EN | Banking the Digital Asset Transition Key Challenges in Crypto Adoption | MERGE São Paulo

Uh we have a banking the digital um banking the digital asset transition key challenges in crypto adoption. Uh our please welcome our moderator Aaron Stanley founder and managing direct director at Promenade Promenade advisory uh Brazil crypto report. Thank you. Uh banking and uh compliance and the state of of um digital assets in the financial systems here in Latin America. So, I'm going to call up our panel here.

We've got a really great group. We've got Jaime Sataque from Santander Brazil. Brazil's very own Santander Brazil. Uh we have Gabriel Campa from Tower Bank comes all the way from lovely Panama. We have Matt Kennedy from TRM Labs.

And we have Saadia Halim from GK8. Also known as Galaxy. They are uh parts of the Galaxy empire. Recently acquired. So, thank you everyone for being here.

Thank you everyone for for joining us today. And um So, to get started here, we'll do a quick round of introductions. I'll ask each of you to to give a quick introduction uh to yourself and your company. Um but last year I don't I'm I'm assuming many of you were here at the Merge Buenos Aires conference last year. I actually did this exact same panel.

So, I'm going to um I want to kind of just ask each of you maybe like what do you think has been the biggest change over the last 12 months in your respective area? Uh so, maybe as you're introducing yourself, maybe talk about what's been the biggest uh shift in what's been the biggest like, you know, step forward in your respective area over this this time period. So, maybe Jaime we'll start with you. I'm I'm responsible for digital solutions and partnerships inside Santander, Brazil, what includes the digital assets, crypto and blockchain agenda. Uh, so what has changed?

I think there is a we are in a very historical moment in Brazil because now we have the regulation. So, I think this is the the big star of 2026. Uh, we in Brazil were I feel very lucky because we we we know exactly who is regulating. We are not stuck into who should I talk to at state level, at city level, at federal level. We know what where to go.

Some In some cases, it is Banco Central do Brasil. In other cases, it is our uh security exchange committee and that's it. It's simple, it's straight. The regulation uh uh has uh fulfilled many topics that would be necessary. Uh, I think we have the conditions to have a a very solid infrastructure and the solid market.

The minimal standards are defined. We already know uh from uh even from a compliance risk management perspective what we need to address. So, the scenario is clear. I think we have everything we need to accelerate. Amazing.

And then uh Gabriel, what about you? Uh, introduce yourself and what's been the biggest change in your world last 12 months? Yeah. I'm Gabriel Cam on the head of digital assets for Tower Bank in Panama. Uh, I lead the entire team that has been uh tasked to transform how the bank operates and connect traditional banking to digital assets.

And we launched our own platform uh middle of last year that connects both worlds. I think I would say that the biggest change is we're getting more clarity from regulators of what's happening, where we're going, and I think it's being proven that what banks thought banks are involved in digital assets, what they thought is how they should be done, that's what regulators are starting to do. So, fortunately, it's being proven that we didn't have to change much for this to work. Um but we're getting more clarity. That's a good thing.

The only issue that I'm seeing is Fortunately, in Panama, there's no regulation. Uh and that's how that's allowed us to have more liberty of how we do things and work side by side with a regulator. But, we're I would say the biggest change I'm seeing from the regulator in Panama is that they're they're more interested in understanding how this work. They're more interested in trying to figure out how they're going to regulate it without putting any restrictions. And I'm I'm starting to see more banks interested in the subject, and we're working with them side by side to teach them what we've done, the mistakes that we've made, and how to avoid them, and how to protect our users.

So, uh so yeah, we have two answers focusing on kind of the advancements in regulation. I think uh the contributions of companies like TRM Labs is probably a big component of that. So, uh with that, maybe Matt, maybe introduce yourself and talk a bit about uh what you guys are doing at TRM. Yeah, happy to introduce myself. Um unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to have anything uh really edgy or contrarian to say here.

I think it's going to be a variation on a theme. Um but for intro, my name is Matt Kennedy. I've been with TRM Labs for about 4 years now. Um my background's in offensive cybersecurity and and found crypto and fell down the the proverbial rabbit hole um in '16 or '17. TRM Labs provides compliance and investigative solutions for large banks and crypto exchanges.

And um you know, what's changed in the last year? Uh again, variation on a theme here. I think if we're having this conversation 12-18 months ago, um at least the banks that we support, it's the question is, do we want to participate? And now the question is, we want to participate, but how, and how do we scale, and how do we do it safely? Um and what do those guardrails look like, and how do we operationalize it?

So, um yeah, happy to be here. Amazing. And then uh Sadia, over to you. Sure. Um Sadia Halim and I head up strategic institutional accounts at GCA by Galaxy and we focus on institutional self-custody.

Uh prior to joining GCA, I was on the traditional finance side. I covered banks and finance companies and then went on to head up innovation for CIBC America's for BNP Paribas and that was a corporate institutional bank. So, I've seen both sides of it and it's been an exciting journey. When we think about what's changed in the last year, it goes hand-in-hand with whatever you said. So, there's more regulatory clarity and banks are more eager now and they have the appetite to pursue it.

As one person said, it's time to accelerate. What we saw in the past are individual uh proof of concepts or small use cases. We've seen a number of banks issue a bond on chain and now it's how do we scale? How do we actually have a digital strategy? They recognize there is a revenue involved, there is a return on investment.

So, how do we do that? Whether it's stable coins for payments for their corporate clients, whether it's offering custody, buy, sell, hold for their wealth clients or even programmable credit looking at collateralized um tokens and collateralized real world assets. So, now it's just how do we add to what we already have and how do we scale this so we can really be competitive in the space. And Sadia, I'm going to stick with you. Uh but the first thing I want to touch on is the custody question cuz I know you GCA is working with uh banks in the US and around the world uh providing custody solutions and helping folks kind of build out their own custody solutions.

And it it seems like there's been perhaps a a bit of a a shift in terms of how folks are thinking about custody uh given some of the rules that have been come come out of the United States recently and other jurisdictions. And you know, it does seem like there are banks kind of moving away from perhaps using like third-party custodians. There's more of a movement toward building some of these solutions in-house to sort of minimize vendor risk and to make sure this this stuff is all being hosted on premise or or what have you. But maybe just talk a bit about what's kind of the state of the custody question in your purview at this point. It's been an interesting evolution when you think about where custody stands with the banks.

Originally, they partnered with a few key players in the space and that worked when there were smaller use cases in mind. And now as they think about, oh we need to add support for more blockchains, we need to add more support for more tokens. We want to have that accountability. We really want to understand how this space works. They some tried to build on their own and they realized to scale it is very challenging.

It's an expensive model to continually support chains and tokens. Some it partnered and it's been interesting to see some of the partners have been acquired or shifted focus. So then there's a concern there. And so now it's building with partners but really having that accountability. So a bit of that self-custody with technology that they're building out on their own so that they can be competitive and have that accountability.

And then Matt, we're going to turn to you here and hoping you could maybe give us an overview of just kind of how the what the current state of like the risk and threat environment is that that these financial institutions are operating in maybe compared to maybe perhaps how it was a few months or years ago. And maybe kind of give us like a high-level overview of like what are some of the main folks that what are some of the main concerns that you're encountering when you're talking to compliance officers and CFOs and whatnot. What are the big questions you're asking? Yeah, TRM sits at a at an interesting point. We get a lot of interesting signal both from law enforcement and regulators as well as financial institutions.

And you know, financial crime absolutely exists on chain. There's no question of that, but I think often times the framing is outdated. Internally, there's sort of a trope at TRM. We we we say there is no such thing as crypto crime, there's just crime. And for the same reasons that, you know, many people in this room are leaning into the space and our institutions are building, criminals like to do bad things with crypto.

Um these are highly liquid markets, the money moves at the speed of the internet, it's 24/7 settlement, and um you know, there's really um you know, there are there are interesting new typologies, places you can take advantage of obfuscation and layering with funds uh coming into the institution using smart contracts and uh programmatic layering. Um but at the end of the day, it's it's the same old things. We're looking for sanctions violations, ransomware, um you know, uh your customers and users being scammed is bad for business and bad for the industry. Um but at the end of the day, these are immutable ledgers that are public for the most part, and it leaves uh a trail. Um on our law enforcement side of the house, we often talk to agents that say, "I would much rather work a criminal case involving crypto than cash and hawala's and art and luxury goods."

Uh you can just follow the train um of this money. Um so, that's that's sort of how we think about it and what we see. And then, Gabriel, let's turn to you. And I know Tower Bank has really been maybe one of the like the earliest adopting banks in the world when it comes to not just like banking crypto companies, but also like offering these types of products to to whether it's institutional or retail customers. Maybe give us an overview of just like what your exposure is has been to digital assets over the years and like what are you guys really focusing on right now that's uh maybe uh innovative?

Um it all started uh doing on and off-ramp for for Latin America, right? It was very very difficult to for Latin Americans to access liquidity, uh protect themselves from devaluating currencies, especially in in Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia. Um and now we're we're working on Well, we just launched Bitcoin-backed loans. Um and it just suff- it just suffered its first crisis and I think we were very lucky to to design it how it had to be designed and prove that it really works, right? Um and now we're also working on on on connecting more traditional banking solutions, credit card, debit cards, uh, payment platforms connected directly to digital assets and and we're also looking to adding stocks.

So, at the end of the day, what we want to do is do what banks do every single day but bring it to this new technology which is way cheaper, is way faster, and it's 24/7, right? And then Jaime, we'll turn to you uh, and we'll get kind of the Brazil perspective here. But Brazil's had uh, a bit of a different operating environment for banks in the recent years just because there's been the involvement of the Central Bank and the Drex project and pretty much all of the major banks in Brazil were you know, either like either voluntarily or involuntarily drafted into being part of the Drex project when which involved setting up blockchain infrastructure, building up blockchain teams, running nodes on the network, etc. But maybe talk a bit about like what has been you know, the experience of of uh, you know, running a blockchain team inside of a bank in Brazil uh, in the last couple of years and how is that what have been kind of some of the main learnings for that from that that you're able to apply to you know, as we to our conversation here today? Yeah, so uh, first of all, we we could have a very interesting experience with the dialogue with the Central Bank.

Uh, as my my friend said, uh, in Brazil the Central Bank was very eager to listen and to to have a solid conversation with banks so you could all work on this together. This happened both from a regulation perspective but also from a technical perspective. Um, one thing that we were very worried since the beginning was if you could have uh, compliance uh, banking grade level standards also on chain. And what we learned is that the the answer is a solid yes. So currently there are there is talent available from both legal and technical perspective.

There are tools that make our traditional finance experts very comfortable as our friend from labs also said we we can deal with risk at the same way on chain as we used it to do off chain thanks to the advancement of the technology and and the service providers that we could find globally, right? I think at a global level you can find a very good expert to support banking grade risk management on chain as well, right? I think that's it. And then so we've been talking a lot about just you know some of the risk management questions and how how this whole environment has evolved and some of the various threats and financial crimes and things of that nature and and even even to some extent the you know greater coordination with law enforcement etc. And Gabriel I wanted to ask you you've been in this game for a quite a long time and maybe like I mean how has how have we progressed when it comes to you know okay you're you're you're a you're a bank you see something that's like okay this probably isn't right I should probably alert somebody but like who do I talk to like who do I go to do I go to the FBI do I go to chainalysis like do I go to you know like who am I Let me talk a bit about like how is that this whole environment improved as far as how do we know where to go when we when we see something that's an issue and maybe what are some of the maybe some of the gaps that need to be filled still as far as you know making sure that nothing slips through the cracks does that make sense?

I think that's a major problem for all banks around the world right now. There's no clarity on how to manage many situations and we're still learning. In the case of Brazil there's more way more clarity because the central bank is involved so you really have to you know where to go. In the case of Panama, we just had a case and actually we're working with the FBI and with the financial action task force because we just got a case. But, it was a nightmare to figure out how to handle this.

Fortunately, we worked side by side with Chainalysis. We contacted them, "Hey, I have this issue. Uh please tell me who I can talk to so we can get this fast-tracked because it was a an actor related to a a big attack in in the US and they were trying to move money through us. Um fortunately, we're working side by side with the regulator. We work side by side with the financial action task force and and things are moving faster because we're the ones training them.

So, we're teaching them what questions they have to ask, how to ask them, and we're working side by side with them to see how we can stop this activity. Now, normally, illicit actors are avoiding banks because normally banks are very solid when it comes to their compliance programs and most of the time they're going to catch you way faster than what an exchange will. So, as banks, we won't see that much activity compared to exchanges that have that activity day-to-day. I don't know in the case of Santander if if they're seeing the same thing, but normally, illicit actors try to avoid financial institutions. And Matt, I don't know if you want to chime in on that question at all, but like maybe how how have you seen this um you know, kind of the reporting regimes or like coordination with law enforcement?

Um maybe you know, from your private sector clients has have have folks becoming been becoming more comfortable with touching crypto or touching digital assets just knowing that there's some more of these processes and procedures a bit more, you know, clear, ironed out, or some of the you know, the the lines of reporting, like where do I go if I see something? Yeah, 100%. Um directionally um in the states in particular, there's been um a massive shift even in the last 6 months, so um the GENIUS Act um, officially sort of outlined rules of the road for stable coins, which is um, turning out to be the killer app for this cycle. Um, we're looking forward to market structure. So, there are now, uh, you know, for lack of a better term, rules of the road.

There's also incredible public-private partnership. Chainalysis was mentioned, that's a great tool, TRM, there are others, um, that sit at this point, but it relies on, you know, the FIU within the institution, the regulator, um, and not to oversimplify, but there is precedent in the TradFi world for how to report these crimes, um, and you know, how to coordinate. And I think we're just all borrowing a page from that book. Um, these are just new payment rails. We spend a lot of time trying to kind of demystify, um, that, um, it's just, uh, again, a variation on a theme, um, but it's all about public-private partnership, and certainly lately, um, we now have, um, better ways of kind of underwriting this risk and operationalizing the coordination.

And then, Matt, sticking with you here, um, I mean, what would you say is maybe like the biggest, uh, like tripwires currently that folks are maybe running into or they're worried about running into? Um, is there, I mean, are there particular chains, are there particular, like, jurisdictions, are there particular, uh, you know, use cases that, you know, seem to just be, you know, there there seems to be more kind of shady things happening here than other places that people are are are are that should be wherever are there they're noticing? Yeah, so so I'll just speak from my my perspective. Again, we're we're partnering with large institutions, and we see a couple variations kind of in order of maturity. The first is any institution that we're speaking to wants to understand existing counterparty risk.

So, um, in most regulatory regimes, whether or not you're doing something bleeding edge with developing your own in-kind stablecoin rails or buy-sell-hold or in-house custody. Um, there may be just wires going out to other firms and entities that themselves are exposed to crypto. Um, and they just need to know that. And that's sort of the most basic level. So, I'll just categorize that as existing hidden exposure that may not be on your radar.

And then if you go to the the other end, the question is kind of what is the crawl walk run to develop these programs in line with with the initiative that you have. And I think it's always better to be conservative. A big issue that we see is in developing the alerting and the reporting processes, you want to start start small and start slow and don't over complicate it. You can get very very granular with the way that you alert risk around deposits and withdrawals. It's much better just to map over your existing policies into these systems.

And then Sadia, we'd love your if you have any thoughts on this kind of the threat environment question, we'd love your thoughts on that. But I also wanted to ask kind of pivoting the conversation here to this theme of maybe I just new products and new types of tools that banks are developing or that are looking to develop. Whether they be you know, custody related, whether they be stable coin related, whether they be related to you know, tokenization or like these DFI DFI vault products that we're seeing a lot of interest in this year. We'd love to hear from from the GK8 side like what are what what are some of what are your your customers asking for? What's on their road maps?

What are you helping them to build? Yeah, just real quickly when we think about security, it's just so critical for the banks to be comfortable with the movements in the space and they're not going to move forward at all if they think there's going to be various players that they cannot catch. So, I think having comfort with the tools out there is critical for them moving forward. That being said, there is help for them and so they can start thinking about what is the business model and where do we see the biggest opportunities. And it's always going to be about revenue and return on investment.

Looking at their existing businesses and where they can enhance that revenue. So, what we're seeing and it's no surprise, we're seeing a lot of emphasis on tokenization, tokenization of real world assets and you know, just anecdotally it's interesting when we think about the banks in the crypto side where we always refer to RWA, real world assets to the banks. That's risk weighted assets, which is a very bad thing. So, it's really important to have the same language. take that for granted.

The acronyms we use versus acronyms they use, it's just a basic mindset change and a basic understanding to make sure you're speaking the same language. So, on the take tokenization front, where it's really underestimated is mobility. So, when we have real world assets that are tokenized, all of a sudden you can really use it for collateral, substitute collateral. It's 24/7, it's programmable, you can do programmable lending with it and I think they see the opportunity. Um, it's straightforward in the sense of they look at their deposits and they realize they want to grow their deposits.

They see stable coins coming. So, a lot of the banks are thinking about tokenized deposits or having their stable coins. Um, it's interesting when we look at the big money center banks versus in the US the regional banks which are one step smaller and the money center banks have been focused and they have the budgets to be able to pursue some of these products and the money center banks realize they're falling behind and just recently, um, there's an announcement of five regional banks coming together as a consortia to start a stable coin so they can be competitive. And what's very interesting here is what is the impact going to be on the big bank and I think one area where the banks are going to lose some reliance that they had is on the correspondent banking side because all of a sudden with stable coins or tokenized deposits, the smaller banks, the foreign banks, they'll be able to move on their own. So, it's going to be interesting to have see what happens with corresponding banking.

And then programmable lending when we think about DeFi for banks will have to be permissioned, but there's opportunity for intent-based lending where you can pick a yield that you want. You can pick a risk that's your preference and trying to find the nice balance of that risk reward and being very careful about how you want to do this programmable lending in these vaults. And in addition to tokens and and staking to do real world assets to increase that yield a little bit. But have comfort in what those what that underlying is. It could be money market funds.

It could be tokenized treasury. So, we're seeing that interest in higher yields in a safe way. Then Gabriel, maybe we'll pivot to you here. If you want to tackle that question as well. You mentioned your your Bitcoin back lending program you rolled out already survived its first stress test, thankfully.

Uh but maybe talk a bit more like maybe talk a bit more about how that program is working and and what other kind of products you guys have in the pipeline that are maybe you know, adjacent to what Saudi was just mentioning. Yeah. Well, I'll I'll pivot into the tokenized deposits. Like one of the issues that we have today is and and Genie said made it very clear, you can't get yield on stable coins, right? And all the banks that have stable coins to do 24-hour operations for their clients, that's dead money that they have there.

Uh so, now you have JP Morgan. They're coming out with JPM Coin. Looks like Wells is going to do the same thing. That's going to change the game for for the banks cuz it's going to allow us to make more money on on the on the business. It's going to allow us to have more 24/7 operations.

And start giving part of those profits to to the end user, right? Uh apart from the a Bitcoin back loans, I'm heavily looking at Tether Gold. And start offering that as a as a as a collateral. I think in the past couple of weeks and months we've been seeing gold how how strong it's getting and it looks like it's going to be like that for the for the next couple of years. Gold is the new Bitcoin, I guess.

Uh Well, digital gold is is going to be the the the the new part of the of the ecosystem. Uh and the other thing I wanted to add and it was what what what TRM was saying, there is several technologies out there, but technology is technology. I think the key solution is the compliance teams. Uh they they really need to see what they're because yes, a a company can say, yes, I have technologies or I have TRM, but it's how they use it, right? And they're asking the right questions on where things are going.

Um apart from that uh we're we're laser focused in offering our services all over the region. We're laser focused in trying to work with other banks. You know, I think that's going to be the key to success to all all of us, especially in Central South America because the US and Europe are going to go in their own direction. Um and trying to to to bring more services to the region, right? Uh let everybody in in the in the rest of the region have the same opportunities that we have in the US and in Europe.

And then Jaime, we'll pivot this to you as well. I know you guys have been doing some interesting work around some tokenized tokenized products like consortia and things of that nature. Would love for you to tell us a little bit about that. And also if you want to maybe tell us a little bit more about how you guys have been thinking about about stablecoins as well. We've talked a little bit about stablecoins here, but how is Santander Brazil thinking about the the stablecoin question?

Yeah, yeah. So, I think um global movements of money, I think it's a key topic. We all know how complex uh expensive and slow can be moving money around. Uh according to the World Bank, for example, the average cost of uh sending a remittance overseas can go for an average of 6.5% of the transactional value.

And the same World Bank says that should be lower than 3%. Right. So, and we all know the reasons for that includes a lot of intermediaries, uh reconciliation steps, lack of automation, so on. And I think there is a major opportunity for a stable coin and tokenized deposits uh to to help improving that process with faster settlement, 24/7 availability, a high level of automation, and and so on. So, I think uh this is a key topic we are exploring.

What we have public that we can uh talk here is we were invited last year to be part of the Circle Payment Network to try to address that challenge of international movement of money uh leveraging blockchain technology. We are in the design group to try to to to to design a solution for that. So, uh this is on the stable coin piece. On the tokenization, I think we have a very interesting topic to mention here and to share with you. So, this year we are exploring in production a very interesting use case on tokenization of a financial product called in Brazil consortium.

For those who don't doesn't have the the contest, consortium is like a collective lending model uh widely used in Brazil, especially for cars and real estate purchases. About 12 million Brazilians have about a hundred billion dollars in outstanding assets in consortium, and historically this had been a secondary market with very limited liquidity and and limited transparency. So, in partnership with Nucleus, we created a marketplace for the secondary market. Uh in this project, we we introduced on-chain registry representing a group of consortium assets that are acceptable by institutional investors. So, in 6 months of operation, we could onboard about 20 institutional investors.

We executed several auctions very successfully. So, and we are growing every day. So, this is a very interesting case where we could prove that transparency could drive liquidity for the market and benefit for consumers, for investors, for whoever managed the consortium. So, it's a very interesting and compelling use case. In production, not a proof of concept, not in the lab, in a very relevant financial product in Brazil.

And to to scale things in blockchain, I think one learning from that case is that if you integrate the web 3 technology with web 2 user experience, banking rate controls, and compliance framework, I think it's a very powerful way to move forward and and do something that's really meaningful and scale in in blockchain. And then, so, we have 5 minutes left here. I think to wrap up, um actually, I want only one more question to Matt here before we I go to my final question. But, I wanted to ask specifically about There's There's been a bit a lot of interest this year around privacy-enhancing technologies and privacy-focused chains. And I know you You guys have been seeing a bit of this on the TRM side.

So, I want to get your your take on just like to what extent is there an overlap here with what we're talking about with, you know, banking, financial institutions that are in digital assets. Is I think a lot of people think of these privacy-enhancing technologies, they think more of like the Cypherpunk stuff, and you know, but is there an overlap between what's happening with on this privacy enhancement front as well as with what we're seeing on, you know, kind of banks coming into the digital asset world? Yes. And And I completely agree with with with the with the misconception. of Um, I think privacy-preserving blockchain technology is the most fascinating conversation that I'm having regularly right now.

It's also the most misunderstood, and it is a very loaded term. Um, I think historically in blockchain context, privacy or privacy-preserving meant Monero, Zcash, mixers. Um, these were ways for criminals to obfuscate the movement of funds, and they were always sort of theoretical arguments around privacy-conscious individuals and using these systems to their advantage. Um, but now that we see the proliferation of, you know, stablecoin payments, for example, um, and and the institutionalization of that, there are very legitimate reasons why an institution needs to maintain privacy while also allowing um, a a way for them to fulfill their compliance obligations. Um, and so with to to to get a little bit wonky for with something like zero zero-knowledge proofs, it allows you um, to to run that compliance check and see enough about the transaction while preserving your customer or your institution or your counterparties privacy.

Um, and uh, it's just a fascinating emerging legitimate use case um, that I think all institutions are going to have to grapple with. Um, kind of further reading, right? Canton, Aleo, Sui, um, ZK proofs. They're they're all kinds of emerging technology here, but it's coming up uh, very often. So, uh, kind of our our to round things out here, I want to ask each uh, each panelist here to uh, just give us what is one maybe like heterodox, controversial opinion you might have about anything we've talked about here, uh, that you know, folks in the audience might find, you know, spicy or controversial potentially.

Uh, just to get everybody thinking outside the box a little bit. Uh, maybe Jaime, we'll start with you. Yes. So, um, if you look at uh for example, the real estate market in Brazil, there is a very interesting situation. So, I'll say that uh there a great part of the Brazilian population that is asset rich but the liquidity poor.

So, let me go through this uh very quickly. Uh there are about 2 trillion 2 trillion dollars of real estate fully paid in the economy, right? And less than 1% of residential properties are used as collateral for credit operations. So, there is a lot of of uh explanations for that. Uh there are a lot of bottlenecks of the infrastructure, and I do believe that uh blockchain and tokenization can help a lot with that.

With uh for example, uh on-chain uh tokenized registration, tokenized ownership, and uh so we can unlock that opportunity. Great. So, and Gabriel, go you. Well, I'm going to be very controversial when it comes to banks. Uh there's no doubt about it that traditional banking model, traditional bank accounts will be replaced with this technology.

And the banks that don't get don't understand this quickly, they will be replaced by the technology or by smaller or bigger banks. I think digital assets are going to level the playing field. It doesn't matter if you're a small bank, a large bank, medium bank. We're all going to operate in the same way. We're going to operate with very similar cost.

So, or you get involved, or you will disappear pretty fast. Matt? Uh it's a fun question. I think I have different answers that I'll give you over happy hour or something as far as spicy takes. Um I think what I'll what I'll point to is the biggest misconception that I hear on a daily basis um from people new to the space is that these systems are autonomous and it's it's actually the opposite.

They are fully transparent. The question is how to pull in context so that you can fulfill your obligations. But that but that that's what I'll go with. Mine is kind of in line with ultimately I think that one of the digital native players is going to be such a formidable competitor to institutional banks and I see that I say this because Kraken just got access to the Fed window. None of the digital banks has had that access yet.

So all of a sudden the playing field is getting flattened and so it's no longer oh just partnership or counterparties. This is a true competitor. So the banks have got to watch out. They have to get current and they have to focus on that technology. Amazing.

Well well we're ending exactly at time here. So very uh miraculous. But um anyway, well thank you everybody for for watching. Thank you to our panelists. Jaime, Gabriel, Matt, Sadia, I appreciate the conversation.

Appreciate everyone watching here and um yeah, I'm bullish on Tower Bank here. So Thank you. All right.

All righty. Thanks everybody.

Thank you.