EBC22 | How Did Crypto Become the Most Invested Sector in Fintech?

wonderful uh hello everyone and uh thank you for coming my name is erwin balder i'm an economist with the european blockchain association i have the pleasure of moderating this panel today with our same speakers and the topic is essentially that from the genesis block onwards what really drove the inflows into the crypto sector from an institutional perspective from a retail perspective what's the underlying ethos the ontology of why this space has garnered so much interest over the past 10 to 15 years and just to give you a small a small tidbit just from the last year alone i mean we're looking at around 247 blockchain deals um or 88 growth 25.2 billion global blockchain funding in 2021 in europe median deal size up from 1 to 3 million from 2015 to 2021 and europe deals reaching an all-time high in q4 with around 560 million so on this continent especially it sometimes plays second fiddle to the united states given it's given its size um we're still seeing considerable growth and i will now pass it on to the uh to the panelists to give you a short introduction and then we can dive in thank you erwin um juan jimenez or jj here i represent alastria i'm the ceo of alastria which is a blockchain organization based in spain but also working quite actively in europe in the whole european region building building networks and building community um also touching on different sectorals that maybe i'll explain later on i'm also the public policy director for santander group where i take care of digital regulation that it's underway in the european union uh good afternoon my name is alexandrakesh i work for city ventures so it's the venture arm of citibank doing investment but also r d and innovation in the space of various topics related to fintech my in my specific team we're focusing on blockchain and digital assets and prior to that i've been in the crypto industry in singapore uh running a custody and prime brokerage service uh actually working from time to time with three hours and celsius who are in the in the press uh for the moment but uh you know that's the the beauty of crypto you meet a lot of people sometimes uh it leads to good things sometimes it leads to bad things and i guess we're going to discuss that as well a little bit and i conclude this round for today my name is sarah palervich i'm an executive director at the digital zero association also topic the digital euro that's still nathan as you said you mentioned the genesis block down the line we're still uh three years if we're lucky or four years uh from the just euro being introduced so still lots to do here and i'm also heavily involved with conceptualizing educational programs around blockchain and digital assets and thus a topic that will foster education further down the line excellent now what i wanted to start off with and i think this is a really prevalent uh prevalent area is the advent of the smart contract you know erc 28 1404 721 and there's a gamut of them realistically how token how tokenization enabled by smart contracts has driven inflows and how programmability and composability has essentially revolutionized the game so to speak and what that has done to drive interest from an institutional level from a category primitive level on the building side et cetera from a uh i would decipher a bit the different use cases and the different approaches i think that when it comes to um to the power of blockchain you know the most attractive thing is is the programmability itself that's why most of the organizations adopted the technology and this is the promise of automation and getting rid of reconciliations and also driven assets or behavioral you know providing behavior to assets is one of the most important features and this is no secret and i think that we're in 2022 so maybe these ones uh this take uh uh is already old but this is why you know the power of the technology seduced all the community or most of the corporates and also smes that want to want to top new revenue sources and look also for efficiencies so you the the the programmability as you mentioned irwin is one of the the main features of course this drives you to the four use cases that we've seen in the ecosystem in the in the community tokenization for sure is one uh and maybe we can elaborate more later on in something that we're this gentleman here and myself i'm working in a working group at the european level uh that's called tokenize europe 20 20 25 to look for how tokenomics or token economics can change dynamics here in europe second one would be notarization how how you can register assets on a blockchain and yeah for sure programmability i think is the is the holy grail is is something that uh that we're all looking at and uh certain constructs that we're looking at in the european union for example diesel europe uh we all we are all trying to push for this programmability feature to be included into the construct i'm going to be curious to see whether uh your assumption about programmable the digital euro being programmable will become true or not and hope to have another panel with you a couple of years from now that will be great to see um i want to maybe take a step back before we kind of get into smart contracts and in how far and this has maybe helped blockchain to become the biggest sector in fentech as we currently see it since well smart contracts of course they give an entire new scope to um digital service payments so and this is obviously what is going to be iterated here right so just um digitalizing the payment process itself isn't enough anymore but it's the money behind it and this is of course what programmable payment takes to the next level in terms of not only tokenizing money as exists today or as will exist tomorrow but obviously taking it a step further and then saying um as we've seen now in china it's actually used as a voucher that's given to citizens that they can use in a certain way um spend with certain um merchants um in order to get the get economy um back rolling after covet hit for example um so these possibilities i believe are mostly also what drive smart contracts and what's also another component that i deem important is that it's not just financial services so of course most people here i mean we have had a panel before us here about the health care system um but financial services um in smart contract there's only one use case and then of course i mean i don't need to iterate all of these but um i mean you can have the the minute of the your favorite basketball game uh tokenized right via smart contracts these days um that's not something if we talk about other sectors in in fintech such as ai for example um we don't see an equivalent of this magnitude i don't think and on the banking side what banks and the financial industry thinks uh finds exciting about distributed ledger technology blockchain the program programmability the tokenization characteristics of this technology is the fact that it's breaking silos so when you look at the current financial and banking market you have every type of instrument has its settlement infrastructure you have rtgs system and ach for payments you have exchanges csds for securities there's a dvp process between the delivery versus payment process between the two but it's up it's not always easy to eliminate all risks for example and and being able to tokenize pretty much every type of assets on one platform and be able to swap those assets from one to the other being able to move i would say those assets in a 24 7 capability which does not exist today in the payments world and the securities world is really what uh the financial market will be leveraging i think in this technology so um the the fact that standards are emerging like the erc standards you you mentioned or the uh the vm uh wallets uh compatibility for example is are good things because it's necessary there are other things that will be needed in terms of standards for the uh the mainstream adoption in the financial and capital market and banking markets uh to happen for example uh the reuse of existing standards that ex that are used today in the in the in the banking and financial sector like the iso 2022 standards which is a data layer that can be reused in any on any technology the digital token identifier which is a standards that has been issued recently to help ensure that you always sure of the asset you're talking about and you don't con mix them up uh will also be uh important but we are uh in a good we're going in the right direction excellent and what i also find really interesting is the fact that you can use this technology and the smart contracts and the traceability for tracking antarctic whitefish populations or conflict minerals or for different kinds of providence record records as well so it has that social characteristic that's that's unique among other frontier technologies and and i think that brings me to my next point is crypto has a cult of personality around it it's a it's a subset of narrative economics essentially and what do you think ultimately differentiates it from from ai or deep learning or other things why has it accrued such a cult of personality and has that contributed to the inflows that we see if i can take this one i would say other exponential technologies are more an evolution of old ones for example when you look at artificial intelligence well this comes from the 80s you look at the maths behind the mathematical models are not that sophisticated and it's been an evolution i would say so we human being we we learned to coexist with the technology and to implement it in our processes and it's been more progressive i would say other exponential technologies are a little bit like these ones when you when you touch on exponential technologies iot for example well at the end of the day sensors connected to oracles is not that sophisticated i think blockchain when it came across 2008 came like you know fresh air and you know new new phenomenon that was difficult to decipher and of course the first use case was about rebuilding the whole financial system which is a quite an interesting chunk when it comes to to to move pieces and that change the course of uh of a history and uh over years i think it became quite confrontational you know the crypto guys versus the blockchain guys i think that is no more like that at least in a last year we're trying to build bridges and to to to position well we can do crypto of course but we should do crypto attached to the regulation because this is a very important piece and at the end of the day you have to protect investors and uh crypto is a perfect expression of blockchain so i think it's two phenomenons that that live together that are you know uh they have to live together and have to coexist and um i think that the more we walk together and the more we can we can we can elaborate and collaborate together we'll get faster out of this crypto winter that i i don't really like the term but it's out there and uh i think that blockchain with crypto has a long run uh before to go further so blockchain and digital and digital assets are one of the eight technologies that we think will shape the future at city so of course iot 5g ai etc are i guess the difference between all those and blockchain and digital asset is that blockchain and digital is assets no the other ones are tools enabling other processes and other activities to take place blockchain and digital asset is an activity in itself it's actually a paradigm shift on how something that we have been doing for many for centuries meaning paying stuff and moving value around will be in the future it's a it's a complete paradigm shift between what we know to do today and a new future that we don't even know how it will end in terms of of outcome in terms of new services new products that will be emerging from that new payment layer in a way and that's i think what makes it more exciting generally people are excited more by money than by uh technology itself here it's actually marrying technology and money and may end value rather and making it um and actually building and leading to the building of a new generation of internet web 3 that everybody at the end on the planet will will be using so i think that's the main difference between those technologies i'm not sure i'm percent in line but let me explain which points i mean and i'll start off with irwin's question which was um we see almost like a cult like existence around or in the crypto community and uh quite simply put honestly i mean we have the term bitcoin evangelist we talk about the orange pill that's infecting all of us by just taking it and turning us into a different human being um i mean i'm not sure bitcoin maximalists would argue it's not their religion of course not everyone but i'm sure you'll find some out there maybe here even out there with the red eyes exactly on twitter if if not here then on twitter certainly um but i think um if i mean there's of course a reason as to why that is the case and one of them is of course that um i mean what type of payment today provides you with the way of expressing your political views right that you think a financial system should be decentralized for example and this is not necessarily something that we've seen before not something that like a pattern detector such as a i can necessarily serve you with i mean i feel like that's more of a of a tech talk you can have in terms of okay are we going to go into machine learning are we going to do neural networks and so on but there's not this this inherent philosophy behind it necessarily then second point i wanted to make is touching on um on jj's point um that um [Music] we uh actually forgot what you what you said regarding bias on them the uh the blockchain guys and the crypto guys maybe oh yeah exactly thank you that was that was it basically out that we see this this a bit of a war almost between bitcoin maximalist versus um other crypto projects and the entire discussion about what true decentralization means and so on and how important it is to the community and i do think it bears a lot of risks and i mean if you wanted to to compare it to religion almost um it's almost like there's a bit of lack of proof for all of these things at this point still i mean it's a lot of talk about the potential it's a lot of talk about what will be in the future what we what we think will happen but can we actually plan everything out as we as we do or do we trust in a lot of um what we don't know but have questions about um so yeah that's that's certainly um my my stance on uh whether it's called like or not no and i think all of you have touched on a very very important point is that blockchain is a pass-through mechanism that links all of these other adjacent technologies together like for for digital twins that can trigger machine-to-machine payments you could leverage an iot sensor to get that done on the physical side which would then link to the to the digital twin in in the ether and they're complementary to each other with blockchain being the current and then i mean it's true uh you look at the bitcoin maximalists and for them you know crypto is a it's a cross-section of counter culture radicalism and technological determinism and then they're kind of somewhere in between but the reality is a little more a little more different and whether it's an inflation hedge um that's also dependent on is this an inflationary sputter or is this an inflationary sputter within a larger deflationary overhang and that's also a question that we had we can't have answered yet because crypto is just now for the first time coming to terms with a high rate environment it grew up it inculcated itself in a low interest rate environment so it's a complete paradigm shift in that regard which brings me to my next question and that's extremely important given the um how am i going to put this the unfortunate market conditions or the extreme market conditions that have impacted 3ac and babel and celsius and a whole bunch of other issuers going back from terra is that in this bear market what do you think is absolutely necessary to preempt a regulatory push that we all know is coming what can the community do to buffer itself and prepare for the next upcycle well i would say when you touched on on regulation regulation is very is very pretty much needed uh in this in this specific moment uh we know is in the oven um we know that we've been we've been cooking this one uh positioning positioning uh the the the industry in front of regulators uh core regulators in in europe at least in my case i think they they understand perfectly that we need we need a framework the more clarity the more certainty we get the better we can rebuild some parts of the ecosystem and intensify some others that are still missing the main three regulations and i think the in the in the panels there in the in the big auditorium it has been touched uh uh for a while this morning has been the pilot regime pilot regime for capital markets it's there it's already published is there for the community for the industry for the financial industry to use it but it's mostly focused on uh multicultural multilateral trading facilities and uh central clearing counterparts not that much to uh financial players but still an interesting uh regulation it's a pilot it's not definitive it's for five years but i think it's going to bring lots of new instruments into the market which is a very good news for the industry second one is mica or mica the market's in crypto assets act it's part of the digital package of the european union with the dora and this one is going to take a while why because of the custodial liability which is one of the one of the points that is still not clear and it's going to prevent certain players to jump into the into the ecosystem and for the custodians the new custodians to have a very a very bad time when it comes to uh uh positioning themselves and that's why we see more and more custodians shifting to a to a software provider rather than a regulated uh custodian uh this one combined with the with the esg with the e for esc the environmental piece of a proof of work and how we shift uh consensus mechanisms from pov uwv to pos proof of stake and layer twos these ones is going to take a while and that's why um maybe it's going to take to until 2023 and then 18 months to be uh enacted is a long long time so the regulation is there the more the merrier but taken in a proper uh in a proper dose and i think it's going to bring more and more clarity to the ecosystem it's only good news yeah i fully agree that uh it's unavoidable and i think it's a it's a good thing to have the right regulations put in place for the industry that we are in uh not to prevent innovation but to protect consumers as simply as that and to avoid this technology and those assets to be used for criminal activities like any value and assets can be used for those type of activities so that's the base but what i know what i've noticed really as a difference from when i was talking to regulators five years ago and now uh talking to the same people is that they've learned a lot they've educated themselves a lot on the topic some of them are more knowledgeable to be honest than some crypto experts experts in the room uh and not pointing to anybody obviously it's a general statement and that's a good that's a good news because they they slowly but truly getting that trying to replicate or apply existing regulations to this new type of assets will not work so specific sets of regulations needs to be put in place they also understand that some they still don't understand actually how they will be dealing with d5 for example because that's some it's it's it's an industry that is complicated to regulate if it's fully decentralized but they but they're not in a hurry to do that because they understand it's it's early stage most regulators understand it's early stage most regulators understand that they need these uh setups needs to prove uh their characteristics of full decentralization they need to uh but but but they're also looking at the industry to organize it themselves like c5 has been doing in the five year in the last five years i think d5 should now try to sit around and understand okay what will a regulated defy look like what should should it look like and then go with their id's to the regulators who are eager to learn and eager to talk and dialogue with those communities i think the point you made about basically not just speaking about d5 in their let's say in their own separated room um is important in terms of actually get people that develop in d5 and so on um into the room to understand really what's needed otherwise we're going to have another case of unhosted wallet ban in the eu for example um that's something we went through and i think in general we can say that everything that decentralized finance is going through right now we have been through already in traditional finance and we needed the equivalence of the terror crash we needed the equivalent of the celsius network um in traditional finance and we've seen those things happen and then regulation appear afterwards and unfortunately we're going through with the exact same thing um i think there's two things to do here like you said basically um get everybody at one table to find a suitable work in progress solution for the meantime until it is fully established whatever that means um but then on the second hand so if we're not talking about d5 we're talking about um e-money tokens for example and um regulation where we already have a blueprint let's say from other jurisdictions actually look over there what works what doesn't i'm i'm sometimes not sure and how far that's happening um what do i mean by this as an example what happens if the eu bans um unhosted wallets well consumers aren't going to not have unhosted wallets they're going to have other exchanges or um or move abroad essentially especially for startups that's true not necessarily for consumers themselves but what's also the responsibility i think in terms of if we say okay proof of work the working mechanism is prohibited in the eu that will put the um the responsibility of dealing with bitcoin and proof of work away from the eu and move it to other countries that don't have necessarily the security of being able to or the privilege of thinking about things like which consensus mechanism do we still allow how do we deal with this whereas the eu obviously besides the ukraine russia war of course taking place right now but would be in a situation to think about do we give this responsibility away to other countries um or do do we keep it we somehow need to deal with it but i do think that we're at a point where um at least um regulation around the world has realized um bitcoin is not going anywhere d5 is not going anywhere we can further ignore this this is actually causing problems if we do wonderful and you actually raised a really good point uh and i'd like to just extend that a little further so i mean recently uh christine lagarde made some comments with respect to like a bespoke regulatory regime for unidentified uh crypto assets that are originating from an unidentified issuer so i mean that specifically looks at things like bitcoin and she's calling for amica too while the ink hasn't even been penned on mikko one uh what do you think of this is the symptomatic of the eu where you know in home improvement you measure twice cut once we regulate twice and then produce once do you think that that's something that's necessarily just talk at this point or do you feel that the eu might honestly move in this direction and already start thinking about additional regulatory umbrellas while this one isn't even penned yet i would say i'd say that innovation goes faster than regulation and this is a bit cheesy already we all know that at least the ones here in the room we have to we have to welcome we have to show at least a bit of of respect about the effort they're making uh in brussels and also in frankfurt uh when putting together a regulation that is not an easy one is the fifth asset is a new asset as alexander was was was mentioning is a is a total new activity in itself it's not a it's not a technology that is kind of incremental this is something totally new and uh putting together a regulation from the ground up from from scratch is is very is very difficult at the same time has to be ambitious so has to be uh uh exhaustive and uh has to embrace or at least touch on the the different matters where investors are maybe struggling issuers are struggling and uh financial players are struggling but i think that is a good advance when it comes for example to defy well defy is not even touched in the in the in mika worthing uh when you when you read the full text the full 500 pages um it takes a while you know to read it and uh and uh of course they go they go uh with the first first attempt but i'm sure we'll have a mika too as we we enjoyed uh me feed too uh maybe maybe we're we're we're uh in the in the journey of of getting a me feed three and this is the course of of the facts uh in in in regulation but for now i think that with a proper mika touching properly on sustainability provisions also taking good care of custodial liability and not being that strict when it comes to unhosted wallets uh and also taking it right when it comes to nfts only regulating the ones that are really a financial asset and not the others not not damaging the creator's ecosystem i would say this could be a good take um i agree with you in that sense i do think that uh every regulation that will occur from now on will either be due to iterations of mika at least in the eu or it will come from another unfortunate piece of news whatever the next one might be i mean it's still 2022 and we've already seen a couple of major news arise within the last couple of weeks in fact um so let's see what's to come and i think they're gonna go about it from a reactive perspective um and then also adjust mika according to what they see it works and what doesn't um if it all ends up being inside of mika i mean i'm no expert on this topic in terms of does it have to be written in mika so do does the entire topic of unhosted wallets have to be within the mikae regulation or can it be standalone um law for example um in that sense um i think that's less important at that point but yeah as i said i think it's going to be more about the reactive way of going about it and re-vamping mika as needed along the way i just want to share one example of a problem that has been solved in my view relatively smartly uh which relate to unhosted things i don't if you remember in uh at the beginning of mobile phone you could easily go in any shop and buy a sim card with an anonymous sim card then use it and you know prepaid sim card and do whatever you want including selling drugs including doing criminal activities including all those issues and obviously those anonymous sim cards were welcomed by criminals because it's it was one way to get a remain anonymous and doing threat phone calls for example but that has stopped at one point at least in my country i'm from uh uh belgium and i guess it's a european law where now when you go buy a an anonymous sim card you need to you need to leave your you need to show your identification and the seller needs to have a photocopy of your identification linked to the sim card number that you've taken it's simple it's not really killing privacy because they're just keeping it in case they need uh to do a law a law enforcement investigation and then they can go to the shop and get an information about who bought that sim card but i think the same could be one solution for hardware wallets for example or or hardware wallets at least for of course mobile it's a bit more complicated to put in place but there are ways of being imaginative about uh helping to uh well avoid those that those uh feet those tools that wallets are are used for criminal activities while at the same time enabling leaving the people who are good citizens use those amazing tools to connect to web 3.0 software and offering in the reason in the future or to connect to d5 products excellent and i can just say that uh that working group that uh gentlemen and i are currently a part of um there's some eu officials that have on the part of the commission initiated this with the deutsche bank verbum and they're very proactive in terms of the way that they see the future of the space which gives gives confidence to the idea that we in the end will move in the right direction um so we have a little bit of time left over i was just wondering whether uh anybody in the audience perhaps had a question if that was okay with uh with all of you so field some questions from the crowd thank you um so i wanted to ask um as it was mentioned about the whole financial system or defining so is there like currently a chance that it may um really happen in some like mid term uh future uh with regards that uh currently um there is still no big progress here and uh bitcoin in fact uh consider it as just another risk on asset but not like something um really different like at the moment so uh what uh your thoughts on that guys is it possible question is if if through this technology our favorite technology we can change the the way financial system is built for the citizens or is it a chance that completely new uh financial system being built based on these technologies and probably replacing the um existing one or probably making the existing one something uh supplementary because currently uh like something vice versa happens well it's it is there in my view but it's used by a small number of people but it's still hundreds of millions of people it's not small in the sense of small and it's increasing every every year so i'm talking about people using bitcoin as a store value people using different types of assets on d5 protocols to get land to get loans stable coins which are uh used extensively i use them for cross-border transfers from time to time because it's more efficient so it is being used but it's not the challenge of this industry is user experience the user experience is pretty to be honest it's uh managing a a a wallet yourself managing your private keys is a bit complicated so most people need and including myself to rely on uh in intermediaries which is not bad by the way it's just it if it hides the complexity of of the of the the product behind why not and it and it will be likely the future so the in my view the future will be uh not only d5 it will be c5 d5 trad five coexisting together depending on the use case one will be taking over uh some of the process in trade five because it's more efficient uh in other case it won't be the case because trade five is more efficient so it's really uh it's going to be i think the future at least for the next 10 years will be if not 20 will be a mix of all types of phi uh c5d5 trade phi i heard a new acronym today dc phi uh why not you know cd c5 next time uh so um but but it's already there and it's effectively working for many people in uh in emerging markets for example to do activities that they cannot do via the traditional financial market financial industry um and if i may add i think this was the perfect uh caveat because i'm gonna go a bit into another direction uh that will show i think i hope um a bit of the other picture as well because if we're just looking at d5 right now um i totally understand if arguing with figures right now you're not convinced that this will ever reach mass adoption and that's not necessarily my my opinion either or at least not right now but what i don't think is spoken enough quite that much is what's happening besides that right so we see central banks actually looking into digital currencies because of bitcoin um because of blockchain technology essentially we see um the regulated liability network where all of a sudden we see commercial bank money deposits as well as central bank money and e-money being being tokenized and thus having a couple of those benefits that blockchain or d5 projects can offer move into more conservative realms and these are all things that wouldn't be happening if it weren't for bitcoin and d5 and everything that's happening around it um as a as a needed almost reaction to the developments of bitcoin and blockchain to not um to not um endanger the financial stability of a country or a currency unit per se all right guys uh thank you very much for all this uh insight um i'm robert de co the co-founder of equito and we had to deal with with the problem that you mentioned uh which are the the the identification of the investors through all this defy and c5 process um the sto framework is now requiring uh automated kyc for every user you were mentioning the the example of of the the mobile phone that we could purchase back in the days without giving our ids do you see the the the id attached id powered by blockchain are powered by centralized entities attached to wallet becoming a norm in order for for the regulator to be able to track whoever old assets or we will still have a gray zone in the coming years on on ledger like hard wallet for example i would say yeah for sure we we have we have these other those here in europe the ei das 2 that is dealing with a digital identity and we know for a fact that is going to be on a wallet what we don't know is that it's going to if it's going to be blockchain based or not and this is something that we're asking to the regulators to be specific because the wording goes like electronic ledgers but not distributed letters so can be different but what we know also is that the european union is pursuing adoption and in order to do that they're going to attach payment functionalities within the id the identity wallet and potentially the digital euro will come on top this way you have this layer layer layer of functionality and when you're dealing with the finance of the people this is where you get adoption and uh but you have your identity underneath and it's very powerful and not only who you are is a 360 degrees of the whole profile of the user and you'll be suffering to share certain data with certain providers or or partners around the ecosystem or not which nowadays is not that easy as we know data is in the hands of the google the amazon the facebook the apples uh the banks the incumbents which i can follow and this belongs to the people um so i think for sure we will witness it um this one this one is not in dialogue so it's still not being discussed that much but i will have in a year time or something we'll have already an app with us to deal with the public sector and the private sector together at least in the 27 member states will be the common rail a common infrastructure maybe different expressions through different apps but for sure interoperable each other and to actually to complement the answer to your questions will it happen i think uh having a digital id uh that works and that is interoperable and that really is global at least in at least regional will accelerate also the adoption of all those d5 and nc5 services because it will solve one of the issues uh that exists today in this industry industry is is knowing your counterparty and knowing and making sure that when you transfer assets from one address to the address to another address you're not sending to the wrong address as well so it's also linking an id to an address is also a positive thing in a sense that it helps you making sure you're not doing a mistake uh when you when doing transaction i just i just wanted to add that you know when you're looking at privacy um and we've had this talk as well you always come to the trilemma of privacy scalability and civil resistance and that's also something that needs to be taken into account provided you go that direction and it depends on the product which weighted average do you place on privacy scalability or civil resistance and that's not something that's currently being exactly dealt with particularly because it's it's the triffin dilemma of blockchain so that's currently where we are but the team that's working on aids 2 is is very uh very bright and capable so i'm sure that uh we'll definitely have as jj said more information within the next year um thank you uh for sharing your views so i have question regarding in terms of investment itself so we see a lot of countries around the world are becoming skeptical about cryptocurrencies and that it might or might not lead to dollarization or illegal activities going on in the economy this said that regulations are tightening in a lot of emerging markets so do you see that this would discourage the sector and even the adoption of decentralized finance in a lot of these countries and making it go mainstream and the second question regarding the same if the companies do adapt to the new regulations then the whole concept of decentralization kind of goes away and everything becomes centralized or the information is given out to the government or is made you know is shared with the organization so how do you see this dichotomy playing out that if you have centralization then government decentralization then government discourage it and if it becomes centralized then the whole meaning of decentralization goes away um i can attend to the to the first question at least a little bit i hope um this is obviously very complex and going beyond crypto i mean the entire um topic of overdollarization um in those terms well that's of course uh a problem in and as far as we see um the u.s stable coin or stable coins in general that are backed by um the us dollar um to be very very very very dominant and this of course has in first priority to do with regulation um so certainly um this is something that um the lack of or too much regulation in other countries is is driving and causing and causing problems again right i mean el salvador used to be um dependent on the us dollar now it i mean they they still have the us dollar and now they also have crypto um but it the the risk is certainly there um i'm not sure how to solve this again i think it has to do with more countries allowing um stable coins to be issued and not have such high entry barriers yeah and maybe on the decentralization versus centralization um i know a lot of people are looking forward to have everything fully decentralized and everything fully managed by individuals in charge of their their wealth and and their and their future but we all know that it's not going to be like that there is no ideal world that is uh all taking place it's always it always ends up being a compromise between various uh interests in this case regulators for example versus users versus service providers and to conclude i would say that uh the the future will likely be a mix of solutions some being able to be pretty much fully decentralized because they don't raise any risks at least perceive risk for the regulators and others having to be a bit more centralized because there's a a bigger risk concern that's that would be my guess but i don't think we'll breach our reach a fully decentralized uh world in in the future okay excellent and uh that was our panel thank you very much for attending if you have any other questions um feel free to reach out afterwards we can discuss thank you to the uh to the great panelists [Applause]