EthCC 2: John Lilic

all right thank you so so we're okay all right well thank you everybody my name is John I guess I know some of you so if you want to reach me online that's where I'm at I'm a troll back ok so I was hoping to just have like a very brief conversation about some of the things that are happening in the Asia Pacific region and my context for that is I sort of spent half my adult life living in the region and I I'm kind of like a business guy at consensus so I do a lot of work in the region and for a while now I've been feeling like we're sort of missing the broader context and I you know I think there's some like incredible business applications and opportunities that we should be considering in the region so I'm gonna break it down into like Japan China and Asia Pacific I kinda have a basic slide deck here but we'll just talk through some of this stuff so I think Japan is a really interesting place to start very often it's underrated or rather it's difficult to understand what is happening because it's such an insular market it is it is sort of like from a macro perspective experiencing some tremendous change some of you may have heard of like the demographic shifts that are happening people are like living longer and they're sort of like not reproducing and now Japan is transitioning towards like sort of a more open policy and a more heterogeneous society so within that there has been this notion of quantitive easing for quite some time now effectively the Japanese government has been pumping a lot of money into the economy and many people will sort of argue that this is potentially unsustainable and I would argue that based on sort of my I guess anecdotal experiences in the country over the last few years there there are many very sophisticated people in the financial sector and otherwise that sort of view our technologies and some of the solutions we're proposing as potentially one way to offload some of the systemic risk that seems to be accruing and and so that's kind of one element I think is really important certainly if you're thinking about building financial applications or infrastructure that supports financial applications another thing to consider is deregulation Japan has historically been a fairly conservative country in recent years again because the demographics shifting economic and technology landscapes this is changing so not only in the financial sector but in the energy sector a year and a half ago the Japanese government deregulate it so they're sort of liberalizing the market and just just to give you context TEPCO which used to be sort of the big energy utility monopoly has since lost more than a million half customers because they were like so inefficient at many things and consequently there's lots and lots of innovation in that space and and and part of that is actually whether it's things like energy Webb Foundation which is which is doing some spectacular work in terms of connecting utilities and so you can like share data and you can sort of have a system that more elegantly describes what is actually happening in the market to even things like grid plus partnering with TEPCO and so these solutions are being rolled out and and likewise in the financial sector one of the big things that happened I don't know that we sort of thought about it very much in our in our industry is the FSA is sort of now allowing non-bank entities to handle money transfers and this is kind of like a key obstacle that we used to face so if you're thinking about these markets with respect to Japan think in terms of deregulation and I think within that there's just tremendous opportunities and so the shifting demographics and opening markets this was another kind of big one there's this entire API layer that's sort of being developed across the Japanese financial sector and actually when you sort of live in Japan and interact with the financial system you realize that like despite the fact that Japan is so high-tech and living in the future there's just a lot of room for for optimization okay this was like I saw this headline I don't know if it's true or not but it comes from Nomura and I definitely know from my experience is that that certainly when there was a lot more like euphoria and and sort of enthusiastic trading activity that we saw tremendous activity you know tremendous growth in Japan and in fact it's sort of by far the biggest market from that perspective in our sector so what can you do like go to Japan and make friends with people that's a really good one I think Vitalik and others i mean we've we've all sort of done events and conferences there community management is a big one like definitely higher whether it's like spectacular projects like I'm a big fan of for example the Gollum project I would say that's the kind of sort of project and group that could really benefit from sort of having people that speak the language and they can produce content there's a general lack of content in Japan pretty much most of the stuff that reverberates locally is sort of like translated from you know content that originates in the west and yeah and then and then some of the stuff we talked about earlier just think about go to market strategies like are you going to launch a product if so do you have like a target location or target market in mind and and I would say like Japan could be probably at the top of your list if if you sort of dig into it a bit okay so then we go to China this is kind of like China before like the Bitcoin Bank Bitcoin ban and all of the sort of regulatory activity and we had like a bunch of funny projects and and and actually lots and lots of innovation so one of the one of the things that I think is sort of a big misconception that we have as Westerners we certainly I something I've learned over time I've been fortunate to live in China and I'm not making a political commentary or anything like that no system is perfect however it is the case that the Chinese government is pretty much engineers and researchers and technocrats and historically the trend has been sort of new emergent technologies come into the play or and and so the government once they realize you know once they figure out how to implement it within their strategic goals and initiatives then everything just opens up and so I think this is probably a more accurate mental model to build around this stuff and so you know another thing I've learned is while we have lots of really talented engineers in our ecosystem and many of us have like sort of built products and some of us have products that hundreds of people use ok and we think we're great well there's lots of these Chinese developers these you know these people have built products that like tens of millions of people use so this the state of like you know innovation that's happening at scale is incredible and I think this has probably sort of where a lot of our mental models break down and and we don't necessarily see what's really going on there ok so from a capital markets perspective this is one thing that is very much sort of happening now in the background there are thousands of companies that are thinking about how to put equity stock bonds all kinds of structured finance products all kinds of things that you know companies do on the blockchain I think this stuff is going to come at a sort of epic scale in an epic wave and it's something that we're sort of almost like maybe not we don't have too much good visibility on it and then finally just thinking about the rest of APEC asia-pacific so it is I would say in terms of addressable market the most dynamic market in the world we have economies throughout the region like in the United States people are so like ecstatic about like 2% growth I mean it's unbelievable 2% growth these are countries that are growing at 7% real GDP for like the next 20 years that's sort of one consideration a second consideration is I think you can be a lot more impactful okay so you can do things and again I I know I'm kind of skewing more on the financial use case aside but sir but let's say from that perspective you can do things like build really cool products that maybe us technocrats use or that large institutions like you know Goldman Sachs used to make even more money or you can do stuff like you know build infrastructure that connects like tens of millions of people to financial services that otherwise aren't available so projects like eye to eye are doing that there's another project called coins these guys are like the coin base of sort of Asia if you will I think that's an old slide I think they have like seven or eight million customers and people just don't realize the scale at which we're seeing like tremendous adoption and traction and then you're sort of seeing all of these other components I'm sorry developments in different parts of the world different parts of the region one other place I really wanted to highlight was Vietnam I've been very fortunate to spend a bunch of time there just incredible incredible incredibly talented people lots and lots of great technical resources and developer communities and you know this is this is a interesting mindset I I think it's important to highlight where historically capital allocation has been sort of hard or very expensive or very difficult to come by in these regions and for better or worse I mean obviously some of the things that have happened on aetherium have been pretty spectacular others have been like huge source games but the the the sort of allocating capital or at least access to capital you know the the bar and the difficulty with which these regions have faced in the past has certainly changed and so these developer communities are thriving and I would I would encourage you all to also consider Vietnam as well cool so I notice the end of the day I won't take up any more time I guess if there's any questions but thank you [Applause] question so is there any well-established like infrastructure like project for dealing with the counterparties in these countries using smart contracts and cryptocurrencies like if you want to to buy something from there or sell something there yeah so is there so there are a bunch of services and products you can use one kind of I don't know cliche use case is like the ribbon side of it and there's so many different projects that are tackling that it's like very very easy to do things like send money over there or pay bills or whatever the stuff I'm more interested in to be honest is excuse me when you look at a country like the Philippines for example 100 million people most heterogeneous population in Asia the natively speaks English that's projected to be a top 20 country in the next 25 years yet there's only ever been to securitizations in its entire history so there's like no structured finance products is very hard to get exposure to like tremendous high yield opportunities whether it's in real estate or otherwise and and those types of projects are Mattoon ities are coming I think there's lots and lots of really interesting infrastructure platforms whether it's like a melon board or if you look at applications like it like like the French guys here building doriel so I I would imagine as we keep moving forward that's that in particular is going to be very very interesting so entering into sort of service agreements being able to purchase access to high yielding opportunities and all of that sort of like a very convenient accessible easy way yes sir are there any banks are there any banks that have launched custodian services for crypto assets so yes and no you have had like very prestigious institutions like Nomura in Japan make comments and and I think Mitsubishi as well the extent to which they've actually deployed I'm not sure there are other smaller banks like Nippon well think in Hong Kong which is launching something with trust ology so that component is happening very very quickly I'm still not sure how I really feel about like banks having custody over lis crypto but it is certainly fair to say that if we're going to like optimize the world of structured finance in these emerging markets and if we think our technologies can like sort of do that then one mandatory regulatory component will be custody and I think so the answer is not not maybe not yet but like very soon yeah thank you very much oh sorry yes sir is is the idea of governance and a lot of these discussions that we're having are based on primarily Western institutions so I thought your slide about China's you know technocratic elite if you will driving the development of these applications in an exponential rate I'm wondering in the long term do you think that in terms of scalability or mass adoption that the focus on governance and the focus on how do we make sure everything's fair and everyone has to say if the lack of that in some cases it is what's driving this acceleration yeah that that's an interesting question so it is not the case that our I don't know Western neoliberal ideals are shared everywhere because that tends to go into things like governance when we build systems and so when you look at places like I don't know Korea or China or maybe these parts of the world where they have like they sort of subscribe to Confucius teachings I mean Japan is like very hierarchical and when you go into the corporate structure there you have this like singular unified force that gets applied to very hard problems or whatever things are targeting the market and it's kind of like effective and it works so in other words governance is certainly going to be a really hard and interesting challenge I think the successful projects will be the ones that like take into account maybe nuances and local markets but but but yeah totally I mean sort of lots and lots of opportunities to innovate there and maybe and maybe you know with a bit of a mindfulness towards like you know maybe not maybe not and you know sort of applying our viewpoints on things like that and responding to the market instead okay thank you [Applause]