Disrupting Legacy Infrastructure: Building New Financials Rails - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

all right thank you for joining us here so we're here to talk about building new Financial rails so maybe we can go around and do an intro and maybe a little bit about your company and how exactly you're disrupting the Legacy tradify infrastructure sure I guess I'll get started hi everyone my name is Annabelle Huang I'm a managing partner at Amber group I was Emma group was founded five years ago really building the infrastructure and the trading UI ux for the institutional and the individual users globally to access crypto liquidity and now we're also venturing into the digital lifestyle space providing nft related infrastructure as well so essentially positioning ourselves as the service provider and also the infrastructure provider for the space We Grew From six people five years ago to now a thousand people globally now we were in Hong Kong before but moved to Singapore a year ago also blessed with tomasik LED round at three billion dollars earlier this year so we're all settled here in in Singapore and it's great to see everybody here in our home turf great uh it's terrific to be here my name is Brooks Entwistle I'm at Ripple we've actually been a 10 year old company we've started a decade ago um based on the premise that there was a better way to move value across borders and we've stayed with that mission from the very beginning as it relates to cross-border payments we have built Ripple Nets which is now existing in some 55 countries we have a ripple X business which looks after nfts and cbdc's and carbon credits and all sorts of new business models but at the core we're about crypto liquidity and moving value across borders providing solutions for Enterprises in a way that uh solves we think one of the last great conundrums in finance which is why people have to pay seven percent money to move money from one jurisdiction to the other we can now do it seamlessly we can do it with an environmental bent to it and we're having fun doing it in Singapore we also are home in Singapore this is our headquarters for not just APAC but also armina business it's by far largest region so great to be on the home turf as well hi I'm Cynthia Wu funding partner and CEO of Matrix support Matrix Ford is a crypto custodian as a manager as well as Prime broker and the way being in the space in for three and a half years and really position ourselves as enabler to help people institutions and retails to access 105 and D5 opportunities nice to be here today hi I'm Mike belshy I am CEO and founder of uh bitco we are also a crypto custodian uh we're wallet technology platform I've been doing this about 10 years now about 20 of all Bitcoin transactions by volume go through a bitco wallet one way or another integrated with you know hundreds of exchanges around the world and then uh custody side has been growing and building up Prime brokerage awesome um and I'm Joe I'm a partner here at Asics and Z crypto a lot of what I was doing prior to this was in peer-to-peer call it transactions uh before crypto so like focus at like Uber or doordash or Cameo and generally just really interested in how people communicate organize and exchange value and so I think how crypto really helps here right is is disrupting the Trad five world where a lot of the current networks are kind of accrued to Central entities and ultimately the ethos of web3 is that these you know values can accrue back to the end users I think using the Uber analogy that Brooks and I both know the network of uber is is powered through drivers and Riders but they aren't necessarily the ones that actually accrue the value in fact they don't actually make any of the decision rights or governance rights and you have this non-participatory class of individuals which are you know the Uber shareholders who actually do govern the network and and so bringing this back to you know Legacy Financial rails I think how crypto disrupts is it's just a more efficient matching of that allocators of capital with those who need capital and so yeah hopefully when you one day integrate the demand curve you can actually have a maximal accrual of the value back to to the actual consumers and producers and minimize that deadweight loss so cool now that we're all acquainted Let's uh go into maybe a discussion about um C5 versus D5 right so um I think generally a lot of individuals for a really long time didn't really care where their yield came from but recently there have been a few blow-ups um I think Celsius is a good example I would love to hear if you guys have any thoughts on if that narrative is changing and maybe Cynthia um you can can start here yeah sure I think a lot of people has been putting a lot of focus on the recent implosion in happening in our industry I think that's highlights a lot of a few challenges or problems that I can see so one thing is that a lot of the Senpai platform has not really been disclosing so much information to their investors on where exactly their funds are used like what is the risk they're taking to generate those returns and how they're managing those risks and also what the liquidation look like when things go wrong I think a lot of that is a black box and it's a problem I think the recent explosion and the the fact that there's no bailout in this industry actually helped us to flush out the bad players a lot faster um than in some of the tri-fi contacts and I think that's overall healthy for this industry and also I think this is a lot for 75 platform to learn from the D5 because in defy a lot of things is executed automatically on chain right through smart contract and the rules and it's hard coded so I think that's something I think central platform like ours can really reference and we've recently been putting a lot of thought around how we can improve the transparency and the risk management through a more real time and the full disclosure manner to allow people really see like their assets on our platform what they what their use how the risk real-time risk management look like so that they would have gradually rebuilt the confidence in putting the money onto some fire platforms and so hopefully after the product revamp we can build a new and higher standards for some fat Asset Management platform that's awesome Brooks did you have any thoughts absolutely um I think one of the things and we talk about this all the time as a group and across this entire Ballroom there's people with very different viewpoints on this spectrum if you will and one of the things we firmly believe in is it's it's not really an argument between the two there is a there is a movement towards defy but we live in a world where there's so many things in this financial system that are still centralized or traditional in what we're doing and one of the things I think we've done at our own company has had to kind of play both sides of that whether or not it's with uh working with old original slow-moving banks that were some of the original investors in our company and on Ripple net initially and then fast moving PSPs who are Cutting Edge and taking this and really adopting some of our crypto Solutions and everything in between and we were broken backstage you know some of us put on t-shirt today some put on a suit some put on a sport coat it kind of depends on which part of that Spectrum you're talking to because we need all actors across that to to be a part of this so I think it's a it's a motion it's a migration but it's not black and white and we ought to come together for exactly the reason Cynthia mentions you know we're all in some ways need to regulate ourselves and make sure that there are no Bad actors in this community we're all out proving we think world-changing Technologies to a much broader base not just consumers but governments and everyone in between and so I think this uh this is all upon us to make sure that people understand both sides of it yeah I would like to add on to that so basically um I I think Symphony D5 would always coexist I feel a few years ago when the decentralization discussion first starts we've always been debating like is is it always good to have everything decentralized and recently when we see the Dao and we have a lot of discussion debates about how decentralized should the decision making should be for the doubt like it's it's always the more decentralizer better I think there's no absolute answer to that it's all relative like it depends on the context right what is the scenario what is the problem you're trying to solve what is the main target audience and what's your primary needs I think it all depends on all that so in my understanding the future right D5 75 will coexist and probably they're going to be a seamless um Bridge like between 7 and D5 and it will be probably so seamless and integral to a level that you don't even feel you are crossing Sim fight to defy defined to send five so I think that's how I see this Market evolving into yeah for sure I think ultimately it's this idea of transparency and when we think about defy it's can't be evil because the smart contract is code it just executes and you have to have like real trusted advisors uh to believe that they can't be evil um and so yeah I generally think that there is definitely a coexistence for sure um so Switching gears I'd love to chat about the trade-off about self-sovereignty so like custody in your own assets relative to custody it with uh you know centralized entity there has been a few security breaches and and generally just wanted to hear your guys's thoughts on you know what are some of the different ways that you can be you know most you know cautious about that and maybe some of the differences and securities between NPC versus multi-sig Mike you want to take this one sure sure um so like the the great the great thing we now have is the option to decide are we going to hold it ourselves or are we going to use somebody else and I think if we lived in a world you know 20 years in advance from where we are now and everything's digital assets you know some things you would use on your own person and other levels of asset holding and you know companies you interact with you want to hire people that help manage your funds you know pass it on to your children should you die you know things like this so there's there's definitely a role for both the decentralized capability the non-custodial capability and the custodial capability but more importantly you know if you're managing someone else's money you are a fiduciary you are held to a much higher bar in terms of what you're doing and how your manage those assets what your transparency is what your fail safes are what your audits are what your operating controls are uh and how you manage that so look we're going to have both of these things and it's very possible now at the technology level since you mentioned MPC and multi-sig I think the vast majority of people actually don't care that much about the differences there look as a custodian as a fiduciary for other people's money you have one job don't lose the money that's the job right so like there's more to it you got to keep audits safe you know you got to do reporting properly Etc um so bitco does both MPC actually use threshold signature scheme in addition to multi-seg um we use the right tools that are appropriate and we make sure that it's all held in deep cold storage because that's again that's the job keeping it safe awesome Annabelle yeah I know I I agree our job is to to continue to preserve the world and then not lose it and um the way that we pick maybe the custodian providers or even building that in-house it's also with that in mind uh you know I'm not the custodian or wallet Tech expert but uh we do also use MPC related technology uh for the reason of having security and also flexibility and I think that's what we want to offer ourselves and also our investors um and I think this question though comes down to um maybe the education needed and um and the current UI ux right now uh we actually speak to a lot of uh the clients are new to the space um they run maybe their traditional family offices there are their ultra high net worth themselves uh but if if I tell them to hey set up your your own wallet whether a ledger or a metamask is still very difficult for them to use and almost like why am I bothered with this so somebody has to come in and provide some easy easier way as an alternative and I think that's what Amber's building one major sport and many others are willing to be that middleman I think that's the value of C5 I I don't think um decentralized Finance uh change how Finance works right so could a risk exist in C5 access and D5 maybe it's the pool is taking the creditors as opposed to another counterparty but it doesn't change that but I I think people still need a sort of a middleman to help abstract way to complex complexity in terms when you are interacting either own chain or off chain with other real world assets and I think maybe this is this is the key difference and to your point what is the difference between civine Divine and how do we onboard new users uh ultimately maybe it will be um a combination everybody will land on on a spectrum but I know for fact that there are a lot of Institutions out there who are perhaps constrained to to face the D5 poll or a dow so they still need sort of a prime broker or someone in the middle to provide services for them and I think um it's hard to see this pocket of me going away anytime soon but I think Divi is in terms of product Innovation it's a perfect playground for that so before joining a C5 platform I was actually working with one of the very early decks I don't know if anybody still remembered as one of consensus folks air swap so I I guess I do see both sides of it and and we need both but I think right now most of the people still perform uh perform uh prefer AAC by platform for sure yeah there's definitely a usability piece there for a lot of users who aren't crypto native yet um so Switching gears I I'd love to talk about you know when we're talking about the crypto institutional stack it would be remiss to not think about generally in the world there's like this shift of like you know monoliths becoming modular I think a really good analogy would be the one that Jeff Bezos used in like 2006 he was trying to pitch a lot of startups to use AWS for cloud storage and his whole premise was look you should just focus on what makes your beer taste best and um yeah I mean like this is kind of back in like you know the 20th century electricity was something that wasn't monetized yet so all these beer brewers had to like have their own power generators but over time the breweries that one are the ones that then just rented electricity and focused on like the spices and their go to market and all that and we saw that also at Uber right it was you know back in the early 2010s it was a very monolithic architecture mainly because a lot of these B2B SAS softwares didn't exist yet but then even four or five years later uh when I joined doordash it was pretty clear that everything that that wasn't key to our pricing algorithm or matching algorithm was then basically outsourced so in the crypto ecosystem right now there's a kind of it's still rather monolithic so I would love to hear your guys's thoughts on any advice to Founders that you think about you know in the crypto space this shift of Monolithic to modular maybe Brooks you want to start here absolutely I do think our former employer Uber was a great example there was a dream at one point we were both there that you would go to any City and be able to take five or six different modes of transportation uh with one press of the app with one payment and being a taxi a carpool a bus go on a flying plane and have an autonomous vehicle take you home and that was great except those were all very different businesses that were going on one platform and I think this example of going into doordash and specializing is very important because we really feel and I think that goes kind of to Our Roots and I think this is a panel that actually has that in Spades of really realize that you've got to do one thing right and for us at Ripple it is very much to focus on the cross-border payments business the treasury Finance business liquidity and crypto liquidity if we can do that right it gives you the license to kind of do other things along the way and develop other business models and it's also the case that I think around the industry and around this room around this awesome conference that's held today and tomorrow that we should be comfortable that there may be people in our space that are going to do certain things better than we are and if we all focus on our specialty this all seems to hold together and much more you know of a way as an industry because we are so early early Innings that we all need this to rise together absolutely Cynthia any thoughts um yeah I was thinking what is the biggest and simplest product in our industry I think it's probably stable coin right it's a great invention everyone use it and there's so many user scenarios and it only does one thing so yeah so yeah I think that's uh that Excellence how how uh we can all build like put our strengths really into the thing that we did best and really work together I think if you look at back in human history our path to modernization and to globalization a lot of that is associated with uh division of work and also um uh also specialization I think that tells like how important it is to have that to boost efficiency and productivity at scale right so I think it's the same for for for our industry I remember a few years ago this is a lot of people if they need to build an app they still need to build their own wallets right and I think now we don't really see that because everyone just go to one custodian and the traders in the early days they don't have Prime brokerage they have to connect build like 20 20 20 plus connectivities to all the exchanges and now they have D5 so they also have to build the rails to defy and now we have Prime Brokers to provide them like One-Stop access to all those liquidity venues plus um leverages and capital efficiency so I think yeah this industry really move fast right so you really don't want to shorten your time to Market and put in put your time on the things to polish your products your go to market strategy your sales and marketing rather than building the reels over and over again yeah yeah awesome yeah I don't know Mike do you have any thoughts on this software engineer so yeah like software is uh invading the financial markets right and so things are changing very very rapidly and probably more rapidly than any other Market in part because there's been pen up demand for decades to have change in the space now because The Regulators don't quite understand where we're coming from because traditional Finance doesn't quite understand this there's a whole lot of questions a lot of people that be brought up to speed and the net results we've actually ended up with pretty siled offerings across the crypto industry today so we've got these completely verticalized Stacks where a single entity is your exchange as your broker is the broker for the other party is the Clearing House is the custodian all of these things wrapped in one and this creates a new problem which is that anytime you have single point of control over that much responsibility It ultimately ends up having failures sometimes those are intentional Bernie Madoff sometimes those are unintentional right Mount Cox um but you have to start breaking this apart and actually opening up the next wave of like real massive institutional money is going to require that it come everybody's watching a lot of capitalists come in a lot of us still coming in actually the global macro climate probably helps us bring again even though there's a high level of risk with the current market structure that we have but if we fix the market structures that you don't have single counterparty dependency on one exchange when you make that deposit with no protection from bankruptcies if we fix that problem it's going to fully unlock digital assets for sure Annabelle did you have any thoughts no I think I think they they explain sort of everybody's role in this industry to be perfectly well but I think also just on the very very base layer or you know on the layer one or Layer Two side of it that's what we're working on modular versus monolithic and there are a lot of teams out there building something like this so that actually our base layer can power so much more and then obviously there's so much on top that we can do together as an industry yeah awesome so let's talk about something a little bit more technical um drilling one layer deeper on the premise of matching and defy would love to kind of talk about the evolution of like amms or like automatic market makers shifting potentially more to be like order books and we recently saw for you know swap B3 uh they're moving along the optimization curve and so you know they kind of are actually more like our order book and maybe the question here is is is there a world where like amms existed because it was kind of a hacky solution when we didn't have uh the institutional rails in place and now that it is a more mature Market this is kind of where we're shifting back to to order books because it is inherently more efficient maybe I don't really want to take this one um I guess I feel like I have a lot about this topic yeah so I think switch back to maybe what four or five years ago the Dex is out there most of them are just the decentralized part is decentralizing uh the custody part so it looks exactly like a centralized exchange so that you need to connect with your wallet so that's running on an order book system um and it's the one that was the most liquid back then and there are others um they're running sort of RFQ so this that might be kyber and also air swap back in the days where we would match a user's order with market makers uh sort of like FX OTC or dark pole type um and and and and that in itself was difficult to bootstrap first of all there's not that many market makers back then that can trade on ethereum or D5 yet therefore less liquidity then there's less users and there's a chicken and egg that was really difficult to solve until uniswap V1 came along so amm what is solved is that it removes the dependency on any kind of Market maker anybody can list a pair I can trade people didn't care at a slippage that was the point most of us came from um either hft or trading background that was news to us like how can users not care about this massive slippage but they didn't they just wanted some liquidity to trade and I think that revolutionized or actually boost job liquidity into the default system and and that was incredible to see and of course then when there's enough uh trading volume and people started to see either in permanent lost or the slippers or they're actually facing um then they are working to improve that so there's V2 and then with V3 then you're looking and then now it's looking similar to maybe how traditional Finance works so I think it is is a process where we needed some innovative ways to boost our blue liquidity and then once we we grow big enough of a pool then we can actually tackle the specific problems um but but yeah this is essentially I feel like the the history of Dax so far sure Mike did you have any thoughts yeah like I think actually there's a an unsolved problem in finance which is you know the global regulatory solution and we have Regulators in all the countries each taking a slightly different approach to how they regulate now what does that regulation doing I mean it's monitoring Brokers to make sure that they're not telling you to buy while they're selling right so it's this ongoing lifetime of you know regulatory overhead and everybody does it differently and it leads to different markets that you trust at different levels smart contracts defy normalize all this we actually have an opportunity to get regulation that works across the globe by way of smart contracts that don't need to be monitored on a day-by-day basis now we have problems you know getting like the technology rights we got all the bugs out we've got to get good programming languages that have fewer security holes in them and whatnot but if you get through through finally cracked the nut on how do we do Global regulatory because otherwise this is a completely unsolved Problem by traditional Finance so anyway I think it's you know it's in its early days there's more to be done it's not quite ready for institutional there's a bunch of Regulatory Compliance identity things to be solved but those are coming over the next couple of years and then we get a Global Financial system that's awesome anyway that's that's kind of like a really good segue into the next question of just what more can crypto do for like our Global Financial system uh maybe Cynthia you want to kick us off there yeah I think blockchain can really change our lives that's my fundamental belief and why we're in this industry why we're all here like today um but I think there are a few areas I really personally want to care to see uh improvements and where I think a blockchain can add a lot of value to improve that one is the 24 7 trading and settlements in the real uh in the financial industry which now is not happening right but it's already happening in our industry so as we expand the scope of our industry by having the more real world assets and financial assets being represented by token or Mt and bring all that asset onto the blockchain network I think we can use the infrastructures we have built today is custodians or it's exchanges or it's Prime Brokers to really kind of disrupt and improve how trading is done in in the financial assets uh space asset classes the second one I think is a small amounts cross-border payments I think a lot of firms are trying to solve that problem it is a big problem and it's very expensive and uneconomic now I think that's very important for the next level of financial inclusion is really to solve the payments and um like issue yeah I think that's my input yeah I pick up where Cynthia left off we were in Manila last week with a big part of our team and you know like every one of the companies in this room our employees are mission driven they care deeply about the business and one of the things you can see when we're sitting there with a partner of ours Ira Metz who's largest remittance payout provider in the in the market not that's not a bank uh the impact that that is having the ability to move money from a worker in the Saudi oil fields to the village in the Philippines and do that instantaneously bring that cost down not have that money go missing because chances are there's a coveted related hospital bill or an education uh fee that's due and so this notion of whether or not it's in the remittance form or small business loans or treasury functions just moving this value around is key and then going back to Mike's point I think this regulatory comment is so huge for all of us I mean we all work in Industries in this industry where the regulatory relationships matter and it's really incumbent upon us just as it was in the early days of the ride-hailing business to explain to Regulators what this was all about what this is going to change and what it can do for you the regulator your country and your citizens and so I think all coming together around that and do it in a way that's simple that is uniform and doesn't have us tripping over each other and having jurisdictional Arbitrage in there which does uh strange things to business models into these markets we work in so you know we can't spend enough time and we'll take every regulator meeting that we can get and thankfully in this part of the world The Regulators want to talk to us including here in Singapore which is great because that is the way the relationship should be two-way helping each other get towards the goal of a jurisdiction that works yeah I think you if we think about the future being blockchain based and I think we all agree which is why we're all here all right what what's the end goal is having everybody who's using the internet now somehow interacting with blockchain uh and it has to be smooth it hasn't maybe it's better to be uh sort of Senseless you don't even know that you're interacting with the blockchain that's what people are building um but in terms of the very infrastructure side I think payment in its own how do you on off ramp is the most difficult uh sort of the most um the biggest hurdle right now for a lot of users to even start interacting um with any on-chain assets so maybe finances is difficult to onboard users but if you look at games or social interactions um we've already um successfully onboarded a wave of users and I think for a lot of us especially for those of those of us who are based in Asia we really do see the potential there but then there's so much hurdle that need to be cleared before they can seamlessly be integrated so I think you know everybody working on the wall infrastructure to cross-border payment infrastructure being the Gateway is incredibly important and then after they are and within the ecosystem there's so many more uh to solve assets or assets on chain that can be created so much value being created and it can be transferred seamlessly within the blockchain ecosystem and I think that's eventually maybe what we see that the future of this is look I guess if I want to add one thing obviously we got transparency we get to reduce risk we talked a little bit about how you know regulatory can be completely upended and where does this all go um the the most important thing and everybody in this room is participating you're all here because you're evangelizing digital assets changing the way the financial system works and at the end of the array there's a human rights issue which we are solving you know we live in a world where money is a part of how we do things and the human right to be able to earn money store that money have that money preserve its value and then use that for whatever it is your housing your food your kids education Etc this is fundamental and we're finally getting to solve it now look around the world what's happening today with the US dollar the FED cranking up rates is having a massive impact on currencies all over the planet we're seeing people that are seeing their local currency go down massively and that's affecting their ability to live and what are they clamoring for well it's difficult to get something stable when your government is requiring you to deal with their currency only they're clamoring for usdt they're clamoring for anything that gives them a digital capability to get to something that's more stable so there's there's a change that is under underway and it's going to be both you know financial and eventually political and monetary but it's really going to change who's got access to money it's going to make it so they're all on a much better playing field so anyway if you want to talk about change I think that's the biggest ultimate thing that we get out of this I love that yeah well I think we have to wrap this up so maybe we can do like a last round robin on things that you would love to see built especially in the context of Emerging Markets or southeast Asia and any predictions for the future maybe we'll go this way all right um well let's see I guess I guess predicted one um look uh there's a lot of there's a lot of road to hoe between between here and there I I actually like the the idea of breaking down you know uh what is the global um regulatory approach to to money and uh digital assets and everything that we do it's two pocket uh too too much siled across the different regions you see like I guess four companies here with you know three different headquarters under different you know jurisdictions Etc you know each of us us with with different jurisdictions in multiple regions we've got Regulators are conflicting with each other um I guess if if there's anything good that can come out of it it's starting to address privacy I think it's uh is missing a little bit from from what we're trying to do so maybe in the next couple of years we can augment everything we're doing with enabling privacy on top of it um anyway I don't know there's a lot coming yeah okay that's a big question uh I think we as as an industry we have a mission to work with regulator to figure out what is Right which regulate our industry especially when a lot of things that's happening today the Innovation we're making today is unseen before right how to regulate D5 how do you balance the the the supervision and you investor protection with the need of innovation and how do you balance centralized and decentralization so I think that's one thing it's of evolving and very important subject in our industry so I would like to hopefully contribute to that I mean as one of the participants in the ecosystem and really hopefully in the next few years we can have a more clear and healthy regulation um I think that's one the second one is that we all care about the potential of our industry and our potential industry to some extent is represented by the market cap right now we have less than 2 trillion which is mainly contributed by the crypto native assets Bitcoin Instagram Solana and things like that so I'm really bullish about Mt and the way how it could bring the real world asset onto this ecosystem so so the so the market cap probably is could 10 10 fold in the next few years or more hopefully more great I think we've uh We've cut on a couple of big points which I would just want to reiterate around transparency but also trust because anytime you build a network or a Marketplace that ability for people to want to participate in that is predicated on trust of that system to hand over that paycheck or whatever it is or to trust that that flow for payroll whatever the case is in in our industry and payments and so anything we can do and focus on around the trust elements and doing everything right and we're in an environment where with conflicts around the world and jurisdictions and regimes that are off limits we all need to to play on the right side of that every time and create an environment we do and I would put in one last point which is a you know this is the third kind of business that I've had the opportunity and privilege of building out of Singapore and this is a great place to hire people to bring people in and to and to build and to do things much bigger than southeast Asia much bigger than aipac this is a global Center and I think you know one of the things that I think we like to call out is this is an opportunity for Singapore around fintech and crypto to take a global handle and be Global headquarters as some of these entities are so I'm excited about where this is going if we all hang together John and again want to reiterate all the points I was brought out by I think ultimately um I realized that a lot of our role is actually here to educate so this is something that we've committed ourselves to educate our clients so back in the day it was telling what is bitcoin what is ethereum and now maybe it's explaining what is a crypto Punk or or board days but there are demand and they want to they want to buy they want to be a part of this community is one way or the other and then but one thing we're certain is that there's always going to be so many changes so many innovations that come out so on one in one part is maybe us working with The Regulators making sure that they will be able to see it away to let Innovation still take its place and that there are more newer assets that are made available and you know on the other hand then we have to work with the user and users to educate and can continue to provide um relevant information Market information um and and that itself is already a challenge because everything changes so fast and not even just in crypto I think in macro land none of us would have expected UK to become a Emerging Market uh type of economy right and so I think of crypto taught us anything said um yeah everything changes for sure yeah I think if you look in the 90s very few Fortune 500 companies were technology companies and you look now the most like valuable companies are all tech companies and I think the same will be true for crypto because ultimately when you think about what is useful about a blockchain is the composability nature of it and the fact that the data is completely transparent so that anyone can build on top of it and that there is no central point of failure and I really like this book uh it's uh by Ori brothman it's called the starfish and the spider and it's it's a book about it's it's about leaderless organizations in a military context but I think it's very apt for crypto because ultimately our traditional Financial systems I think is like a spider and I think defying crypto in general is more of like um a starfish right so how does analogy play out it's like with a spider you have this big head and you have all these Limbs and generally you think about like centralized Banks would be the head you cut the head off all of the depositors being the limbs are the ones who actually lose out based on bad decisions or mismanagement from this one entity whereas with the starfish there is no head it's just a bunch of Limbs and if you break off a big part of the limb uh the starfish is intact number one number two the limb can actually become a new starfish which is really really fun and generative um and then in D5 you think about it in terms of like a single participant actually being very risky with how they think about their allocation like you know on maker down if they actually really lever up and they explode everyone else is actually okay and this is really important because ultimately it's actually really hard to differentiate a spider from a starfish sometimes and I think Celsius is a really good example of this actually um and so like I think the takeaways here is is well twofold right centralized entities sometimes when attacked become even more centralized and they actually try and take control in a more I guess aggressive nature and then decentralized entities when attacked actually become more open and decentralized and number two this idea of like giving access to so many people can be scary but many times people actually rise to the occasion and contribute a really good example of that I think is just like Wikipedia being kind of like a decentralized Canon of information is just as accurate if not more comprehensive than the centralized version of that which is like Encyclopedia Britannica and so like at the end of the day I think composability sits at the center of what makes crypto really exciting and and why we're really excited about it at a16c right it's this idea of being able to to like so many questions right like what is the right architecture for data storage what who are the people who should compute and store um I think zero knowledge groups are like super fascinating and so as we're kind of wrapping up here I know it's you know in the midst of crypto winter but ultimately I think hopefully we're all taking a very long-term view about crypto as as a very disruptive force and um yeah I think now is as good as a time to build as any so thank you so much for joining us and maybe we can do a round of applause for all of our panelists here [Applause]