Les Amis d’Ethereum France #14 avec Memo Bank et Cometh — Face à face TradFi vs DeFi

So today, a showdown between 10 Flaws and a deal. Team Diffy, Léopold from Comète, and Team Ferdinand from Mémo Bank. I can leave you now, yes, good evening everyone. So indeed, Léopold, CFO at Comète, I see there are already matching t-shirts in the room, but just in case, I presented the company anyway. What is it?

It's a group with two activities. We're natively in blockchain video games, so some of you may have had the chance to play our first game online and perhaps our second game, which is still live on Polygone. And what have we done recently? We pivoted. We asked ourselves, what can we do to better serve the ecosystem?

We released everything we'd done on our video game, standardized it, and now the service provider is a platform called Alambic. Basically, Alambic is... What is it? It's the tool, the toolkit, that allows any Web 2.0 project—why not a bank?

—to interact with the blockchain using various NFC, RC20, etc. So, today we have two flagship products that are live. We have a Marketplace SDK; in three clicks, you deploy your marketplace and can sell NFC. And the second flagship project from Alambic is an account abstraction service. We'll be talking a lot about it tonight, about wallet history, strawberry sites, and recovery.

The idea is that there are many people who want the advantages of Web 3.0 without the complexities, and accountant action is one of the first topics, one of the first building blocks we offer our clients to make this Web 3.0 migration. So, Ferdinand, hello. So, I'm Ferdinand, I'm the CFO of Memo Bank.

Your banks, well, it's a bank; it was created about three years ago. It's the first new bank in 50 years. So, for those who may know... These are the people who started Captain Train. I don't know if any of you know Captain Train, but they've launched another venture.

They started with "Mes Robes" (My Dresses), and we've been working together for three years now. It's great. We're going to sell the entire bank from A to Z. It's for businesses, or rather, for large companies. So I haven't seen any t-shirts, but your banks are among you at Comète.

Basically, I bumped into Léopold over breakfast, and we thought, well, anyway, we had a good laugh. I didn't know everything about crypto, far from it, and he didn't know everything about finance, far from it either, especially banking. So we thought it would be cool to discuss it. Thanks, Ferdinand. Also, it's worth noting that Memo Banks doesn't systematically reject crypto companies, so we're neither one nor the other.

We're neither crypto- adverse nor crypto-friendly. In any case, we're pretty much within the rules, meaning that if... There are never any, it respects the anti- money laundering rules, especially since we're coming, we don't have too many problems. So, as a new establishment, we have the CPA, so it's the banking regulator. There are two parts, I'll explain for a second, but there's a control part, so there's a fintech part, they're really into crypto, they think it's great, and the control part, that's the one I deal with pretty much every day, they don't really like crypto, so we try to be careful with them too because we're very, very closely monitored.

So we're going to do a little poll in the room because there are two TeamStop-FY members here. So, the outcome of the vote isn't too doubtful, but who is Tim Trade? Don't be ashamed, I also work in a bank. And who is he saying? Okay, so we'll see, just one question, and who doesn't have a bank account?

It's a bit like Twitter, we complain about it, but we complain about it on Twitter. Here we go. A quick disclaimer before we begin: we're going to use analogies and shortcuts to simplify and explain. We'll focus on VM chains because that's where the Dify happens, and we'll keep the presentation from a corporate perspective, so from a business perspective. Regarding opening an account, the fairly simple part is you click a button, create a wallet, and that's it, you can have lunch.

Creating a bank account is a little more complicated, perhaps. I'll let you, Leo, start commenting on that. So, you have to take it into consideration that we're really talking from a corporate perspective, about a company, because it's true that if you want to open an account, so open your identity on Web 3 via a wallet, today I think there's more debate. We go to MetaMasks and we're quite comfortable with opening an account and generating an address. When you have a company, it's a little different, skipping over different topics because we'll see later, there are...

Concerns about explaining what we're doing, etc., traceability, and so all of that needs to be taken into consideration. Opening an account in the default setting when we generate our address as a company is the question: what do I do? Do I grab a MetaMask on the fly, like we might do for OpenSI for a collection, that sort of thing, or am I going to bother with complicated setups using a Ledger with an Ozy Safe, and I'll have several multi-accounts? It might seem like the bias is thinking that if we did it for ourselves in three clicks, it's solved.

However, if we switch to business mode, with all the constraints that come with having crypto on our balance sheet, the thinking is ultimately quite counterintuitive, but we should spend more time on it. Or, when we're at the startup stage, we adopt our DJ side, and the day we're a bit more mature and hire our first cybersecurity expert, we let them pick up the pieces and manage this. That part, there you go, that's also a solution, Ferdinand. I'll let you get into it a bit. Yeah, from a banking perspective, it's actually a historical issue.

That's why we've ended up asking so many questions. It's because there are more and more regulations. So, for SASUs (simplified joint-stock companies), small, truly single-person businesses, it's quite easy to open an account, especially with payment institutions. So, chains of companies, there's really a possibility of opening one relatively easily. You often need a Kbis (company registration certificate) less than 3 months old and the list of beneficial owners.

I'm just coming back to the US situation because some of you, if you have a company with American beneficiaries, it immediately falls under FATKA. So, it's the American regulation that says if you ever have an American who opens a bank account, or if they are a shareholder of a company who opens a bank account, I want to know everything. And so, the Americans have surpassed the Swiss in terms of banking expertise because they manage to... Having all the details of an American citizen or someone with a role in what we call an American character, and from that point on, we are obliged to do an annual report or close the account. That's why most companies—there are very few banks, there are fewer, well, there are more and more, but not a huge number of banks—open accounts for companies that meet American criteria.

Perhaps a fundamental difference here is that in Diffa, and you know this, when you open a wallet, you don't have to answer to anyone except yourself, versus Ferdinand, who is spending this day with our friends from the CPA, I imagine. Yeah, we have quite a bit of reporting, mostly monthly. So, the reports include everything that will be problematic, so for corporate checks, so without sufficient funds, to report them, there's a list that's made. If it doesn't work by email, we can do it by fax. That's where the Bank of France is quite good; we have a whole system for reporting defaults, in fact, for companies, and then...

There's Anacrédi which has been launched, so it's a bit more detailed, but basically it's the same thing: we have to report pretty much all the clients we have who have experienced a default. So, we understand, one is a bit easier than the other, but there are historical reasons for that. Next, we'll move on to recovery. So, I'll start with Ferdinand, on the banking side. We shout "recovery!"

when I've forgotten my bank password, my bank account password. It's easy, I call my banker, basically, and generally it goes pretty well. It's a fairly well-established process. However, in the case of a default, that's another problem. So, I'll let you start on Sunday.

So, for the recovery part, yeah, overall we manage. Generally, the banks... well, it depends on the type of bank you're dealing with. There are some with little calculators, I don't know if you have those, but little calculators where you have to enter your code, whatever... anyway...

Normally, once you've lost your code, you can find a way to regain access to your money. And even if your password has been stolen and the money is gone—we'll get to that later—there are ways to recover your money too, but it's more relevant to your own situation, I think. Regarding security measures, one of the topics on the previous slide is that even if you open a Metabasque account today, the most trusted and universal solution, I believe, is that after the second or third step, you have a list of 12 words, and that's it. Here are your 12 words, and you're on your own. So, when you're an individual, a student testing a vulnerability, you write it down on a sticky note or in a file, then you run it on your PC.

When you're a company, it's a bit different, especially when you're raising millions and have assets to secure. And so, there's both the... Haricot, very sure, I need to be able to keep this little strawberry safe, and there's also the issue of having corrupted wallets because it's becoming increasingly common. We're a small company, we're new, we all know each other, but if tomorrow you reach a stage where you're a financial service and you don't even know your employees, and they're supposed to have integrity, like handling chips, IWAs, and saves, that kind of thing, and they manage to corrupt them, how do you ensure the recovery of your wallets? So today, it's a real issue that we address differently at Comète for the needs of our clients who, for example, don't want to bother with the waste management relay for their end customers, etc.

, and who want us to manage their land fund to pay for the waste, and they impose fees on us, saying, "No, but guys, are you capable enough? Are you going to be unusual enough to do it?" And so we're going to demonstrate to them clearly that we have mechanisms. Solid recovery is essential, even if we wanted to deploy solutions for end users, etc. Recovery is therefore a crucial topic because when corporations go to Web 3.

0, the first thing they look at, the gateway, is the wallet. So once they've chosen their wallet, they'll read more documentation. The second step is customer support, dealing with all the scans, Rockpools, and everything that's happened in the past that's still happening today. This can be quite frightening for them, and the typical case is that they don't want to manage the complexity of having Honor Ship on their own wallet as a corporation. That's why some companies become almost incompetent in terms of service.

They've done something like, "Hey, there's PSN, it looks cool, we'll switch to it, and then we'll do PSA for that service for people who absolutely need customized services." And so the recovery process becomes... A pretty serious topic, well, actually, I'm taking the Narship on my assets, I can't call my banker, in fact, you'll have no one to contact if you're ever in your own pocket and corrupted, if you haven't lost your strawberry site, and for the record, I think that today we estimate that more than three or six million Bitcoins, in quotes, have been lost on the Bitcoin Ethereum chain. I think it's around 600,000 ethers that would be lost, a priori, on wallets that can no longer be accessed because, from what we're saying, the analytics team is corrupted, or the citizens are lost forever. So I want one at $2,000, I'll let you get a sense of the value that is currently lost on the Main Net, but there you have it.

So it's still a pretty important topic, below the Scorpio price, and even for you, because today there are people who can't separate the wheat from the chaff and they'll go all -in on the failure because they've heard about it. Super customers with returns of over 1400% will be putting all their savings into the account, and then they'll cry. So, recovery is a sensitive subject. There's more and more fraud. Have you seen it?

I don't know if there's a great thing on YouTube, but I don't know if you've seen it. I've been exposing thieves and SMS scammers. I don't know if any of you have seen it, but it's excellent. Anyway, it doesn't give much away. We spend a few nights on this topic, but it's about people who manage to scam companies or individuals.

They manage to get in by saying, " Give me your password and your SMS number." And from there, it's true that if you've given all your codes, you've given everything, you've validated everything, and without even realizing it, it's gone, it's paid, there's very, very little chance of getting a refund. And yeah, so it's true that the problem with acid is... That's a real problem to solve if we want adoption by billions of people, but there are solutions that exist today, like money that allows for social recovery and Ledger recovery. Basically, if I have a Ledger, I'm in self-recovery mode, but I can still call Ledger if I've lost my MACD, and they've sent it to three partners in different jurisdictions, encrypted with shards, etc.

So, if the courts require at least two visits to return the crypto, etc., you have to consider that if there's legal action against someone, they might have an interest in changing their codes, or while it's being processed, it will give them leeway. So it could also be a kind of convergence between the two worlds, perhaps a better world or the worst of both, depending on the viewpoints on social media. In any case, for Haricoterie, the 24-word limit is something we have to address if we want to attract more people to this ecosystem. And we move on to the next topic, which is multi-banking.

So, in traditional finance, well, generally when a company starts to reach a certain size, it tries to have several banks to diversify. But if you're just using your wallet, you might say, "Yes, I'll put some of it in a big Diane account, some in my wallet, some on..." There are solutions, though; you can use multiple banks or a professional, but it's still limited. I don't know what you think, Leo. It's mainly about building a name for yourself.

We'll explain all the advantages of multi- banking in traditional finance. And in fact, this is something that doesn't exist and is absolutely impossible in a traditional system because, by its very nature, the principle of banking is to take a risk for you and trust you. On paper, we're all alone facing a decentralized community, and to solve the problem of information asymmetry, no one is going to take on the role that a bank does. In traditional finance, multi-currency banking is something that doesn't exist, and it's one of the virtues we lose when we move to the internet. So, Fernand, I know it's explained, so the advantage of having several banks in your arsenal today, to really understand the thing, is that the bank balance sheet, quickly, but basically, it's: you deposit money and I take it back, okay?

In between, I take a margin. So that's the basic principle: all your deposits, we take them, we put them in the bank, and then we withdraw them. It turns out that for those who experienced 2008, 2010, and maybe even for those who know something, but back then, it was said, well, it's simple: if we want to start a revolution, we just have to withdraw our money from the bank and the bank will collapse. And so it's true, meaning that tomorrow you all decide to withdraw your money, well, all the French... For example, going to withdraw money from BNP Paribas—there are mechanisms that allow you to absorb the losses a little, but in reality, normally it collapses.

So what happened? It happened at SVB this year, for those who know about it. SVB, which is a medium-sized American bank— everyone calls it a small bank, but it's still in the Top 250 American banks. It's over 140 years old; it was a great company. Basically, there were rumors— just rumors—and it's called a bank run or a panic run.

The word "run" comes from the Latin "run," and in fact, there's this aspect where everyone was pulling their money in out of fear, and overnight they lost, I think it was 20% to 30% of their balance sheet in two days. These are mechanisms that are quite frightening. Personally, I experienced it at ING. At the time, there was a rumor—it was after 2009 or 2010—about a collapse. With the euro bubble, everyone was saying, "But actually, foreign banks aren't reliable," or something like that.

So, INGT, the Dutch bank, and two billion euros disappeared in two hours. So, you receive alerts like that. My bank had a total balance sheet of 10 billion euros, so 2 billion in two hours... needless to say, we were all panicking. The idea is, how can we protect ourselves from this?

For you personally, you're guaranteed up to 100,000 euros in each of your banks, and for your company, it's the same 100,000 euros. So, it's not going to save your life, you small business, because 100,000 euros in network coverage for a company depends on the size of the company, but it's not exactly huge. But we invite you, and that was kind of the point, that's why we met with Leopold, to have several banks, partly because of these famous... 100,000 euros and, on the other hand, to be able to get the cache out fairly quickly if you happen to have even one of your banks involved, a little piece of advice I also give... Free of charge, but there's a side to it.

Most people, when they have a business, think, "Okay, well, I have one account for cash flow, I 'll pay the suppliers, and then I have another account where I'll collect payments from my clients." But actually, when you do that, it's super risky. For example, if you have a bank like SVB or Credit Suisse fail, well, it happens. At that point, you have to call all those clients back and say, "Don't pay me on this account, pay me on the other one." So, even just giving two bank details means receiving the funds is much more secure—you mean twice as secure— in case of bank failure.

Bank failures happen, so we can discuss that; it's another topic. But it's true, they happen. And the bank guarantee... if BNP Paribas really does fail one day, we'll see if the government pays them. I think that's what they did in the United States.

At that time, the state, without everything collapsing on systemic banks like BNP, had many mechanisms put in place. There's been a new calm since 2008; it's not a crisis, not a crisis where all your money is at risk tomorrow, but still, you need to have several bank accounts. I encourage you to do this personally as well. I'd like to add something about having multiple accounts: I don't know if there are any startups or growing companies here today, but banks, and it's no secret, have equity ratios to consider when lending you money. So today, if you've just raised X million euros in a funding round, you just need to go to your two banks with the bank statement showing you've received millions, and say, "Well, I'm with Suggested and I'm also with BNP," and they'll lend you 10% of the amount you just raised as bank debt.

I'm exaggerating a bit, but last year, this year, it might give you an idea. It's a little harder, but at least by using multiple banks, you also increase your chances of leverage. Conversely, there's also a form of loan called a bank overdraft. If you're all in a startup, you probably don't know much about bank overdrafts, although if you're close to the runway (which I hope you're not), well, there's the idea of having good relationships with several banks so that in case of problems, you can benefit from and stretch your luck a bit, having lines of credit here and overdraft facilities there. This is absolutely impossible here because you can't just pick up the phone and call Jacqueline, who you've been working with for five years, sweet-talk her, and get a little 15-day extension on your purchases.

You know, and if possible, you're buying from rich people. It's counterintuitive, but the less risk you take, the better. There are also defaulting loans, so protocols like Atlantis or Claire Poule Maple, etc., but the problem with the Transparency means that others can also see where you've taken out loans, and so we can't afford to do things like what I see. There are more and more loans with collateral, sometimes just Bitcoin, sometimes just Bitcoin, sometimes not.

It depends on USDT, it depends on whether it's a stablecoin or not, but in any case, there are more and more startups, especially in Northern Europe, being created with this approach. So, I grant you a loan of 100 or 150, and they want 300 in exchange for stablecoin or Bitcoin. It might seem counterintuitive as collateral because it's twice the amount, but it allows you to get fiat currency directly. The interest rate is extremely high, but there's volatility, and if, for example, the price of Bitcoin collapses, they cut the loan and get back what they put in. And these are companies that make loans at 10-15%.

These are the great business models. As a banker, it's because we do this, but... It's had pretty crazy success on large transactions, so the first payment... on the trade five side, we have interfaces from the US that are actually perfect and have had time to improve over time. So here I think it's Lydia, magnificent.

We send a small pizza with Emmanuel Macron, and yeah, on the difficulties side, so the waste, the maximum, the maximum waste, the priority, do we speed up the transaction, do we check on the task force if it's confirmed, is the network congested, will everything go well, do we have enough Matty or land to pay for the gas in the wallet? Well, there's a lot to consider. It can be a little confusing, that's an understatement. It's perfect timing because this week I had a great experience with one of our clients who made their first crypto payment. So they're a traditional player, and they said, well, since we're doing a Web 3 project, we might as well be Web 3 in the payment of our suppliers and...

So, the guys sent us a transaction of about twenty dollars, and I actually had the accountant on the phone for three days because she was beyond stressed—I can't even find the word— she explicitly asked me, while I was on the phone with her, to manually copy each character of the address she was supposed to transfer to. So, I think you've all done transactions with Metamas because you all know what a public key looks like, imagine! Of course, I reassured her; I copied and pasted it from Metamas. I didn't have to rewrite it, but I still had to reassure this person. It was her first transaction, about twenty CAD.

I don't know if you're in the corporate world, and in that case, these kinds of amounts don't shock you, but honestly, the person really thought she had no one in her account. That's what was going on over the phone, and in the end, it went very well. She made her first transaction of $1000, we looked at it together, we found 10 bugs, it went very well, it was done in three seconds, she didn't believe it at all, and there you have it. But I can tell you it was a lot of teaching for three days, it was fresh consulting for me too, but it's not a big deal, we love it, and so it's going rather well, but it's quite anxiety-inducing, especially since we're still complaining today. But frankly, on René 5, 6, 7 years ago, doing NTX, there weren't Lumix cameras as sleek as those we have on Metamasques or other toilets, it's even more raw, you had to go into even more detail, and I do n't know if some of you interact a lot on networks like Polygone which are constantly saturated, but I can tell you that when she saw the network warning, she broke out in a second big sweat, thinking, "What's going on?

Where am I going to get my money?" So you mustn't forget this rather anxiety-inducing aspect. From the first TX, maybe today for you it's, it's, it's part of normality, but go see your grandmother, show her a metamask, ask her for 50 bucks for Christmas and you'll see how it goes. So, if you go up, Lydia, your grandmother, you'll, she might freak out too, but no, well, it's just a matter of time, actually. It's only at the time, well, I don't know for those who know, but the bank comes from, it's the Italians originally, when they came, and so in Paris, well, anyway, it was quite high up on the bench, the Banco Banco, the Banco, that's where the bank comes from, so it's to say you sit down, you wait, and then it'll be your turn, and then, user experience after experience, quite improved, we were getting better and better, and then we did, me, I've been in banking for maybe 20 years, more or less, and I still had fax machines until last year, but really at the The fax machine is a circus, and if you don't fill in the right fields on a SWIFT form, it can sometimes look like a failure, a really bad SWIFT.

So we were lucky because all the fintech companies for the last 10 or 15 years have tried to revolutionize everything, especially the user experience, all the innovation that banks left from A to Z for rather ICT-related problems. And thankfully, all these tech movies came along that allow us to have something pretty cool now, almost in real time, too, thank you. So, the thorny subject, to be precise, is the failure of international transfers. I made one last week in the United States, and I ended up with two choices: SWIFT or another option with different chances depending on the choice I made, with fairly substantial fees. It was n't my home country, and it took quite a while.

As for Diffa, well, I receive them every week, and once the first transaction is completed, they send a scout, usually for $ 1 rather than $2,000. We're not mentioned, but you're a rare accountant, but after that it goes well, it's sorted in two minutes. So yeah, Ferdinand, start with the atfight part because I feel the correspondent banking system could be interesting. Yeah, so it's complicated, indeed. International payments, roughly speaking, everything goes through SWIFT.

So there's Russia, which launched its own protocol, but otherwise 99% go through SWIFT. So, you have to imagine it's like small country roads, but they're all connected. But they're country roads; you can't drive super fast on small country roads. So basically, these protocols work, they're resilient. You just have to be careful with the codes, and knowing that the information we send can be different depending on each country we send it to, it can create rejection problems quite often.

They have released some new features, though. So, to access SWIFT, you need a landline. It's silly, but you need your computer to be directly connected to the SWIFT network and therefore to SWIFT. The alliance that tells us they'll be in the cloud means they say it's coming every six months, so we've been waiting for it for three years. But normally, the other first ones try to get it down to 2023, and so this should allow for improvements and faster transfers.

And especially, there are some companies that are starting to do it. I don't know how they do it yet, but they're using Chronopost, for example, who say, "Oh yes, you sent an international payment, it's there, it's stuck in such and such a place." But at least we have the information because most people who transfer cash, especially large amounts, often via SWIFT, use large amounts. The fees really vary from one provider to another. On average, Swift takes the fees themselves; they even take a commission.

And then there's the exchange rate. Listen, if you're tired of waiting for the new SwiftCloud features, I suggest you go to the forum because, in this case, the aspect is more complex. Ultimately, it's a network, period. And the idea is that, to give you an idea of ​​the scale, I think an international transfer costs you at least 15 euros in fees. Here on Dify, it's 4 cents on Polygone, and even 4 cents is being generous.

So, on this, the double advantage of using a service for international transfers is both the exchange rate and the speed of execution. And even the third advantage is the cost of the exchange rate. Why? Because today, if you go to a traditional bank, they'll rip you off on the exchange rate; they won't give you any breaks. There are ways you can try to be proactive and use a service like Revolut or TransferWise and say, " I'm proactive with my exchange rate; I manage it myself."

In this case, you can divide the cost by about 100, according to Revolut's marketing promise, just the exchange rate. And with a service like Revolut, we come back to making a... Swap operation: you'll look at a stable USDC, an unstable euro, and a stable pound sterling. So, basically, you're just doing a swap on this kind of platform. The operation is profitable; it's just a few cents, and we're making a good saving.

The transfer itself is executed in a few seconds. If you're short-term, it will always arrive faster than a transfer on a falling market. I agree and disagree. So there's the aspect of... I find the technology brilliant, and the fact that you can send it in a few seconds, that it's practically instantaneous, really...

And with exchange rates, it's the conversion to fiat currency that poses a problem. That's the point for me. The downside is that when you pay salaries, for the moment at least, you'll have to pay them out in real money. You can have significant exchange rates and taxes too, and we have, for example, players who are going to specialize just in the one-off ramp to make international transfers. One of the portfolios currently we have...

FIP, a French company, had 10 million in this specific vertical. There are plenty of others, some of whom use platforms you know, like Kraken and Binance, even though they've made things much more complex. I don't know if you've tried it, but I needed to manage a dollar bank account, and that was one of my first points of reference when I looked into this. Actually, it's practically impossible, if not impossible, to do fiat-to-fiat currency exchange on platforms like Binance. It's very complicated because these guys don't want to be currency exchangers; they don't want to get busted as soon as they have enough raids.

Right now, I think they'd be happy with that and not having a CPA. But the idea is that it's still a loophole. It's quite appealing, but there's this part: once I'm with my recipient, how do I get out? How do I do the data entry? So there are companies that allow you to do that.

It's pretty good, but it's not quite there yet, it's still exploratory, and especially since, indeed, we run into trouble if you've gone through some rather complicated mechanisms, collateralized access on which you'd previously made a capital gain, and then transferred it, etc. The tax authorities at this stage are quite experienced with this kind of thing, and it's more than that, well, they have the skills to read this kind of transaction and they're able to come to you, sorry, come to you and tell you there's a capital gain to be taxed because you've withdrawn funds, because in fact you made an international transfer, the counterparty being a commodity, so in fact you've withdrawn funds. So, be careful, we haven't talked about it, by the way, but at the time, with Libra, this Facebook project and the currency that was really on a roll, with excessive interest rates and a potential of 4, I don't know how many Facebook users, 3 or 4 billion, but all of a sudden the banks thought, ' But we can make money here.' To take it down overnight, there was a bit of pressure from everyone. I just wanted to qualify what was said in the arbitration.

I see that at Comète, we're very much Team Polygone, where it's true that it's not very expensive to do swaps. But it's true that when you send significant amounts, often on my end, I receive quite a few payments on Ethereum Net, and there, at 4 cents, it's pretty good, let's say 5 or 10 dollars per transaction, which is still low for a settlement and delivery in 12 seconds. Let's say I'm cheaper, we're at 5 euros, and we have a margin rate of 0.75% with us. And no, that's what it is.

On the other hand, it's cool, it's just Karine, so the clearing houses. So, roughly, how banks work on transfers, quite often there's a clearing house. So you send cash, so I owe you 50 and you owe 100. In the end, I do a net transaction and I... Just pay 50 and basically it's a clearing house.

There's one called eBay Lighting that's quite active and launched a project to make instant payments possible. So throughout the Eurozone, you have instant payments; it's received in 10 seconds. And they want to implement instant Euro/Dollar payments by the end of the year. There are a lot of things happening at the end of the year, so we're watching all of this closely. It will be pretty amazing to have dollars in 10 seconds.

Sending a spot payment is a good option, and that's it. Yeah, just to clarify regarding the stable crypto offering against the Euro, there are exchanges with names from Greek mythology or animals that still allow for very good exchange rates on USD/Euro with 0-1% fees. So ultimately, it remains acceptable, provided the bank accepts the transfer. But generally, we have nothing to hide, right? We could always prove it.

So, what we're doing now is moving on to the topic of financing. If I get there, yeah, then there's the investment of the company's Treasury, so it's a very important topic, even for Ethereum France. So we receive payments from sponsors, and up until ETH CC, we have a latency period during which we can invest. And so, on the vulnerability side, we have many options, but it's a minefield, so we have to be careful because things can explode everywhere, so it's dangerous. But there are lots of things to do; you have to do a lot of research.

I'm very interested in this area to, well, manage to do something effective, but it's possible. And from a work perspective, let's say it's simpler, at least from our external point of view. Maybe do Dinant, yeah, because it was one of the roots. They didn't agree because, for me, I found there were really a lot of offers on the Redfight side in terms of investment, whether it was securities portfolios, but there was this notion of risk behind it. It's true that In the flawed trading system, we can finally store funds, finally we can get a return, we have the impression of not taking risks provided we recover the money through traditional finance.

So normally you're all more or less aware, I hope, that rates have gone back up. So roughly speaking, last year rates were practically free, or money was between 0 and 1%. You could get a mortgage at 1.50 or 2% over 25 years. Whereas now, if you...

With demand currently at around 5.5 to 6, the rather sharp rise in rates has allowed for the offering of fixed-term accounts, which are now available. Many banks are offering these accounts for three, six, or nine months. Your working money is "risk-free," so to speak, unless the bank goes bankrupt. But that was just to say that there was also this aspect now where there were attractive rates and returns, which has led to cash flowing out of crypto towards finance because the rates and returns were attractive.

If some pairs have dried up a bit and become less liquid, it's because, indeed, in the world of trading today, rates are sometimes more attractive than on the market. It's clear that, since it often follows the mechanisms of inflation and monetary distribution, it's becoming interesting right now. The basic issue is... Crypto companies are often startups, and what often happens with startups is that they receive a massive influx of cash. Then, what do they do before burning it all up, either for the next funding round or for profitability?

The question is, when I don't have a 20-month runway or a 24-month recovery plan, what do I do with all that money? How much cash do I need to have readily available? And when you have a Web 3.0 company, depending on how you've exposed to the blockchain, it's the same thing. We see the same thing with crypto, for example, at Comet, for every €2 you have in your bank account, you have the equivalent of €1, or at least half, in default.

Why? Because one of Comet's business models, through its Alambic platform, is to say, "You want to create a marketplace? If you want to abstract wallets, you can do whatever you want for your..." End customer, but actually you did n't want to own the crypto because of the topics we saw previously about recovery, etc. We're going to manage your land pool and relay the waste for you.

So, in fact, every time someone makes a transaction on your decentralized application, we're the ones sponsoring the waste, and it's Comet that will pay for it with the safe that holds the ethers of the application in question. Therefore, we need to have crypto; it's something we have to have, it has to be available. But then there are seasonal effects, and naturally, since we've raised funds, we have a large pool. So what do we do? Well, we go to the falsity, we see what's happening.

We can have a very "didger" side, and also a bit of a " good family man" side. Even in the falsity, we can simply go to an Ave or a heart to take chickens that are well endowed, that are quite Safe on paper, and to think, "I'm doing supply chain management, I'm not messing around with complicated things like composability," and to say, "Well, simply put, my goal is to be able to recover my crypto at any time to inject it into my clients' SFs, to waste it, etc." And there's also the notion of, well, actually, we have interactions on the internet, we need to have massive amounts of land for it, so is it useful for me to have stablecoins? Well, yes, in a way, yes, because there's high price volatility—well, there's a certain volatility in the price of Ether, if I'm in a B remarket context, which is the case right now even if it seems to be going back up—well, actually, I'm better off stabilizing my value with a stablecoin and thus diversifying my networks. And so all of this is something you have to keep in mind when managing crypto treasury in a company, even if, well, in traditional finance it's still much simpler because often we Juggling with a single 46 is quite rare; it's rare to find companies with the skill level to manage multiple 46s, except that we have a large group, and then, well, it's short-term, it's kind of left to the company, meaning, well, I have some cash, I invest it for three, six, a year, and I get a guaranteed return.

The second part of financing is when a company wants to borrow, either to invest or to finance its operations. On the Defy side, there are very few options, so there are some, but it's not very widespread yet. Basically, in the short term, they lend to you if you have twice what you want to borrow; that's over- collateralization. And on the other hand, well, it's kind of the bank's business to lend, and that's what makes part of the margin. So it's at the beginning.

I've talked a lot about startups raising funds previously, but even an SME, well, a small provincial one, has this same exercise that we all do with Business plans are often used when there's a need for financing. In fact, it's often stated that this financing need will generate positive cash flow, and that's what Dinant will explain. It's not as simple as saying hello. Jacqueline has been advising me for 10 years. I need to buy a machine, I need to hire more people, I need this and that.

Well, Ladyfy, that's clearly not possible. In fact, today, by design, the blockchain only accepts elements that are native to the chain or standards that are universally accepted, like ERC, ERC 721, etc. So, if you have an Excel business plan, the blockchain is because, as Rémi said, the only condition for having leverage and raising debt is to own twice what you have. There are some protocols that allow you to bet on the future positive returns of an asset. For example, Happy Wine asks, "Hey, what if we explored..."

The idea of tokenizing the future deal of an asset, well, why not? We've had some players you mentioned earlier, like Atlantis—that's right, Atlantis, exactly— trying to open up default lending systems, but it's still very exploratory. And it's something that, by design, we won't be able to make people understand what a business plan is and to be able to introduce a notion of risk without a counterparty. Oh yes, a business plan is a business plan. Sorry, I don't know if that was clear to everyone, but here are the things that actually affect it.

At Ferdinand's, I give him an Excel spreadsheet with a timeline of the expense items, and he immediately knows what he has to do. So maybe I can leave the job to him—it's really the job of a banker, you know? So if possible, minimize the risks because right behind them are the customer deposits; we mustn't lose them. But basically, with a business plan, we always look at the company's age; ideally, it should... It has to be three years because I think only 25% survive after three years, so it's definitely better if you have a three-year business and then a solid business plan, revenue, some clients, good contracts—normally that works, or failing that, with guarantees.

But in any case, we find ways to finance what on the site or really the investment. It's more of a venture capital job, a capital painting job, so the goal is rather to dilute your stake. Well, I think those who know, who have started a company, will understand, but the idea is clear: not a banker, but really investment funds that will finance part of the company in exchange for a share of the capital. Then, staying on the topic, if a startup or a company wants to raise funds, what often happens in crypto companies with crypto-native investors is that you send it to this address for the fundraising and boom, it's done. And when you explain to your banker how you're raising funds, how does that work?

If you raise funds in cash, there's generally no problem. So, all banks— pure banks, because there are several levels of banks, but credit institutions in any case— can offer certificates of deposit. Basically, you send cash, you give it to your investors, and you say, "Here's the bank account number ( RIB), which is really specific to this. We verify that the cash comes from the correct people you indicated, we stamp it, and you have the right to do your own research." It's really quite simple, but we only accept cash, and banks can do this.

Search engines, however, are not able, as banks, to recognize or see these certificates. So, this is where I don't really know how it works regarding fundraising and the recognition of capital paid in crypto for investors. I don't know how it's done. It's purely a matter of legal formalities, and you know, it involves lawyers. Raising funds in crypto—I think if you've been in the ecosystem for a while, you've probably seen the first wave of these.

So, ICOs were one of the first ways to get a massive influx of crypto to raise funds and bring a project to fruition. We also had SDIs (Security Token Overlays) which came from security token overlays with specific tokens indexed to particular projects, sometimes with characteristics similar to stocks. And then the third form of " fun race" that emerged was, "I'm going to do a gaming project, I'm going to do a marketplace project, I'm going to do this project..." Basically, I start an initial LFT (Low-Flying Token) collection, and by some fluke, I raise 3 million. This allows me to give away two-thirds of it, we do a big team-building event, and then we see what to do with the money.

And today, if you could talk to most of the people who funded Web 3.0 gaming projects, well, very few are actually live today, very few indeed. So those were the first three mechanisms that emerged, and in the meantime, what happened was that people participated in these ICOs. There are people who have simply invested in crypto and made incredible returns, and you have crypto millionaires and crypto billionaires who own tons of crypto but don't really know what to do with it. So these guys are thinking, "Well, what do I do with all this crypto?"

And then you have big angel investors from the Web 3.0 world coming in who can invest in your projects. And ultimately, when you look at all the crypto projects in France, some names are very redundant because some people are investing massively, partly for financial reasons, thinking, "Well, there's no point in having crypto that's just sitting there. The big players in the market aren't what they used to be, so I might as well invest in a company that's going to see a 600% increase in value on its shares." That's the first argument.

The second argument is that these people thought, " Okay, one day I put one euro into Bitcoin, the next day..." I had 15,000 bucks, well, actually, there might be some things worth exploring. These are people who have become kind of blockchain fanatics, who sometimes live on the fringes through DAOs and systems like that, and who have become purists who think there's something there, there's a model to develop. So, using the wealth they've made in crypto, they're going to evangelize through different projects in gaming, marketplaces, and even the removal of existing cryptocurrencies. So there's enormous potential in terms of fundraising, both in terms of the mechanisms and the availability of crypto for raising funds.

And above all, well, it's like talking to friends. In short, it's really very simple to raise crypto. You put investors and lawyers around the table, and on a piece of paper, you say that Mr. So-and-so sent this amount of crypto to this wallet address, and in return, you gave him shares, quite simply. You don't need to go through all the banking mechanisms of deposit accounts, etc.

That's cool, that's what it's like when someone leaves, you have to give back to the community, distribute a little bit, it's always nice. And then, on the financial operations side, when you're treasurer like the three of us, in terms of task automation, besides IFI, basically everything needs to be built from scratch, or there are tools that are very recent and immature, and there are still some that have the merit of existing and offering something. On the other hand, regarding Tradfight, I think I understand that it's much more robust and proven. There's been real progress in the last three or four years, let's say, or maybe let's say ten, and fintech has contributed enormously. So PSD2 allowed us to connect to all the banks, which enabled us to carry out many operations.

So there have been many new players who have arrived. There's also a phase of de-Apiation in the banking sector, which is becoming better than it was before. There's still work to be done, but there is... Really great APIs and good players like us, there's Swan, there are quite a few companies that have created things for corporations, at least, that have really created things that streamline all the processes, allowing you to automate everything. Before, you needed 3-4 people in finance, honestly, with one person you can do everything: the accounting automatically, the supporting documents are attached, there's really been a big evolution in terms of progress, especially over the last two or three years, for SMEs, for larger SMEs, something is really starting to take shape, and it's great because it was sorely lacking, it was a bit of a wasteland before, especially the management of paper expense reports with the CEO's signature.

I don't know if you've experienced that, I have, where now everything is automated, you take a picture, it's really become the norm, it's pretty cool indeed, to the point that today in my own financial organization, at this stage, I've only recruited developers to automate the I don't even need an accounting assistant, actually. I have a Data Jinner that creates a cube for me, consolidating all the data into an automated PayPal account. I also have a Data Analyst that lets me access all the open APIs of my various tools. Then, of course, I intervene on the business rules, how things work, etc., giving directives.

And it's clear that even today, without even mentioning data visualization and analytics, you take a Penny Lane, a Zapper, a Paysfit, you drag and drop, and in three clicks you have a magnificent report. It's really quite amazing, frankly. I don't know if some of you are in auditing, accounting, or management control, but this is a big change that has taken place in the last three years, which is really incredibly convenient. In terms of task automation, we're still in the early stages. Let's say it's possible; we can do very elegant things, we can make things really sexy.

The only problem is... You need to master Solidity; everything is based on Smart Contracts, so it's not a super complex language, frankly. For those who might have already tried tinkering with Python on the side, well, I find that Solidity, not necessarily only in its tools but at least in its contracts, trying to understand them, is something that's really very accessible, a bit like Python, which has become incredibly democratized today. You have people graduating from law school who manage to code in Python because it's so widely used. And the barrier to IFy today, as Rémi said, we have tools trying to emerge, trying to package automated flow solutions, but they're nowhere near the level.

A rather striking example: as soon as you have, for example, multiple acronyms, multi-six, it's the bane of all FinOps tools, very poorly managed, and so we're still quite far behind. Whereas in a company where you generally have developers on hand, you can take one Tell him, "Okay, go ahead, you're going to work for me. You're going to do some automation tasks. You're going to teach me how to do things like this." For example, in our video game department, we had a problem: we're organizing a tournament, we have 50 people to reward, and we're going to give them a prize because they won the tournament.

Well, the question is, how do you do it? You can't exactly handle all 50 of them one by one. So, you'll see someone explain the basic steps, how we can do it, and then how we can automate it. Because that's not obvious. It seems like a simple task, but it requires getting your hands dirty.

I have this with the product you have with your backend, and so we can do some really cool things. But that's actually the state of the technology. It's been several years; it requires development. It's not yet accessible to everyone. We had the ambition, but we've put it aside for a while.

We'll do it in 6-7 years. I think, but leaving the bank in code, meaning that, well, these ideas, Jordan, who is the CEO, basically said, "Okay, we have it." So we built our Corbinking system completely from scratch. We did everything, we rebuilt everything from A to Z because we have a big company of geeks, so it's really all people who want to control everything, understand everything, and so on. So we had three years, we set up the bank without any clients.

This allowed us to spend time on the code, and there's this thesis: we were thinking, well, actually, we could just leave the code, we just secure the funds, but we leave the code, and in fact, any user could do whatever they want on their interface, they could code everything, they could automate everything. It can go very, very far in terms of possibilities with a significant security layer. But for the moment, my friend, putting that aside, we're still waiting for profitability and all that. We'll have to work on that first, but it's something we'd really like to do, so there's a slight delay on the... The weakness lies in this area, and we'll continue with the reporting.

There are some things that are no good; there are still 10 multi-bank Octave options, but that's just how it is—these are solutions that are still young and not yet very robust. These are very nice tools, Ferdinand. Yeah, it's a house too, it's not crazy yet, but to aggregate several accounts, to have an overview of your cash flow, even just to anticipate incoming cash flows, forecast cash flow, and address SIFO issues a bit on a daily basis, theoretically there are more and more tools that are well-made or being developed. There's Agicap, which is nice but does quite a lot. There are more and more coming, in any case, that are increasingly comprehensive and, above all, allow you to anticipate cash flow drops.

For your information, I was discussing this with other CFOs, COVID really hit all CFOs very hard because most of them didn't really know how to survive until the end of the year. For your information, in a previous company, I crashed and burned, but when you go through COVID, when you don't know what's going to happen, and you see this network that's there, it's important to have a good tool that It allows us to really anticipate this cash flow, to know exactly where we stand, and there are tools that are really well-supported at this time. I think that over the last two years, it's really become the development phase of cash pulling and vision cages for CFOs. There are some really great tools that have come out, once again with a delay. We're still quite behind on this.

I don't know if some of you have tried reporting on corporate or even personal wallets. There's often this shortcut of saying, "No, but anyway, everything is on the blockchain, no need to go see a tax inspector, go see an auditor, go see your investors and tell them, 'No, but everything is on the blockchain, no problem.' You'll see the reaction. They want an Excel file, and then they want accounting, and they want everything formalized according to traditional finance. And so, well, there aren't 36,000 solutions.

You can trust emerging tools. You don't have the other one. If you have Recoas Finance, a type of emerging player, the only problem is..." The thing is, these are Web 3 tools designed by Web 2 guys. In other words, they said, "Okay, how does PenDesk work?

But we're going to make the SpenDesk of crypto." So, if you're not native to the flow and payment processes of these tools, well, they're useless to you. Besides, you manage your entire stack of addresses, contracts, Ledger, and so on. You can't integrate it into these tools the way they designed them. So, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: take your addresses.

Step 1: list your addresses. Step 2: retrieve all the data from the blocks. Explorer. So, I hope for your sake you don't have a treasurer who's a bit of a DJ going through every possible layer to find islands and companies, because you've spent a lot of time on it, as many wallets as you have and layers you've interacted with. And then you'll have to format all this data because blockchain is data that...

It 's ultra-structured, clean, and elegant, but it's not at all the format the tax authorities expect to fake, it's not at all the format your auditor expects for the review, it's not at all the format an investor is used to reading, and so you'll have to take this well- structured data and convert it, and then, be careful, you're going to have some surprises, for example, with wrap operations. It's a nightmare to follow contracts that change every three months, we don't know why they were updated, so you don't know why your processing tool can't handle it anymore, when you have multicolored, infernal curls, you're going to see the kind of things that will make you tear your hair out. For your information, the 2022 report on Comet's crypto operations, I hired a developer and locked him away for a month and a half, he did nothing but that, that's all he did after that. Today it takes three hours to update the report because we had to understand how it works, we had to We had to create rules, we had to create automations, we had to use APIs, we had to ask ourselves, "Damn, how does this work?" Protips: if you hold stubbles, especially now with the rather favorable conditions for the euro, buy Stevens in euros, your accountant will bless you.

There are things like that which will retrieve prices on Kong Eko or Yahoo Finance if you want, but in any case, doing crypto reporting is a nightmare, and we're not even talking about NFCs because with NFCs you have the concept of Flore price, you have the concept of quid pro quo, you have the concept of scarcity. How do you value an NFT? That's also a real question. I don't know what stage your companies are at, but I can tell you that the auditor has his little notebook because, in fact, the guy listens to Alexandre, this chenko, and those kinds of guys who know crypto very well and they know the questions to ask to put his finger on the sore spot. So be ready, crypto reporting Web 3.

0 It's not very mature yet, and the workflow is still a bit skewed. So, on the crypto side, at Orfeu we mainly have multiples and MPCs, but it's still somewhat of a multi-factory. We can implement slightly more complex, more elaborate workflows. It really depends on the company and its internal system, but broadly speaking, banks have been very cautious. There have been a lot of frauds, so they've created a lot of RIPs (Return Information Points) for businesses, a lot of security measures, especially with these little calculators.

I don't know if you've ever seen them, but there are really a lot of them. For example, with Jippy Morgan, for any transfer we make, they'll call us and ask why, how, how we received this transfer request, whether it was real information, whether it's a deepfake, etc. There are really things that happen, so internal security is complicated. We've implemented everything using the iPhone, so it's a bit faster. That's what happens in the private sector.

Retail, that's it. And me, yeah, I previously had a background in auditing where I worked with very large companies, and what was quite funny was seeing that in these huge, bureaucratic machines, they had such complicated rules that in the end, it was like a real password. And you had this accountant who, after 40 years of loyal service to this listed company, leaves and passes the torch to the young intern who got a permanent contract and realizes that he can't do things the way she did, according to her processes. And actually, that's normal because for all the transactions under 30 euros that didn't require any validation process, well, they went to her nephew's bank account for about thirty years. So, imagine small transfers of less than 30 euros in companies with 8 billion in revenue, with billions in transaction volume.

So, we make life much more complicated for ourselves, but ultimately, we come back to the fact that when It becomes too complex, it becomes a real sieve, actually. In the end, it's a bit the same, I mean, it's just the medium that changes because we know, in fact, we'll draw inspiration from what exists in traditional finance. We can have different access rights on a safe. One rather elegant way, let's say, to conduct transactions, to manage company transactions, is to deploy safes and say, well, here are the key people in the company who can judge whether the money should be withdrawn or not. It's the concept of asset preservation.

Well, we'll say, okay, we'll take the CEO, the CFO, and the site manager, and they will be the three access rights on a safe. And this will be for this type of transfer, this type of withdrawal, this type of transaction, this type of operation. On the other hand, if we're dealing with much lighter movements, well, then we'll allow the CFO to act completely autonomously, and all of this, in fact, also brings us back to the issues of Solidity, knowing how to code, being able to set up rules. in place and able to configure Guardian and Steiner devices on safes, and ultimately the mechanisms are the same, it's just that they are more elegant, it's just that they are tech-savvy, they are 100% tech-savvy. And then, well, obviously, with Ledger, generally, I think all companies have this recommendation to use Ledgers, which, I don't know if some have already used Ledger, are essentially just a calculator; it's something that allows you to control a wallet, but it's not the wallet itself.

It's the same as what is done in other traditional financial systems, so better valued, better valued, so ultimately, it's just a question of support, but the rules are quite the same. And then, once again, there's always this technological barrier. Then there's also the question of how I would have my internal control in a Web 3.0 company. When I arrived at the beginning, I had explored Web 3.

0 a bit 5 years ago and I had been immersed in it since. My only experience was doing a TX, participating in an ICO, and losing everything. That was my experience before joining Comète. When I arrived, the Citizen had a billion times more knowledge of Web 3.0 than I did, which is normal and reassuring.

Naturally, he had more responsibility for crypto than I did at the beginning. And that's the counter-narrative. It's done this way in the offices; it's somewhat standardized. There are three levels of control: the first level is the regular people doing their jobs, then there's internal control, which is the risk management aspect, and the third is internal audit. So, that allows us to check things thoroughly.

But just so you know, in that famous company, we didn't make it through COVID; we died rather unscathed. That is to say, all the procedures were very well-defined, everything was well-documented, written down, with the right levels of control and all that. But if you don't have clients, OK, so... The audit of accounts, so I have a general idea of how it works in a traditional company. However, in deferred auditing, I'm quite curious about how you do it.

Firstly, we'll scale the level of auditing to the stage of your company. If you're a small startup that just raised 3 million, we're not going to ask you for one of those crazy processes that will cost you the entire amount of your funding round just to audit what you're doing in Web 3.0. We're not talking about smart contract audits here; we're really talking about auditing what you're doing with your crypto and your ERC 721 tokens that belong to the company. So we can stick to challenging your internal reporting with an extraction of landscans from polygon scans.

Basically, we'll look at a tool widely used in the market, like Dybunk. She might think, "Okay, that's roughly true." Actually, it's not entirely accurate. We don't care; that's the general idea. So the 10 will be scaled to the size of the company.

The more companies you encounter, the more they'll be involved in very, very large rounds of transactions, companies valued at several billion dollars in Web 3D. This will cause a lot of sweating because, in fact, the processes being implemented in the auditing world today involve saying, "Okay, what are your crypto reports? We'll look at what they show." And then, we'll ask you to manage your own ERP system to explore the blockchain. Now, I don't know if everyone has followed what an ERP system is.

Basically, we'll ask you—I don't know if you understand how it works in the blockchain system—but you'll have to take control of one of the servers that holds the blockchain data and ask it. So, that's already a technical barrier, and also a financial one because it's not free. And then we'll say, "Well, there you go, you've managed your own ERP system. We'll do the same thing on the other side. We, as auditors, will challenge it.

In addition to that, we'll look at a solution like a bunker, a Trojan-type solution." The market, basically, guys don't really know, there's no clear track, so we're going to play it safe with the most elegant solutions, and even at the end, if we're still not sure, we'll always do a polygon scan extraction because you never know. So the audit will evolve as you grow, but I don't wish you—well, I wish you the very best—to be a unicorn, but I also don't wish you to be a CFO so you don't have to deal with the consequences of your crypto. And I had a real question because I wanted an answer: how can I trust a bank when they send me as an auditor to review a bank circular? Honestly, I don't know, but it works.

So we are audited ourselves, we really have control mechanisms, reports against management, and in fact, they will only interview certain clients. So there's a whole mechanism that's done through classic sampling of auditors, but does it work or not? We have time for a quick question. So, bonus, that's where I like the question. We talked about it a little earlier, the question of bank runs.

So, you understand, banks are a business model based on holding 10% of the assets and then lending to each other in a chain of lenders and borrowers. So it's a bit like a house of cards, really. And in Diffa, well, there's self-reliance, so we have the 24 words, we have all the problems that go with it, but we also have the advantage of not depending on other third parties. So maybe, Ferdinand, you want to defend your own interests a bit? Yeah, no, but for the moment, to pay salaries, it's still with fiat currency, that's what 's complicated.

But I'm quite pro- crypto. I think that, well, regarding the technology that's used and really the future of finance, I think it's there, it's in there, because there's precisely this notion. In fact, what 's a bit strange is that, regarding the fight against money laundering, for example... Crypto could finally be the blockchain to become a truly great tool, and yet it's still seen as the devil by banks and regulators. So there's definitely work to be done.

It's going in the right direction, it'll take time, that's for sure. Regarding banking, yeah, on the bank run side, it's a house of cards, I don't know, but in any case, it's a business built on trust, that's for sure, and that's what makes a bank function well, getting bigger and bigger, and that's what's been going on for the last 12 years. It's not true, but the 500s before, it was a business where, I don't say anything, money just came in on its own. To sum it up, profitability was easier to achieve before. And so, regarding crypto, well, what scares me is getting ripped off, really losing everything you have.

FTX didn't reassure Tao on that point, it might be related to what you were saying just before, which is super interesting, but for FTX, I think auditing Having accounts must be a pretty complicated nightmare, so that's what scares me more. But I think it's just a matter of time, you know? You can't lose what you have in the sense that there are so many people who simultaneously know the reality of what's happening on the blockchain. Basically, the blockchain ledger at any given moment, there are millions of voices, and so there's a consensus on how many assets you own, etc. So that's the secure-by- design aspect: you'll always have what you have in your wallet; it will never be lost unless your account is compromised.

However, the downside is that crypto is ultra-volatile, so you can own— I think at this point you all have a huge amount of cheat coins in your toilet, and yet they're worth $0. The flip side of that is saying that, okay, whatever happens, I'll always have my crypto in my wallet if I'm careful, etc. However, it can be worth... it can be worth 2000 could be worth a million, it could be worth 0, and it's volatility that's the negative counterpart of this model, knowing that basically there's no volatility at all because we have euros or dollars coming in as an alternative. Then we had fun creating different mechanisms for commoditization within blockchains, even within them we managed to add complexity.

But I mean, basically it's euros that arrived in exchange for Bitcoin, it's euros that arrived in exchange for land, and volatility mechanisms were quickly and quite strong. But whatever happens, you'll always have your ether, you'll always have your Bitcoin. The question is what's worth tomorrow, we don't know, and where can you use them? We'll see. So we're coming up on the time limit for sliding.

Yeah, we have time, my wife's giving birth, it's your fault. The ESG theme, go ahead, it's once again we can It's difficult to do business without doing social responsibility these days, especially in the startup world. We're forced to fill out insanely long questionnaires. For example, we work with a very large player, a major mid-sized company in the gambling industry, and this company told us they would pay us if we did a CSR audit because we ourselves are bound by strict CSR regulations. We have to submit a CSR report, saying that everything is fine here, that we have a 50/50 gender ratio, etc.

And so, the proof is tonight. But the idea is that the more time passes, the more this will become ubiquitous: on your suppliers, your customers, bank loans, and Ferdinand, to talk about it. And of course, when we hold funding rounds, when we talk to investors, the investors themselves are always subject to ESG reports from their limited partners, and so we have to ask them, "So, what's the CSR aspect?" Here, it's a topic that resonates really well because it's one of the few we can talk about when we have a blockchain. It's like saying, "Thanks to blockchain, we're eco-friendly!"

It's great because there are people—I think everyone knows Alexandre Sachenko— who wrote a lengthy anti-crypto argument to explain that crypto is actually eco-friendly. It's a real topic. I gave a lecture to first-year master's students at a school about two weeks ago. As an accounting expert, I started the course by asking them what they equated with blockchain, and actually, after the scandal, after Skam, etc., I got the response: "It's not eco-friendly."

We somehow managed to create the idea in people's minds that it wasn't eco-friendly, and now we don't really have any arguments when we have to fill in the ESG box at the end of the deal. So we say staking, that's Jean-Côme here, staking is approved, it's elegant. So, just maybe a quick point: at the very beginning of blockchain, we were in a world of brute force, what we called a meritocratic system where the more computing power you put into it, the more you were a TV scene to validate on the channel. That's still the case, as a professor, with Bitcoin and Ethereum, which worked like that. If for a while they said, "Okay, damn it, we 're really not eco-friendly, one day we're going to have problems," then they adopted a capitalist system where...

So you're now gorging yourself on Ethereum mainnet 32 ethers and in return you act as a validator on the network, and so we're no longer in that model of the graphics card race in refrigerated warehouses, you know, I admit that was the image I had of it. And then at the bank, it's a bit particular at the moment, because there are indeed some of our investors who are asking for USG reports, but two, especially two and three, let's say, from our clients. So, our clients are afraid, they tell us, "Okay, what's your carbon footprint? What are you doing for the planet? And do you finance Total?"

So, most of our clients ask us this question, and three, so we refused Total. But basically, we have our employees who don't want to stay if we're not aligned with their values. So, basically, we asked ourselves the question. We have a great company that comes in, that does quarrying, quarries, and so at the beginning, the whole company... We asked him the question, he financed it, we asked him for a carbon footprint assessment, we saw that we could move towards improvement, and so that's what we're doing right now with all our clients, asking them for a carbon footprint assessment.

It's not mandatory, but we ask them, we analyze the risks, saying, " Okay, if we're making 100 euros per ton of CO2 in the future, are you viable or not?" And for your information, the Bank of France, starting in 2024, will be giving them a green rating—I don't know what they'll call it yet—and basically, you'll get a rating. So, if you follow standards that are applied very simply, meaning you manufacture chairs that you want to have made in China and import with disgusting materials full of pollutants, or if you make them in the Jura region right now, you'll get the same rating. So what matters is being able to do a carbon footprint assessment that will show, "Yeah, well, look, in fact, I am..." So, we started doing this for our clients because they asked us to.

So every time they spend with their credit card, we tell them, "Well, on average, these are averages. So when you go to a restaurant, it's not about whether you ate beef or fish, but on average, here's what you consumed in terms of CO2." And in fact, this accounting is happening everywhere, really everywhere. All companies are asking for it, and then we'll track this accounting. It's increasingly being handled by finance departments, and if necessary, they're dealing with it more and more.

And that's what the future is, and I think that's the only way we'll manage to change things, or at least make them better. So, it's true that on the professorial side, there are downsides. There are people writing books about it, and there are downsides because, when you shut down coal-fired power plants in China, there's still... Bitcoin's hashrate is falling, so we think, well, that's good, but maybe there are also some mediocre things, so overall it's not a black and white thing, there are many nuances and it requires reading entire books to fully understand the subject, but it's true that Professor Steak will therefore dismiss this topic, and so on the EVM side at least we haven't had this kind of discussion, and well, thank you all for coming to this Meetup [Applause]