Tokenization of Securities, Assets and Real Estate

[Music] many thanks daniel and yeah i'm very happy to be here even though i'm a bit ill i'll try to keep it on my side from the moderation side as short as possible and um i'm very excited to have well known faces on this panel starting with monica from consensus then radoslav for watko from bitbond sebastian from middle and cold and jean-marc from share all already working for years in this industry and i would like to ask them in this order to introduce to themselves to you and to give a quick intro i myself i'm simon working at how can our voices since october as head of digital asset previously with deutsche bursa and commerce bank so monica would you please introduce yourself thank you thank you to the audience so i worked for consensus for the last four years and as you know consensus is one of the biggest blockchain companies in the world and we have developed a lot of technology that enables the tokenization of absolutely everything but previously before joining consensus i created 25 years ago the central securities depository in south africa which what i did i had to bring the financial markets from paper-based share certificates checks to electronic so the shared certificates were dematerialized and then the cheques were converted into digital payment payments and then we created the central securities depository and i run it for 20 years so then i read satoshi's paper in 2016 and i thought oh i think the world is going to change and i predicted that what was going to happen was that the listed companies were going to start not listening in traditional stock market because they were going to start finding new ways to source capital and therefore i felt that the company i was running it was going to reduce the number of listed companies therefore the revenue and therefore i felt that i had to go and once again create a new world order which was the world of blockchain and here i am and and the world is changing completely and and you can see if you look at the numbers in legacy financial markets the number of listed companies in this market many of them is reducing so what i predicted is actually happening and now we have here a team of experts that are making that reality happen by producing technology that is um taking the best of the blockchain to ensure that we bring the same controls or even better than using centralized intermediaries thank you many things monica saw uh start [Applause] and ceo of bitbond um at bitcoin we're leading provider of technology for the tokenization of assets primarily to banks and financial intermediaries and frequent issuers and we provide them with the technology that they need in order to do that and in many cases we also support in transformation projects for banks in order to go from a legacy settlement world into a tokenized settlement world and i started my career at berkshire bank in london um which was a very conventional uh banking environment yeah i'm very excited to be in tokenization today yeah sorry to read the discussion rather slav is very high the volume of your mic sorry sorry to interrupt maybe if you can lower it 20 30 i'm really sorry to interrupt but it was this better yeah much better thanks sorry about that i moved it up a bit and and that was me i hope it was uh uh possible to hear it and yeah thanks because it was only quite impressive now all good so sebastian hello everybody sebastian becker my name i'm in charge of sales and business development at ritland code an austrian based blockchain company we call ourselves the blockchain interface company so we do let's say we provide technology solutions to the financial sector for the end-to-end management of tokens but our midterm focus or long-term focus is more on industrial tokenization so we are tokenizing energy we're tokenizing data we're tokenizing supply chain solutions for large industrial companies with a banking grade backend and that's let's say our playing field looking forward to the discussion many things and then thank you simon good afternoon everybody i am the ceo of liquid care uh liqueur is a is a is a fintech or a consortium of uh various uh financial market players which is developing solution both for the the management and processing of digital sets and but also using those new texts for the the traditional set word and that's a few words about my background so my background is mostly i'm a veteran of the asset servicing securities fund management industry starting with the central bank of the french bank and uh spending some time with the uh with the csd european france at the time then joining some custodian bank and then i had uh had been given the opportunity by the end of last year so to to join liquid chair and to help i was very happy to to make this move and see how we can use those new technology to better service the market out of blockchain and dlt services perfect many thanks guys for the quicker intro yeah sometimes it can take longer so many things for that and i would just dive into the topic directly mainly with first kind of question we are talking about the tokenization of everything now uh it's a bit hard maybe to start with everything the question is maybe with what do you start first and what kind of assets do you see in the market that will be tokenized by a large scale in the beginning whoever might take it i don't mind starting so so what we have seen in clearly that the easiest has been anything that is not regulated because if it's regulated there's still quite a lot of murkiness that we don't really know how it will be regulated so that's why for example there's an implosion of a non-fungible token right because it's it's collectibles we all love collecting and and then you have the whole debate as to should you tokenize things that the naturally from the beginning their tokens so so you have a digital art that was created specifically for the nfts or we also have tokens of real art and the beauty of that is that then because you use the blockchain the whole audit of the provenance and where this artwork is kept and all that is all kept in the blockchain which as we know is an immutable shared literature that you know keeps the record of the truth then you will always know if there for example the token that you have about picasso where is that picture you should hang in a museum where did it come from and all that history would be contained in that blockchain so that's for nfts but i really believe that um yes everything will be tokenized but i think that the final one is going to be when we have clarity and regulation which i'm very happy to see that in in some european countries you are promoting the clarity of this regulation i think finally is going to be the biggest price would be when you see the tokenization of the securities that are currently listed are supposed to tokenize securities um you know it's the concept of do you take the securities that are listed currently in a legacy stock exchange and you tokenize those or the next type the time that you're going to require funding as a company do you go into one of the markets and you create a tokenized security in totally in a new parallel environment that achieves all the benefits of tokenization like many of the companies that we're talking with in this panel which is really the most incredible thing which is for me super magical because in the legacy financial markets as you know it takes at least three days in south africa two days in europe and in the us to settle when you could actually issue clear settle all real time and without intermediaries it reduces the cost it increases the the ability for anybody to invest increases liquidity if you you can do fractionalization the benefits are huge so i think that that for me is what i'm still looking forward because of the fact that i know how bad the current plumbing is and i know that we can do it better so that's what i'm excited to look forward to everybody share this view or some other views what kind of assets they see being tokenized i i shared a regulatory view and when we look at the assets that are already tokenized today then we talk about cryptocurrencies which in some parts of the world are already regulated but in some parts are not yet regulated and then we of course do see nfts we've seen a lot of icos and security tokens today make up a relatively small portion of the entire digital assets that already exist um at the same time though um i think it's uh going there's going to be a moment when tokenized securities are going to overtake um cryptocurrencies and other unregulated assets by volume it's just going to take another 5 10 maybe even 15 years simply because um banks and those who are involved in traditional capital markets take longer time to adopt and then within that space at least from what we're seeing at bitbond and it's not just because our name implies it but bonds are one of the first asset classes from the traditional financial markets that in our view are going to be tokenized simply based on the demand that we see and also the regulation um around bonds is typically enabling tokenization germany of course being one of the examples here with the electronic securities act that was passed in summer this year which is focused on bonds but there's also other i'd say legal reasons that put bonds into the forefront of tokenization of traditional capital markets assets i would maybe try to characterize it a little bit differently of course you see certain waves right now most people are looking at existing you know financial assets and securities because tokenizing them is going to become a commodity we're waiting for regulation yes but if we look at the purpose of those tokens so they're clearly visible that we have efficiency place that's more you know tokenizing what is so far done differently in the financial markets then we have some purpose-oriented uh place i would even add you know some of the ms nft environment or nft projects there but also esg driven projects like we were doing with um austria's largest utility company veena energy tokenizing the country's largest pv power plant and putting out kilowatt-hour tokens to drive desired behavior and then you have really markets where you see a new leverage of things that couldn't be leveraged before and we will see this in the commodity markets and other markets where completely new business models will appear that are not only you know liquidity driven so this categorization might also help to um see whether or not you know tokenizing will have an uh a big effect or just to give you a counter example i was having a dinner last week and a very reasonable guy told me he's about to hire an army of game players in a market like the philippines because some of these new computer games have tokens or ethereum tokens locked up up to 3 400 million and and you know pre-fining seeing their avatars and then letting them refinance them or recoup them within six months seem to be a good business model but what's what does it mean you know is it really bringing us further ahead as a society i doubt it that's why i like to take a different view at um the the capabilities that tokenization can bring to the market well [Music] maybe to as a follower to what sebastian said and having a slightly different angle we as a service provider we really much wanted to avoid uh to bring the technology forward and say hey guys we have a wonderful tech solution and we can do that and that that's true of course but what we really are trying to do and what we are seeing on the market is that there is now much more uh focus and interest in the kind of use cases where there is uh value uh to be extract on those technologies uh also what are the needs of the of the investors of the the promoters or whatever more than the pure tech possibilities just to maybe to illustrate in a few words what i have in mind uh as you certainly know the the secretary's industry is now demeterized in most big markets all the way this process is fully demonetized for uh many years so i'm a bit skeptical that's the first use case and where the business will ramp up will be you know in those very standardized process such as settling agaves or settling b caps but for me the process there are rather efficient i'm not saying that we can do better with block change maybe we can avoid some some layers but basically the processes are already very automatized uh 99 plus something stp uh the the t plus zero is achievable it's not a question of technology it's really a question of the regulatory framework the various type of of players in the market but the technology is about to do that my feeling would be that we can have use cases and have the tokenization of the assets that are more i would say in the real world so maybe real estate i think monica mentioned art uh they could be ip they could be infrastructure so you know all those assets where they could be a strong need for investors to go into there could be a financing need for the asset owners and where the technology the way the market is operating the possibility to exchange those assets is today and not so obvious not so efficient not so cost effective many thanks jeremiah for this perspective as well so we have now mentioned or all of you have mentioned actually i like the correct regulatory regimes and also if i got it from write your opinion also depends a lot on whether there's a proper regulatory scheme when we talk about digitization of everything the last one on our list is real assets so what do you think from the panel side is a proper regulatory regime to tokenize real assets and what does tokenize of tokenizer's real asset even mean yeah what are we tokenizing ownership usage information or could be possible let me maybe start here um and of course in europe we are waiting for for the mika regulatory regime to to become clearer this might take another year or so depending on who you listen to um but the the first regulation for the so far monica acquainted as unregulated space around utility tokens and nfts will of course be quite important and it's clear that the regulatory burdens will be a bit lighter than in the security space but i don't really think that the regulatory regime will be decisive if we talk about physical assets the question is more what do we do with the oracle problem and i'm not saying this because we are providing solutions here but it's clear that if we basically need to create or want to create a registry of physical assets to prevent people from from cheating from duplicating duplicating or cloning assets then we have to somehow secure them in the real world our approach here is to use cryptochip modules so a little bit the same level of security that we know from the credit card industry and to look at how to integrate these with at least valuable assets and we do this down to packaging foils in the packaging industry so that's really more you know r d on on the physical level and i think solving that oracle problem is is key because otherwise we all know it odometer fraud in the car industry metering fraud in the energy industry supply chain is not only not very efficient but there's also a lot of fraudulent activities happening so so that's maybe the bigger concern and if we then look at the regulatory regimes i think it will depend from industry to industry because some industry is critical infrastructure like the energy sector like the mobility sector where we have questions of life and death in the end and other ones like collectibles of course will will not have a let's say direct supervisory body except for the broad regulatory regimes that i i was referring to well if i can click on on sebastian there for me there are basically three main issues and uh i think it's fair to say that you already addressed uh some of them sebastian uh so the first one is obviously that we have some legal or regulatory framework that covers all the geographies that is uh homogeneous and also that covers uh every type of underlying assets because otherwise if you have to bother about each and every single regulation depending on the type of token you are buying it's gonna be quite a nightmare uh the other and mika for the europe is doing that but it's not happening not live so far uh until i guess one or two more years minimum but the other thing is how the legal framework is designed so to make sure that there is absolutely no uh gap between uh the the rules governing the ownership of the uh i would say real world assets physical property on the ship and [Music] the the rules that will affect and that if you are the owner of the token you have exactly the same right so this is still i think for me a part to be tackled by the by the regulators and the lawmaker i'm not sure that we are there so far and of course this is a handicap for the development and ramping up of this this business and then if we i think that if we want that that this markets really develop as we all wanted it to be to be developed we also need to take care that the responsibility regime the regulatory regime with its various uh perspectives it could be a risk management it could be compliance it could be a tax regime whatsoever is clear through that everybody from the ascent owner the promoter of the tokenization the financial intermediaries in the role that they will retain and the investors they are all comfortable with issuing and investing in those assets and as you certainly know there are still a big question mark the one uh is just one or two the most known one for the people familiar with the security industry is regarding those assets and speaking of the same keeping what kind of regime are we uh targeting is it some kind of a custody regime meaning that if somebody is holding the uh the token uh test uh entity if there is an entity between the investor and the promoter as a responsibility of the underlying asset and as and is is to compensate any loss or anything that can happen to the token or are we more heading towards what's called a position taking uh occupancary regime where you have the uh responsibility to just order register stating that this entity is indeed the owner of this token but whatever happened on the underlying asset and those are very important question mark and i suspect that if we don't have the proper answer at least the i would say the wholesale business the institutional world will be quite reluctant to enter into this tokenized world yeah many many things for that maybe as a follow-up question as we see that these are at least tasks that are not so easy to solve um where do you see the big benefits of the tokenization ultimately is it really i mean myself coming from the security side as well of course we're looking a lot of fish species but if i would ask sebastian maybe he would go rather also into the direction of new kind of business models and new completely new ways of structuring products that we cannot do today where do you see the see the benefits maybe monica or what i'm happy to okay so there are so many benefits and it's a it's a game changer once you understand you know really i think that everybody should read satoshi's paper because that is where everything starts it creates the idea of one currency for the world but really think about the concept of going from the investor to the investor the buyer to the seller you know when i was running the cst one of the things that the issuer the issue wanted real-time information as to who's buying and selling the shares why because if there's a hostile takeover you need to know who's trading your shares you know that that in the current plumbing is nearly impossible unless you have a nominee sorry a name on register where the csp has got real-time information of who's on the register trading which doesn't happen most of the western countries western world countries win for nominee structures nominee structures means the cst doesn't have the information of the investor that information is contained in the in the books of either the broker the bank an administrator in layers and layers of nominees which we allowed because we thought that we were very clever in allowing this lack of transparency in our financial markets and to break that it was nearly impossible to actually do it so that was that's why this new method is saying guys everything you did is didn't work we needed to do it differently so that's number one number two you want to be able to to know you know who's who you buy who you selling mean you want that proximity as an investor and then the other thing is we allow these layers upon layers of intermediaries everybody charges so that's why i can assure you that that's why it's very difficult to be a retail investment investor in a stock market why you you invest by a pension fund but as a as an individual is very expensive because you have to pay a broadcast australian bank the cst the stock exchange everybody charges and therefore it made i give an example in south africa you have close to 60 million people there were less than two million direct investors direct investors why because of the expense it's ridiculous so then what do you do you invest in a mutual fund a mutual funds i can give you a whole lecture as to how inefficient and lack of transparent the costs are when in reality think about what is a mutual fund it's a portfolio of shares that have been issued as units imagine now you tokenize the portfolio and you issue the tokens and you don't need all these intermediaries in between and you issue them real times in you know all the benefits of what you can see when you trade crypto that's why i say to the world please buy at least 100 euros of crypto to experience that emotion that at three o'clock in the morning on a sunday you could be trading without phoning anybody waiting for the stock exchange to open waiting for sentiment to happen you've got your own wallet you control your own destiny you didn't ask permission when you experience that then you say oh my gosh there's no ways that the current plumbing and stock market can continue to operate once your paradigm changes it's the reason why i think all of us in this panel have joined the revolution because we realize that this is a much better in every possible way you know there's a question in the panel that's talking about real estate the barriers to entry to buy property in most countries in the world is horrific imagine that you could now own a fraction of a real estate unit and therefore enjoy the benefits of this um asset class the increased value you're gonna enjoy that benefit by just owning a fraction token of the burj khalifa in dubai or um ten percent of the mona lisa one day it's to be tokenized do you understand that the the point that i'm trying to make is that we will have eventually an apps with all these tokens of all these new asset classes from carbon credits to energy to anything but you will empower people to have a better ability to create a portfolio that is not just equities bonds and money market instruments we're going to have to change how we empower people how we educate them how we allow them to create wealth where wealth was never created in the past and that's why this is a massive change that is coming to the world i i must say i'm very thankful monica for this passionate uh explanation of the benefits and i fully agree with you i think it's going to take us some time until we get there because earlier we discussed um you know what are some of the asset classes that are being tokenized today and you know how does kind of the the road of the future look like um i think at some point probably everything that has value will be tokenized which brings us actually to the title of this panel right the tokenization of everything i think there are asset classes where it's rather going to take 20 than five years and i always like to compare that development to the switch of uh professional and private communication from letters and telephone to electronic forms like email right even today we still every now and then needs to send a letter because something formally requires a physical form but probably 98 99 of our business communication is conducted electronically um but this also didn't happen overnight right when people were able to send the first emails at the end of the 1980s beginning of 1990s it's not like everybody immediately understood the benefits of email and said well let's you know let's ignore all other communications channels and let's just do this now um so even though there are benefits um and and i think monica described them very well um there is also switching costs right and for some more established financial institutions such as banks and securities exchanges the switching costs are much much bigger than you know for a retail user who wants to mention an nft or who wants to buy an nft for example and and that is the reason why the benefits might not be as obvious to everybody because a lot of people first see the switching costs that they have before they actually are able to to capture and to to understand the benefits that tokenization brings personally what i would recommend to everybody is to start using tokens go to a decentralized exchange um buy some tokens and and and and look at the process how it's done and now imagine all asset classes that are today illiquid such as real estate art vintage cars many others or assets that are liquid but that are settled in legacy systems such as stocks and bonds imagine all of that would be available on there then i think the benefits become more obvious but i can only recommend everybody to try and use it um because it's it's much easier to grasp it than looking at it at a very theoretical level but if you're allowed simon you gave me the hat to talk about the new stuff but let's use real estate for a second because i think it's important uh if the audience engages in tokenization to understand the different capabilities that come together so most of monica's passion went into the efficiency play which is obvious and and the settlement turning it from t plus x just working in the german chemical industry where we aim to go from t plus 28 to t plus zero and of course it can be done with that technology layer that's clear but in real estate you know you have registries of course of real estate today in a public office where you can go and look at maps and and stuff so there the efficiency benefit is obvious but then you have everything you have a cyber security benefit if it's you know if we talk about access we can have an energy efficiency benefit if we tokenize the energy consumption of that piece of real estate and connected to to the grid management so there are very different capabilities that blockchain tech or tokenization can add to things so it really depends on the use case but it's not a one-dimensional play it's not just an efficiency play um it's really multi-dimensional and you should look at every use case and think which dimensions do i want to to reap and you know some of them you might not have heard of you know for example there's a german leader in in building facades they work on smart facades you know really not only coupling your pv installation on the rooftop to the energy grid but the whole facade the windows etc and then and this is i think where we will uh reap the most benefit as a society going forward it might take even longer than the 10 to 15 years radko was predicting for the traditional efficiency markets but that's the gain that we can have and we will not reach the new climate goals within you know nine years if we don't use the incentive incentivization function of tokenization in many industries now many thanks for yes yes sorry one quick comment to the what was said by the other panelists i think the the tokenization and and the usage of those technologies to to manage assets uh is also very interesting interesting if you consider the possibility to embed a business logic from the inception from the creation of a product uh into uh the you know the modernization uh if you take the example of uh sebastian was referring to to climate and environmental objectives as you certainly know most of you there are more and more green issues bonds or whatever and you can very easily using blockchain embed into the smart contract or the features of a green product so that you you are able throughout the life cycle of the pro of the product uh to play every rules uh on boarding for instance a rating agencies that will the agency that will say okay the the objectives in terms of uh environmental target whatever they are all sustainability and so on and so on those targets are met and then you will pay the nominal coupon or you miss the target and then you have to pay premium or a penalty or whatever and all this all those rules are embedded from the one in the product which mean which makes life much easier for everybody and who's much clearer for the investor and every player across the chain yeah many things um and and i also like that the passionate discussion and very much uh interesting also for me in terms of the new aspects here maybe one field if you're now talking about tokenization you have divided the field what can be tokenized um i think one thing that is different to cryptocurrencies is or to most cryptocurrencies that you actually have an issuer within tokenization and of course we are talking about how the dlt can gain benefits and can create new business models but how do you think we can deal with uh like the initial step to get things on the dlt so the tokenization always doesn't start right at the beginning on the chain yeah it starts before with somebody putting something on the chain right that is basically tokenization so in classical terms we would say we have an issuer and we have a counterparty risk of the issue and this might be especially the case for real assets how do you deal with that or how do you see it let me maybe give you the example from the energy space so we we built what we call a trusted gateway means a gateway that measures the energy output we put a cryptochip in there to give both the physical asset a digital twin that is rooted in the physical realm and then we tokenize the data the measurement of the output right where it comes into existence namely on the chip level so i think we need to differentiate between oracles so the original data sets coming from machines because then we can use hardware components to basically make the machine speed vehicles or production machines directly sign the data and then the smart contracts can take over so the quality or the provenance of data is solved and then there might be other cases where we still have human data entries or you know corporate data just coming from a cloud where we cannot be sure about the quality of these data sets and and that's when you really have a counterparty risk but i said you know we always need to differentiate between the technology layer and and what is enabled by the technology in a satisfactory quality and what is process design and i think most most of the cheating will happen on on the process design you know by things that are promised in in in papers uh white papers and also in the published documents that a regulator might require which will not uh come true um so the the clear play or the most obvious and and most rational uh rationalistic play will be data coming from machines and from public registries i would say after you know examination thorough examination everything else there will be still a arrest of a risk i i just would like to add that we mustn't forget that this register that we create why is it called distributed ledger because there's many actors in the in the register that are looking at it at the same time in the legacy financial markets the csd cannot see what the route is doing what the custodian bank is doing what the stock exchange is doing because everything happens in in steps and everybody has to reconsult but you then rely on another intermediary the auditor who comes and orders the books of the custodians the broker the csds the banks whatever in the dlt you get all the actors in the shared version of the true and that's why i'm an ex-auditor we are saying that even auditing is going to evolve to real-time auditing because you put an auditor as a node that can see the journal entries in real time you can put the regulator instead of the regulator getting a report at the end of the month the regulator can see every single transaction and then you add artificial intelligence to all this information to do ratios to detect if something is not going well so instead of waiting for a crisis to happen when nobody could have predicted you will be able to see it more in real time so everybody's asking how do you prove that that token comes from the real asset that you tokenize the beauty is that this immutable ledger has the ability that you can even put you upload the real document let's assume you're tokenizing real estate you will upload into this ledger the actual copy of the title d so you will know that that token has the title deed and you'll see the complete provenance and just apply that to supply chain apply it to any industry what you need real-time verification of how did it started how did it end and what happened in between so the i think that i'm really trying to answer all the questions that i'm seeing in the audience that you need to understand that this is a complete change that hasn't happened since the renaissance when double entry were keeping took place this is called triple entry accounting why because everybody gets to see the same version of the truth and on top of that not only is immutable it has this cryptography mathematical formula that prevents cheating but then we have smart contracts and the smart contracts are a miracle because it is embeds this application which says if this happens therefore that happens people are asking how are dividends going to be paid very simple the dividend is a simple mathematical formula is on this day all the shareholders in the register will get paid so much and therefore the smart contract will not have to wait for human beings to to do the payment the smart contract will do it and imagine how many functionalities will be completely automated you know in terms of you know the lease agreements uh contracts and all of this will be a game changer when you start putting the trust on the code and not so much on all these you know so many intermediaries that we created because we didn't know any better to tell you the truth when we created this this is all we knew we knew we had to trust all these people the central banks the lawyers the accountants everybody now we know we have something better which is this version of the truth that is immutable and less corrupt but we we have to we have to be careful and just uploading a document will not mean that we catch the truth you know if it would be the role of the president's office of donald trump to publish the election results then we would have an issue so data stays on the blockchain forever that really means that you know data that triggers oracles or smart contracts need to be regulated or supervised same for smart contracts you know that's the essence of it it's not custody custody is it's solving a technical issue that can be solved by many companies but regulating smart contracts regulating governance overseeing the quality of data that's critical yeah thank you i appreciate that i think as mentioned by monica we we are not facing i would say technical or functional issues because obviously the blockchain and trt can bring very satisfactory and efficient uh answers to any kind of technical functional question and a much better uh processing the question is really how do we make sure and we are coming back i think simon to your initial question how we make sure that the legal and regulatory framework is absolutely bulletproof and that we are sure that the representation that we have in the blockchain under the token form is absolutely as valid and as the same legal enforcement as any ownership on the underlying assets and for me that's certainly the the main challenge that we are all facing in the coming years how do we guarantee that how do we run that and how do we make anybody who wants to adopt those technology comfortable with this things remark is there's the question coming from the audience if we can have some time for questions just to let the audience know i already already tried to include your questions into the discussion um it's just a lot so that we cannot tackle maybe every question but just to let you know um so and maybe then continuing the discussion and as you have mentioned now before like i really like also the example of experiencing a crypto and token trading yourself by just trying it and you also all have mentioned kind of um what kind of infrastructure we need for that and the question for me would be how open does this infrastructure need to be in order to be truly immutable and also to make this experience of trading at three a.m in the morning on a sunday um something at least possible and where do you see maybe limitations also of that kind of open infrastructure maybe i can start with this one so first of all what i would say is that i don't think we will ever have a super homogeneous environment where either everything is on a public permissionless blockchain or everything happens on private blockchains i think we will always have diversity just like today we have diversity and electronic communication channels we have email sms whatsapp telegram slack many other forms of electronic communication there will never be one unified platform um and i think the same is true for um tokenized assets and and tokenization in general i think a lot will happen on public permissionless chains just like we already see that today but i think there's also sometimes situations where you need a private permissions chain and there are good reasons for that um i think there will be centralized trading venues i think there will be decentralized trading values such as the taxes that we already see there might be marketplaces or exchange-like structures that are run by several banks for example so we will see uh a big diversity and i don't think it will ever unify to just one protocol or one platform um i do believe though that um that there are a few things that we can already see in the market uh someone in the question was asking what we as bitbond would do differently um uh or what we have learned over the past year since we've done the first security token offering in germany i think back at the time i wouldn't have done anything differently because we managed to get regulatory approval we managed to get a lot of investors we managed to conduct everything in a functional way from a technical standpoint there were no hacks or anything um but of course since then the market hasn't evolved i think when you look at the public permissionless space one of the biggest and most fascinating developments is the evolution of scaling solutions for ethereum back then we did our issuance on stella because network fees on ethereum already back then were quite high but today we are in a different situation there's several protocols that are using the ethereum virtual machine but that have put it on a more scalable platform such as polygon or avalanche and many others and of course all of them have advantages and disadvantages but you see that there is a lot of experimentation going on and eventually i do believe that ethereum and evm compatible chains um are going to play a very important if not even a dominant role um in the market so these are some of the things that i think we can see at the same time um centralized players like uh deutsche buzzer group have launched platforms like d7 uh and so there's also a lot of exciting developments there and and i think all of them will co-exist to be honest and as more assets will be tokenized and will be made accessible to investors um i think there will actually be a need for a variety of platforms a variety of technologies on which tokenization can happen and i also want to add very important that we haven't mentioned but it's the whole explosion of the decentralized finance product and then what we are seeing is now the merging of legacy with d5 i'm sure you heard about a society general issuing a bond that they are using as collateral for make a die which is a stable coin in the d5 environment so we i still think that we are at the very beginning you know i always tell the story you know if someone would have told me that 20 years ago someone would have invented an app called whatsapp and that i was going to press a button and call anybody in the world for free i would have said no you're joking that that for me 20 years ago would have been a miracle today we use it all the time and it's changed our lives completely and this is what i predict is going to happen with this technology today we cannot even begin to imagine what this new world order is going to look like when we start tokenizing absolutely let me maybe add something here as well you know as a deep tech company um i'm not fully sure if i can agree with the statements about the ethereum ecosystem of course it's progressing but others are as well but i think that's not a main point we need interoperability so in complex projects we will have different blockchains working together also the legacy systems it's also very important to have peer review that's true for the protocol level but also for important components such as you know hardware wallets etc but of course we there are boundaries to to the openness if i look at our custody solution of course we need to be td power compliant so there is no customer data in there so there's a separation between the custody product and let's say the fiat crypto on-ramp for regulatory reasons not for for technical reasons so metadata management becomes key and personally i'm coming from the media industry and metadata management has been underestimated there for decades so that's that's certainly a key point we we shouldn't forget uh and then as i said you know the whole smart contracting space that's where the next focus of regulation supervision and discussion should be because especially in the critical industries like self-driving vehicles etc this will be key our focus is also more on new let's say currency equivalence so that project in austria that i mentioned where we launched a kilowatt hour token that was of course not a coincidence the whole bitcoin scheme is basically an equation to turn energy into money just with a different focus and with the whole co2 certificate regimes every cfo has to deal with the cost of decarbonization now so there will be other equivalence or values of units compared to just new currencies be they cbtc's or cryptocurrencies we will announce tomorrow a joint venture with austria's largest energy companies i think we're one of the few blockchain companies that form already jv's with traditional industries not for our mother company but for for a daughter company and this is also a way forward maybe picking up because now as a kind of roundup question to to sum it up as we are approaching the end of the discussion and there were some suggestions for the tokenization the tokenization of truly everything from the audience which is kind of interesting and as this is our key topic i think we have to face this challenge so um what do you think about the tokenization of human labor or even humans and also of science like kind of funding for science i can i can give you an example um what happens is that this in many examples but it's all to do with the decentralized autonomous organizations as we know the dao hasn't got humans as a guard in you know it's really a smart contract and they but they've got objectives so for example if you need to finance a pro a project and let's assume that i want to be able to study and i don't have the money so then i can join a dow and contribute to the dao just be it with a technology my time you know and the dow will then give me tokens and with those tokens i can use them to go and pay for my studies so that's what i see is going to happen this whole social impact projects even the concept of universal basic income where people will be able to sell their own data because you're going to have yourself serving information under your control you'll sell it you'll get a token and that token will be used for other projects because like we all have said today eventually all these tokens will interoperate in one way or another and therefore we need to start thinking about how do we it's new ways of creating a wealth and and the ability to bring everybody up you know we must lift all the votes through education and through this new technology that and and just reinvent it doesn't matter where you live that for me is the most beautiful thing i live in africa in africa we have a problem with transport and connectivity imagine that now you can give education and access to the poorest of the employers they can work for any company in the world as long as you give them access to the internet on a laptop that has to be something that i hope that everybody comes out saying i can see why we should all be working in the space to make a difference to the world so last call last reply regarding human tokenization or science tokenization before roundup who wants to take it well maybe algeria takes it well not not so much a human tokenization because i'm afraid to be some kind of a science fiction and it's definitely above my capacity but maybe just about the science tokenization uh to make a parallel with uh one of the assets that can be tokenized which is ip in other sectors such as art or music or whatever uh maybe there is there is a field there to be a explored and developed regarding the possibility to to finance research and development and and whatever uh using using tokenization as a support for the for the the science as all yes that was quite quick me and thanks for mark so we would have time for another quick last stance maybe from both of you then radko and sebastian like two sentences each what do you think about tokenization of truly everything like even humans or science well we we have just been invited by the european commission or the european ip office to suggest the design for anti-counterfeit blockchain based solutions so this is for sure coming i also believe that staking which you know has appeared in the financial sector of the blockchain business over the past year and a half this will become very important also for us as normal citizens to be able to stake smart contracts and certain efficiency suggestions and and so we need to promote and drive citizen let's say participation uh in different areas such as you know suggestions how to to reach the the new uh green deal goals um so it would be also a way forward and i like really monica's idea to participate in a dow and lend your workforce but also give creativity promote ideas that you have and there must be or will be reward schemes for that not only in the b2b space it's a bit hard for me to comment on um tokenization of science financing for example i do believe that over the next months and years most of the value that is tokenized is rather coming in the context of financial assets let's say whether those are securities or more like utility tokens however i do think that we're going to see a lot more nft like tokenizations not necessarily only art but we've been approached to look into the tokenization of genuinity certificates for gemstones for example or to tokenize certificates like drivers licenses so these are applications that are not from the financial services world but where there is likely to also come a lot of demand for tokenization pretty much everywhere where you need a secure and unique proof of ownership in something many thanks radko and many thanks also to you monica sebastian and mark i think it was a really interesting discussion for me personally and especially being able to listen and not only to talk this was for me quite interesting and i think that we can conclude that there are still things in this world that we do not want to be tokenized and looking forward to the rest of the day see you