Good morning. Thank you for inviting me so quickly. Um, I'm Marius. I am one of the co-founders of Ethereum Institutional. Um, we are one of the recent forks of the Ethereum Foundation.
Um, which you may have heard of. Uh, and yes, we announced this 2 weeks ago. It was quite an exciting time with a lot of positive feedback, but also a lot of work. Um, and today I want to briefly tell you why we are here, what we plan to do, and why we believe a separate organization is needed to drive institutional adoption of Ethereum. Um adoption of Ethereum.
Um , and also talk a little bit more about market forces and things that we see shaping the crypto industry and institutional adoption right now. I'll also be around after the performance if anyone wants to chat. Um, so I called this presentation " presentation " Saving Ethereum as the Home of Institutional Finance," and I chose the word "saving" intentionally, which I'll talk about in a moment. Um, and the second part is why we actually need " actually need " institutional front doors," which I'll also talk about in a little more detail. Um, so why are we here and why do we need this front door?
By front door, we actually mean an access point where people can go, who they can talk to when making important decisions about blockchains. Um, and more importantly, which blockchains to launch on. Ahem. So, we see, and this is our general thesis, that over the next 2 years, most of the major banks, asset managers, and market infrastructures will start to lock in the platforms and networks that they will use for scenarios like tokenization, stablecoins, and network settlements in general. Um, these decisions are going to be pretty pivotal as we are essentially re-flashing the entire financial system.
Therefore, the decisions made now and over the next 2 years will be quite important and will have a long-lasting effect on how we think about these integrations and the ecosystem in the future. Um, and so, although the discussions and a lot of what's been discussed over the years where people say " say " institutions are on the way," I think it's not so much a question of time anymore, because everyone we interact with has a strategy and is moving online right now. But there is a big battle for position now, and all of these institutions are getting ready to determine whether they want to build, what kind of implementations they need to connect to the on-chain economy in a scalable and long-term way. So why does Ethereum need a " does Ethereum need a " front door"? One reason: we all used to work at the Ethereum Foundation, but as you know, the foundation wanted to narrow its focus a bit.
They wanted to return to some key principles and adopt a new mandate issued for better coordination of work. Vitalik also openly stated that the foundation sees itself as part of a multi-node ecosystem that collectively contributes to the vision and implementation of Ethereum as a whole. And we are a product of this approach. Inside the foundation, we realized that it was sometimes quite difficult to do the institutional implementation work that we wanted to do. Especially now, when these institutions are really ready to interact.
The second thing, and this goes back to my previous point, is that institutions are now really making decisions. I think there will be a massive fight for positions in the next 6-12 months, and it is critical to have someone who can adequately represent Ethereum and its ecosystem. Today, such a player does not really exist. There are many different teams, each with their own commercial interests. I think everyone generally agrees that Ethereum is the best global settlement layer, but there really isn't a single organization that these institutions can turn to, unlike the situation with Solana, Canton or others, where it's clear that there is one foundation or operating company to talk to talk to .
So we needed a specialized and neutral interface for such work, as well as for coordination with the ecosystem. But also to support deployment, help these institutions transition to on-chain, and remove obstacles along the way. Ahem. The second thing is that Ethereum is already the leading institutional settlement layer, and it combines a lot of qualities that are really important for institutions. This is actually not news to those present in the hall, but it is the most battle-tested infrastructure.
It has the highest uptime of all networks. It has the deepest liquidity in all digital asset markets. This is the most reliable and neutral infrastructure. And I think many institutions see great value in it. At the same time, it is also by far the largest ecosystem when looking at the developers, infrastructure, and applications available to those who want to join.
Unfortunately, this alone is not enough. So, I think that while Ethereum benefited from being a pioneer and having all the basic infrastructure that makes it easier for institutions to make the decision to start working with Ethereum. The dynamics change a little. Ahem. So I wanted to show this slide.
Not sure if you can read it. But what we're seeing now—maybe it's not news—is a large number of competitors and many different teams. I don't want to single out Solana , but I found it interesting what you see here: the future may be multichain, but institutional finance is leaning towards Solana, for example. And if you look at the market capitalization of real assets, you'll see that's not true at all, right? But I want to say that there are a lot of opinions being heard right now in the offices of key decision-makers in all these financial institutions ; they are influenced, communicated with, and convinced why one tech stack is better than another, so the dynamic changes, and while Ethereum has many of the traits we love, it's not enough for Ethereum to win.
So we generally think that there are four forces that are converging in this window of opportunity that we are seeing right now. First, we face a competitive field that is growing and accelerating. I mentioned some networks, but there is Canton, which is gaining momentum, especially in an institutional context. There are Aragon, Circle, Solana, Tembo, and many other networks that are positioning themselves right now , and they all have very attractive incentives, big incentives for deployment, and large, experienced business development teams that are constantly knocking on the doors of all the largest financial institutions. Um, and also clearer coordination.
I mentioned this before, but it's very easy for institutions to navigate other ecosystems because there's usually only one organization or team to interact with. It's a little more complicated when you're trying to navigate the Ethereum ecosystem. Um, so the battle for institutional attention continues, and I want to emphasize: it is clear that Ethereum is already winning and leading, but we are facing increased attention and competitive pressure from many other ecosystems that are now pressing the gas much more aggressively. At the same time, we see that the choice of platforms, which I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, is also becoming more stable. So many decisions about where to issue assets or how to integrate a particular stack into existing infrastructure are becoming more and more final, and while the selection process is still ongoing for some major networks, we only have this window of opportunity to make sure that Ethereum becomes, if not the only one, then at least one of the options chosen for the initial stack.
So we need a clear interface. We need someone who can engage with these institutions, sit in the same room with them , help them navigate Ethereum and its ecosystem, explain Ethereum's advantages over other networks, highlight unique features, bring them closer to the roadmap, and help them overcome barriers to make the path to technology adoption simpler and easier. Um, and that's exactly where we are now . That's why we launched Ethereum Institution and announced it a few weeks ago. First, we created an independent non-profit organization.
Our broad mandate is broad mandate is to represent Ethereum and the broader ecosystem. These are tools, applications, service providers service providers , developers— , developers— anyone who interacts with Ethereum or contributes to its development in one way or another. These are the people we want to engage, but we need, say, a centralized interface to interact with institutions. So we raised funds from Tom Lee of Bitmain, Joe Lubin, Shapeshift, and about 100 other teams from the broader crypto ecosystem to create this independent organization. So, right now there are three of us on the team , which is not that many and certainly not enough for significant changes, but we have the capital and resources to create a team of 15, 20 or 25 people who can take on this work.
We were originally founded as a non-profit organization. I think this is important for us from a reputational point of view as well. We do not need to pursue the interests of any shareholders. We try to be as neutral as possible in how we perceive the implementation of Ethereum and the development of the ecosystem. Although we may have our own opinions about who we should work more closely with.
We also aim to act more commercially when we interact with these banks. And the last point on this slide point on this slide : we are an institutional structure, so it is very easy for us to clearly formulate our mission. We simply want to talk to institutions, and our ultimate goal is ultimate goal is to ensure institutional implementation. So, what exactly are we going to do? There are a few different things on the next slide.
I'll elaborate on what this actually means, but it's clear means, but it's clear that competition is increasing. We have a lot of people working directly with these institutions, and we've done a tremendous amount of work at the Ethereum Foundation, where we've engaged with, I think, over 500 different institutions in the past year. But we need to pick up the pace and accelerate this process even further. So we want to ensure our presence among all these institutional participants before they make important decisions about implementation, choosing integrations and infrastructure, and how they perceive Ethereum and the broader ecosystem. As part of this, we also plan to publish significantly more research.
We want to be a hub for collecting analytical data for the ecosystem. We want to transform institutional requirements into reports, plans, and deliverables that will help us scale implementation much more effectively much more effectively than simply consulting with them individually. Third, we want to talk about ETH as an asset. We consider this an important narrative, important also for the entire ecosystem. We approach this very carefully.
But we also want to talk about all the interesting events happening in institutional Ethereum. The Ethereum Foundation, um, uh, has taken, let's say, a slightly different position on how it wants to approach, um, discussing different types of deployments and, um, maybe coordinated work. But we want to make sure there is a voice for all the interesting things happening on Ethereum today. So we want to be a voice for, uh, institutional use cases. We want to highlight every instance where we see, you know, a new interesting organization coming online coming online .
We want to work with them to demonstrate to the wider community why this is great. Uh, and we want to be that voice that, uh, effectively promotes and, um, clearly explains why these choices are being made and why these choices are great. Um, interacting with all these different institutions, we also want to collect requirements. We want to collect feedback. We want to understand what the obstacles are, what we need to do as an ecosystem to accelerate efforts.
Um, there are a lot of questions about privacy, about the Ethereum roadmap, um, about various small implementation details that relate to regulatory and operational compliance. And we need to prepare better and easier-to- understand materials so understand materials so that these institutions can interact more effectively. And we also need to activate the broader Ethereum ecosystem so that we can remove barriers and, um, uh, achieve faster adoption timelines and acceleration. Um, and the last thing we're going to do is more of what we started at the foundation, but we want to do a lot more institutional events or meetups, places where these institutions can come together and meet with the core developers and ecosystem builders. And we want to create different forums or platforms to make this happen.
It could be workshops, it could be special events, but it could also be large-scale flagship events that we plan to launch to have a meeting schedule for the industry where topics can be discussed and problems can be solved on a much larger scale. So, what are the priorities ahead? What exactly will we be doing over the next 3 months? So, first and foremost, we are currently very actively hiring very experienced professionals experienced professionals , preferably with experience in traditional finance and some blockchain awareness, who can go out and do business development with all the different banks. So different banks.
So , we want to have Ethereum representatives in all major financial centers who can meet with these institutions and convey a common position. We want to be much more active and proactive in marketing. So we really want to accelerate, talk more about the interesting things that we're seeing, and work with all these institutions to identify not only their requirements but also their implementations for the ecosystem. Be a little more practical. We are also building a solution deployment engineering team that can work with these institutions, understand their needs at a deep technical level, and translate that into not only the ecosystem, but also real implementations and frameworks that benefit other institutions and the broader ecosystem.
We want to expand. A few months ago, we hosted the first Ethereum Institutional Forum in New York City— Ethereum Institutional Forum in New York City— a small event of 200-250 people, but with select senior executives from major banks, investment firms, etc., along with key founders of the Ethereum ecosystem. This is something we plan to do more often, in coordination with major institutional events taking place in different parts of the world. Ultimately, we hope this will all translate into an institutional interface or platform that we create so that institutions can interact with the ecosystem, which is what we are currently shaping.
You can think of it as a way to interact with the ecosystem and institutions on a much more scalable level scalable level . And that's what we're ultimately heading towards, or what we want to build over the next 6 months. So, that was a quick overview of where we are at right now . We are extremely excited to accelerate the institutional adoption of Ethereum. We are happy to have the opportunity to do this.
With this new organization and structure. We are very keen to engage with everyone in this room and in the industry who wants to contribute or provide any support they can. It is important to note that our efforts will also depend heavily on the broader ecosystem. We strive to involve the ecosystem in this interaction as actively as possible. So, somehow .
If this resonates with you, then we are just beginning our journey. I left my contact information here. I will be there. I would be happy to chat with anyone. We are currently gathering a lot of feedback and are very keen to implement it to make it the best for both institutions and the ecosystem as a whole.
At this point, I think our time is almost up. Please welcome him with loud applause.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.