Andrej Majcen - Crypto is Not a Product. It’s a Choice. - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Good morning everyone and thanks a lot for being here today. A very warm welcome actually. So brave move of doing this event outside at this time of the year but we're all in the same camp together here. So my presentation is called crypto is not a product it's a choice. being in industry for now around 12 years.

I think I can say I'm extremely proud to what we as an ecosystem but also as an industry have achieved in that time. Finally, we can actually talk about adoption on a larger scale if not even mass adoption. We can uh talk about regulatory tailwind um after all those many years and I think that's generally on a very global scale a very positive development. Uh so it's not really a question of if and when crypto will succeed. The question at the end of the day is what will be our role in it.

How will we succeed and what can be our contribution to the further adoption of crypto going forward. So that's basically the the key part of um of today's um um exercise. So crypto is of course much more than just like a speculative asset. Um it's often used and abused by a lot of uh how to get rich quick kind of schemes um memecoin pumps and so on or even worse and that's currently the problem that I see. It's often squeezed into the traditional rails basically of threadfi.

So we try to squeeze crypto into as many layers as possible of traditional financial infrastructure and that's of course a little bit challenging because that's not really the idea uh that crypto was built for originally. It helps on the mass adoption side. But of course the true potential goes much beyond that because I personally see crypto as the biggest driver and enabler of structural change uh that finance has ever seen and thus also as the biggest choice that finance uh and also human mankind has ever seen because essentially Satoshi had a vision and Satoshi didn't just give us Bitcoin as a new kind of asset class to speculate with or that is cool to have somewhere in the wallet or to get rich quick as a scheme basically. Bitcoin was introduced and given to us as a choice as a choice from the beginning. A choice to opt out of the traditional financial ecosystem and the choice to opt into some sort of an alternative when it comes exactly to that.

So, Bitcoin is not here to make the traditional financial ecosystem slightly more efficient or convenient. It's here to challenge it. It's here to challenge it by being up all the time, 24/7, 365 days a year. It's permissionless. It's accessible to everyone anytime anywhere.

So the overall ethos of crypto is of course based on three pillars of programmability and automation where smart contracts disintermediate where they pro uh automate basically processes. It's a system that is based on interoperability and inclusion. A system that is based on self-custody and self- sovereignty where the owner of an asset also controls the asset and all of that completely decentralized. That is also why a little bit more than 12 years ago I helped to co-found Bitcoin Swiss because I was fascinated about the idea and the potential of decentral currency the potential it can have for today's financial ecosystem and also for the future of course but when we started Bitcoin was of course very niche it was not like a cool asset nobody really talked about it and the ones that did so they more or less loved about it. Ethereum was a wild idea in Vitalikat discussed with a few of his early companions but that was about it.

So the resistance in the early days was of course very big. So it was good that some of the early pioneers gathered together went to conferences together in order to promote the idea of crypto of Bitcoin of blockchain in order to also educate the average people out there. So there was a lot of resistance but of course we managed to overcome that by believing actually not just in a hype of crypto but actually also seeing the overall movement that it represents a movement where power is shifting away from centralized gatekeepers towards decentralized ecosystems but also towards its users. So that was the overall uh idea behind it and we started to realize that what the internet did for information um blockchain technology can do for value. So we started to build, we started to integrate, we started to develop, we of course also failed, we reiterated and we continued even stronger.

Today as the CEO of a global crypto financial institution, I continue to build and I continue to believe in the real power of blockchain technology um for our um planet but also for um different values like fairness and inclusion um where technology can actually help everybody to get access to the same kind of opportunities. Bitcoin of course has a very unique role in all of that because it started to become a catalyzer. It's not just like a cowboy asset anymore that is used by a few um funny people in the industry, but it's also being adopted now as a reserve asset. And that's of course a main driver of the of the um adoption that we're seeing. Looking at the chart of how the how Bitcoin as a reserve asset actually developed in the last couple of years, it becomes evident that it started with private companies like ours that started to already put Bitcoin on balance sheet in 2013.

But later on it also got adopted by public companies like Micro Strategy and Tesla that of course um then continued that journey. Now with the launch of the ETFs already in the recent years but definitely with the approval in the US that got boosted to a completely different level and now uh on the bottom right what you also see and that's the interesting aspect here is governments. So also governments started to integrate Bitcoin and started to look actually at Bitcoin as a reserve asset. And it's not just the small let's say exotic countries anymore. It's larger ones.

It's the UAE, Switzerland, Norway and of course recently in all the press of course also the US coming up with with a strategy uh for Bitcoin as a reserve asset. So it's not just that in times of economic uncertainties and instabilities that governments start to accumulate bitcoin or actually gold uh historically. So they have quite a strong track record of accumulating gold in those times. But the understanding of the potential of bitcoin in those times is also increasing even stronger. Um that shouldn't come at a complete surprise because if we look at the main task and responsibility of a central bank which at the end of the day is to ensure economic stability for an entire country over time uh it becomes very clear um that bitcoin fulfills all that kind of role.

So because what could be better than a completely neutral a completely decentralized and non-political kind of asset like Bitcoin and that of course fits perfectly into that uh that kind of segment. So blending in the neutrality security and scarcity of bitcoin that even becomes more evident. So um a digital age as we are today in of course also needs a digital form of gold and I think bitcoin perfectly fulfills that role. That's of course also supported by facts. So if you look a little bit at the correlation for example from Bitcoin to um to other asset classes with like bonds, commodities, equities and so on we see that Bitcoin has an extremely low correlation to all of them.

Of course in times of economic uncertainties the correlation is higher closer to one but in a long time uh or longer long enough time period that of course is very low and that makes it an extremely interesting asset from a portfolio perspective. Another aspect is the asymmetric kind of performance track record of Bitcoin. So looking back at the last 12 years in nine out of 12 years, Bitcoin was the best performing asset of all. In the other three it was the worst performing asset. So why is that important?

So blending in the portfolio theory now where you want the portfolio to be well diversified um and not correlated over a long enough time period that of course is extremely interesting because if you have a standard portfolio with fixed um with fixed allocations to gold fixed instruments um bonds uh and equities and if you start to replace 1% of equities with 1% of Bitcoin uh you can increase the sharp ratio but also the annualized returns and the higher the Bitcoin allocation is the higher those numbers also get. So also from a pure portfolio perspective, you cannot ignore Bitcoin and the impacts of it anymore. So that's of course all amazing news and uh myself being here after 12 years talking about portfolio dynamics and portfolio theory in relation to Bitcoin uh makes me extremely proud and is probably going further than all my wildest dreams like 12 years ago. But uh and here comes the big butt. I still think that Bitcoin is some sort of um reduced to an asset that we try to squeeze into an old traditional kind of setup.

And what I mean with that, it helps to zoom out a little bit looking at the year that we're currently in uh 2025 uh and looking at the different absurdities that are still um out there. So, we are in a time where moving money still takes days instead of minutes or even seconds. And it gets even more absurd if you look at the fact that you can send a physical letter internationally and sometimes that even arrives earlier than a than a bank payment which is a little bit funny because uh blockchains are completely done on or based on different mechanisms and of course much faster and efficient. The same goes for the cost and efficiency of the financial system. We pay banks a fee in order for them to accept our money and thanks to fractional reserve banking they even make more money with that.

So the high fees compared to what we're used to see in blockchains is of course also another kind of disadvantage that we that doesn't really fit into the current time that we're in. Then when we talk about the value of money and of course inflation that is decided at the end of the day by a few people sitting around the table uh versus a fixed supply and protocols or actually codes that is defining all of that. So a certain amount of people can sit together and just print trillions out of nowhere. They label it with funny names and say that this is some sort of an extra bucket, not really factoring in into the overall amount of money that is in supply. But the end of the day is that everybody that thinks that putting money on a savings account is uh going to save you when you're retired, it's it's just like a scam, right?

Because at the end of the day, it's like it's pretty hot out here. It's like holding an ice cube um here in your hands and it's melting away. That's essentially what inflation is doing over a long amount of time. So having an inflation rate of 3 5 8% a year seems already crazy but try to do that over the amount of years or the number of years that you're actually saving money. So do it over 40 or 50 years and then you realize uh the ice cube uh story.

So the other thing is the access. I mean everybody that has been suffering in the US but also globally from operation choke point and similar uh initiatives from the governments in the past knows exactly how dependent we still are on uh on the banking system but also how vulnerable we are uh when it comes to being locked out of basically um your own account and your own money. Then um the last one which is also funny I mean there is u financial crisis has not been too long ago uh banks tend to uh have the tendency that we need to bail them out with taxpayers money blockchains don't and um certain countries even thought it's clever to merge two large uh to fail kind of banks together and um yeah the systemic risks that we're creating with exactly those kind of moves are also evident. Blockchains on the on on the other side are transparent, fully automated with smart contracts and code is the law essentially. So it's not really about adjusting the old system.

It's about creating something new based on new values, new principles of being more transparent, fairer and of course also inclusion for everyone. So we need to build together and that's what I actually want to raise awareness here uh the way it was intended and not just try to put something new which is Bitcoin in that case into existing rails and into the existing infrastructure and squeeze it in there because that probably will not work and it's also not leveraging the full potential of blockchain technology and crypto. So looking at the potential uh of of the entire ecosystem and we just look at the uh the the bitcoin allocation actually globally or the size of it compared to other assets is 0.2% of global financial assets. Crypto is slightly larger.

It's the second um red part um down there uh if you compare it with gold and other assets it becomes obvious the potential that this asset class has for the future. If you go into the another example, and the ones that have been in the space for a while are probably sick and tired of that example, it's RWAS, but essentially we're getting there. It takes a lot of time, and I heard a story since like 10 years that RWA are coming, but essentially it will be there. And since the market is so big, it's a 500 to$ 1,000 trillion market. Uh if you can just tokenize 1% of that, that's a 5 to10 trillion uh opportunity that you can basically create just overnight.

So it's a huge opportunity and whoever builds the infrastructure, the services, the the systems to accommodate all of that will be the financial service infrastructure rock stars of the 21st century. So remember um at the end of the day um it's all about a choice. So that's why we at Bitcoin Swiss we do not just list new assets um we actually support ecosystems. We have been doing that since the last 12 years. We work together with the early adopters.

We work together with the foundations of course the who is who out there that has built everything that is around now but also with the emerging protocols with the new projects in order to also help them grow even faster. And then of course last but not least we're also embracing everybody from the thr sector that didn't make their choice yet but is trying to find some sort of a entry gate into the crypto space because essentially it all starts with with a with a choice. So do you join crypto or not? Do you just integrate it as a product and you actually leverage the full potential? So red pill or blue pill, what is your your choice?

Thank you very much and have a good day.