Kling and finance

people want to issue risky, long-term liabilities and hold riskless, short-term assets.

I get it.  I have it a bit different.  I promise a fixed monthly cash stream for a long time in exchange for cash today.  The cash today becomes a car or house.  We do this because we time plot, we can adjust consumption, the budget, ahead of the payment.

The intermediation function is real, but in the sandbox this is smart contract, as there is a lot of insurance contracting against fails to deliver.

In pure cash, interest charges are volatility adjusted by quantization. The charges, therefore are asynchronous, adjustable; but generally bound in variation. Hence, no intermediation function.  The distribution of fails to deliver is derived from the observations of bit error in pure cash, and it is not stationary  with time, so the insurance adjuster adjusts rates periodically.  These smart contracts watch the adjustable, asynchronous interest charges emitted from the pits.  From the most recent observations they can price the risk that sandbox rates and smart rates diverge.