Have We Finished Building the Bridge

Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to this discussion on have we finished building the bridge. We're looking at the how blockchain has reshaped the financial ecosystem and how we're going to build value and trust with this technology. But we're in a situation where traditional finance, traditional finance rail and DT finance rails are not connected. They create bridges and there is a lot of discussion as to how they should be connected.

But a lot of that is quite theoretical and what we want to focus on is the reality. What do we need to do to actually bring value to consumers, businesses and end users as we link these two ecosystems? Um, Adrian, I'll come to you. Please share us some thoughts.

Sure. First of all, what's up Abu Dhabi? How you all doing today? Looking good. Lots of energy.

Thank you guys for making it to the last panel of the day. The best panel. They always save the best for last. The answer to your question, I I have two answers. So, from where I sit, uh, from Matron's perspective, we already have stable coin.

I think we've been listening to people talk about stablecoin. We've been talking about uh we've been talking about DeFi. We've been talking about RWAs. That that ecosystem exists for Tron. We've got more than 50% of USDT transactions are are on our blockchain.

And that's not an accident. That is because uh of deliberate intentional placement of of of what the Tron blockchain is in comparison to other blockchains. every [clears throat] blockchain is going to have its own kind of niche and and they're going to specialize. It's going to be security, it's going to be speed, it's going to be cost, right? So, Tron has has kind of put their stake in the ground like we are the stable coin uh blockchain of choice.

The other part of it is going to be um I think the regulatory clarity which we've made we've talked about it today as well. We've done tremendous work from stable coin perspective on the Genius Act, but there's still a lot more to do. Clarity is coming down the pipe and people are working very very hard in the US. I mean the government is back open, schools back in session and people are working very hard on clarity as we speak. So those are the kind of the two things I think that need to happen.

The bridge has been built. You know, convince me if I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong, but the bridge has been built, but we need to get more traffic going across that bridge and we need to kind of fortress those structures.

Okay. Well, demo, do you think the bridge has been built? I think there's a lot of bridges that are built. I think uh we we have a tendency in our space to get uh over over uh zealous on decentralization and I think there's benefits of decentralization but there are also some key benefits of centralized networks as well and I think somewhere in the middle is the right answer. I think um just like you're traveling here today, you cross a bridge, at least I'm on the other side where my hotel is.

It could take you 3 minutes or it could take you 40 like it did for me yesterday. Uh and when we're bridging all these decentralized islands together where they want to kind of play, you're vulnerable. Uh heavy traffic, heavy expenses, single points of failure. So there's got to be a better way from a from a from an infrastructure perspective and a security perspective to eliminate those those those threats. So I think that's some of the challenges that we have and hopefully the regulatory clarity will will isolate that but really some interoperability of connecting these these disparit islands together in a much more systematic way and eliminating the single point of failure I think are going to be critical to our success because I know a lot of my customers and they don't care what what chain their stable coin is on for the most part they just want the stable coin and they don't need to know what chain it's on and we need to make that seamless Thank you.

So Omar, I mean there seems to be a question mark as to actually how robust these bridges are if we actually have them. So what's your view?

Sure. Also earlier when we were talking it was uh it's about what are you bridging? So yes, bridging tokens takes a really long time and it's you're literally trying to move physically one token from another chain to another chain. But what you're actually trying to bridge and I feel like that's where it becomes important is asurances. So you want verifiable compute happening across these bridges.

And I feel like a lot of the way we've been bridging up till now has very little to do with asurances. It's more about actually getting the token to move physically across different chains which creates a certain backlog of like how are we actually going to get these assets in different places and then tied to that like and Tron's like volume with stable coins is is kind of evidence for this. We have liquidity. There's a decent amount of liquidity there. What we don't have is good quality underwriting of credit which you can really give to traditional financial actors so they can trust that ecosystem and they can actually invest in something that's connected a little bit more to the real world.

And I feel like we think a lot in terms of APIs as we were discussing earlier, but we think a lot less in terms of how are you going to underwrite this credit? What are the open standards that are trady finds comfortable to use and how are we going to invest these and get more like fixed income yield for example.

Adrian you

I think the cool thing about what what we were just saying is TRFI has woken up right I this conference is is clear evidence of that. So, Trafi got the message, the liquidity is there. 1010 aside, um the what I mean, Trafi doesn't love blockchain because of decentralization. They love it because it solves problems.

Yes.

It solves problems that they're facing. It and if if they don't cross that bridge that we've built, they're going to be left behind and they know that. So, then to your point about as far as the APY, I mean, to me, that's my team and I, we just wrote an op-ed on that. I think giving up that APY for stable coins specifically is an olive branch to the to the FIS and the traffic and say hey walk this bridge with us come over here. Stable coins were not invented to generate yield.

They were invented for volatility hedge you know when crypto trading and then it became super dollars digital dollars that can travel all over the world instantaneously securely. Uh so I mean that that to me is is where trady where the rubber meets the road. Traffy and DeFi come together.

I think I think they're okay with earning on stables and earning because I mean running an infrastructure and a staking business and a wallet business and a DeFi business for DRDFI. Um obviously you have to have security as being paramount uh from from conception on but people want to earn but they also want to understand the risk associated with that earning because uh I get a little crazy when people want to loop certain assets multiple times or they're promising double digits of APY and not under understanding the the risk continuum behind that. So I think you have to be able to provide that scoring and provide that methodology and provide something because people want to stake their assets but they also want to earn in other capacities too and if they can earn on BTC they can earn on stables um they can earn on ETH and other assets but in a reasonable secure way I think it's it's comparable.

Agreed. And I think some some of the standards that we see kind of finally emerging in DeFi, it makes it easier to understand how we can actually not necessarily regulate but structure and create frameworks in DeFi. And it's going to be much easier than to monitor the way Trad has been evolving. And I think that's that's probably what 2026 is going to bring, some credibility to frameworks that that are adopted within the DeFi ecosystem. But you mentioned and I'll I'll come to you Demo.

You mentioned about the the islands and and linking the islands, but actually there are many islands and many bridges. So what is this actual future ecosystem going to look like? Are we actually going to see um decent level of interoperability?

I think you're seeing some of it now too. You're seeing uh a lot of uh crosschain connectivity bridges being built crosschain platforms uh which we're in supportive of and building out and supporting over 80 different chains and protocols. Uh as part of block demon we have to provide that connect the connective tissue in a secure in a secure way. Um you're seeing a lot of intentbased systems trying to simplify uh the complicated bridging capabilities. Again people just want to own the underlying asset.

They don't care what chain it's on. And and I think we're not there yet, but I think uh over the next few years we'll be there. Hopefully, you know, we'll be able to say this is just financial services and not trady and DeFi. And that's going to be, I think, the thing of where we're going to get to with proper regulation and proper technology innovation.

I like that. Financial services, not trady and DeFi. That should be a key takeaway for the audience.

Um Omar, your thoughts?

Yeah, I know. I think these liquidity modes that we've built that are super hard to kind of consolidate into one piece is is definitely a problem. At the same time, uh bridging these assets across chains just takes so much time that it's not practical to actually get anything done. Um I think there are more innovative ways of kind of locking or creating creating asurances on each individual chain and then replicating them on other chains. So I think BitVM is an ode to this as well where you can lock Bitcoin on Bitcoin, create representations of the UTXO and mirror it across different chains which enables that composability and programmability of a credit market.

So using all of these different uh crypto tokens as collateral and then being able to borrow against them and invest them in real world yield opportunities I think is probably one of the future things that makes me very excited about DeFi in the future.

Absolutely. Um, I am conscious of time, ladies and gentlemen. So, I'm going to wrap this up with that time old tradition given that we are in December of what is on your wish list for 2026. Adrian, I'll come to you.

So, I I have a couple, but I'll I'll try to keep it tight. Number one, stable coins becomes a standard of uh settlement for 2026, not just an experiment for banks, for fintexs, and for enterprises that want to use it. I want blockchain to sort of just something that disappears that the the consumer is not constantly asking about what is blockchain and what does it mean and it's just the payment rail similar like the AC is a payment rail in the US similar to swift people don't need to understand it it just is so these are the two things that I I hope to see in in 2026

yeah I I think it's uh continuing to expedite the regulatory clarity uh specifically in the US and I think all the and we're catching up to some of the other regions in particular here too that where they've set the standard. We need guardrails. We need to know what is a commodity. We need to know what is an equity and we need to know what we what we're able to do with it and what services that we can offer to get to where financial services versus trady and DeFi.

Thank you.

I think this is going to be the year we can separate custody from control. So actually have programmable controllability of what you want to do with your collateral and your Bitcoin, your other crypto assets.

Wonderful. Thank you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, come back next year and we'll see if the wish list has been fulfilled. Thank you very much.

Perfect. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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