Harnessing the Power of Blockchain for Social Good - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

This is fun. It's fun to be at a festival, not a conference with serve alcohol outside. So that I I sort of I like the vibe. Um it's really good to to be speaking to you. The title of our panel is blockchain for social good.

And uh we were just teasing an announcement earlier this week, a really big one came out of the UAE. For those who are not up to speed with the news, uh earlier this week, a new stable coin plan was launched. ADQ, which is one of the sovereign wealth funds here, uh alongside one of UAE's largest banks, the first Abu Dhabi bank, that's FAB, and IHC, uh announced that they're going to be the founding partners of a new stable coin that is going to be using ADI blockchain. Now, Guiam de Latul is sitting next to me. He's going to be the CEO of the ADI Foundation.

A few words on Giam before I ask him about what the ADI Foundation actually is going to be doing. Um, he's got a 30-year plus career. He built seven startups from age 21 in France and US. Uh, implementing innovation in finance via emerging technologies like blockchain, tokenization, CDC, quantum computing, and open data. So, you are really the right person to be the CEO of this foundation.

Tell us about it. Yeah. So first of all um to to about this this stable coin that we have launched. This is a massive stuff. This is a sovereign wealth fund edq who push on the market a stable coin dur based uh and and this is a sovereign attitude to help completely the industry.

Mhm. And uh it was announced this week and I think this going to it's going to be a big plus for all the economy all the web three economy uh on the planet. Yeah. So for the sounds of it sounds like it's not just another blockchain. There's a whole concept behind it.

What is the concept? Yeah. So um EDI foundation is a foundations. It was uh founded by Sirius which is a digital harm of EHC. Yes, she is a huge financial conglomerate here.

Um and the goal of EDI foundations is to empower governments in order to solve and and help them to realize digital transformations and um so we have at uh EHC a bit less than and Cyrus we have bit less than half billion clients that we are going to put on chain. So just imagine I repeat we have half billion clients that we're going to put on chain. I mean today so plus tedar have together a bit more than 120 um million address. We're going to do five times that numbers. Where where is that population coming from?

So from our clients. Yeah. So, but which which part of the world? So, Africa, um, Middle East, India, and um and so this is why it's a big plus for the for the region. To give you some example of of clients that we have, uh, we announced recently that we are going to empower Empa in Africa, uh, who has 80 million clients.

We're going to empower um courage a big company in AI in order to do um sovereign AI blockchain um offer in Indian market. So courage has 1 million GPU and from the latest standard in India. um other project we have a lot of project of social card in many CES countries yeah in Africa um this is why uh you see what we do we we empower those governments we build them and it's it's done for good with two philosophy we want to do inclusion because we want to help the the people okay and we want to um do something universal. So, sorry I I I go further. I was I was going to say, you know, when you come up with a new technology, usually there's a problem that you're trying to solve.

What is the specific challenge that you're trying to address with the launch of this particular stable coin? Yeah. So at the edge of seeing the humanity going to Mars, uh at the age of seeing Bitcoin at this whole time high again, um and uh it's there's a lot of things who are not normal on earth. Um it's not normal to still spend three days and a and a lot of money to spend to send money from here to US or to any country to another. It's not normal to um um that a young kid in Nairobi does have the same chance in life than a young kid in US.

It's not normal then web3 company has struggle against um to to work with traditional institutions and I know what I'm speaking about because before that I was a group digital officer of the largest bank of Europe and because of all this not normal stuff we created EDI foundations. Yeah. What sectors are you targeting specifically? So today we we focus on AI, health, green tech. We have lot of project in green tech.

Uh today uh yeah in green tech we have uh 76 trillion transactions um per year that we're going to put on chain um and payments of course and um that the sectors we're are focusing and but more or less all our clients are governments, institutions and business. So we were saying earlier that this is a stable coin that is backed by the Dham the um AED. Is there a value to the fact that the EED is pegged to the USD and and the potential rollout scale of the stable coin? Yeah. Um so if if you look at from from outside okay um there is four big monetary zones on the earth.

There is US with um USDT, USDC. You have Europe with digital euro who's going to emerge one day. Mhm. We don't know when. I know because I was speaking I was the guy in charge of that.

and um and um and digital one and here in Abu Dhabi with a leading place for all the region okay Africa and Middle East there is there is um there is a sweet spot okay because Abu Dhabi is at is very balanced between east and west north and south um it's the capital of money the call it the capital of the capital okay capital mean money and there is um uh it's a sweet spot for um for financial institutions and we fixed the goal that we want to reach 1 billion clients um from 2030. So it's not tough. You see, so on day one, you have your 500 million and the the target is 1 billion by 2030. Just cross two. You think you can get there?

Yeah, it should be. Okay. That's a big number. Yeah. Okay.

We'll have to I'll have to sit down with you in a few years time to see where you're at. Um what do you think is is uh specific to the regulatory setup in the UAE that is allowing for this ecosystem to thrive? So there's a lot of things in UAE who makes things possible. First of all, it's fast. It's efficient.

Um, there's rules, but B inside these rules, you can you can do a lot of things. Yeah. Okay. And, uh, I was completely amazed how fast things are going here. Um, you know, as long as the government is okay, as long as everything check, boom, you don't need to wait three months.

How do you think the UAE fares versus other parts of the world, other jurisdictions in the world? So, um I tell you the the UE chance is that there is already a huge uh ecosystem of companies who are there. So, that's a huge plus and there is money here. There is a lot of guys who are willing to invest to to push initiatives and there's huge financial um background here huge in financial institutions. So I think it can be okay there is only one Silicon Valley on earth um and there is no silicon here but it's a very fantastic financial hub.

So this is why I invite all my buddies from web three and from web two industries to come and create something here. That's a sweet spot. Yeah. Let's bring it back to ADI Foundation. Um can you just walk us through how the technology is superior to what is already available right now.

So um we decided uh at ADI Foundations to create a layer 2 uh EVM and it's um it's a blockchain with uh a modeler and inside those models we have a lot of compliance layer in order to be compatible with any jurisdictions where we operate. So it means that one guy in one countries couldn't be allowed and in other country could be allowed depending on the local jurisdictions and so that every governments can set up their rules depending on their local jurisdictions. That's very important because it is like it is there is regulations in the world or we're against that or we are with that and all the big financial institutions as we want to do the bridge between web two and web three between traditional institutions and web three in order to to to provide clients and activities to all the web three companies um we we need in order to make those bridge we need to provide those web3 companies um the possibility to work with local regulations local governments and everything like that so that everybody's okay yeah ultimately to reduce friction yeah with the transactions yeah what about reducing the amount of fraud that takes place with payments yeah so that's um that's a goal uh yeah that's one of the goal of the DT and you know what um Uh, this is one of the reasons why I like this project. Um, why why I decided to take the lead on that project because at the end um what is blockchain? The block we go back to the basic of blockchain is to to blockchain is automatic TT.

This is exactly what we're doing and we adapt DT to the real world. So, so that we can tokenize camels for example and make it uh compliance with the local laws of uh camels stuff and we can comp um yeah depending on the countries where operates we we can adapt um the the different project because at the end the DT what it is it's it's a decentralized systems it's a decentralized database and um uh secure and viewable um protected um and you can build smart contract on it. We can automat automatize a lot of things. Um yeah, that's cool. I was speaking to someone earlier who told me that this year is going to be the year of the stable coin.

I guess you believe the same thing. You also believe that it's going to be the year of the stable coin. what do you think is going to determine the relative success of the stable coin that you will issue versus others that are available in the markets? So that's that's an important point and I'm going to extrapolate that. Um so we have created here the UAE stable coin.

Okay, the EA coin. We're not going to stop there. We're going to create a lot of other stable coin in other countries because again with my not normal stuff, it's not normal that all the countries cannot have their currency on stable coin. It's not normal that those guys need to use US dollars or digital euro or whatever is currency or who they do not control and um so yeah, we're going to use a lot of other we are going to create a lot of other stable coin in order to empower countries. Yeah.

Okay. So um give me got the last few minutes. Let's fast forward to your 2030 vision because many countries in the region have a 2030 vision. You have your 2030 vision. You've got your 1 billion users.

Yeah. Describe to me what ADI foundation looks like then what's the ultimate goal? Okay. Um what I wish to do is after creating um uh after or during creating those local civil coin, we can create little foundaries in many countries in order to help local guys to create to create their dreams building something on blockchain on web three and others and and help all the industries to address all the markets because of course uh again who how many people are are doing web three every day on Earth maybe 10 20 million we are we are 7 billion on earth not 1020 so we need to create this bridge towards you guys us guys and the real world this is why we're here yeah blockchain for social good everybody thank you very much thank