Aptos Ascend: Tokenized Real-World Financial Assets Ecosystem and Solutions l KBW2024

[Music] testing hello hello great uh thank you guys for still being awake uh we're very fortunate that this is one of the you know better attended uh stages so we're we're very happy to share you know our our stories and uh and what we're working on so I am Alex I am the head of Institutions for Asia adaptto Labs uh and I'm today joined by you know our our dear co- family CE I'll let you guys do the software intro for a minute go for it okay cool well I I learned my first bit of Korean so I can practice in Moto Koo wake up everyone wake up that's uh um but amazing to see all of you here I'm Mo co-founder and CEO of apos I used to work at Black Rock I used to work at BCG so there's a lot of BCG blood here um and I worked at meta and I worked at Facebook and before it was meta where we were building a blockchain designed for 4 billion people today that blockchain lives on it's called Aptos and we're excited to get into it hi um I'm AG Kobayashi uh leading the effort of security ties in Japan been with the crypto tokenization business for five years uh more of my career is on the trfi side starting with meril Lynch and Goldman Sachs uh sort of the stuff to be replaced so I look forward to this discussion today hi my name is Sean Park um who is leading we three practice in BCG right now um in Hong Kong um I started my consultant career um almost 30 years ago back in 1995 and I left BCG and I was working at the CJ uh and Kaka and the N Mar CEO job and then I rejoined BCG and then first job I did is I started the web 3 Consulting project the most conservative Consulting confirms in BCG so I think the BCG is the most sometimes once we confirmed and very comfortable about the Innovation we are the most radical consulting firms in the world so that's why we are we decided to work with the Aptos together and today it's a great honor to share some of our progress together with you guys great thank you thank you guys um and you know and Korea is is a very special market for us and you know we've been here for a while ever since we we launch our minet um and so naturally it's also the best place to kind of share uh you know the major step that we're making for institutional related initiatives um so so I guess the first question for Mo um is you know we did announce app this Ascend in May this year earlier and you know we I I'm guessing a lot of people don't exactly know what that is so maybe it'll be great to you know quickly explain what that is what that covers but also why we are here with you know our dear partner securitized and bcgs and maybe the first the second question is what are we doing with securitized yeah all right two questions in one thank you um so the the first thing is I guess going going back to our days at Facebook we realized if you want to move money across you know the world peer-to peer or for Commerce you need money to work the way it does today but you need it to move more efficiently and you want to be able to move it in a way that it's familiar to people and those two parts are really important because if you think about money movement you know whether you're at Morgan Stanley or you're at Franklin Templeton or a large financial institution in Asia you're going to want money to move the way it does today with the rules that it does today and so apas Ascend which we announced earlier this year together with BCG Microsoft SK and Brevin Howard is designed to provide the same features the safety the rules and compliant products and feature sets that allow you to again move money if you can move money you can also move other things other uh tokenized products on top of that and so when you look at you know either Equity products debt products or other types of commercial products you can have the same benefits there and so if you can imagine you know creating new uh portfolio strategies new tokenization models that can ultimately lead to better risk models uh you can now have either the money movement or the actual Financial product all in that same ecosystem that's familiar to the same large institutions that are out there today so that's awesome the user experience has to be on par ideally better and so with Ascend you have great Integrations with either Partners like SK which we talked about earlier but even other ones that we'll be highlighting uh in the future so you have a wallet you have custody you have uh and and you have forms of money but you need financial products and so together with securitize as you guys think about which financial products will ultimately make their way on chain we do get a sense of how they can move again with the familiarity that everyone wants these are regular ated assets they can't you know move around in the way web 3 feels um you know uh too fluid you want to provide those insurances and so together with securitize we're excited to be the network that can help support that the most important thing is what APS does right you need a network that's going to be reliable it's going to be safe it's going to be secure and it moves in much more efficient ways than the financial system today we support throughput with thousands of transactions per second in fact we hit 500 million transaction in a 24hour window that's 10 times greater than salana 10 times greater and the network didn't go down and the cost did not change that'll make black rock Morgan Stanley all these financial institutions very happy and very comfortable and now securitize has that benefit of abas yeah and and and I think you know kind of moving on to securitize you know we did announced earlier this year that we were you know you know partnering up with securitizer in the US but actually you know we we have a s from from Japan here and it's very interesting that they've looked at this from a very Global lens as well from the get-go and we'll be you know we love to know you know what exciting stuff you guys are working on as secur di but also especially in Japan and kind of what what is the scope of work that you guys are covering there and what are exciting stuff that you see yeah sure thanks Alex um as Mo put it um more and more institutions are actually active and more serious about organization we work with Black Rock and ble recently started like several months ago hugely successful fund organization is with also Hamilton Lane few funds and KKR in the US um in Japan as well large institutions actually quite active too um recently we work with Sony bank for example smtb namura and institutions also not necessarily cover Financial but also corporate uh large corporates as well like marui for example or Jr West or KAG working with institutions actually something um it's very complicated it's very detailed um of course they they are I mean they have a lot um they have to sort of concerned about be concerned about the existing business as well but anyway it's a great learning for us uh we should be able to comply with what they are actually asking for and our solution becomes actually even better um an in institutional grade uh like with when we we working with appos as well so that is really great but to do that we we need to look at what institutions are concerned about one first and the most important one is compliance and security um that is something that you know we should be very keen on the second is probably the flexibility or some elements of customization as well um large institutions have their own way of doing things and for reasons so they don't want to change it's really there's no point of negotiating whether or not they want to change that but I think we should be able to flexibly adopt to that so that that works best for them as well and the third is reliability or confidence so to speak um of course the institutions not want the system or platform to fail or have problems so uh either but at the same time customers or end users also come to institutions as well for confidence as well so we can't really break that so that element is very important and they're very confident that working with Aptos we will be able to achieve these things and probably the most important is cost efficiently yeah thank you thank you so much a and just to St on you for 10 more seconds I I do think it's very important to highlight that you know tokenization is not just a buzz word that happened this year I think it's very interesting this year you know how long have you guys been in Japan already 5 years exactly so it's been around for a while um and this is not you know some something that we just hey you know we invented this year it's a buzz where there for everyone's doing it we have very serious companies and solution providers who have been working on this building relationship trying to regulate you know to talk to the regulators and the institutions for the past 5 six years and that's why you know securitize is successful today and that's why you know we're also happy to be partners with them so so really really appreciate that thank you ju just to give you an audience and color on top of the fund tokenization we in Japan actually Pioneer lot of other stuff as well like we have done a US dollar denominated tokenization the first in Japan by Sony Bank recently we're also doing the self offer deal which is an offering of a debt Securities directly by the corporate entity not through broker dealers that's where the tokenization actually counts most recently we have done the film or movie tokenization in Japan the first one as well so there's a lot lot broad range in color in the tokenization activities which is very exciting thank you thank you now Sean I know you were uh you're you're you're craving to share your thoughts you cannot control yourself so um you know we a very easy question for bcgs always you know what are the trends what are things that are you know exciting for you guys to to to kind of you know think about looking forward and I guess also right why this partnership with appas and you know um what what what can the audience expect to see from us I guess um this is a very long uh considerations and a lot of stress for you guys where is going to be Mass adoption use cases in blockchain world right everyone is still searching for it I even though there are so many trial and error but I believe Frankly Speaking there are not that many uh sustainably successful use cases yet but we had a strong belief this is going to be the first one which is going to be tokenization uh tokenized asset uh so when I first met the mole and the eptos team this was exactly you know the team I have been looking for because uh these guys are coming from meta which means they know the real world and they always dream big and uh something they want to create the sustainably growing real one not the nich one they want to address the real one and then we talked about the project asend together and how can I say uh you know we find there's some clear Gap uh between the the regulator between the financial institute and between the actual the investor you know uh so we came up with the concept of the permission public blockchain uh where uh regulator can be feeling comfortable about the compliance and also security issues of those information and eptos is a clearly a beneficial one because they can very easily provide the system level on chain level controls and the the you know monitorings and everything so that was like a really good for the regulator so I cannot tell the detailed story right now but BCG and eptos together we make it very concrete and the clear use cases right now with the regulator uh so that's that news probably will be coming soon but uh we will make a very uh how can I say large use case I mean a lot of guys talk about I I've looked at it but many tokenization opportunity but to me it looks like a two uh Niche cases but I think the real one real size of opportunity is coming from money and fund and the OS has a same visions and their network is a perfectly fine so all we have to do BCG together is actually make a more affordable and the acceptable product to the regulator together so that's actually the why we work together together and then we are making a real use cases right now so my advice for you guys uh you need to find very concrete use cases to the market to the acceptable to the market and sustainably growing it doesn't have to be so sexy you know sometimes it it's it need to be very obvious clear benefit disruptive benefit to the system to the institutions and to the regulator and to the users and investors so that's why we are working on the this project they got sent together I think uh probably 5 years from now it will be really massive and you realize oh my God at the time Mo and the secret TI and BCG Sean's comment probably were right so that's why we're working together yeah and Alex oh yeah Alex no sea Sean no no apas Alpha you did good you didn't Spill the Beans um no I mean to Sean's point I I I do think that we are uh one of the few you know infrastructure who are willing really to spend time with Regulators you know make sure that they can trust us you know put a face where you know where there's a body that's you know cuz a lot of people say decentralization feels like a machine that moves without the head because we can't really find the head and I think for us right I mean they know where to find us um so so that's that's very clear so we have five minutes left um I I think it's it's we're going to close it up um so how about if each one of you shared One Wish slh hope slth thoughts uh to either the Regulators the industry institutions um that you think will be essential to ensure that you know we actually move past the stage we're in right now and actually you know unlock massive opportunities moving forward that's almost an easy one for me because I I sit on the cftc digital asset committee and so I could make my wishes you know very very obvious to them um but but but I think Sean raised raised a great great point right like um if you want that obvious use case to come to life it's you know sitting right here right um and you know forgetting about the throughput and the reliability that Aptos brings compared to everyone else orders of magnitude as I mentioned compared to other protocols we're bringing it with ways that is again familiar to everyone right so if you're if you're a large institution Sitting In This Crowd you probably did not expect Hannah Financial to be sponsoring the stage right five years ago and here we are to to the point of tokenization is here and so you know our wish is doing things in a safe reliable and responsible way and doing it with a partner that's going to make you feel trusted right so you can go to sleep at night and that's the protocol that we built for four billion people at Facebook and that's how we bring you know this obvious very obvious use case to life the last thing that I think is also very important is it's not just about a billion users and we're definitely excited about that the second thing that's really important is getting trillion dollar of value on chain and a trillion dollars of value on chain is going to happen when assets that move markets are going to be tokenized on Aptos and obviously we're very excited about that wish coming to life thank you thank you a s yep um fortunately we have been actually very very busy with a lot of follow on and Deals and pipelines with existing sort of efforts um so that's good but in my view we are actually far from being there in terms of tokenization what he can possibly achieve uh to do that um I I think that thinking about Japan I just met the SEC commissioner this morning uh than talking about various things but my my comments liit limited to Japan um I I think that if the regulator can work with us and help us not only securitize but all of us in the ecosystem to achieve what a tokenization can actually do to the market that would be really great the few sort of immediate hurdles I can see are one is a secondary Market um the other in Japan specific is a public chain uh thing all all the deals so far done in Japan the private chain so which is not really you know particularly exciting I sort to speak um if the regulator can help us and work together to get over these hurdles and move really to what the tokenization can really achieve for example like Dex for example um It's A Hard issue but that would be ideal for me uh and that's something I really like to propose that we work together with The Regulators thank you yeah I mean um I have been uh quite struggling to find out the real use case when I was even CSO and CEO job uh in Kaka and the mobble uh like you know like Frankly Speaking when I participate this kind of conference uh for the past almost seven to eight years like you know most of the items are still same you guys are talking still same same topic without any slide and same same talking and same talking and they you guys are complaining about the regulator you guys are complain about the you know existing Legacy system come on you know that will never change you know my personal advice you got to focus on the uh you need to make the product and the use cases which is acceptable by the regulator you know maybe Trump can change the world right but you know like you know you cannot expect the world uh will accept this web Street concept or tokenization as it is because it's too big it's too radical so which means you need to make a very specific on the use cases which is acceptable to your your customer to your regulator that's why we are working with the eptos together thank you yeah thank you thank you we're run all time thank you thank you everyone uh and thank you guys for joining [Applause] me thanks to our last panel for those