The Future of Finance: Digital Assets and Beyond

[Music] so hello everybody and happy to have you still with us i'm going to present today's planet uh panel my name is luth parondo i'm a professor at upf barcelona school of management but i'm not going to be talking to you guys today i'm introducing our panel which i think is quite interesting panel we have uh cadence candice kelly is a general counselor at estella development foundation from san francisco very sunny i think it looks sunny at least from here then we have alvaro suarez the dlt lab technical lead at bme is the stock market in bars in spain for those that don't know and scott king a blockchain product owner i img uh so welcome all you three and uh thank you for being here so the best uh the first thing i'm going to ask is that you introduce yourself a little bit more and uh and then we'll we'll step up on i think first a very short introduction on yourselves and then i think we will go ahead on your companies and what do they do in the crypto sphere which is the future of finance digital assets and beyond which is the panel that it takes it today so it's very difficult to me can you repeat your name for me can't candice candice okay so yes yes thank you thank you so much um i'm really uh very happy to be here with this great panel and yes as luke said i'm come calling in from san francisco where it's morning time uh so i am the general counsel at the stellar development foundation and we are a non-profit organization and we're seeking to create equitable access to the global financial system through our support of the stellar network so we can get into exactly what we what we do and how we think about it a little bit later but just my background i was a federal prosecutor for over 15 years here in the united states and joined the private sector because i was seeing that there was a lack of knowledge transfer and trust between the private sector and the public sector and i felt like the only way to really break through that was to have people like me who had spent my entire career in the federal government uh spend some more time uh in the private sector and so that's really uh you know the crypto space is a perfect place for me to be because i think there is a knowledge and trust gap that we really need to work a lot work harder to to close that divide and so that's a little bit about me that was very interesting that sounds great the federal prosecutor so alvaro i just in order that i have hi everyone um i'm alvaro suarez i'm a computer engineer and project manager with more than 14 years in software development and multiple sectors i work for for vme the company that operates the stock market in spain and i'm the technical the dlt lab technically i i first learned about bitcoin ethereum blockchain back in 2016 and i i was very excited i went immediately deep down the rabbit hole as we usually say and i i uh back [Music] in back then i wasn't working in blockchain but then in 2018 i decided to go all in in technology and i joined the pme um excited about the development in finance and what the technology can do in our sector and our laboratory was created in 2017 at the tlt lab via the laboratory focusing dlt technology and the main goal was to study the technology and analyze the implications in in our course core business that basically is what blockchain is about right a transaction and value transfer so yeah very excited thank you alvaro so scott thanks liz um yeah really happy to be here today my name is scott i work as a product manager and initiative lead at ing within the the dlt team there and specifically actually ahead of one project that we're working on which is around uh data privacy on blockchain um so we we look specifically uh we're building out specifically a product uh using zero knowledge proofs uh to to kind of achieve privacy in um in transactions uh on on one of the platforms we use uh most from a dlt perspective great so my first question is to candice er will the stellar development foundation's mission is tied to financial access and inclusion and can you share more about why that is important as an important focus and how digital assets can facilitate that and how scalar foundation is you know helping to facilitate that sure well um i'll start with with why that's really important and um we we at the stellar development foundation believe that financial access is should be a right and not a privilege and we are seeing you know 1.7 billion adults in the world don't have a bank account and that's not to mention millions of others who have limited access or restricted access to the financial system and with a 500 billion dollar a year remittance market that is just a a recipe for um for lack of economic opportunity not not just for individuals but for full communities and and regions of the world and so we think that uh transactions and financial and payments are really the key to that process because transactions being able to make transactions efficiently and safely uh it helps people to have access to business and education and also to manage unexpected disruptions in their income so if you lose you know if you become unemployed unexpectedly a breadwinner loses their job on being able to to manage through that and have access to savings and insurance and all sorts of stabilizing uh financial services and so and and we think that it can actually prevent people from falling into poverty in the first place if they have access so that is really the the kind of the why and how stellar and the stellar network and community are really working to address this is that the the current financial system the reason there's there these issues with access we think is one there's a huge de-risking issue which is that the big financial institutions are getting more and more um controls put on them uh and so it's easy to just cut out full swaths of people and and um and sectors of the economy that serve those people and then on a more individual level the folks who do have access it's very slow it's very costly to send transactions particularly cross-border payments and that's what the stellar network is really optimized for so um with using the styler network and very at a very high level you can issue any asset on the stellar network with a couple lines of code it's not a smart contract based system it's uh it's very simple um and what we are developing is it is a network of anchors and so these are financially they're regulated institutions that are at the edges of the network the on and off ramps between the stellar blockchain network and the traditional payment rails so we're trying to work within and sort of uh improve upon the admit the existing financial system as opposed to trying to supplant it and those anchors will issue fiat backed stable coins and then users can transmit on the network either peer-to-peer or through a virtual asset service provider and we have a built-in decentralized exchange and so those stable coins can go from one country to um and be uh converted into the recipient's home country stable coin and then convert it back out into into fiat and all of that takes three to five seconds um on the network and the transaction fees are negligible they're really there just for to protect against spam and ddos attacks and they're burned they're not for profit we're a non-profit organization um and we don't control or run the network that is all built into the protocol um and so you know removing the friction from the traditional system that is in place is really kind of the goal of the of the network so that's i've said a lot i will stop there and if their questions are we can we can move on or i can i can answer questions if there are more specific questions about how it works or how we think that that's helping uh to address the issues of financial inclusion thank you very much uh i've been i i see that that uh the the audience is already uh stepping up and asking like being a lawyer myself says after working in civil service before i love to see uh changing careers into ngos participation in finances is so important so they they are somehow congratulating i think you move and and how that and i think what what you're doing uh not only you yourself but your companies that are as something that humanity what we need at the end is is this connection that i think was missing and and we really appreciate that and i'm thinking that they're gonna be uh somebody thank you that would meet somebody and that would mean um there were gonna be a lot of questions i hope because you are saying at least uh to me it raises questions about this this what you're saying non-fees we will come back to that but you know these negligible fees that you're having that you you're turning them that you have no profits i have my own questions but i let the audience if they ask you later so alvaro what are the digital assets initiatives that are you developing at the bme so what is bme doing whether the initiatives what we we will see i would think i don't know if we will see it in a short time or in a long time you tell us so what is what is ahead what is ahead of us it's just yeah tell us a secret if you can so in our laboratory we usually classify all the projects that we have we have multiple projects and we have three three different verticals uh the first one is tokenization and digital assets and then we have process digitalization and new business models or or a project that don't fit in the one of the two first a verticals and uh for if i focus in the first vertical organization and it does we have two different projects right now one of the projects is focusing the tokenization of traditional assets um also based on the the mika proposal uh is also named as asset reference token right or it's basically a security token and then we have a second project that is focusing uh instance of pure native digital assets so it's not a backed by a another there is no underlying asset right uh the first project that we also name it as the digital bond and consists in the tokenization of a traditional bond and that this issue in the legacy system right and once it is tokenized we manage the full life cycle in the dft platform um from from the distribute from the instance to distribution to the coupon payment redemption everything right and uh despite it uh the main goal of this project uh the first one first one was to show the benefits of the technology in the stock market uh also but validated compatibility of dlt with the current regulation and also since we are the uh the company that operates the stock market we wanted to lead a new model that serves as a standard for regulating markets and we we are expecting some benefits from this technology from settlement uh risk elimination and this is because of their transaction atomicity and also prove that this can be an efficient mechanism for continuous alignment between the central registry and the detailed registry and i know if the audience is familiar with how they our system works but in in in spain we have a two level registry uh we have a central registry that is what the cst or bme have and then there is the detail register for the final investor that is kept by the custodians the the banks and financial entities and also we are expecting cost reductions because of the process digitalization and optimization and then our second project that is focusing native digital assets is a financial financing platform for smes small and medium enterprises where investors can buy security tokens and receive interest from these tokens so this platform allows easing companies and investment services companies to have a simple way to manage their instances in a uniform secure and efficient way um what is the problem with the current system well this type of investment is usually very opaque and very liquid this type of investment instruments and by using this platform we expect it to create a more transparent liquid and attractive ecosystem for it for for everyone right we investor and this is small and medium medium-sized companies and right now we are [Music] is not in production but we are using two different investment instruments that participate in loans and convertible loans that are what investors are interested in but basically what we want to do is to build a marketplace that is flexible enough so in the future we can use it to to issue basically any any type of token from collectibles to securities to utilities or to nfd's that are very unboxed right now sorry my my muting and very interesting i have so many questions there are some other questions here uh one says all those projects are you mentioning being developed in-house yeah okay and we also is we are working along with other companies and entities and i can not give names right now let's say you can just say okay so basically these two projects that you say is one which is is acid referenced all of them are securities all of them all those projects are securities in in this case one is is asset reference and the other one is native and one is it's just because you find that this is what like i for instance my students i have a lot of students that are doing a lot of work my undergrad and postgraduate students are analyzing what are the benefits of blockchain in in the stock market and so the study that you have made has already revealed that the main benefits and that's what i take from your saying is that it's it's reducing the settlement risk and also reducing costs and friction right right in one side and the other side is making more transparent and liquid the financing on the second one apart from the same benefit that you can have in the so all these benefits you have them all these benefits you follow them in both of the projects right okay and and but you see because we always understand we i've heard i've read many times this this thing about liquidity how this makes it much more liquid so you have proved that and you have seen that liquidity increasing actually something is real yeah yeah it's not that necessary because you build something on blockchain is going to be more liquid but by making it more transparent and easy easy to use for for users uh what we are expecting is that we will have more investors more instances and at the end of the day that is more liquidity more volume and at the end of the day is cause reduction that is what everyone wants so the liquidity increase comes more for the volume not so much because you fraction it yeah yeah well if you function it what you is that investor can invest less money so you can attract more investors so also they also that is amazing yeah okay thank you very much alvaro i'm jumping to scott and and see what um how is ing working on the digital assets uh space and and what is the view that uh ing has on it so a little bit on on your company's relation to digital assets so financial assets sure sure um yeah well i think uh like a lot of companies within ing um we're definitely seeing um increasing opportunities when it comes to uh digital assets um kind of in the in the spaces of uh asset-backed but also native security tokens um but obviously we we do have to kind of consider regulation as well uh quite quite a lot when we when we think about these sort of things um but i i think one example that i can give of a of a project that we work on in the space is um finality um so ing is part of uh finality group which um some some listening might may know of already but it's a group of 15 participating banks ing being one of those um and really what finality is looking to do is to build out a multi-currency payments platform for dlt um to be used to to settle uh international money transfers instantly um so so in doing so uh there will be creation of uh tokenized versions of five of the major currencies um fiat backed uh one one to one um and really the the goals of that are well the kind of advantages that we see that come out of that are the the reduction in intermediaries uh in the process um the enablement of instance uh 24 7 execution of those payments um and really on a higher level it's it's reducing time reducing cost and reducing risk i think some of them you already mentioned your counterparty and settlement risk yeah i forget i mute so but the reduction of the risk you say is both counterparty and um so you said counterparty and settlement and settlement risk um why can't can you go a little bit deeper why in counterparty risk is being reduced um yeah well i mean it's uh it's a it's a project of ing which uh i don't work on myself completely but um i think what we see is that um that there is a discrepancy between uh between transactions and then the the settlement of the of the uh funds that go with that so um really we're trying to uh reduce risk that that that doesn't get fulfilled basically so it's mainly because again you increase transparency and less disagreements or less mistakes unless like mismatching so you just by matching it everything and very all clear and make it like real time increasing all that it just makes uh less counterparty risk just by the fact that is better performed exactly and somehow yeah i understand sorry there was uh one missing question for alvaro that i just missed that it says the second project you are working on does it mean that if i am a very small company that somebody is already you know a potential customer of yours so it says if i'm a very small company say one million revenue will i be able to issue new shares and raise money with the second project that you that you made yeah yeah so we we haven't decided what will be the minimum amount that you are trying to to to raise but yeah we are focusing as small even startups start as a small and medium enterprises because big companies they already have the stock market right so what we are trying to do is to to uh reach those small and medium companies that for them is hard every day to to get funding from the banking system sometimes and so they need to go to alternatives and so those are the type of companies that we are focusing on thank you then going back to candace um so to make an impact and to move the ball forward to the greater financial access that you were mentioning before adoption of digital assets is a big factor so how does how is uh stellar to simplify thinking about driving adoption of a stellar technology so adoption how is it and then after i will go back to a question of the audience but before tell me how is is stellar planning that sure so i think that that there's sort of a there's adoption at various different levels um and first and foremost i think our overarching kind of outlook is that we want to focus on solving problems for people and businesses in a user-friendly way and i think that unfortunately there are some crypto projects out there that maybe don't it seems very simple to say that and to think that way but some of them are are not necessarily like really just thinking about the um the usability both from the user perspective as well as from the developer perspective so another key element of how we operate is that we're open source and so we think that operating in the open breeds transparency and trust and i i'm not an engineer but i can tell you that in my time at the foundation the number of times that we have been complimented on our documentation and how easy it is to understand this technology because i think again back to my kind of original reason for even coming into this space that knowledge and trust gap is something that's really important in in driving adoption again at all levels um both that the developer and the businesses building on stellar and then their their ultimate users we don't have we don't interact with consumers and users as as the protocol the sort of shepherd of the protocol code so i think those are a couple of the and we do have a subsidiary that is working on a self-hosted wallet and that's those are sort of their driving um you know their guiding lights right is making sure that they are solving a problem and it doesn't even matter if the use the end user really understands but blockchain technology as long as it is helping them solve a problem and it's doing it safely and efficiently so those are some of our kind of guiding principles i think other work that we do at the foundation that's trying to move the ball forward is the time that we spend educating and interacting with and working with regulators and policy makers again to bridge that gap and to make sure that as policies and regulations are developed they're done with the understanding of what is the technology what is the actual threat of this this new technology these new cryptocurrencies um and how do we address that and do that in a way that you're balancing the need for inclusion and and creating economic opportunity um and then finally we both with our anchors we have a we have grants that we support and help on it both some financially and some just on a technical level of helping them integrate into the network and then we separately have an enterprise fund where we see businesses that can bring value to growth and development of of the network and we look for for companies to invest in and to help integrate that that have that reach right we we are a small organization and located um in san francisco and so making sure that we are leveraging the folks on the ground in various countries who have the local knowledge of both the regulations the population and the needs i think is is part of our our secret sauce of how we we're gonna get um you know not be the american company going into an african nation and thinking that we know how to solve their issues it's finding the right partners and and supporting them in building on the network i i like this last sentence that you just you know you are local let's say you you try to help where you know that you can help and where you somehow master there was this question that you're trying to bring this inclusion and we were saying how would you do that with education not only financial inclusion but also social inclusion which i think you have already answered right now very much so you also your time talking about knowledge and trust up so it's not only about trust is also about knowledge and i think educating everybody i mean regulators but also users i mean is somehow making a bridge between everybody so we can understand this much better and then we can trust it and then we can all benefit from it i think you are somehow working on that i i that's what i have this i i i that's what i listen from you yes we are and the one um and my the marketing folks will will be upset with me that i had to add this on because i didn't put that in my first answer but we also have a very a very strong marketing team and as a foundation that we're just supporting we're really focused on the network and the protocol but uh the marketing team partners with some of these institutions and anchors and others to highlight what they're doing um and to help them to to get the word out to get the education out because it is you know the most important thing is making sure that people understand you know there are a lot of you know if you think of it from a user perspective like understanding and managing private keys for example is it's not in your common you know that's not something that you you might have like a safety deposit key that you go to a bank um but it's not the same as having to really understand the power of this key and the ways that you need to protect it and so spending time and making sure that when we're working with with the various people in the in the gro ever growing stellar ecosystem that everyone is really focused on that and i think that because of our mission and i think we attract organizations and individuals and developers who who really care about those issues and and the education again at all levels from the businesses to the developers to the regulators to the end users is critical to um to adoption of this new technology so they understand how it can really solve the problems right all you want to do is push a button and have it work um you don't need to understand but but know that you have um the the ability to to dive deeper into it and yeah and you know everything we have is out there and in the open for people to ask questions to analyze to audit my next question there's another question for you uh um but uh i will ask it later because i will jump to alvaro one first question it says from the audience why all the tests being carried out on top of blockchain by financial institutions or financial intermediaries involved depth instruments and not equity instruments did you get the question so all the tests yes is it often often been asked that i i understood um i cannot talk uh for everyone and everyone that is testing the technology in in our case our initiatives are focusing in um in depth because it just because they are uh simple products right and for proof of concepts pilots is just easier to to build something simple and we uh yeah in our marketplace this financial financing platform uh we already have in our roadmap the possibility to add also equities but when you have investor with participation in in i'm i'm my background is technical so i'm a legal expert but what i understand when you have an investor with participation in companies is way more complex everything that you have to do with them so for now we are we just focus in very simple instruments to start with so this is going to be for you three the challenges because uh there is some questions on the audience also for you guys uh i had it prepared for alvaro but it's going to be for you three and i think scott should be the first one what are the greatest challenges or the obstacles that you find what are the biggest obstacles that you're finding and if you want to be concrete so who is protein i i don't know how to say it in english but in spanish is how is putting all the wood under your your wheels no so that your wheels will not uh move uh so you mean the the greatest challenges in digital assets yeah yeah um but specifically what you find in ing i mean in your company yes yeah of course um well yeah i think i think one of the one of the issues that we see is um a massive um a massive topic and a massive challenges in the space is is that of privacy um that this is obviously kind of the the angle that i probably work in most in uh in my role um and i think uh yeah obvious to say but within financial institutions that we do have to is imperative that we adhere to you know compliance and regulation and things like that and i think um privacy is something that people generally think of um public networks when they think of it think about privacy they don't think too much about position networks um within ing we we work with permission networks on the uh on the on the projects we we work on um but privacy is still a still an issue that you see in in commission networks as well so um when you think on a consensus level for example the validators or even if uh if you're thinking of some kind of application uh trading application um where you have the idea of back chain or transaction history which which follows an asset as well um so this is this is something that we are actively looking at at the moment and we're working on a project to to address this currently um and we we're basically looking at how we can because there's different ways that can be achieved you can you can go down cryptographic solutions for example you can also go down more hardware based solutions but within ing at least we look to tackle that really uh using cryptographic solutions so what we are building at the moment is um uh yeah a product using uh zero knowledge proof cryptography and the idea there is really that we will um offer transaction verification um and fully private transactions uh using using xero knowledge proof so that actually uh the the contents of the transaction can be validated without any parties having to apart from the participating parties actually having to see that transaction the historical transactions you can still prove provenance without actually having to kind of disclose those details um so that's what i would say anyway for my role that we see as uh as one of the key challenges and and how we look when you mention zero knowledge proof sorry about that i'm from not a technical person i always think of this promise of the sovereign identity you know when they explain to you is like you accessing the casino and you don't have to say which age you are you just have to prove you're over age and that's it um so this zero knowledge proof does it has to be linked to zombie anal entity so when i have to in your case when you talk about privacy you are not talking about identifying a person because you're not doing that at any moment yeah aren't you yeah exactly so i think um the area that you're speaking of is kind of um the area of verifiable credentials and and things like that which i think is zero knowledge proof is also uh very linked to as you say proving uh certain facts about identity uh and aspects like that but yeah i know we um and there's obviously real value in that as well but we really look at this from the from the concept of transaction verification um but actually yeah your question is is it tied to identity i would say yeah not specifically it's not zero knowledge proofs can also be used um out of the context of distributed ledger technology even to to be honest but um would you need it i mean if you have that sovereign identity would you use it in the bank i mean with our citizens we will identify ourselves using that type of identity with you for instance at some point yeah i mean when we go into identity that makes it a larger conversation i think as well so we're not uh it's not that the pro for the project we don't uh we don't really kind of delve into that space so much um but uh yes particularly particularly we look at where we can use it to actually make uh transactions more private for end customers uh and to allow them to actually the only the parties that need to see details are the ones that actually see them i understand so the the same question transfer is uh and this was for the audience what are the main obstacles to the mission of a stellar development convention and here was not the word challenge but obstacles so i think it's a bit different um yes i think it is a bit different i think um i would say that regulatory uncertainty is probably the biggest obstacle um because if someone wants to decide to build and and engage in in these types of activities they want to have a certain level of certainty as to what a regulatory landscape is going to look look like and we've seen regulators who are more focused on they they're not balancing that that risk kind of the anti-money laundry encountering uh terrorist financing which are very important i spent a lot of my life uh you know utilizing the tools of that as a federal prosecutor um but balancing that with allowing innovation to happen allowing economic um opportunities and financial inclusion and so i think to me making sure that there is that that regulations are really being driven by they're data-driven and they're threat-based and they understand what is it that this technology can and can't do what is it facilitating or not facilitating and how do we create rational rational regulations i think a really good example of this is um the situation in nigeria so we had and we have an anchor there and there was a very active quarter for europe to nigeria payments this one this was mostly the b2b but in nigeria the naira is not really regularly traded on a lot of the centralized exchanges so it was it was solving a lot of problems uh and there was a there was a pretty uh robust corridor and then earlier this year the central bank of nigeria i think in response to some of the uprisings and some of the folks um who were kind of anti-government there were talks of them using bitcoin just came out and said essentially it wasn't exactly this clear but essentially banks can't deal can't um deal with companies that engage in crypto and so what's encouraging is that the central bank and the sec are now engaging in a conversation and engaging in research and engaging in and talking to the private sector um and really understanding these questions right but i think those knee-jerk reactions of there's a threat there's a problem there's an anecdote there's a fear and making rash decisions without really understanding um not only also the like the benefits there's so many benefits um as scott was just talking about the you know the uh um the the ledger the transaction history it's all it's all right there the transparency should be increasing trust and not increasing fear and risk and so i think those are the the challenges that we see and because every country is operating slightly differently um it makes it a little a little uh challenging to keep up with everything and to support folks have you seen like a bit of improvement on the site like i myself i think i perceive some improvement on how regulation are looking at these cryptos like less fuel with less fear like in the last maybe year something like that have you seen that yes i definitely do and i think that they're you know the conversations that i'm having um are not the 101 level they're they're at a higher level people are get understanding it better and i think the other really encouraging thing again because of our mission is that you see the new biden administration that the new secretary of treasury here in the united states focusing on that balance that i keep talking about between the regul making sure you're addressing the risk but also seeing how that might affect um financial inclusion and fatif as well has come out and started a project to to look into and address these things so i think that to me that's really encouraging that folks both are understanding the technology and and not having as much fear of the space and to not just looking from one angle which is yeah let's let's address this risk that we don't totally understand but there's a balance here just like there is with any kind of regulations whether it's national security and civil liberties there's always that balance and i feel like it's coming back into more equilibrium and that there's more engagement with the with the private sector so all of those things to me are very encouraging um i've seen an improvement too so now alvaro's your challenge also so what are the big obstacles that you are finding in in bme and in this specifically these two projects maybe that you are developing yeah what are the challenges maybe for adoption or maybe for for making it on the next step yeah so from the technical point of view apart from privacy that scott mentioned one that is very obvious is scalability uh like in finance and the stock market we handle hundreds of thousands or even million of transactions per second and um today we cannot achieve those uh throughputs uh using the blockchain technology so uh there are many developments around second layer solutions and that will be probably the solution for this challenge sorry to interrupt you so we're going to wrap your butt could you tell me how far are we from solving the scalability problem could you make that guess do you think it's a matter of one year two years or ten years uh there are already solutions out there that are being used in public blockchains so you think like big adoption it would be possible like right now very soon uh yeah yeah i think i think it will it's not a challenge for our projects right now because we are not expecting millions of transactions per second but uh for sure in the stock market it will be uh something that we have uh go over and also some we can find some challenges in standardization and interoperability this is also very important because um well first i don't think there will be only one blockchain for everything there will be multiple blockchains and they will have to communicate between each other but not also not not only be between blockchain but also with the legacy systems so if today i built anything you will have to interact with the rest of the systems at vme and and also with the external wall and so so there are already is also developments around this area and so we have to to for the interoperability with the external wall we have blockchain oracles and that being developed and then interoperability between blockchains we have projects like polkadot or cosmos that let us communicate blockchain in a secure and safe way so so you say that scalability is something that is somehow being solved interoperability is something that is somehow being solved but standardization yeah but the interoperability i think that will that that is farther away than farther than scalability yeah yeah yeah okay and then you talked about standardization with me coming from accounting is something that we've been having like for hundreds of years and we have not been able to standardize or i need to homogeneous so i'm very skeptical on that side that we can get together and agree on common standards or things like that so uh how how you see that working thing you you're doing well um well i there there are working groups that i think will help with the standardization we have the ethereum foundation foundation can tell us about the stellar foundation i they are all working together to try to standard to work in token standards and other type of standards in blockchain and i think that will help okay if you want to step guys in any of the questions i i asked particularly just feel free to to step i i was just going to say i was going to repeat the one that kinda said regulatory clarity and that's probably the hardest challenge in in in our projects um as you can imagine uh the the laws and regulation uh that we have today are uh based on uh centralized systems so we have to work we in every project we have to work very closely with regulators to educate it and educate them and also to go this journey along with them so that and we that's really the one that we are spending more time uh in every project in regulation in regulation um i i like this question sorry about that it's it's uh i think for it's no i think no it's for both scott and alvaro it's from the audience and they say um are those projects high priority or just nice to have things you know in your companies so in your companies on within your companies those projects are high priority so just are things nice to have yeah i mean i can i can go first um yeah i think i think they're definitely um definitely high priority we definitely as a dlt team we have goals which are you know to drive these applications to production and there are um definite kind of deliverables on those so i think they are high priority there's also obviously you have to consider as well when you when you try to then integrate those solutions uh within the bank as well because we work in we work in innovation departments um and that is that is also a challenge to try and get this on the on the agenda of the right uh the right kind of areas of the bank as well so you have to also be able to um yeah not just be a high priority in terms of innovation but also be a high priority in terms of the relevant department so um that can be that can be more difficult because obviously every every department is is has their own uh backlog has their own things to work on um but generally yes we we do see those uh those projects as high priority because we uh we have real um yeah key key deliverables and key goals to to to drive more initiatives to production yeah that's great and alvaro you i believe that you're gonna say the same so i i'm gonna say that they are uh high priority for me and my team which is not the same i don't know obviously but they as scott said so we have an innovation lab but if you want an innovation lab to be successful and you need to have uh timelines deliverable the deliverables and and we have them and you need also a business case behind it otherwise you're build it and you will throw it away yeah so so that's our approach obviously uh in our company uh our project is not the core business so there are other priorities as well but they are important projects and they are dedicating resources on time and people okay so we have eight minutes and also i'm going to have straight my priorities and my priorities are the audience questions i'm keeping on them and this is one this is for can candice any extra detail you can share about cbdc in i haven't heard this one is in rena i don't know what that is but how you say yeah ukraine you have any other i suppose any other cbdc or any other um co-op at the bank um sure so i i think the the ukraine for those who who don't know so the stellar development foundation entered into an mou with the ministry of digital transformation in the ukraine to help them to study uh the issuance of a cbdc a fiat back token on the um on this cbdc sorry there there are other projects with respect to banks and um and acres which are more in the stable coin um category so i think one important thing to say about the ukraine is that we are we are certainly actively engaged in helping them uh there was some press uh that that kind of ran with that news and made it sound like the ukrainian central bank has decided to issue a cbdc on the stellar network which is not it's not the case they are very interested in learning they are very familiar with the stellar network they were familiar with the stellar network before we engaged with them which is what we always love to see that when whether it's a business or a bank or anyone who who has found the network and is starting to build that's the beauty of being this open source project and available to everyone so um and i think you know some of the issues that uh that alvaro mentioned about interoperability uh are very front and center whenever we're talking about cbdc's because we think that that is one of the most critical pieces there's so many different countries and central banks that are looking at cbdc's and they're at various different stages of of their understanding and development and possibly even piloting things but the key is as alvaro said there is not one blockchain that is going to win and be all things to all and we think that the interoperability is critical and that those questions have to be uh addressed early on so those are the types of things that when we're talking in the cbdc realm that we focus on is making sure that folks are building and thinking in a way that that interoperability because interoperability is a key part of how things are working right now with our anchor network right the connection between the blockchain network and the traditional rails regardless of what country you're in and which rails those are that that has to happen because otherwise we're going to create the same problems that we have in the current traditional financial systems where the rails are not super interoperable so um so that's sort of a high level on kind of what we do and think about in the in the cbdc world so the same question i asked i know this is a difficult question um but we've heard a lot about cbdc's and how central banks are all of them analyzing the issues of them and you have been close to it could you give us i mean how do you see that happening when do you see that happen do you see it like something happening in one year two years five years personal guess you know i'm not i'm not big on speculation um as a given my background but um but i think you know we've we see that there are there are smaller countries um you know in the caribbean for example who have already who are not living and working on on this uh so i think that it's really going to depend a lot on um on the country right obviously china has their own their own process um that's that seems well ahead of everyone else's and maybe they're not dealing with some of the issues of that that um god has mentioned in terms of privacy and things that we that we value in some other parts of the world um so i think that um it's it's a little bit of a race and i do think that there will be uh it my guess is that there will be smaller smaller nations that um it's easier for them to to manage and to try and um and then some of the folks will will learn lessons from from how they roll it out um and the bahamas is because they needed it they didn't have this yeah so maybe these are the situations that will start like the small the small cases and then spread to the big ones it could be it could be and then heading this last minutes i think i don't think i don't know if we're going to have time for more questions it's for scott which is do you focus in a specific zkyp protocol i don't know how you say but that's very technical i think are you more focused on token balances like cash or aztec or more generalized snark circuits this is a very specific question yeah yeah you understand that so explain it to us i don't understand it um yeah so it's it's a question of how we uh what we use to develop the solution um at a protocol level um i can answer that by saying we we do work at a circuit level um so this isn't going to be interesting for everyone but um we work with uh with zinc which is a product by mata labs um and yeah for this question if you want to find out more you can also we've got a um a page up at the moment as well which is uh zkflow.io and so you can go there as well to find more details on that okay that you didn't want to borrow us then thank you very much scott you would not you would not have so i i don't know if you if you want to just um the this the the title of this is the future of finance the future of finance and digital assets and beyond i don't know if you want to wrap up like half minute and see how do you see the future of finance how how so what are the benefits or what are the the let's see the changes that you wish maybe or you wish or you see that are going to come um for finance in general i don't know who wants to start maybe alvaro scott and attendance maybe that older i don't know just to wrap it up and it's an exciting ecosystem data and finance i expect many changes in the next few years from decentralized finance and how they are gonna be integrated with the traditional finance as well and also i would like to to see finance uh going to scandal said to people who cannot have uh who don't have access to to finance today um and so that's what i would like to see what caused my attention is that you will see decentralized and traditional coming together not against each other but somehow i know i think that i think it's inevitable yes me too yeah we agree on that thank you scott what would you say finish yeah i think to keep it short for for me i think what what i'm really looking forward to seeing is the um the the new asset groups that we see that that come as a result of this so the the new kind of tokenized asset areas um that we might not have seen uh before and we might not have seen finance involved in before so um yeah that's what i that's what i'm really looking forward to seeing in the area finally i agree that with alvaro that i think that the blockchain and traditional systems i look forward to seeing them working seamlessly together and solving a lot of these issues that we've talked about in terms of inclusion in a way that um the blockchain is is for the for the really smart people who understand it and the solution is is easy for everybody to um to manage and and safe obviously well we are constructing you know after this i always get so satisfied of a new world a better world then you just put on the tv and hear the news and you just come back to reality unfortunately so hello victoria we are done you