Building a People-Centered Blockchain - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hello everyone. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you very much to the organizers for this fantastic event. My name is Arena Hiver. I'm UAE's crypto lawyer and I write for Forbes digital assets on UAE crypto laws.

It's absolutely fantastic to host this um amazing panelists talking about the fantastic developments that are happening in the UAE. Over the last few years, and I've been in the UAE for 18 years, UAE has really grown into the central crypto hub around the world. Sorry Singapore, but I think you know UAE takes takes the price. And today we will talk about building people centered blockchain. We've arguably we've nailed technology.

We've nailed cyber security. But what about giving people the trust, giving people the usability? And this is what I want to talk about when we're talking about launching a chain based on which the AD regulated stable coin will be launched. I'd like to introduce my panelists. Um, Andrea Zareno, chief executive officer of ADA Foundation, founded by Series International, the digital arm of IHC, a $240 billion UAE holding company.

Thank you, Arena, for the panel. Uh, great to be here and, uh, always great audience at talking 2049 in Singapore. And of course, Alex Kchovski, a software engineer and a co-inventor of ZKYNC. He currently serves as a co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs.

Um, thank you. Really excited to be here. Thank you all for coming. Uh, very excited for this conversation.

Andre, first question to you. What makes Abu Dhabi the right place to build this chain? what is so unique about Abu Dhabi that is not possible anywhere else.

So yeah, the ADA Foundation operates out of UAE and I think that uh last years we've seen very positive and uh the right dynamics of how the ecosystem is developing there. I think uh it's uh really important to mention that in UE we have a unique blend of collaboration of the innovative regulator how it does approach uh the business in order to create the environment that works for the business to scale and uh enables it to grow in very compliant and regulated way and um one of the reasons why we are operating out of there because we are fully regulated by ADGM, the uh regulator of Abu Dhabi. And this is very innovative, progressive structure that allows us to uh scale fast and uh launch our ecosystem. But also uh UAE uh in 2025 is the unique blend of like all the nations different entpreneurs like very active and progressive entrepreneurial community and uh for us this is the the base how we source the talent how we propagate our technology and how we advertise UE to the world.

Absolutely. Um, ADGM is a financial free zone located in Abu Dhabi. ADGM's regulator FSR launched the very first crypto framework back in 2018 and our amazing organizations like yourself are benefiting from this long track record of the regulations. Absolutely. Alex, a question to you.

Let's talk about the ecosystem plumbing. It's all great to launch a chain in a regulated environment, but what about everything else that surrounds it? We're talking about the custody. We're talking about the bank integrations. Um, you know, what is around there that supports the launch of such a massive project?

Well, the Zikysync ecosystem has integrations with all major tooling providers, uh, um, especially on the regulated side. We're working with enterprises, with banks, uh, with custodians. Um we started as a cryptonative environment for uh uh you know with a single chain the first ekm on on ethereum and brought all the cryptonative requirements and then gradually expanded into a network of more chains um with with this focus on um uh uh this very professional uh enterprise grade infrastructure which is not fully supported. Let's do a little bit reality check here. Let's look at the sense of the scale.

You're looking to bring a lot of institutional projects onto your chain. How will you do that? What is already in production? What are you working on? What can you share with us?

All right. Some things like we already can share. So um we have very broad uh partnership network uh whom who enable us to enable the distribution to the products that will be hosted on ADI chain and uh this is one of the angles where we invite all the builders to join ADI and uh to distribute their products through our partnership network to the world. We have mission to bring u a billion people by 2030 on chain.

How many?

One billion people.

One billion people

on chain.

Amazing.

By 2030. uh saying that I mean it might sound like a buzz word but uh our focus are enabling enterprises and governments to uh utilize web3 technology in the understandable compliant form for them to bring efficiencies and uh create the future together with us. So uh we have a projects in the variety of sectors. We do have a project where we are uh tokenizing energy grid and energy certificates in India

for dozens of millions of people already that will be launched in production soon. We have projects with the uh largest payment system in Africa where we'll bring their users onchain in order to utilize efficiencies of unified liquidity, transparent and uh instant settlements, liquidity efficiency like all those aspects. We have projects with uh health in with few African governments where we are redefining the digital identity from the health tech perspective

bringing compliance of it like to the whole next level.

Well, that sounds quite impressive. Earlier last year, UAE central bank has issued a new law um governing UAE backedbacked stable coins. And I think one of the largest announcements or most exciting announcements in this regard was the launch of AD stable coin by FAB, IHC and ADQ, a sovereign wealth fund in the Abu Dhabi. And that stable coin would be launched on your chain on IDI chain. So in simple terms, can you let me know what is this chain?

What is the stable coin about? Who will use it? And what are the everyday uses for it?

Uh yeah. Okay. So um um those three institutions uh are the founder entities of the uh fully licensed by central bank UAE uh stable coin which is spec to the to the dirham it's a digital dirham version and uh eventually we are hosting it on AI in order to uh fulfill this u uh soity gap. So the uh whole chain is sovereign with the own infrastructure with help of our partners. uh as well as the uh stable coin as a product uh is aimed to bring uh the next level of efficiency compliance to the financial sector of UAE and the underbanked regions that eventually because you can use it for the crossber payments they can use it for instance settlements they can use it for the B2B or B2C as well as in AGI ecosystem the way It's built in the very modular way and uh with ability to do the custom subchains with different data.

This we're doing to enable the governments that are trading with UAE and Dirkham to create local environments with their compliance level to ensure full compatibility and instant settlement with this digital dirham with their stable coins or when they're using the digital darham stable coin. Let's not talk technical, Alex. Let's talk about how ZK sync will power this chain. What integrations are you bring planning to bring in onto this chain? Um so we're starting with the u um the chain infrastructure itself which is going to be powered by zkync with the uh cryptographic guarantees that everything that executes on the chain is fully sovereign and enforced by cryptography and uh the rules that were set up front right so so that's the very basic part and on top of that uh um there are parts of the ziki sync infrastructure which the chain can be extended with such this previdium um framework for uh for enterprises that want to have privacy on the ADI chain and they want to have their own private space from which they can connect to the ADI ecosystem overall to other enterprises uh with selective disclosures with compliance uh um management of access and so on.

Uh and of course on top of that there is a partnership infrastructure with uh what we discussed before the the oracles the custodian integrations the exchange integrations um stable coin integrations um everything that is connected um connecting ADI to the broader crypto ecosystem uh of Ethereum and and beyond that

but let's also talk uh let's talk about air bender the technology that you're planning to introduce for non-engineers in the room Please explain what is this technology about and how will it improve the speed and the cost.

Yeah, so um ADI is going to be the very first chain that is powered by air bender which is the uh most cutting edge zigg technology in the world today. So airbender is the world's fastest risk 5 virtual machine and um uh prover um it enables um very very low cost transactions like going down in into a tiny fraction of a scent at extremely high throughput uh which enables the real world loads that we expect on the ADI chain like bringing the entire nation on chain is a very different thing than uh just doing you know a small application specific chain or or even like general purpose uh crypton native things. Uh but very importantly it allows the ADI chain to run their own prover infrastructure on premises. So they can control the uh the the the full proving stack. They don't have to outsource it run it on in some clouds that are hosted outside of Abu Dhabi.

Everything can be fully controlled under the sovereignty of the nation. I think this is an extremely important factor that um that f flow in into this decision.

One of the hottest topics right now is RWA, right? The tokenization. Everything will be tokenized. Everything will be traded on chain. I've heard it since 2018 and it failed in 2018.

Why is it different now? Why it would not fail now? And why would IDI chain succeed? I think that fractionalization of liquidity in general is like the mutual problem that lots of markets including web 3 uh are currently working to improve it. uh in AGI uh we're using very modular stack uh by zinc in order to embed this uh fraction liquidity in order to make it unified.

So we are very closely working with the regulator of UAE from the legislation perspective but also working with all this partnership network that we have in order to enable the tokenized the real world assets onchain but also in the unified liquidity pool compliant form and uh very custom compliant where the pecularities are needed. So that's just uh part of our whole buildup that we're going to be sharing very soon with you on public. So uh follow us on socials and well fantastic giving us give it up to ADI chain building people standard blockchain. There's a bank grade trust already built in. There's a regulatory support from Abu Dhabi and the sovereign wellound support.

So what else do you need to have to succeed? you know, a fantastic tech team and a fantastic team to deliver. Thank you very much everybody. And Andrea and Alex will be here. If you have any questions, do reach out.