Interview with Piers Ridyard, CEO at RDX Works | European Blockchain Convention

[Music] hi everyone good morning we're here at abc1 uh day two um here at beautiful Barcelona I'm anona Stein co- CEO of Brian XPR agency I'm sitting here today with uh V redard uh CEO at RDX Works how are you good morning very good how are you how has it been for you so far at ABC 10 yeah it's been great I mean like it's uh it's every year get a bit bigger uh I think this year um The The J out's been really great uh the the the audience has been packed during the speaking events um it sort of is not so big that it's hard to sort of see people meet people uh and uh you know a lot of the exhibitors are very impressive and there's a large there's a larger and larger number of Institutions where coming to these cules as well anything you found particularly interesting uh walking with flors here I think I think look like a lot of the ideas that crypto came up with in the early days um are just now getting more and more cish I I think that there's less sort of like core Innovation that's happening and more and more people being able to M business requirements and business needs to what the technolog is capable of um so I wouldn't say like from a technology point of view there's anything that particularly blew me away here um but just from the point of view of people get becoming much better at defining what the problems are in the industry that can be solved using the services that people are building uh and and it's great to see every year people becoming more commercial more problem oriented uh and uh just becoming more polished maybe um so you want to tell the audience about radx sure so rad is a layer one protocol focusing specifically on decentralized finance um we uh have built the platform for basic three reasons the first is uh to solve the scalability issue within crypto so creating a platform that's able to scale to millions of transactions per second without without breaking Atomic composability which is something that you see as a big problem in the L2 space it's a big problem in most sharded environments on public networks uh radic solves this problem with a very inovative set of consensus mechanisms that enables us to have linear scalability without breaking Atomic opposability the second problem that we're solving is around security and developer experience um right now in the crypto space there are still regular hacks and exploits and individuals and of applications that builds on top of Crypton uh and so we've built a suite of programming languages and execution environments that make it much easier for developers to build secure applications and much easier for users to interact with those secure applications without ending up having the kind of exent hacks and exploit that you see a the space today okay and then the last aspect of is unuser friendliness our view is that crypto is never going to become mainstream until it becomes super easy to use super inuitive to use and so we built a a new set of user experience tools that make it much easier for everyday people to use the platform things like human readable transactions so you don't you're not confused as to what it is that you're actually approving when you're approving some interaction with a smart contract things like seed phrase free onboarding so that has a user I don't have to worry about the seed phrase I can do decentralized recovery and I can I can make it so that just losing my phone or losing my device doesn't mean I actually end up losing all of my prick to it and a bunch of other sort of like nice to Habs there on top of that and so those things came together around a very long-term project we've been building for a very long time to build this stack that we sort of see as future back like what is necessary of a piece of infrastructure that the world can rely on so that everyone in the world could feasibly build and used public Ledger technology and then taking those requirements and then Translating that into a full stack solution where we brought every layer of the stack to address those problems so you guys are pretty much um around defi scalability where do you see the opportunities and the challenges in the defi market so I think defi is a super interesting market like the idea of disintermediation and transparency within Finance is very appealing not just to the crypto anarchists but it's also very appealing to financial institutions as well things like FDX things like blockfi things like Celsius continually show how much of a problem counterparty risk is uh and what defi does is it removes a huge amount of that counterparty risk and it creates tools for creating automated markets where previously those markets were highly human driven highly manual and so while defi when it first started in sort of 2019 2020 was creating very efficient market Market places for things that most financial institutions would look at and go well I don't care about that object right I don't care about that mean coin I don't care about that like tokenized banana project but what what defi did is they created incredibly efficient marketplaces that were able to operate at scale you know with billions of dollars under management with only like four developers or like a team of 10 a team of 10 managing billions of dollars of AUM and the reason they're able to do that is because the smart contracts do the heavy lifting that's super interesting and and and the difference in the cost bace of managing that kind of AUM and the difference as a user experience in terms of getting that transparency reducing the counterparty risk is really really appealing to the institutional space as well so what we're seeing is more institutions coming in and going hey while the assets that are in defi may not be that interesting to us the underlying idea of how you can build these marketplaces these Financial marketplaces these Financial building blocks are super interesting so how can we how can we interact more with these kind of disintermediated transparent um highly scalable pieces of infrastructure to really create better better markets for our clients to create better tools for us to create Financial products and that's really stting to come to Bear now in defi you know four years on from when defi summer happens you're now starting to see institutions go how can we play in this space as well so is this also where you see the next uh stage of growth for defi or do you find it perhaps to be in other areas yeah no I think I think there's sort of like um there's three things that are happening in defi right now which I would sort of say there the three major Trends the first is polling Financial assets that exist in the real world into defi the first example of that was actually Sable points right like just do you know to dollariz a token and like look where that is there you know sort of like tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars are being transacted every single day by a stable pointy the next phase of that we've seen is um is tokenized treasuries so either uh token yeah yield bearing stable coins that rra tokenized treasuries underneath it or now we're seeing like pv1 doing specifically token treasuries directly tokenize bonds directly on public Ledges which then allow you to actually hold the underlying with than tokenized way you're seeing Black Rock bringing in tokenized funds you're seeing a large number of other fund managers who are going hey we want in on that action and the and the First Market they're looking at is they're going well crypto is a $2.3 trillion industry all of that money wants to diversify let's go to where the money is let's create products that we can access crypto Capital VI so I'd say that's the first trend is like creating crypto Capital aligned Financial products that are pulling Real World Financial products in Via tokenization to public ledgers the second Trend that we're seeing is what I would call institutionally enabled marketplaces so you think of like amm's uh automated market makers like Unis swap as like retail enabled marketplaces what you did is you had LPS who were generally individuals or Wales who would take money they would put it into a pool and they would start pickart a Marketplace to be able to buy and sell assets that's also kind of where the centralized exchanges started but what's happened since with centralized exchanges is that trading volume has increased this has more and more been institutionally enabled so market makers come on exchanges and they're most of the offer book so on on a on a centralized exchange when you have uh a central limit order book or Club you have market makers who are continually putting on offers onto the onto the book and that creates your order book and then you have people takers who are coming in and are buying into it which means that most transactions on binance on coinbase is a retail facing off against an institution rather than a retail facing retail obviously sometimes there's a coincidence of a trade but most of the time is a market maker who facilitating that buying that's starting to happen within defi now as well you're starting to see more and more market makers directly facilitating liquidity on things like Unis swap B3 Unis swap X cow Swap and a bunch of other markets where it's the market makers who are providing the liquidity and then the retail is trading against that liquidity I think you're going to see that an increasing amount where institutions are facilitating retail volley and then the third point is institutions facing off against institutions so in environments where institutions have a need what they often want to do is they want to aggregate liquidity across multiple venues so if I have want to do a lend borrow for example I want to do over collateralized what institution doesn't like to do when it's over a certain amount is to face off against a single other centralized counterparty because of my counterparty risk so what they tend to do is they'll go venue to venue so I'll put you know I'll do a little bit of my lending on binance or do a little my lending on coinbase if a little bit of my lending on crackers what would be better is if I had a transp arent Marketplace to be able to face off against other institutions that have the same on as mine is opposite right and so I think that third phase you're also going to see as well institutions enabling other institutions to face off against each other via transparent trustless defi enabled marketplaces rather than centralized vs very interesting perspective thank you for sharing with us um any last words that you want to share with our viewers today sure I mean like I think that if you're if you're looking at the devis spased one of the things that I think is going to be has been interesting in the previous D5 booms was you saw like crazy yields right you saw like 200% 300% yields during defi summer what you're seeing now is closer to real yield right and so what I think is interesting as a result of that is that more risk adverse Capital there's now enough of a real market for more risk obser reverse Capital to come in and so while if you're a complete djen you might be going well where's all the yield G if you're a everyday person or someone who's thinking like how can I get an 8% yield on my cash or a 5% yield on my cash D is now matur to the point where that's actually sustainable and realistic so I think if you're if you're crypto aligned looking at more ways in which you can bring your Capital into savings products as well as like high alpha yield generating products is just now the next evolution of the crypto space and I strongly encourage anyone who has a who is comfortable with the risk of that to do that because I think it's a a the next wave of how defi is going to become moreish and very thank you so much for sharing thank you