Flash Talk by Alex Witt, Founding General Partner, Verda Ventures

All right. So, we all know how great stable coins are and how much progress we've made over the last 12 months. The question is what's next? What's the alpha? How do you play where the puck is going?

Um firstly, we believe that stable coins in the next two to three years are headed to $1 trillion. So, over 3x of where we are now. And a lot of that will be led by institutions. Right now over 50% of institutions according to EY financial institutions are predicted to use stable coins in some form in the next 12 months in [snorts] addition to accelerated retail adoption. So the retail adoption which we're defining here as under $250 has grown by over 10x in a period of four years.

A lot of that transaction volume is happening on platforms like mini. Um and so we continue to see an acceleration and see $1 trillion in site for the next uh in the next two to three years. The second area that we're particularly focused on is privacy. And [snorts] businesses right now, they want the advantages of blockchain, the speed, the cost savings, but they don't want their competitors knowing what they're paying their suppliers because of the onchain public uh data. And so we're very bullish on leveraging zero knowledge proofs uh in and layer twos um to basically have your cake and eat it too.

So get the advantages of the speed of the cost savings but also not divulge which area uh how much you know you're sending on a on a public blockchain. And so this is an area where we think there's a lot of opportunity in the general privacy vertical in onboarding those institutions um where there's already sufficient a huge demand. The third interesting trend that we're focused on is fungeibleization. I I may have made that word up, but we believe that a lot more value is going to flow up the stack towards the application layer towards the applications that have the distribution like a mini pay, that have the brand, that have the network effects. Um, and we believe there are going to be additional primitives that make it very easy to go from one blockchain to another.

Uh and so that increasing fungeibleization is going to take away in our view some [snorts] of the premium on the underlying infrastructure um and and move up the stack uh in terms of where there's opportunity, where there's alpha for everybody in this room. And the last area that we're keen on is looking at new markets um and that are uniquely enabled by stable coins. It's you know it's it's we're now seeing like a wave of opportunity that just wasn't the use cases that weren't possible before. Um obviously prediction markets is one but we see additional evolutions and iterations of this and one company we invested in myriad markets basically embeds prediction markets within content within news articles. So imagine reading an article and then being able to take a bet on whatever you read in real time.

And so creating a new form of content engagement. Um another interesting use case that we're exploring is [snorts] u AI real time machine to machine. So imagine you need to pay for uh a source that was generated in chat GPT. the ability to in real time pay for that um machine to machine. A third area of opportunity uniquely enabled by the advantages of stable coins uh as we see it is real-time IP licensing and royalty payments.

Um, we think it'll be a great opportunity for creators uh and and builders to directly monetize from their audience in a scalable and efficient way without needing to have an intermediary agent. So, those are some of the the key trends and areas that we're focused on um and believe that the next two to three year years are going to be central to mainstream adoption. Um, [snorts] so with that, I'm uh I'm done. If you have any questions or want to talk afterwards, I'll I'll stay around in this room. Um, but thank you for your time.

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