Institutional Adoption: The Next Phase of DeFi - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

it's great to be here really happy to share a little bit more about what we're doing at Mantra and summer finance and how we see the next phase of D5 being institutional adoption um so first show of hands here who has been in the crypto space since the last Ico boom so not this last D5 summer that we just had but rather the 2017-2018-2019 area just raise your hand if you have been around only one person two people three people couple people okay not too many but for those who were around back then you probably remember the cry the institutions are coming the institutions are coming the institutions are coming just like my good friend here Paul Revere the crypto Chad um saying the institutions are coming back in the day um unfortunately uh this just didn't happen and there was a number of reasons why I think when we look forward to today uh you're starting to see this change and there's also a number of things that um from a Market's perspective have really changed to influence this uh change and and whatnot so um going forward the institutions are actually legitimately coming uh you see every other day a new headline in the news about an another big name financial institution uh coming into the space looking to adopt crypto looking to adopt D5 um and actually really putting some time effort and money and resources into this space um I just want to highlight a couple of these because I think they're extremely interesting to consider so Back in the Day 2019 area era everyone would have loved to have a big Bank invest in their Ico token right um obviously for a number of different reasons this never happened um but today there's actually banking institutions bulge bracket type banking institutions are looking to invest in tokens yes they are that's crazy so I'm just going to point here to nomura the Mora actually has recently launched a wholly owned digital asset subsidiary called laser digital which is actually meant to do actual on-chain defy activity it's meant to invest in tokens it's meant to have staking products it's meant to do all this type of stuff that honestly as a crypto founder or crypto project we always dreamed about what happened um if you look at Fidelity I mean this is a platform that has hundreds of thousands of customers who are now going to be holding Bitcoin and being able to access this on their traditional platform so things are really actually changing and again I'll show why um we just talk about the sheer amount of money and capital that's coming into the space it's honestly absurd uh whether it's from A Bank investment managers payments firms big Tech Etc uh all the big players around the world are investing into the space um one of the biggest investors in the space actually is is alphabet I believe they're probably the top in terms of capital deployed into crypto and blockchain projects I believe it's well over a billion dollars um off of alphabet's balance sheet that's been invested into this industry so this is only going to continue to change uh continue to increase and um Don is going to be very excited to see what the next step is going to look like particularly as they start being able to actually participate in on-chain defy activities um so I guess it was maybe taking a step back why you know when the crypto Chads back in 2019 were asking and saying you know the institutions are coming why didn't they I think there's a couple reasons why um you know back then the technological limitations were pretty significant uh if you looked at all the different projects that were launching back in 2019 area 2017-2018 era everyone was launching on ethereum there was no uh Cosmos ecosystem there was no Solana there was no there's no other layer one options or layer two options for people to even build upon and honestly there's a lot a lack of scalable uh and and other type of infrastructure options available for projects to actually utilize um if you look at you know even back into the summer of 2020 so what do we call the defy summer right when you had all the food projects raising money going crazy and pumping and rug pulls were ramping and all this kind of thing which is another impediment but I'll get there later um everything was launching on ethereum to the point where it actually became so impossible and and not even financially possible to use uh that you had to have other scalable options then came uh BNB chain then came polygon and other eth Killers so to speak um but also there was a significant lack of regulatory clarity um just like this guy's saying can't be regulated if there are no regulations right smart um but now there are now there have been whether it's in Singapore whether it's in Hong Kong or I'm based or in the US where we're offering and and uh creating regulated Financial products regulation is coming it is here um and it's here to stay in fact then additionally products didn't have Market fit so there wasn't the available uh you know either custodians or other type of financial hedging products that some of our other uh speakers have talked about that are actually allowing institutional players to actually participate because they just weren't comfortable with the technology as it is oh so I mentioned a little bit of these now that you have working L1 and L2 Solutions there's a number of different chains who are here presenting today um and and representing at this conference all these different D5 applications which I'm sure many of you use we're not around back then um the only Decks that really people were using were ether Delta idex or or or or something like that and honestly the experience has significantly improved although honestly it still has room for improvement um infrastructure side a lot of the exchanges were just popping up that was really the era of when everyone wanted to launch their own crypto exchange wallets have improved as well so we've really seen a really big increase in the amount of technological development that's occurred in just the past couple years as anyone who's working in crypto knows this industry moves at the speed of light um which never makes it a dull day working in the space but it also means that the technology is rapidly rapidly developing from a regulatory development perspective um you know we've pretty much been on the Forefront of this um we basically were issued a license by Fender back in 2019. um back then pretty much everyone didn't really believe we even had the license that was an interesting thing to go through but we've been working with the regulator hand in hand um and basically back then you know particularly in the United States people would just say hey there's no license we're just going to try to use existing uh licensing or brokerage firms to be able to offer different types of products but they didn't have any really specific Clarity from the from the US regular SEC about what you can and can't do are these token Securities or not you know are stablecoin securities to a certain degree and what type of applications can I be offering to U.S participants or even International participants and this says it had a big impact on how we've actually seen things have been changing in the past year or so The Regulators are here I was actually at a conference last year exactly a year ago almost where uh we were at mainnet in New York and it was the infamous situation where do Quan uh got subpoenaed by the SEC at the conference on the conference floor um that was pretty much a I mean I knew what the regulars were there but that was like oh The Regulators are here moment um because they're going to be subpoenaing you at the conference for for doing uh unlicensed regulated activities but even additionally now again you see you know things like Biden's executive order about crypto you know you're actually having presidents of the United States or even the FED chairman drone power even last week is talking about there needs to be more regulation for crypto so it is here at the highest level of Regulation and additionally products achieve Market fit I mean we've had a custodian to go before me so for example on 10 custodian you know they're aiming to serve institutional clientele they're creating products that are utilized by institutions and and other different types of players um and this is across the board whether it's you know derabit with options and and futures um fire blocks is another custodian all these different players have been able to create products that institutions need to be able to operate and feel like they are comfortable in operating uh within this space because you know utilizing a I mean it's good that keychain X who was right before me has the ability to recover your assets if you lose your your metamask keys or your wallet keys but an institution is not going to use a metamask right maybe they use metamask institutional that's the next step but uh again you need to have these enhancements in the products and the technology that actually institutions feel comfortable utilizing so now I'm going to talk a little bit about what are our Solutions and how are we even um you know kind of operating in this space um so from a technological implementations player regulatory Clarity side and the product Market fit side um so from the technological limitation side what is Mantra to Mantra um is a company that I co-founded with two other partners a couple years back um it's basically meant to be at that time a defy Dao which created staking lending borrowing and uh node service business and it was meant to be a launched as a multi-chain product platform this is again in the summer of 2020 so you know a lot has changed since then we're initially meant to be launching solely on polka dot but we've also additionally launched on evm compatible chains ethereum BNB chain polygon we're building on hedera we're building the cosmos ecosystem we built on Solana so this multi-chain ecosystem has really developed during that time and it allows you to operate and create different types of products across all these very uh uh high quality uh chains and protocols you can actually Target different users and and markets from um from a lack of regulatory Clarity side we have a solution which is called soma Finance so shout out to some of our summer Finance supporters from the audience right in the front row who just came up here um someone Finance is essentially a joint venture between Mantra and a US broker dealer out of the United States called tritorian Capital so essentially Mantra is the tech Builder the tech provider that's creating compliant D5 products servicing the US market and tritorian capital is a regulated broker-dealer entity that has very special Licensing in the United States so what does that all mean let me unpack that a little bit so effectively with the licensing from the broker dealer we can offer both institutional and Retail Market participants any different type of private placement digital security whether it's in from a reg D which is accredited investors only all the way down to regulation CF regulation crowdfunding and everything in between what this allows us to do is essentially create compliant D5 products that you can offer to retail users and you can create it in a way that you're going to have to you're going to be able to avoid any sort of compliance issues and you can actually kind of sleep well at night if you're going to be issuing tokens selling them directly to us retail customers we're building a launch pad we have a DEX where you can actually tokenize equities publicly traded equities trade them in a defy environment again they're all one-to-one redeemable and backed so for example if you have a Tesla share shout out to Elon if you have a Tesla share that you want to tokenize you can bring it to us we hold it in an Omnibus brokerage account in custody with someone like a Merrill Lynch from Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs uh that would be one-to-one tokenized on our platform those assets could then be staked they could be yield farmed they could be leveraged traded they can do all these different things that you're used to in a defy environment but for example if Tesla pays a dividend you would be entitled to that dividend you would be entitled to those voting rights so you don't actually give up the real world benefits of those underlying assets but you maintain all the flexibility and the functionality of bringing it into a tokenized world and then finally on the Mantra side because it's the other uh part of the business we have a couple different core products whether it's staking in our nodes business Mantra chain which is actually a cosmos L1 we're going to be launching in the beginning of next year it's going to be a permissionless infrastructure that supports permissioned applications such like Soma Finance um and and and and the like uh Mantra Finance is the Soma Finance sister which is done internationally uh we're going to be getting licensed in Dubai from varro so we're going to get our provisional license in the next week or so I'm actually flying out there on Sunday to go visit with him as well and then of course we have the Dow which is what we launched with uh several years back um so I don't really want to talk too too much more about uh what we do we have a booth uh over in the main hall if you want to find out more information go check us out over there or you can scan any of these QR codes for any of these specific products that you're interested in um I think that's all my time for today so thank you so much for your time and attention and I hope to talk to you guys at the booth later on