Jay Rae, Silvio Ventre, Lorenzo Amoroso, Vugar Usi Zade - Redefining DeFi

Jay Raid, account director at hype, guides defy and web3 project through branding, community building and token launch strategy. Then we have Sylvia Ventre, head of innovation at Auroro Immobilary Asset Management, SGR and startup mentor at Startup Geek. Lorenza Morzo is the head of operation at Herklay Herkl, a crypto trading scale up operations such as broker dealer and OTC desk. Then again, Vugar, uh, COO, operating officer at BitGet, scaling the exchange to 120 million people. Guys, Jay is the moderator.

He has the power. Enjoy it. The stage is yours.

Thank you so much for the warm welcome there, Gadencio. And GM, everybody, hope you're having a great day. Hopefully, we can finish this uh this session off with a big one before we go out and enjoy our evenings. But yeah, we've got some OGs on stage. Uh, interestingly enough, I know there was a small intro there, but I'd really like it just to go around just a quick couple lines about your role and what you're currently doing.

That's all right.

Yeah, just quick intro.

Yeah, that's fine. As as Yon said before, uh, we are not liquidity provider. Uh, so basically we're B2B business in in execution specialized especially in forex stuff like uh stable to to fiat settlement. And so I mean we can manage it through accessing lots of trading trading venue like from defi to checks and aggregators and yeah that's that's basically what what we do. We are men in the middle between uh I mean institutional and and all the trading banks.

Thank you Lorenzo. And then if you want to jump in and vugor actually used to work we used to work together at B crypto. Exactly. I think like being crypto the trampoline and the same is applies for bit and hello for the Jacob.

Hello Jacob.

Bitchket is a truly web three company literally and virtually serving everyone depending on a need as a centralized exchange. We're the second largest serving probably 120 million users moving 20 billion dollar every day which puts us by the market cap around third or fourth largest exchange digital asset marketplace and on decentralized front with BitKit wallet we serve another 80 million users we move 12 uh billion dollars again every day we are the most cloud decentralized wallet surpassing both MetaMask and Trust Wallet serving half a million users listing half a million project and serving uh another 80 million users there. Totally we are a true army of crypto lovers and I always say in this kind of an events in this kind of events I think bitket doesn't need an introduction because almost everyone has bitket either exchange or wallet one way or another.

Thank you and silia.

So uh first of all thank you so much for having me here again also this year. Uh let me spend some few words about uh my uh my employees uh my employers. Uh a mobile asset manager asset man asset management is an asset management in Italy. Uh we basically invest fund invest money we create funds investment funds. So traditional finance we are an institutional uh traditional finance.

Uh we are part of creditano group. Credit group you may know is one of the largest bank in Italy. Uh we are exploring a lot of trends here in the blockchain space in general. We did some experimentation during decentralized finance and also real world asset tokenization. Um there's a lot to learn.

Uh there's a lot to do for sure. uh and I happy I'm happy here to to be here to expose my point of view about the technology itself and also talk about the centralized finance opportunities and and so on. Thank you so much. And just on a final note, my name is Jay uh account director at hype partners. So we support uh we do the go to market for tes.

So we support token generation events. If anybody is launching a token or launching a product uh come and speak to me after. So you know what's interesting is we have some industry players from all over the space and I think it's really important that we talk about DeFi because it's something that's really at the core of what we do in this space which is essentially creating financial freedom for us all as individuals. So what are what are what a better way to start out than tell you uh about the cipher punks manifesto. Now who in the audience knows about cippher punks?

Nobody knows about cippher punks. Oh there we go. Gadencio. Thank you. Right.

So just imagine in 1992 um some players like Eric Hayes, you have Hal Finny, you have Adam Back, some of the original cryptographers of the world were developing a movement called cipher punks. They were all coders, but they had one true message. Let me set the scene for you guys. So long before Facebook, long before the great firewalls of China, long before Snowden revelations, the cipher punks saw it coming. They foretold of a reg regime of online censorship and surveillance that would eclipse not only the internet but according to there was one tool to ensure internet's freedom and that was cryptography.

And if we look at the way cryptography and blockchain is supporting the decentralized financial market as we see it today we can see that this movement has been going on since the '9s. So I want to jump first of all straight into you guys uh and ask you a very sort of personal question. Um how did you find DeFi and what drew you to the the industry itself? when you found it.

Uh yeah, I mean um we found it in some some some years ago. Uh I am back in university days when I was like young and you start trying stuff uh and uh losing money because it's it's part of of of the game uh to to to better understand how everything is works and uh I mean big steps are are are coming from from the the past days to to now. I think now the the environment is really really more um I would say don't want to say institutional because it's not institutional but I want to say more standardized for some point of view. So right now the problem shift from infrastructure to I mean more uh UX experience more services what we can what we can build and what we can like reach uh what we have already with the thread file. So it's more like how we can reach everything and like shift some of uh I mean traditional finance to the to the new one.

So that's uh that's basically what what I think about that.

Thank you. For me, the future is truly decentralized. But the same way when you deep dive into a water, if you hit the bottom, you can just push yourself up. And I think we are in that period where we started with an idea of peer-to-peer, right? Uh the Satoshi and the white paper and idea was truly true peer-to-peer, cut all the middleman.

Now we are in the era where institutions come in and we see the hyper centralization. But once this hyper centralization and institutions come in and legislations put the frameworks in place, I think we will be once again seeing how fast we become decentralized because it is the only possible way to challenge the current financial system unless we bring in institutions. They still apply the same strategy. Now we all take advantage of technology but the end user doesn't feel that effect in them. If this happens definitely it means we are just putting the traditional finance to of my colleagues on chain making it fast but then institutions scoop the money scoop the profits.

It's great for a shareholder value but end user doesn't get anything. as users, especially if we talk retail, definitely decentralization is the only way that we have to reach in order to make sure that we all have our financial freedom, financial uh ideology because you remember we always were pitching this your seat phrase, your wallet, not your seat phrase, your not wallet. But imagine your seat phrase. Yes, all your wallet. But for every transaction you have to go to centralized place.

Then it means it's still not yours. Right? Someone else decides whether you can come and sell it there or not. In order to eliminate this one way or another, we will need the centralization. We are just yet to see how it's going.

And I believe the speed of the centralization we see now will fast track us to the era where we see this similar high speeded decentralization that will propel the user on boarding to a decentralized site actually the centralization it's u we um let's say we came up into different way uh on the concept of decentralization from a personal perspective I came I came up with uh decentralization just because I'm I'm a tech guy uh behind the financial institutional role. Uh I was really curious about the um the exchanging the way uh you can exchange money, you can exchange value uh in a decentralized way. Instead from a professional uh perspective we uh we seen an opportunity uh in order to uh change the the actual actual model business model uh just because you can create with the centralization and with blockchain in general different uh business models different use cases uh even considering the traditional assets uh that we have that are the main assets assets in the world in general. So I totally agree with the the colleagues here. Uh decentralization it's kind of an opportunity in particular for the financial institutions institutions in Italy all over the world in general.

Uh but it's um a trend a trend to observe at the moment but it's quite slow uh from my perspective from a business perspective uh from a financial institutional uh just because the the main assets are still traditional assets uh are still classical equities bonds multiasset funds funds of funds and so So um we we started for example with with an automated market maker. We came up also um thanks to universities in Italy. We did some projects uh in like two years ago, two or three years ago uh with all the institutional um major components of the Italian sector and we uh built an automated market maker for institutional in a decentralized way. It was really interesting to it. Uh but it was just an experimentation just because we we didn't have real assets in order to develop some businesses.

Thank you. And you know what? I'm I'm hearing a recurring theme here is that it's almost the balance the balance of DeFi. Hello. Oh yeah.

Okay. We'll just just wait one minute while we uh we get going. Yes.

Can you Oh,

hello. Wow. Wow. My voice is really loud. Oh my god.

Okay. So, the recurring theme that that I'm hearing here is I'm gonna have to Is that not a bit loud? Okay. So the recurring theme that I'm hearing is the institutional side of the space kind of encroaching on what Deepi really stands for. And this segus perfectly into another question I have, which was how centralized is DeFi becoming?

Because when you really think about it on an infrastructure side, when it comes to storing on centralized cloud servers, leveraging centralized LLMs, how what direction does that take us? Where do we end up from here? because the whole movement started as uh a way to defend our privacy and security. Um and I and what I do feel is what I refer to as the centralization of the sacred chain. We're moving very very quickly because money moves markets.

So the more institutional players we bring into the space, the more that they can manipulate those markets. And I worry that that pushes retail investors out of the space further. So my question before I blab on too much is how uh do you think institutional players are going to change and mold the space um and whether that will be benefit us in the long run or whether it's actually going to hinder us as as little guys in the space.

Can I start? Should I start?

Yeah. Um I think it's uh a long journey to to institution to come I mean to to be a part of of the I mean defy uh side uh it's going to go step uh right now we have some institution that already invests in crypto or do some services mainly related to custodies and to organization um so uh I mean we are not even even there in my opinion uh but we are coming coming to step I think that bring institutions in the defy side is going to meaning like uh exploding the overall infrastructure since I think this it's not even ready to to take those amount of money we are talking about trillions and trillions if we talk about payments uh world or uh I mean capital markets world if you want to take it in in a decentralized way and uh like shift everything into the centralized world I think We are not we are not ready right now but um we are going through them. We have uh some I would say maturity uh problem regarding infrastructure regarding risk management compliance stuff all all the stuff that institution like need. So um it's going to change everything uh I think and it's going to also change the the way in which we see the fire as for now. I think institutional defy is going to be little different from what we have right now.

But uh we are going through those steps.

Let's put things into perspective. Uh I think it's yeah let's put things into perspective. Uh for example at Bitkate we take a huge pride that we move 20 billion dollars every day which makes us third largest exchange in terms of volume. While city bank or HSBC that banks government does this in a single transaction for a single government in a single day you have to understand how far this scale or scalability is same applies for another experience like get is seven years old first five and a half years we didn't have any institutional offering year and a half ago we start doing institutional offering today 80% of all the action in our spot market happens by the institutions. Institutions mean a huge volume a huge market cap but also access to scalability and very sudden scalability.

Therefore institutions and institutional great solution are very important whether we like it or not. And if today I don't know last two and a half year three years centralized exchanges start introducing market making and all the other traditional financial aspects and today market making is very fragmented while the largest market maker in US every day does around $400 billion worth trades. While it is more than entire crypto together and it's just a single market maker in the traditional uh aspect in in this sense that we start celebrating since the ETF the institutions coming in today we have to kind of understand how we survive without letting them eat us up because at this point it's not only crypto institutions that are emerging this is actually traditional institution that institutions that start adopting think this black rocks it is fidelities it is family offices and everyone like I have this sudden jump I don't know some hedging bitcoin some doing something else some scooping the market I know even there are some institutions that doing pump and dump meme tokens anything and everything is in that spectrum because traditionally the finance industry nevertheless they were always strict regulated there always were open to speculation making money and if there's a money there will be some crazy guy who wants and go do it and get it. When we match all this energy with the decentralization, first of all, achieving full decentralization is very hard for two key aspect. Aspect number one is you will always need someone to run the infrastructure and to make sure this shop runs.

The same way even traditionally today we are in a chapel. Traditionally even religious institutions, they always had someone to run that institution because first of all it makes money when someone runs it. Second of all, it's very hard to rely on communal where good or community to come do something else. Therefore, you can't never have like a fully autonomous decentralized world unless I don't know AI agents develop and then you have an decentralized world run by AI. This is one scenario.

And second key point uh that the centralization always runs on this like a smart contract kind of fulfilling each other. But we always forget a key important point that Yes, goods have certain value, right? Today we all know that Bitcoin is above 120. But not always you have at the same time two parties willing one to sell and another to buy. That's why all the markets makers come in and that's why even if you will have a full decentralized platform, there will be a lot of centralized factors and institutions who come and play in.

If you top it with all these micro strategy and big whales that scoop Bitcoin and we are now seeing that how much influence they have in Bitcoin's price and everything else going on. Even though if you can have this autonomously running infrastructure once someone gains a significant portion they dominate the narrative and they dominate everything else coming in place. to wrap or like to sum up my whole idea is that even though in theory fully decentralization is possible I don't think it is achievable in that naive sense unless like everyone in this room holds the same portion of voting right and same portion of the allocation which mathematically not possible then you will always have someone even though system is decentralized someone with a dominating voice and simple example to this would be Yes, Bitcoin is autonomously running system. But today you have Micro Strategy who buys a lot of tokens and nothing will stop them if they come and tell that we're going to sell 20% of allocation. Panic sell will happen, price will go down and they will go just buying more and no one can stop them doing this kind of a manipulation.

And we saw how President Trump and his allies did it before with both stock market and the crypto market. Therefore, even though the system is decentralized, centralized powers have more control over the narrative and processes than just system autonomously running itself. And when we talk about the centralization, we should always think about not only how system runs itself autonomously, but is it truly decentralized or there is still a higher power that can shift the paradigm or shift the next step. actually uh

we can we can we can move forward. Um yes so by no means do you all need to answer every question because the second part of the questions are the exciting part that we're coming to some of the different products that are available in the space for example uh for retail investors and so on. But what I'm what I want to jump into before we do that is just this ecosystem where these protocols are available for people. Now we do have the Ethereum EVM uh Ethereum virtual machine to thank for many of that the ecosystem of decentralized apps that allow us in in many ways to um access the internet in different ways. So something Vitalic has said along um and even Gavin Wood himself, Ethereum is essentially the new internet and when you combine that with the fact that we're in web 3.

0 right now, we're also in the fifth generation of blockchain. And what I wanted to ask you guys before we move into some of the products that are available is how important are these sort of layer three protocols, these user interfaces uh in in driving adoption in the space and onboarding new users. Um and then once we've done that we will we will jump into some of those products. So Silvo do you want to start first? Actually user interface and user experience uh for almost all the products in in in the market in every market uh is the the key point of success of an application at the moment.

Defy is completely difficult to use for a norm normal use uh for a normal person let's say uh for an everyday use daily use um UI and UX uh could be one of the key point uh that uh all the providers uh can use uh in order to enhance uh the capabil and make people understand what are what can they do with the decentralized infrastructure. But I want to add also some other aspect. I mean sometimes there's um like um uh separation between uh something that it it is institutional as something that is decentralized. At the end of the day, if you want to use something, an application to exchange value, you are going to use a sort of institutional platform. I mean, you are going to use a platform and behind there is an infrastructure.

at the very end of the journey uh every kind of uh institution could could adopt maybe because it's um I don't know uh they can uh perform better or they can uh use in a better way data infrastructure and and so on. Uh every platform could be powered by an infrastructure and the centralized infrastructure. At the moment there is a separation between the two trends, the two topics and that's the the pain point I would say of the industry. Uh so UI could be one point. The second one is that uh actually the centralization it's an infrastructure.

is like a feature of an infrastructure that can could be run by an an institution like BP like mine. I mean in my case it's quite difficult uh because we are not a web3 company we are not an institutional company um how to say uh we try to be innovators in our sector but in a um not in a strong way let's say so we we explore a lot of uh things in the market uh talking about blockchain and so on uh but at the end every kind of institution like mine uh should adopt uh decentralization decentralization as an infrastructure not as a product and that's the the key point and uh UI is ex extremely related to the company that is going to run the decentralization behind their infrastructure their products and so on. Of course AI could help a lot uh in that. I like I like the way you put that there and I think I was reading something last week, but if you don't capture someone's attention in seven seconds, if they're using a new app, then they will never visit that app again. So, it's so important some of the product designers out there, some of the people that build and and develop, refine user interfaces and dashboards, their job is so important and so key in the space.

Now, because we're running a little bit low in time, I wanted to jump into some of the nuts and the bolts of DeFi. So who in the audience uses uh D5 protocols uh for example yield bearing mechanisms, liquidity pools? Anybody in the audience currently leveraging those kind of D5 products? Oh, there we go. Go.

Yes. So what I wanted to say and I know all of you work in an industry where we leverage those personally. We also work with those for example OTC deals that you're doing. We're going to come to that after this question. But my question is those types of DeFi products, how easily accessible are they for everyday retail investors?

And do you think that there's a bit of a walled garden around the kind of staking mechanisms and yield bearing mechanisms that institutional players are leveraging compared to consumer investors?

Yeah, I I I can go with with that. Um yeah, let let's let's say that uh as you said for now it's more on on a retail side and u I mean on on the on what Sylvio said on the on the UX uh you can have uh even the best product built on back end no down time not perfect but if you don't give to user a good user experience uh you can you can't reach uh I mean majority of people and you for sure can't reach like institutional stuff. Um in in the OTC in the OTC side, we see lots of institution that right now uh want to start doing uh doing something but they want to do in a safe environment and uh yeah even if the FI is is growing from an infrastructure point of view uh they have some lacks uh the have some lacks uh in uh especially on on the on the risk on the risk side the risk management and and institution especially financial institutions cannot deal with the with this risk. So that's why you need you need company in the middle that that can help in uh I mean in in assessing this word. So uh I I I would love to call it like defy enables for defy neighbors for thready actors let's say like this uh you cannot go directly through uh yielding uh protocol and stuff uh if you have if you are a bank uh I mean compliance will kill you uh but you can rely on some actors that can facilitate facilitate the accessing on the on those type of uh of product that I mean are are really good product if we talk about even coralization of loan or uh yielding or something.

It's like you you can think about there are thread five products that that are really similar to yield you to stake yielding stuff. No, I mean um so it's just a shift of um of of risk and and of compliance. So uh as for now you for sure need need actors that facilitate this uh this for financial institution. Honestly, I think the question is little bit uh needs to be reformulation. For example, one thing is decentralization is very fragmented.

For example, today we don't say that oh as a retail user I use stripe but probably 60% 70% of every time I do any online check out and I buy something stripe is what processes that payment. The same way uh we don't go and tell that I use XA ATM network right you go just put your card take your cash and go on with your life what we are missing at this point in decentralization is that gluing element where the centralization becomes a solution becomes a platform and then there are service providers and on the forefront we don't see and we don't feel that fragmentation but today if you want to decentrally stake something, loan something, you have to go to different providers. what we did in Bitkate that actually helped us to grow especially with Bitket wallet where today Bitket wallet I always say it is not just a wallet it's kind of a hybrid wallet similar to an exchange because you can go through DAPs you can go buy and have an access so many decentralized exchanges you can buy you can sell you can take advantage of staking you can get your air drops in the single user experience in the single user interface as a user you don't have to go to 20 places to do one coherent action. Instead, you just command that provider that acts as a glue and then on the back end that provider goes and does all these actions on your behalf on these decentralized platforms. Once we overcome that fragmentation, life will become much easier because as a user you don't have to it's very complicated to on board to any even like a taxes it's very complicated you use any of these staking platforms terms and conditions how things work or you have to invest a lot of time to understand consensus mechanism depends what is it is and as a retail user probably you don't have a time the same way you never read terms and conditions of Facebook when you sign up or any other platform and in my opinion we are need in a huge need in this hybrid model where we will have either like a centralized platforms or any kind sort of a service provider can glue all the decentralized products together and as a user I don't have to go to 20 doors to open you know one place rather than just having everything in single place and I think if we do that we will be able to solve both institutional side of the things and retail side of the things

I've got the um selective god my voice is loud my my aology Apologies, guys. Yes. So, I've got a question for you now, um, Silio, um, especially regarding what your organization does with the OTC side of things. So, what role does OTC trading play in bridging DeFi liquidity with institutional demand? And do you think that there's any friction points in terms of those OTC desks um, compared to the sort of traditional financial markets uh, in the DeFi sense?

Well uh so uh the question is about how traditional finances uh get an influence.

Exactly. Okay. Uh if I uh if I could answer with a number uh today is uh more or less zero just because um just talking well about numbers um the total investment funds financial sector is about 128 trillions of dollars and the total value locked in the decentralized finance sector in general is about 100 billion. So it's a lot but it's that 0.11% of the sector and um if um I mean so that's uh that's just to say that uh the centralization all the terms the facts related to the blockchain industry uh from a financial perspective because when we are talking about the centralized finance we are talking about finance and finance is still finance.

All the money in the world are actually all uh in financial institutional uh financial institutions like mine like the major ones like Black Rockck, Fidelity and uh the other uh hundreds and hundreds financial institutions. So basically at the moment the influence is more or less zero. If we uh look at the numbers uh of the total value locked that uh is inside the the centralization the centralization focus the um so basically I would say we are at the beginning of the trend. So it's interesting to observe the trend but we need at least 10 years in my opinion in order to um have a real shift and the real shift will happen when uh we started as an institution uh to tokenize the real world assets and in particular funds just because all the money is on funds funds of funds sec which is Luxembourg funs uh since um the moment we will not have uh this kind of infrastructure, we cannot extract the real value from the centralization as an infrastructure. So yeah, basically I would say zero.

Yeah. And you know what's interesting, we do have some I know you want to talk about this a little bit, Lorenzo, so please jump in. Yeah,

just just to jump in uh on on the OTC desk desk side and uh to to add a little point can can foster the the discussion here. Uh I think that OTC desk uh can bridge the gap that right now is one of the major gap of of defy which is liquidity fragmentation. We have liquidity fragmented through really different protocols and different I will say DX checks and and similar. Um so what what OTC desk can do in order to help a special institution to to I mean to enter in in this world is trying to aggregate liquidity. There are there are some protocol that that are start using it using it also int based protocol like co swap and stuff but I mean you need actors that can rely on multiple venue and can try to bridge and I must say aggregate all the liquidity because otherwise it's going to be difficult to I mean um have those type of of institution if you think about a fund that wants to like exchange 50 million I mean even between like uh liquidity token but I mean it's difficult to make it in uh in the defy today you you can do as a retail you can do small amounts it's good and uh lots of circulating tokens but the other side if you want to make big deal with big sites it's uh it's difficult so that's why you need actor in the middle and that can aggregate liquidity so that's basically

a very specific question to end with um and And I suppose as the DeFi markets are always constantly changing um you know as they say we're in the trenches. I think we're actually in the jungle because we never leave. Trenches implies you leave. But AI is now um a huge huge industry that's that's um even setting DeFi at lightning speed. Now technology in emerging markets has always been pushing us and driving us forwards at lightning speed but AI is now driving that even faster.

And what do you think um AI uh the AI space will bring to blockchain um and specifically to DeFi um and how is that going to change the markets over the coming years um for you Sylvio first and then I wanted to ask you Bugar how that's how Bitget is is staying ahead of the curve and the competition by leveraging AI itself but Silio if you want to

thanks for the question uh actually we we talked about this aspect also during this morning uh during a workshop for um AI about AI uh actually AI in this um business could um could have a crucial role just because uh AI it's easy to understand even though behind AI there are a lot of neural networks engineering stuff very difficult to understand very technical but artificial intelligence is uh easier to understand instead of blockchain or decentralized finance and so on. So uh in my opinion AI could um transform or um play a role for the user interface and user experience uh in front of the infrastructure behind. So at the moment uh as I was said as I was saying before the centralization is still so much technical. So it's not for everyone. Uh, of course when we are talking about finance, we are talk about everyone in in the world.

But uh when the platform that people uh have to use in order to perform transaction or uh create wealth for example if it's so much technical they will not going to use it. So um thanks to All the AI wave that we are living here uh in this peri in this period uh could help um uh of course infrastructures companies uh like BitGet or like also the real infrastructure like Uniswap for example to create better interfaces with a easy to understand user experience in order to make people uh easy at least that the part of using an application then uh AI could play also another role um into the educational aspect because we have a problem with uh financial education in general uh so in particular in Italy but I mean the trend is worldwide uh people uh doesn't know a lot of um concepts a lot of information doesn't have information about how to manage their money and that's the second problem maybe with AI you can on board people in a different way you can make people understand how they can manage money in a different way using a different infrastructure but um avoiding saying something so much technical So in my opinion AI could simplify the explanation uh of the usage of the educational aspect uh behind the decentralization behind money behind finance. So it's uh very broad aspect but in my opinion AI could help a lot uh to reduce the time to market the real time to market of the decentralization uh worldwide and also in Italy. I would say for us we are at the forefront of AI adoption as an company. I think we are the most AI empowered exchange.

We were the first one to apply AI to fight scams and deep fakes and that's why we never had any serious tech breach. We are the first one to introduce AI trading bots that can actually handle trades for you. Today we introduce get agent. It's your AI agent that can analyze your portfolio, do suggestions and many other things. AI is definitely something huge and it is a leap forward in technology.

But there's one key point that we all are still missing. Whether you are trading, whether you are prompting Chhatri to write better emails for you, AI is very expensive to run. And for now, we haven't paid the gas fee. In crypto, whatever you do, you already pay for that transaction. But AI got more investment over the time than entire crypto industry.

and users haven't actually paid for that service to run whether it's running a node electricity cost and anything else once we start paying AI will become we'll be super dependent on AI and AI will be so so expensive we will be all kind of a living on a rent and paying rent kind of a money we have to understand AI is cool AI is amazing but energy fee and running that note and infrastructure fee is very high and I always give this example that people ask me like talk can we reach in a state where AI will be doing all the trade we just give AI $100,000 they make millions over the time I say yes probably AI will be able to do that but running cost of AI might be much higher than that profit which will eventually make a zero sum game and at the end you will be in a minus paying for that running nodes and uh GPU prices and electricity and that's why I believe even For the future, trading will be the only job that humans can still outperform the AI because we are emotional. We have a better understanding and let's not forget key point that AI is trained to do a task. As humans, we have the liberty choose not to do something. AI if made to trade, it will continuously trade because it only can trade. AI can't not trade.

As a humans, we even if we are traders, we can choose a day not to trade because we are not here programmed to trade all the day in any market circumstance because AI will always try to make the most profit in any situation where humans we do emotional decisions and at the end of the day having AI is good but factoring a cost of an AI is very important that in my opinion we are missing a lot today and once we factor in that cost it will become a very cool debate to discuss whether it is expensive to develop something like blockchain technology or is the whole investment to the AI is worse but at this point I believe because governments are involved and politics are involved and it's becoming like kind of a tech warfare we see all the governments pouring a lot of money a lot of money to be ahead of the other government and societies being ahead of other societies but the impact will be devastating once we start paying for it because we are the end user at at the end of the day Right. Right. Well, you know what? We may have a couple minutes for questions, but before we do that, I just wanted to say a big thank you to our speakers because we really have covered quite a huge area space. And I think something I wanted to follow up on what you said, Silio, is that there's so many there's so many opportunities without crypto without being so right.

So AI and AI toolit and the final question that I have is what means to me to me is self sovereignty sovereignty so sovereignty he means is that essentially you can be your own bank. You don't have to pay taxes the way you're paying them currently. You can travel freely. You can create financial freedom and run yourself as a business and then in turn run yourself as a bank. So I wanted to ask you all what does DeFi mean to you?

Um maybe a little bit of alpha to let people go away today and then we'll open up for one question from the audience. So yeah, what does what does DeFi mean to you? really wide question here. Uh but but I mean I mean as you said uh I see uh real innovation there and what what I mean what does it mean? Um it's yeah but I mean in in in a much more I would say uh if I have to to say couple of words on that is like accessibility transparency.

So it's like changing the way you you always see stuff especially on the on the I mean financial point of view. You also talk about uh sovereign identity. So I mean not your keys not not your bitcoin is same or not your data. I mean it's it's it's really it's really similar. So uh you

you have lots of so you have lots of point to grow and and do better. But on the other side I mean you there is space you have already covered part but you have space too. Just building on that idea and idea of an AI before just it came to my mind because AI can build you a website can earn you money but what AI can't do is open a bank account but with defi AI can open a wallet and start earning money and I think with D5 we will see more rich AIs than humans and that will be a very interesting topic to discuss. We better start taxing AI.

Let me say that's the I hate I hate this kind of question because it's it's really difficult to find the perfect words keywords. Uh I don't have keywords actually. Uh it depends by the point of views in my opinion. So if you look defy uh from uh for example your point of view, yes self-s sovereign uh or um accessibility, transparency uh fair enough, but from a business perspective uh I remain to the concept uh about infrastructure. I see an infrastructure that can enable new business models.

Maybe not now but in the future could be for sure the new infrastructure in order to create new typologies of funds or something like that. Uh so I would say as a keyword business uh because we are talking about finance and about finance we are talking about money. Uh with money we we can do a lot of stuff. Uh as humans, as investors, as professional and and so on as as people.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for your answers. And I just a little a little point to go away with now is that during um these iterations of technology that we have, for example, we're in the fifth generation of blockchain. Um but we're in the third generation of the internet.

Uh we're actually not in the third generation of the internet anymore. And we're in web 4.0 currently. Um, and the reason why we're in web we're in web 4 now uh I believe probably for the last six months is that web 4 is all about leveraging augmented and virtual reality uh utilizing AI with blockchain and the internet. So if you look at the way that the ecosystem of decentralized apps operates currently as in its existing form it we've actually already involved into the next iteration of the web.

So we're in web 4.0. Uh the world is just not telling you that yet. So we we're going to be hearing a lot more about web 4.0 0 over these coming years because Agentic AI is essentially building that and what Agentic AI means is it means that the AI is operating on your behalf.

So AI in its existing format is changing. So we're actually in the fourth generation of uh AI now which is agentic AI and that's something to watch out for because that's when AI can then like you said set up wallets, trade for you, make decisions for you and to watch this next era of AI evolve is really going to be something special and maybe a little bit scary as well. But we'll we'll see where it goes. So, uh, first of all, does anybody have a question for our esteemed speakers? I know somebody here must have a question.

It could be around DeFi. It could be around AI. Oh, of course he does. Of course he does.

Okay. All right. I I have a question. Let talking about AI. Um, they will be able to replicate themselves to the they will be able to deploy smart contracts and and grow like a swarm.

What do you think about this oblivion question? an oblivion uh vision.

I Yeah, I mean I think it's possible but

uh when I was kid my dad first time bought this a copy machine and there's a good very good experiment if you just put a white paper and make a copy of white paper then make a copy of a paper copy of a paper and it becomes completely black at the end. It means when you copy something over and over again it loses its value and I think that will happen with AI. If AI doesn't learn from humans or other sources and become generic then they will be just doing the same thing over and over again and it will become zero sum game because if we all go do the same trade if we all open sell then price goes to the down because no one is buying and the same will happen with AI. I think that is the danger and that's why we will need more human generated knowledge to train more agents on AI because a AI also can't be trained on a AI generated information and today we are very much polluting the entire ecosystem with all the synthetic knowledge because AI makes a lot of fake facts and if you learn on that fake facts then you just become nonsense.

So do we have any more questions? Oh yes, admin. Let's go.

With AI taking over the world slowly, do you think we're potentially creating cryptocurrencies for AIs to use more than humans actually using it themselves? Like as potentially currencies for them to interact and transact with themselves. He um his question was, "Do you think that AI is developing cryptocurrencies specifically for their ecosystems, for their blockchains that they're leveraging?" That's a good question, Edmond. I actually don't know the answer to that.

Uh yeah. Um I think that's even possible with the with smart guidelines and and stuff. I mean, the the um at the end of the day is how to use it. So um if if you can use very well and with control you can do basically anything right now with the with the we already see good really good strategy on trading uh stuff so I mean why not

right thank you so much unless there's any other questions we are going to call it a massive round of applause for our speakers today guys thank you and a huge Huge round of applause to the whole team, the coordinators. Look at that.