AI governance), Daniel Wernicke (NYALA, on tokenisation and co-listing), Tim J. Sauer (secupay, on payment infrastructure), and others.
The technology discussions were notably practical. Not “AI will revolutionise everything,” but “here’s how AI creates new governance challenges that platforms aren’t ready for.” Not “tokenisation solves liquidity,” but “here’s how tokenised securities enable cross-platform distribution while maintaining investor data protection.”
Andy Field’s summary captured the room’s consensus: “Technology – including AI, tokenisation, and infrastructure – is beginning to provide real solutions, but adoption will rely on practical implementation rather than theory.”
The tools exist. Regulatory frameworks are emerging. The missing piece is coordination between platforms willing to build shared infrastructure rather than proprietary moats.
Daniel Wernicke’s presentation on NYALA’s Co-Listing Network illustrated this precisely. Tokenisation doesn’t automatically solve cross-border distribution – but when platforms agree on shared standards, blockchain-based registries can enable “shared fees, unified reporting, and zero investor data sharing between platforms.”
The technology enables coordination. But platforms must choose coordination first.
What Comes Next?
If the first 20 years were about proving crowdfunding works, the next 20 years are about deciding what kind of market to build around it.
Several pathways emerged from ICAFR discussions:
Path 1: Professionalization and Integration – Continue the current trajectory. Better integration with traditional finance. Institutional investors. Qualified investor focus. Stricter compliance. Higher barriers to entry. This path delivers scale and stability – but risks losing crowdfunding’s original promise entirely.
Path 2: Community-Driven Finance – Fundamentally rethink platform models. Optimise for ongoing community relationships rather than transaction efficiency. Finance new types of organisations – cooperatives, community-owned, steward-owned. Build infrastructure for shared ownership and governance, not just capital allocation. This path is riskier and requires rebuilding core assumptions – but it reconnects with why crowdfunding felt revolutionary in the first place.
Path 3: Hybrid Infrastructure – Provide professional, compliant infrastructure that enables both paths. Tokenisation and digital share management that supports both VC-style equity rounds and community ownership models. AI governance that works for both institutional deals and citizen participation projects.
The Question That Matters
GECA Steering Committee member Florence de Maupeou captured the choice facing the industry during the panel discussion: “The sector has undergone deep transformation: increasing institutionalisation, with the arrival of qualified investors, legal entities, financial advisors, and banking networks… strong professionalisation, driven in particular by demanding regulatory frameworks.”
That’s Path 1. It’s already happening. The question is whether it’s the only path.
Ronald Kleverlaan’s challenge stands: “To finance innovation in society, we first need to innovate finance.”
The real innovation isn’t in technology. It’s in who we finance and how communities are involved. That was crowdfunding’s original promise and added value — and that’s exactly where the next phase should emerge, if platforms choose to build it.
What ICAFR Proved
The most valuable outcome of ICAFR was getting the right people in the same room having honest conversations about hard questions.
As Andy Field noted: “This was a great reminder that there is so much value in simply getting the right people in the room and having the right conversations.”
Rotem Shneor and Marco Luzi created a space where academics and practitioners could genuinely collaborate – not present past each other, but build shared understanding of the challenges ahead. That collaborative spirit needs to extend beyond conferences.
Platforms competing for deals while duplicating infrastructure isn’t sustainable. Regulators working in isolation while platforms struggle with jurisdictional fragmentation isn’t scalable. Technology providers building proprietary solutions while standards remain fragmented isn’t efficient.
The industry faces a clear choice: keep digitising traditional finance models with slightly better user interfaces, or actually transform finance by building infrastructure for new kinds of organisations, new kinds of ownership, and new kinds of community participation.
The technology exists. The regulatory frameworks are emerging. The question is whether platforms will coordinate to build it – or keep competing to replicate what already exists.
ICAFR Málaga didn’t answer that question. But it named it clearly enough that the industry can no longer pretend it doesn’t exist.
The next 20 years won’t look like the last 20 years – unless we choose to make them that way.
Looking Ahead
ICAFR 2027 will convene in Montpellier, France. By then, we’ll know whether the industry took Ronald Kleverlaan’s challenge seriously – or whether we’re still digitising traditional finance and calling it transformation.
The platforms, technology providers, and ecosystem participants at ICAFR Málaga have the tools, the expertise, and increasingly the regulatory frameworks to build something genuinely different. Whether they choose to is the only question that matters.
About ICAFR: The International Conference for Alternative Finance Research brings together academics, platforms, regulators, and technology providers annually to advance crowdfunding research and practice. Organised by the European Centre for Alternative Finance at Utrecht University and the University of Agder (UiA), ICAFR 2026 was hosted by Universidad de Málaga, April 8–10.
About GECA: The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance is a neutral, industry-led network fostering dialogue, alignment, and practical pathways for cross-border collaboration in equity crowdfunding. Learn more at thegeca.org
