DeFi's Importance in an Increasingly Centralised World - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2023

thanks everyone for joining I know we are slightly light on the panel today I think people are being decentralized and uh you know living where they are in the world but I think we still have a pretty awesome lineup of uh investors and D5 founders with us so excited for the conversation um I feel like people don't need any introductions but maybe for the sake of the audience do you guys mind uh telling us a little bit about uh yourselves and uh your projects yeah sure um I can go first oh check one two check check there we go um yeah so I'm Kane Warwick uh founder of synthetics um founder of infinix so we are one of the OG derivatives protocols in the space um and yeah I've been building in D5 for a little while now hi wow it's like 10 times louder than yours I'm Jody Alexander I'm the chief Alchemist at mantle mantle is a modular Layer Two on top of ethereum we just launched very recently and focusing very much on defy hey everyone I'm maroon Christensen I'm the co-founder of maker now which is yeah the the the Dow behind the world's largest decentralized stable coin and as a what we're currently doing is we're splitting out the project into many sub-dials which is what I'm I'm All About um I think you know one thing that I was thinking about with this panel is um you know I feel like being going through a few Cycles in crypto you sort of see ideas rise you see ideas Fall but you sort of gain everyone on this panel has been in this space for a while um and I think in particular been in D5 for a while even before like that the term D5 was was sort of coined and so I I you know for you guys having sort of been through sort of the pre-2020 cycle going into now what do you sort of take as a big lesson from the 2020 cycle like what were your biggest learnings what were your biggest surprises um you know how do you sort of think about the experience that you've gained so I think one thing that was pretty interesting uh about the loss cycle was how it kind of got out of sync um so unless you're DJ and Spartan in which case I think it was it was in sync for him um but uh we had this kind of defy um you know uh boom that happened uh much earlier than the rest of the market sort of responded and that that kind of you know I think catalyzed a lot of interest in the space um and then later on the L1 uh kind of uh explosion sort of uh I think put a little bit of pressure on defy to um you know try and keep up and and you know uh retain interest um and so you know we had D5 2.0 emerge and there were some novel things that happened but throughout that entire time the OG D5 projects just kept building um you know regardless of the attention that was sort of being paid to a lot of our projects we just kept building and um you know kept scaling and kind of making things work and we got to a point where I think we hit some kind of sustainability you know where it wasn't just memes it wasn't just the narrative it was actually fees being generated um you know there was genuine activity people were paying for services um and while I think that we hit our stride maybe just a little bit too late for this cycle I think that we're in a position now where through the bear Market that kind of uh momentum has continued to grow and so I think when we come into you know the next cycle and and see a new bull market start people are going to be looking around for what is working what's you know sustainable what's generating fees and I think that that will be defy again so it's very possible that we kind of front run the cycle a little bit and and really you know Drive uh Resurgence in the space uh I have two mics now let's see this one works so I think we speed ran in like two and a half years through all of traditional finances like 200 000 years we have to figure out like what is base money because we had you know UST and like random coins telling us that they were real money we had pool two tokens that was like an interesting learning people valued them very highly and then they eventually realized that you know they're kind of getting farmed to zero so like uh Kane said you know a lot of the sustainability lessons that we had to Speed Run hopefully we'll uh we'll take into the new cycle and I'm excited to bring a more sustainable version of defy I think um one of the things that stood out the most to me in the in the Bull Run was really how the sort of the demographics of crypto have changed a lot right now it's really I mean the a lot of the people that are involved are are involved to get rich and that means they're really easy to scam and they created this whole like I mean the the call of the the whole dynamic of the Bull Run was just like scams upon scams amongst games right and Ponzi schemes and all this like complete hot air which is it I mean it's I was honestly surprised that when sort of the Dust blew over there wasn't really there was barely anything new that came out of the bull run right it was just like one giant lesson and yeah don't be too greedy obviously it's not gonna work out for you right and the projects that remained were like the the D5 1.0 projects and of course there was a couple of new ones but that was really like I mean totally not what I expected at the beginning of it right when you look at D5 summer it was like it's a whole new world what's the what's the thinking right but I think every it's just everybody was like we invented these Primitives like this ability to coordinate and organize and then everyone was like I'm gonna use this to make some quick money rather than build something something lasting right and and if you look at I mean I think the more sort of OG protocols they were actually trying to do real things right we were trying to build proper Dows proper governance and it was just so difficult and there's like a struggle and it kind of looked looked bad in comparison to the you know the main character types of like will this dude centralized and spirits and propaganda um but I think also as Kane was saying right now we are in the now we're in a position where we have we've gone through these like hardships basically and we can start trying to build some real stuff in this space with kind of the the dust that remains after the all the the I mean the important lessons the space had to learn through that whole that whole uh episode yeah I uh yeah I think you know for maker particular uh sort of a sort of a good segue in the next topic um one of the sort of current metas in in defy and crypto overall is real world assets or rwas and that means a lot of different things all the way from like tokenized real estate which my eyes might you know Blaze over if I get another like tokenized real estate pitch to kind of what what maker is doing in terms of actually financing and real world assets and obviously a bunch of teams trying to do tokenized treasuries now I'm curious maybe starting with roon to get just a quick synopsis of of what maker is doing with respect to rwas and for the other panelists how are you guys thinking about rwas with respect to your own projects High time we know you didn't mean to start without the women we're here don't worry oh amazing amazing girls are here time to get grilled it's perfect uh yeah so uh what we're doing in maker is basically well I mean literally you know we're like eight years old now in maker so like I guess seven years ago we realized that the basic economics means you simply cannot I mean you can't you can't scale one asset pack to some particular external acid without backing it by other stuff that's also packed to the same thing basically like you can't you can't scale up a stable compact to the US dollar unless you use collateral that has some connection to the US dollar as well otherwise you basically I mean you end up with either having the pack break or the collateral break which is something like what happened with Tara and Luna right you know so we I mean early on it was it was hard for us right because the problem with real assets is they're not as decentralized as you know pure Noble eth or something like that right but it was clear that this is this is how you actually scale it up and how you make it sustainable and it would it took so many years to figure out how do you make this connection between D5 which is one completely separate thing and then the real world and Regulation and Banks and that have no clue what the hell we're doing um it took a long time we finally managed to actually make that connection and then basically what we're doing now is we essentially take we essentially generate stable coins convert them into cash and then allocate that into treasuries and and similar assets and then we can pull it back out so basically um uh keep the peg of die essentially so if people want to pull their money out they can they can essentially tap into the real assets that the Tao is allocating and so the key thing is all of this is ultimately run through um in essentially what we call governance instructions which means it is like Dao proposals and DOW decisions that are voted on that it sort of translated into actual legal instructions for the counterparties that they have to follow according to the sort of the whole legal structure set up but it's it's still it's very primitive in many ways uh the important thing is it works and it's safe um the next step is absolutely tokenized assets moving things on chain moving it really getting things to move really fast and efficient um and then also just kind of the closest we get to decentralization of real assets which is a very very good diversification across jurisdictions uh Kane I mean I think synthetics has taken kind of a different approach uh Curious to hear your thoughts yeah so I remember uh 2018 the first D5 Summit uh sitting uh in the crowd heckling Rune about his plans to tokenize real world assets right um and I think you know my confession I guess is that I really mid-curved it like I was like you can't tokenize real world assets they're not on chain like and you know the reality is we didn't have the tools then but I think the vision of finding a way to wrap these things in you know an approximation of like permissionlessness and credible neutrality um was really the game and we didn't again we didn't have the tools and it wasn't clear how that was going to play out but I think that we're getting much closer um and so I think yeah now I look at that and you know trying to do everything with purely on-chain assets is like Ultra hard mode right and you know synthetics has done this for a really long time we've dabbled with certain things like allowing dye into the protocol and you know and we've we've kind of started to get to a point where I think we're comfortable with some off-chain assets being included um but you know taking that really hard line stance of like eth or other permissionless assets only makes it really really hard to scale and so you know when I look at maker and and this kind of whole cycle of how they've gotten to this point um it's super impressive because in my mind I was like this is not gonna be possible you're not gonna be able to do it at all so um you know I think the other advantages now the real world assets having such a a good kind of inherent yield really creates the right incentive as well you know when treasuries are paying out um you know the you know non-zero interest rates then it makes it really worthwhile to work out how to do this and and you know makers spend a long time doing that and I think that they've kind of led the way and hopefully you know this is the nascent period but I do think hopefully we will get to a point where we get much better at tokenizing all kinds of real world assets and that's going to unlock a ton I mean D5 is not going to be real if it's this little sandbox that is cauterized from the rest of the world like it has to find a way to interface and I think that working out that interface is is one of the critical things so um yeah it's pretty impressive to watch like MC I mean uniswap largest decentralized exchange presumably there's some place for rwa within decentralized exchange curious to get your thoughts yeah sure so I'm MC MCO of uniswap labs so you're right we're best known for uh being the original developers the USB protocol largest decentralized exchange 1.6 trillion supported today but we also build products on top of that um and really believe that like amazing products for consumers and for professionals are critical to making this a better Financial system so to that end I think actually this is kind of well-timed this next chapter in D5 is kind of well-timed as you've said yield has shifted to real world assets we don't see the same kind of on-chain yield um the question we've been asking is what kind of infrastructure do you need to support other kinds of assets we need more assets on chain and the reality is that the trading Market structure that we have today is kind of limited so amms are Innovative in the context of financial markets they're uniquely enabled by blockchains but they don't necessarily allow for some of the customization that you might need for different kinds of real world assets so that's your you have certain approach to that and uniswap's approach is uniswap V4 which is essentially allowing customization at the liquidity pool level so that means that if you need to have certain kinds of phased release of a token you could have even circuit breakers that adjust for volatility you could have all kinds of different customized approaches that might allow different kinds of assets to trade more easily on chain than they can today when there's just kind of a little bit more of a one-size-fits-all approach so more assets on chain great we're not doing anything to actively tokenize assets but hoping to be at the Forefront of building infrastructure that's a lot more flexible very cool dovey I think from an investors perspective how do you think about the invisible parts of sort of this rwa stack if there are any in your perspective yeah so I think like the river asset like like this cycle like reminds me a lot about the sto from like 20 to like 2018 like which was a meme um and also just like um like back in the days when it comes to like base shares because I was at the early use of a big shirts and I think there's a lot of this experimental um ideation around by wrapping realware asset but I want to give a very interesting example is when I asked my younger brother so like he's like a gen Z and like he has been trading all those thinkers right like sneakers are real asset and there's all this like Asian market places and then you start tracking the price of like individuals thinker model and when I was working at eBay and there's also all these different platforms and uh trading just like tracking different like price quotes So I think the question for us is like as a good investor do we want on like from user perspective um are they looking for Price exposure like to like the real world asset and if it's just a price exposure and then we can do Oracle right so like we can like probably in the future like decentralized Oracle like have like multiple like data feeds and I think that's the most high leverage play like would encounter price exposure to Liberal asset um but if we want to bring on River asset as that collateral and like as like a rapper whatsoever and then the question to me is and are we actually introducing more like counterpartate Risk and then like more just um like opaqueness like to the system um because I'm very crypto native and so I'm a little bit um on the fence for that um so so far I think uh like R double A so like t-bill like a difference and liberal bonds so it's actually very decentralized and then so uh in like traffic so you can actually sell bearable like to the non-us retail um so I think if we want to expose to like table in like a bare bound manner so I think that's possibly like a opportunity out there but like there's also macro interest environment dependent um I think at the end of the day like diva is like a macro interest rate like Arbitrage between the C5 world and then also the um ontrend world so so far we haven't made any investment yet so in this area so but we're definitely actively talking with a few teams out there yeah got it got it um actually if Jordy uh yeah actually so I would love to talk about this because we had quite a big announcement yesterday related to rwa's um we're designing you know a new defy ecosystem and I think from a first principles perspective I don't want to get too philosophical like do we want to bring things on chain leave things off chain I want to focus on the user create user products that are great to use that I would want to use that people want to like bring their financial lives on chain and actually keep their savings and do their activity on chain and from a first principles perspective if there's a five percent plus yield being you know debasing your dollar let's say like whatever uh fiat currency you're denominating it it doesn't really make sense to just waste that especially if you're in it for a long term and you're multiple years so at mantle we've been examining all the providers potentially of uh rwa yield we're happy to work with multiple ones yesterday we announced a huge partnership with Hondo um so mantle has a very large Treasury and the Dow has approved an initial 60 million dollar tranche to go towards these type of assets and it's actually not for the treasury we don't really care about getting five percent as much on you know our large treasury it's more uh there's a process by which we can actually give it to other users to use the same way that they use usdc usdt there's all this legal stuff that makes it possible basically there's a 40-day uh holding period but with a very large treasury what we can do is do the marination ourselves and then once the 40 days are up uh users can actually just hold it in their wallet and get five percent yield which I think is a game changer you know until now rwas have just been sitting in corporate treasuries out of kyc so it's something I'm very excited about very cool uh MC I wanted to go back to something you were talking about with respect to unisop Labs developing these applications on top of uniswap the protocol I think uh you know in many ways uniform was sort of at the Forefront of this trend of uh teams having these sort of for-profit entities that are building applications building products that are complementary to a core protocol but you know separate and sort of having the Dow and the and the protocol being being governed separately roon I feel like maker is almost like the opposite side of the spectrum sort of like Xiao Maxi if I had to you know kind of kind of put a phrase on it I'm curious to get both of your perspectives um how do you think about these these two sort of different structures of these are two different cap tables are they synergistic in some way or like walk me through a little bit how you think about unisop Labs versus Unison protocol um an amazing protocol that's going to be a critical utility a core utility for a financial system has to be used by many many teams and needs many teams that care deeply about its success and making it better and better and so multiple for-profit companies that build on top of uniswap protocol I think is the best answer for DFI so I don't really see it as like a choice right um you're right in the case of uniswap it happens at the the team that Hayden Adams started with a grant and then as you know swap protocol took off it doesn't need a team to continue to operate as autonomous as probably everyone in this room knows and hopefully you've all used it it's autonomous self-executing code and so then you have an opportunity to say well what's going to drive the adoption of this primitive and really it's making it easier and simpler and that means delivering it delivering the ability to swap any token for any token in a mobile app that's why we launched a wallet it means allowing off-chain liquidity providers to more easily provide liquidity to on-chain swappers that's why we launched unit swap X so each of those are products I think Drive the overall success and development of uniswap as a core protocol and how I think about this broadly just beyond uniswap is that part of the point of having core Financial activities is interoperable code is that you get technology Network effects and to really have the power of those Network effects you need multiple teams that have a positive sum approach that are invested in that so it's kind of like saying SMTP exists why should we have multiple email applications that's a very simplistic I think analogy but to me it's really like the question of 2020 and the question of 2021 and instead I'm really excited to see with you know swap V4 for example um so it's being built in the open there are a couple dozen different contributors who have no relation to uniswap Labs we didn't solicit they didn't even get a grant from the unisplat foundation and they're now multiple companies being funded to build things on top of Unos webv4 and I think that's the way we make defy really powerful and not just an interest rate Arbitrage but actually a better Financial system what about you is there going to be maker Labs coming out soon we're going to get uh maker swap soon or what's how do you sort of think about uh entities versus those is a big difference between maker and uniswap which I am very envious off is that unit swap is you know uh it's a it's a D5 protocol is simple enough that it really is just like fully autonomous right it doesn't require ongoing adjustment of parameters to not explode and most other D5 protocols especially the more advanced ones they're not so lucky so they require what I most cases they require what I call Big governance and maker is definitely maker is like furthest out on that Spectrum right because what maker has to deliver is constant tail risk management right that's kind of the whole thing is diet doesn't randomly blow up because there actually is all these like economic mechanisms and all these companies and all these people sort of primarily focused on that one problem right but the problem is tail risk is sort of by its very nature it's not you can't really automate that into like a simple a couple of smart contracts or something on chain like you can do with unit swap dysfunctioning so what that means is not only do you have to sort of govern it under sort of the first order basis right of actually do this thing it's supposed to do you also have to like watch The Watchmen sort of and then you get into this like big governance scenario where you really have to build up a massive system of checks and balances and governance Dynamics and processes and even like political Dynamics and yeah all this good stuff that the maker has had to deal with for the past eight years and so what we found is like absolutely um our approach is you want to split it up you don't want to have a single sort of uh Big Blob you want to have many different companies right we have we have so many companies working for maker I I can't even count them I can't even like 20 30 or something depending on how you what you count and we're actually going a step further in that we realized you even want to take the Dow token itself and the Dow itself and you want to split that up and so that's this sub-dial launch that we're doing right so we're basically taking maker we're splitting it up into smaller more specialized dials and it's the same basic idea of like you want to keep things smaller so it just doesn't get too complex and so people can kind of focus kind of on their on their own specialization and then have a more kind of transparent and competitive environment between the different actors rather than like a big sort of structure that you're then sort of um yeah I mean have to basically justify why it's decentralized despite that ultimately it's hard to like it's hard to imagine that a big governance requiring protocol could survive if it primarily has just one company delivering everything and then suddenly that company goes away right so that's really the our main goal in how we view the maker ecosystem is there cannot be like a single company or two or three or whatever that that are required for the thing to survive Kane I mean one of the other big you know D5 Founders on this panel curious to hear how you're thinking about this yeah so you know we have a similar problem right um in synthetics uh it's a complex system it requires ongoing governance and maintenance and not just you know parameterization but uh development right like you know uh we're we're about to launch V3 um we're trying to launch on other chains there's still like really unsolved questions in the the kind of mechanism design of synthetics that need to be managed and someone needs to make decisions about that so a long time you know we started with the a similar approach to maker where we had an open source software Foundation um and then you know we had a sort of um Dow on chain component um we shut down the open source software Foundation we don't have any for-profit entities that uh that are you know involved in the protocol anymore um for a whole bunch of reasons but you know the primary one was regulatory Arbitrage you know we were very confident that regulation was going to get much harsher and you know unfortunately that has played out I wish I had been wrong there but I think you know the reality is probably worse than we expected and so the idea that you could have any centralized party that had meaningful control over something like synthetics is just not possible and so we had to do that and you know we pushed through that and now we have a version of representative democracy you know I'm not a big believer in uh direct token democracy I I think you know anyway that's a longer topic to talk about but um you know we have we have representative democracy we have councils and you know as roon is saying the same things happened we started off with one Council that was like monolithic that did everything and then we're like wait a second there's people on this Council that have no idea about treasury management no idea about risk management no idea about this and so we started splitting things further and further out now we have five different councils that govern the protocol um but all of that I think is really about you know trying to create an environment where you can have this continuous development without having centralized control and it's just a challenging problem and you know we're still all kind of figuring it out um one of the things that's been interesting for me over the last few months is as we've launched infinix which is a new front end that I'm building to build on top of the synthetics protocol we're able to take a lot of the governance failures that we had in synthetics because again that's not a for-profit entity it's going to be its own Dao its own uh you know separate coordination mechanism and we've been able to strip out some of the mistakes and you know kind of tweak it so again like this is an ongoing process and you know I think it's going to take probably many more years until we get to a point where it's stable I mean Jordy I think mandrel is is in a similar kind of situation where you have you know some approaches to l2s like base with coinbase where very tightly can connected very tightly branded together mantle a little bit more arms length from from bidet um how do you sort of think about that that relationship between um sort of the the the entity and and uh and the the Dow and the L2 yeah you know we talk about L2 Wars but what I'm realizing is there's two different Wars going on and they're completely different one is more product based l2s so like bass you mentioned is a great example a bit more us focused I would say mantle is more internationally focused and but in the same category and then you have maybe um the very like ZK and the Very you know arbitrum tech-based uh L2 focus and we're very interested to see you know who's going to make the best CK approvers and let them kind of you know fight their Tech battle which they've been doing for many many years right like CK is saying all these guys have been doing it for many years we're very interested to see who's gonna get the best technology and adopt it and ultimately just like focus on the user itself centralized exchanges you know we saw with Solana and FTX there's ways that that can go very uh well in terms of bridging but ultimately it's better to also keep things fully independent so yeah with mantle there's no direct association with buy but apart from you know we have a lot of Partners and they're one of our partners um and I'm curious like so uh when we talk about any kind of company having a labs and having a token what I'm seeing as we invest in companies and we have an ecosystem fund that is 100 million that we're kind of co-investing with VCS some projects like to have some value go to the equity and some value go to the Token I'm curious what w thinks about this as well generally I feel like the token should be accruing the revenue because although otherwise normal people don't have access only vcues for getting access to equity and if it's like half goes there and half goes here it sort of splits up the value I don't know what what you think you guys yeah so I think like when we invest in protocol so there's a particle business there's product business right um so I think the best analogy here is if so if you build like an open protocol so it's basically like you're running your own like nation state right and so then what is like the equity of the company like the equity of the company is the residual value of the company right um so I think the analogy to me here is okay so the protocol gonna get the um Equity of the sovereign state and then so going to be distributed to all the citizens and so with its own like Treasury Department blah blah blah and in like a decentralized way and then so like that's how the protocol can accrue value over time and like the value coming from the GDP generation uh on top of that particle economy and uh the company I think like the companies so there's also state-owned company right so I think like the company in this contest are gonna probably represent some decided state-owned companies um activity out there in that specific economy so it can be building for tooling building for infrastructure like whatever Services out there um so I think there's definitely a balance that the same team probably able to play so definitely is super super hard um so so for me as an investor and I would definitely prefer team to just pick a side so you eat a beautiful product or business or you build for product business but I think because we are also very big backers for like GMX and so what I have seen in like gmax is that the courting basically set up the protocol business like a new solven state and then so we have all these like anonymous team members are coming from like everywhere and into the building on top of that and also similar to lighting Statics as well like all the front end like all the client side and then so with the unit swap right now we have hooks and then metamask like yesterday just launched their snaps right um and I think it's like permissionless API um so permissionless API business and then so to contribute to the permissionless economy and so it's definitely what we crypto native investors that we want to see um yeah yeah yeah um I think Kane you mentioned um regulation and sort of thing about regulatory Arbitrage and I think despite being on the opposite side of the world we have to talk about U.S regulation a little bit um you know some some news coming out in the past week there was a cftc settlement with open deridex and and Xerox there is treasury guidance uh coming out suggesting that things like wallets and uis might be reclassified as Brokers under under U.

S regulation um I'm curious how you all think about um domiciling your team serving U.S users overall going forward how you think about U.S regulation and impacting how you choose to build product how you choose to form your teams things like that um maybe MC starting with you yeah I'm happy to start with that um so uniswap Labs is based in the United States and we have a physical office in New York City and I'm always amazed how that blows people's minds but uh look I think that the Details Matter a lot I think that it's easy to look at headlines and get really freaked out so our team is based in New York we're building software as as we don't custody anybody's money none of the activities that have caused uh sort of regulatory actions are things that we've engaged in and so if we're going to build a financial system that's going to be part of the world's largest Finance Financial Center in New York City we think it behooves us to have a presence there and um so we don't see that as a problem our products the wallet the web app are instantly Global and a fraction of the users are based in the United States so of course that's why I'm here we're really focused on growing in Asia we're focused on making sure that we internationalize our products that they're not all in English that the interfaces are mindful of the markets that were that they operate in and that we're focused on markets where the consumer environment is a little bit more open-minded than what it is in the US right now so look it's going to be a challenging period but if we're ultimately trying to build safer more transparent more accessible Financial software uh then it's worth pushing through and that's no reason to leave the United States Rune you may be curious to get your perspective as well I mean maker is kind of AS Global as it comes dies what three four billion in uh in uh size now how do you sort of think about global presence and sort of global serving Global users yeah so I think it's a it's a bit of a contradiction in a sense right that on one hand you have you've got maker we we're we're building the biggest decentralized stable coin which means we are I mean in some ways we're like promoting dollar dominance right uh and on top of that we are investing into the American economy right we're deploying billions of dollars into treasuries in a banking system and but when it comes to basically the crypto regulation I mean our stands at this point pretty much we look it's complicated enough already to be a Dao so uh we we've we've basically uh um sort of through our governance made the decision to to just like uh I mean from any basically from I mean from all the all these sort of official front ends uh affected by the Dao we block American IPS and block vpns and this is just what we think is this is like a you know obviously it's a very complex problem but this is a solution we think is like a decent solution in the sense that that you know then we can focus on building and on delivering to users and not run afoul of some yeah basically an uncertain environment um so uh yeah I mean I wish it'll change and I think I think it will uh it I mean it should change uh it's possible and this is kind of the way we see that we can contribute to it right it's possible the way the change happens is we go out in the world and we make some really really good examples of what are the advantages of properly embracing crypto right now what I'm seeing is uh South Korea and Japan are two countries that are they I mean on one hand they're sort of careful and slow moving and have their various um you know have had the various issues with crypto but they have this like sort of enduring positive stance towards Innovation that means that they're very careful about how they roll out the regulation and they're very very interested in capturing the benefits um and that's the kind of places where in maker that's what we want to focus on and build that up as like a positive story uh and then it's just I mean you gotta get with the times if you want to be competitive right uh again America is in such a weird decision because it's the Global Financial Center and it has a US dollar and so on um but but even in that case I mean sooner or later I think sanity should Prevail yeah Debbie how do you think about underwriting regulatory risk as an investor yeah so um first of all I think it's pretty lazy for all the garments and so first they Outsource the monetary policy to like US government and now they Outsource their regulatory understanding to like U.S government um so I think there will be um competent garment like coming up and then so no matter it's out like South Korea Singapore Japan and then so we have seen a lot of things that happen in like Dubai right now um so it's definitely such a Negative for like the us as like a talent pool because what I have seen is that 2021 and I have um two U.S Founders and basically on the process of reading also just like giving up their like U.

S passport and like 2022 and I have like four us Founders and just like on the process of just like cutting like the U.S tie um so I think you as a Founder so I've been telling all my Founders try to regulatory Arbitrage like as much as you can hand and also if you cannot Arbitrage anymore sanction us before U.S extension you um and also like that's why we are very deep into the anonymous founder space because I think that is the only way that you have to become a ghost so like that's why when the solvent power light tries to punct you so they could so like they will punch you into the air um and I think like we just need to wait for long enough and for the U.S Empire potentially just say degrade and like deteriorate and some other solvent power gonna rise up and then so like that is my True Believer to be honest because if you look at all the um Empire in the history and so they always have a life cycle and then so we have to access from the top so like that's why that's my calling to all the U.S Founders and if you can ask it from the top and then so try to do it um yeah let me add something I think it's very different if you're starting something right now at this moment in time where you want to do that for maximum flexibility versus if you're like you know swap labs and you have a product that's used that is that achieves the principles that Regulators try to right and then the owners is on us explain what we do to explain that the biggest problem for consumers in crypto is FTX and that that uh and that self-custody isn't it there's a response to that right so I think the answer is very different if you're starting something today versus not and the other point that you mentioned I think is important is that Financial regulation is starting to kind of fragment and decouple around the world as a result of the US's now outlier harsh stance on crypto and as an American I think that's sad and unfortunate but it's good for the industry to have a little bit more competition so that there's a there's more deep thinking around what kinds of rules and regulations should take place and the response this in the past few months I've been in Paris the United Kingdom Hong Kong and the response is very much uh we want defy here we love defy in different shades and it's in stark contrast to the US so globally I'm pretty optimistic and hopefully it doesn't take a decade or two decades for the United States Global Empire to crumble for DFI to be adopted in the U.

S I think that's probably a good light note to end on versus uh the Empire crumbling so uh thank you to all the panelists really enjoy the answers really enjoy the discussion and uh looking forward to the rest of the conference thank you