Beyond Energy: How Blockchain Is Powering the Next Wave of Real-World Infrastructure

Transcript

Good evening. Um my name's Gemma Green. Thanks so much for having panel this evening. Um we're very excited to be part of the conference this week in um I wouldn't really call it a keynote. I just wanted to say a few opening remarks in the lead into the panel discussion that I'll be having with a really amazing and highowered group of entrepreneurs and leaders in web 3. Uh in preparing for these remarks tonight, I was chatting with uh some of the panelists and Steph and I were discussing a couple of weeks ago that the the US, you know, tried to issue and sell more debt a couple of weeks ago in the market wasn't buying. I think it was about $16 billion. And so they ended up having to purchase the debt themselves.

And for some of you who've been tracking what's been happening um with looking at new additive ways to um kind of keep the punch bowl going um as the I think the Federal Reserve from like the 60s had said um the the US government started to look at issuing or is going to issue a credit default swap um to repackage some of its debt using stable coins. and initial comments thought this was a way to really keep the punch ball going for a lot longer, but like more detailed analysis kind of shows it's really not going to touch the sides of the $36 trillion of debt that we're up to. And we're adding another or the US is adding $2 trillion to that every year and

that's not including things like social security. And if you tally all that up, I think I mean I think it could be as much as hundred trillion worth of debt. Um and so you know that's quite sobering and concerning on one hand but on the other for uh for investments that are a hedge against uh inflation which is you know another way to kind of reduce the size of the debt um that's a great investment prospect. So gold and bitcoin I think have a very um exciting future amidst the kind of concerning um neverending debt ceiling increases and whatnot. And you can see it's not just the US which is starting to experience um resistance to the market purchasing

the debt obviously and then UK mistrust um very brief uh prime minister lost her position when she tried to issue guilts and the market said no but more recently you've seen in Japan um the market not wanting to purchase um Japanese debt and if you look at the kind of macro situation in Europe you've got this uh yeah very high debt um situation as well. So I think it's going to be very interesting times uh from like a macroeconomic perspective. And then if you kind of look at the situation with web 3 obviously we've got Trump version 2.0 which uh for many who've been in the space for a while is like a breath of fresh air with more regulatory clarity.

Hi Olga and happy birthday. Um and I think that's very exciting. So, we've got a tailwind and you're starting to see a lot more um enthusiasm and kind of bullish outlooks coming into the market. And I think from the panelists tonight, uh I'm really interested to hear from them about what they're working on in the topic of decentralization and deepen. And hi Lily, welcome. Uh and I've got a little graph that I wanted just to um talk about. So you know people think about decentralization as something that is very web 3 specific but it's actually been happening um in all technologies pretty much. Um so if you just look at um knowledge it started off that

churches held all the knowledge and then the printing press um basically started to u decentralized knowledge and then with the advent of newspapers uh knowledge became centralized once more and the promise of the internet was that it could democratize and decentralize knowledge. Um but now we've got you know censorship over the top of internet um which is obviously calling into question actually how you know where there's centralized forces deciding what knowledge is disseminating what can be said and policing what's being said uh in many respects as well.

So you've got that kind of arc of a particular topic which is changing through time and then you've got new industries which are typically decentralized at the when they're nent so lots of small um enterprise establish themselves and then they consolidate. So there's, you know, M&A. Uh, so there's kind of a natural arc of decentralization and centralization that's happening through time. Um, and I think it's important to kind of set the context around that because what is happening in web 3 in different sectors might is different in each sector depending on where each of those sectors are in their own unique or specific arc.

So um what I wanted to do was invite the panelists onto the stage and begin a conversation really by asking each of them around what are they working on on the topic of decentralization and centralization and uh I'll just just before I do that I'll just just talk to a couple of the things on the slide there. Can I slide back? Yeah sorry thank you. Yeah. So um in the case of electricity grids which is uh what power ledger is focused on in terms of tracking and tracing electricity uh grids actually used to be decentralized.

So small grids um used to exist and uh there was like a nationalization program that happened in like many high income city countries where the grids became inter uh interconnected and there were national grids and we're seeing now actually a trend towards a more decentralization with electricity generation as well. So not just poles and wires. So electricity remained unchanged for a century with big uh power stations from nuclear, coal, gas bringing electricity to people's homes and businesses. And then in the past 30 years, you've had more um decentralized solar and wind um coming into the grid and having really a hybrid system, I would call it. uh and then uh centralized players um offering

electricity was you know was really through government owning the poles and wires and then pretty much in the Margaret Thatcher era you had the beginning of deregulation and um privatization which actually cut apart all of the grids generation uh transmission network assets and um the selling of electricity the retailing of electricity. So you've got this um theme happening in electricity the sector that uh we work in as well. Um couple of other comments. Uh oh, in terms of centralization, iOS released um was yeah an example of um centralization.

Uh telecommunications regulations act of 1996 um which was under Bill Clinton. That is like an example of decentralization because prior to that telos were pretty much owned by big government players or big players and uh I don't know if you're old enough to remember like you know making a longdistance phone call costing like $2 a minute um but after that you know many new internet service providers set up um and so there was a big wave of decentralization um through the telecommunication sector which um has continued today but we've also seen consolidation in that sector as those players got bigger and you know you've got now got like a number of large players that operate in that new space.

So I think um yeah and then I think oh Brexit as well um I think that the EU project was a mass project of centralization and then uh you know 2012 2013 Brexit was the beginning of decentralization and I think there's you know other uh conversations around uh uh like individual like I think the trade wars that we're seeing with tariffs as well is like a level setting of all of these arrangements which were very in macro and now individual like countries making more decisions unilaterally rather than uh in an aggregate sense. So with that I would be very delighted to invite my esteemed panelists onto the

stage and start by posing some questions to them around the theme. So if you would mind I wouldn't mind putting up the slide with um uh the photographs of the powers. Oh, you can. Yes. Beautiful. Um, so first of all, I'd like to welcome Oliver Fel. Where is that? Just go. Oh, from Griffin AI. Um, welcome Oliver. Ralphishnik from Inactive Ventures from Alexandra Cari from Acurate and Stephan from Truth. Please join me on stage.

[Applause] Please do seat. Oh, however you like. It's fine. Um, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then yeah, you guys up there. Thank you so much. Uh, welcome. Um, so I'm going to start just with a broad question to each of you. So it'd be great just to get a a brief comment in terms of what you're working on. What would you say about how how where do you fit on the arc of centralization versus decentralization in the sector that you're working on? So maybe I'll start with Aleandro.

So basically it's um so okay let me quickly say what what it is that we're doing. Hello everyone. My name is Alexander. Uh what we effectively do is we created a compute network that is decentralized uh but fully powered by smartphones. Um why smartphones? There are a couple of reasons for that. My background is in mobile security. So basically uh it all started with this um high security chip that you have in each and every one of those phones and then continued by realizing that it is the vast majority of compute available worldwide. So when it comes to decentralization in this case um we start seeing more and more of

um nowadays this push towards self- sovereignty especially in the compute case um because you have more and more acceleration through AI that is pushing power towards uh these already very big and powerful uh tech giants right and um this might all seem like a very ideological thing but was actually very very very real. Uh one example is um how the international criminal court um basically decided in a way that uh Trump was not necessarily happy uh with and they cut off their uh Microsoft um accounts uh basically cutting them

completely out of any forms of communication, emails and all their services. Long story short, this um obviously is not uh the future that we want to see for humanity where we basically just work and uh get replaced by compute uh that is sourced from um giants and that's what we do at Great. Thank you. and then and thanks for suggesting to just give a brief intro of what you're working on your company your title and what you're doing and then if you could just also explain the the decentralization piece as well.

Thank you Ola. Thank you T for hosting us and good afternoon everybody. So I'm with scription AI what we do is we teach agents how to use blockchain technology so building agent specific for blockchain spec specific use cases. So it's mostly around DeFi about crypto finance and so on and decentralization versus centralization. I think we are operating along the full spectrum. So some of our AI agents are using services like like OpenAI. Uh some of them are running on self-hosted cloud services.

We are now working with integration of decentralized compute providers and uh on the other end of the extreme we are operating AI agents on local distributed hardware. So it's a trusted execution environments where basically the agent is run on a on a specific hardware chip sitting in a in a server. So I think we cover the entire bandwidth of centralization and decentralization but really our keen focus is on teaching agents how to make sense of all the DeFi crypto blockchain transactions.

Thanks Oliver. So it sounds like in your field it a varying degrees of importance for it to be decentralized versus centralized. So you're using a mixture of things whereas Alessandro is very focused in more absolute terms on decentralized. Correct. For us it's um it's about being cutting edge and some of the most cutting edge technology is still centralized but at the same time in the long run we believe in a decentralized future because we don't want to give all the trust and all the power to a few big tech players but we want to be able to host AI agents ourselves and control them in a decentralized way.

Thanks. We'll come back to you on AI agents in a minute. I've got some questions to ask you on that but I'll turn to Ralph now. Thank you. Um, thank you very much. My name is Raja Vishnik. I'm one of the founders of Nacta Ventures, uh, Crypto Valley Association, Crypto Aces and some other stuff. Um, what am I doing? Um, I I'm building technology. We are invested in a bit more than 100 projects at the moment and uh, decentralization versus centralization. Um, unfortunately, we at the moment fully on the centralization path. Uh so there was a a vision 2014 2015 of having a fight against the gaffa companies smaller companies ruling and

when we see what happened the last few years Binance Ted and a lot of other players we have seen the fastest centralization ever and I'm a little bit more worried about AI even on that level because when I look at open AI or guac uh decision making is centralized Now before you have been googling you probably evaluated 20 or 30 different answers and now the normal user gets one answer and this answer is very confident. Uh most of the people will not ask is this true or not and there might be hardinations in these answers and stuff like that and I think we have to fight for decentralization but the reality goes into centralization

at the moment. Got it. Thank you Stephan. Yeah. Hi. Um, can you guys hear me? Hello. Um, I'm Stefan. Um, I'm the founder of the truth network. So, we bring the truth. We do cryptographically verification of real world event data and then enable onchain the calculation with that data. So, you don't need to go index that data, take it off chain, write a calculation to that data and then write it back to the chain again.

And one of our biggest applications that we've launched is true inflation. True inflation. Why did we launch true inflation? Uh we focused on the US and the Argentinian markets because the governments there, Jerome Powell in specific told us it was transitory. We realized it wasn't transitory. And then we had um the Argentinian Department of Commerce head actually cheat on the inflation numbers. So much so that he went to jail. So he lied about it as well. So um we experienced a 30% inflation over the last four years. What does that mean? That means we lose purchasing power. And that's why for example we have issues like the debt

issue in the US. We have people cannot afford their houses anymore. So there are more houses. There's about $700 billion worth of housing markets for sale by retail in the US because of these last four years or five years of true inflation of 33%. So how decentralized would you say is true inflation? So we started very centralized. Um, so we built everything on a centralized SQL database and but we now have six validators that maintain and monitor and write data to those databases. They're whitelisted. It's not fully decentralized because the cost of data slows down all of the network. So

how do we maintain speed and turnaround times? Um, and so it's kind of like an optimization in these two factors. Great. And cost. Thank you, Lily. Welcome. Hi, my name is Lily uh Lily Bu. I'm president of the Salana Foundation. I work on a deepen project called Solano. Also decentralized physical infrastructure network. How decentralized would you say Salana is? Like how important is it and how decentralized is it in the scheme of things? Oh, it's more decentralized than anyone who wants to hold on to an ethers would like to believe.

Fair enough. Um well, thank you for just sort of setting the scene around what you're doing and um how where you provide a factual answer to that as well. Well, I I'd love we would love to hear more from you, Lily, please. There's like 1500 validators all around the world. It's truly permissionless uh and also pretty fast, right? It's not as fast as if you have everything collocated in a single data center. That will always be true. Um but then those trades that you make for instead of 10 milliseconds right now at 400 over the next couple of years uh we'll bring that down and um the theme is always increase bandwidth to reduce latency and uh I think the purpose of this deepen project has

always been uh financial markets infrastructure. So the closer you can get to great performance systems that you can have with, you know, like the fiber and the microwaves and all those types of things, although arguably will never actually be at that point of, you know, 5 milliseconds or whatever people can do between Chicago and New York these days. Uh so so but then the trade-off of that is uh there are financial use cases outside of um you know the extremely latency sensitive types of things. Uh this has always been about broadening financial access to both the buy side and sell side. Buy side being let's call it you know the classic example of uh folks who live in highly inflationary economies and have no access to assets assets outside of

whatever uh the monetary policy they're subject to. And then on the sales side uh and this is part that people don't talk about nearly as much uh but that is companies having access and issuers having access to capital markets which is uh a tiny little pipe even in the most robust capital market of the world which is the United States and even then there are very few uh companies are able to pay and uh can afford and also undergo that process in order to have access to liquidity. So the value proposition of this project is called liquidity.

I might just my next question to each of you I might just ask you firstly because it builds on what you just said there which is how does Salena think about strategically what projects it wants to bring onto the protocol. Um like are you being more of a broad church approach or are you trying to target u particular sectors? Yeah, I think most of this industry thinks that thing it just inherently believes that things are apps because everyone comes from an app world. Everyone that worked in tech before worked on an app largely speaking. Uh and so I find this to be interesting uh now whereas for example there's an ongoing conversation of uh why don't a salon we be more like hyperlquid you're like well uh I mean 10 different reasons

which is not to say that you don't want to be more performant to perks uh but uh you know there's a lot of uh projects out there that uh take the a type of partnership model of we're going to have one stable coin that we do a deep partnership with and we're going to work with one canonical BDC and we're going to work with uh you know have an ecosystem of partners uh and you make your choices right I think that there is something to be said for uh at the and that makes sense if you're an application uh but if you are seeking to be sort of analogous to TCP IP then at least at the protocol layer now you can talk about apps on top of that uh but the protocol layer uh you have to be uh be something where all of the assets and

all the ways to use those assets let's talk about all the assets initially uh have equal access, right? Uh and so with money market funds, you're not going to enshrine a single money market fund. Uh and in the same way in the traditional finance world, there's I don't know how many money market funds and that's fine. Uh so that's what I see the role of generalized infrastructure being versus uh where I I think actually most people spend their times which is implicitly in application world and I think the worst of all answers is when people try to do asset chains. I mean that one is doomed to fail. So I would suggest not doing the not investing in the not spending time on that one.

Got it. Thank you. Um I'll come back to you in a minute and just um dive a bit deeper around applications um on that topic of um focus um and where they well maybe a question in advance is is it important to saline for the applications to be decentralized in the in the way that they operate? Uh it depends on what the application is and needs to do. Uh I think that when people got all into this whole sort of you know the gaming era which I think is my least my truly my least favorite thing about crypto in the last 11 years uh the gaming era and people wanted to build fully onchain games the question was always why like why and when people wanted to do

social like why uh and how does blockchain add value to the social app and how does a social app add value to the blockchain as well. Uh and uh like do you actually want to stuff your chain full of like fully onchain like why like who uh it doesn't make the app better and you know if you have to pay a fraction of a cent to like something I'm just going to give the less. So uh so I just totally depends on the app. Now the transactions that really matter to have on the blockchain are things where you're transacting value and I think that's maybe one core principle that you have that there needs to be value transaction now what's now

defined as a transaction that transmits value is broader than uh the way we thought about that before blockchain because blockchain is newly financialized new markets I mean heck we even made pictures into billion dollar market uh and so you know what the definition of what is finan financial what is a financial market what can be financialized has inherently been broadened in crypto. Okay. Uh uh taking that into account therefore uh it still comes down to you uh a transaction that value is what is actually important to be on a blockchain and those parts that are not having to do with transaction value are better served by using AWS.

Yeah. Great. So you're not just an acolyte of decentralization for any odd reason. There has to be a good reason to do it. Decentralization. How does that add value to something that humans want? Uh okay, so decentralization adds value to something that humans want because it's harder to censor it. That's number one reason, right? Uh and I I would say that's one of the big reasons that has been I think particularly relevant over the last 5 years. And then the second one is by uh being decentralized, it means they are neutral and open. Imagine if the if TCPIP was uh you know we are American technology and not open source. Who would want to use it? Nobody but Americans. And would you have the same liquidity of eyeballs

and attention that you have on the internet and content? No, you wouldn't because people would still be stuck in basically online newspapers rather than truly global content liquidity. And so I think that's the other value of being permissionless which is that you can be uh you are acceptable to the largest set of potential users which is everyone on the internet 5 and a half billion people. Oliver um just building on what Lily's talked about there in terms of censorship a lot of what is happening in um in AI decentralized AI is focused on kind of addressing that concern. could you perhaps talk to to what you are working on and tell us like what are agents why are they needed like what

tell us about this a couple of questions here to unpack maybe let me first start with AI agents and that's what we focus on so we don't build the big models like the foundational models the llama the deepseek and so on that's that's not our business we focus on building and teaching I agents how to take this blockchain now now What is an AI agent? It's basically a software program that can act autonomously and transact and interact in an independent way with its own reasoning, with its own thinking process. And I think this is uh well nowadays everybody talks about it, hears about it. OpenAI is working on it. Meta

is working on it, X.com and pretty much Salesforce and everybody else. It's it's really a hot topic. Why like why do people why why do we want them to think for themselves? Like I think for us for many of us the breakthrough was really with GPT when it first came out and it was a chatbot. It's basically this experience you can talk to really really smart chatbot and be creative and talk to it. But that's just the beginning. And the potential with CI agents is not just to have somebody to talk to, but somebody who does the work for you. Somebody who's doing task that are repetitive, some

that is doing tasks that are maybe highly analytical that require advanced knowledge and skills that you might not have assistance. And you're fine with a centralized service. I don't know if I want my action to get me the latest crypto market prices. What's the price of Bitcoin today? Of course, maybe I have a super sensitive application behind it and I want it to be verifiable and so on. But in most cases, I will just go to coin market cap. So why would I oppose of having a centralized service now access coin market cap? I'm fine with that. They are just care about speed and costs and and I'm good with it. But once transactions become more sensitive, once the CI agent is doing more sensitive stuff, maybe I'm not so

happy anymore of leaving it into the black box, not knowing who makes the decision, who controls everything. If I want this agent now to trade my own crypto portfolio, I maybe I'm concerned now. I give it to some startup. Are they changing the code from one day to the next? What is happening with all this data, with all my private data? I'm I start to get really concerned. And if I go into other use cases like health data, decentralized infrastructure, energy trading uh uh healthcare uh data and so on, it's becomes even more critical who do you give this data to, who has access to it and what can they do with it and for those types of use cases then decentralized compute and decentralized

AI really really comes into play. Great. Thank you Alexandra. Your project, Acurist, is using old mobile phones for decentralized cloud and compute. How many mobile phones have you got on your network? Uh, it's about 73,000 uh last time I checked. Congratulations. Thanks. Um, question for you. Will decentralized cloud and compute just be a fringe thing? Is it really ever going to touch the sides of the cloud market? I think uh true decentralized compute will follow a very similar path to how uh or what Bitcoin basically did, right?

Uh the only reason why today we do have an alternative which is digital um to fiat uh which we even take as a hedge to um compared to inflation um is because it stayed true decentralization from the start and never compromise on that uh on every step um along the way. Right? In the beginning, people were joking about it and then at some point now even nation states are kind of thinking about adopting it as as treasuries, right? And I do believe that it's going to be very similar for decentralized compute because if you take a look at now as well the whole um AI um hype and and

latest movements, it becomes more and more clear that computers power and whenever you have uh power centralized um it will not be used uh for good, right? I mean it's yeah it's obvious. So what humans will be able to do is only counterreact to that by uh having a more democratic and a more uh decentralized structure where basically this compute becomes available for whoever um in the world right because that's another thing right the entry barrier for compute is really really high you cannot afford or you cannot access the same compute that you do here in Switzerland uh in subsaharan Africa it's simply not

possible right so just by by thinking from a inherent push that humans will have towards that I'm pretty sure that decentralized comput will not just stay niche and um many people don't realize that but the vast majority of compute is already basically in your pockets in your drawers uh somewhere at home in the format of mobile devices right so already today the compute is very much centralized but It's just not used that way, right? It's still controlled by centralized entities. So, it's just a matter of time to to unlock that.

How big will it get? How quick? Like what? Yeah. I mean the the cool thing about mobile devices is by lowering these um entry barriers not I mean I think decentralized compute in general will be bigger than every centralized stuff that uh has been out there for the simple reason that you don't have the same capital expenses. you're basically completely offloading that investment uh onto your your users um who are investing into that compute into that device regardless right how much cheaper is it than um AWS or Google that's another aspect right these

devices um are the most engineered devices that are available to humans um you have Apple that is uh generating more than half of their revenues from the iPhone alone. So it's not the iPad and the iPhone or the iPhone and the app stores. No, it's just that piece of hardware that you carry around. And Apple alone invests 33 billion in R&D every single year. Right. So what you're basically carrying around is really the most engineered piece of technology available to humans. And um that also means uh that when it comes to compute efficiency, these devices are pretty much above everything else, right? So long story short, the operating cost of

compute mostly is um just energy. Uh these devices have the shorter nanometer uh technology in their chips. So um never have the privilege to be constantly plugged in to the power supply. That's why they excel at the bots per per compute or compute per bounce metric. Um so the cost structure is completely different. That's why I'm also so very bullish on this case because ultimately if you want to challenge these very much established players, you cannot just say okay um we just utilize the very same hardware as they do. Um we utilize the very same data center as they do and then we hope that our cost structure will be

competitive in some way or form. That will just not work right. Can you share an application that people are building on this decentralized network of cloud storage? Yeah, absolutely. So if you go on hub.acress.com um there is actually a uh instant deploy uh button um and if you click on that you can actually uh describe the website that you would like to see and what is happening in the background is that a large language model is creating that website based on whatever it is that you described it um and then hosting it directly onto the uh network. So the hosting of websites is is one of the use cases. Um obviously because we're coming from the uh decentralized world, right?

My my background was also um we've been in in crypto since 2015 uh building very early Bitcoin wallets uh back then. Um and many of the cases are also coming from that angle. So there is this project called XCBTC. What they basically do is they wrap and unwrap Bitcoin similar to WBTC, but the very big difference is that you're actually able with your wrapped version to convert it back to the uh native Bitcoin on the native Bitcoin network without a taxable event, right? Because with WBTC, the only way that you can do that is by

exchanging it for BTC, right? And uh that project is securing about 900 bitcoins which nowadays is about 100 million. Um and that's also powered entirely by accurac elements that you have mentioned before creating a trusted execution environment. Those are big his spare ones. Um I'm I'm super surprised I'm sorry for jumping in but for me uh energy is compute and is power at the end of the day and for me centralized energy production is always more efficient than decentralized energy production. So centralized compute and big computation will be more efficient

usually but I hear the first time the way around you are telling it. with the website. I would use the phrase of Lily, why host it decentralized if it's a it's if it's a normal website. So why decentralized? But because then you can't be shut off like Parlor. So there's a very good reason. Uh Parlor's got shut down. Yeah. I mean depends on the website. Yeah. When we talk about the gaming website probably it's not relevant. Uh so but coming back to that uh on the other side I I think when you when you look into BTC and what you said uh this is probably the most decentralized use case we have at the moment and I look into everything what keeps it a bit decentralized and what probably adds

compute power in another way now to BTC uh and I'm a bit concerned of centralizing in the BTC world so what we see with strategy with the ETFs and so on the entity is locking up 2 million, 5 million, 10 million BTC and the vision of using BTC for something useful ends up in I can't unwrap my ETF and and not by WBTC at the end of the day. And so coming back to that, I would love to learn more how you can be more efficient decentralized, but I understand that this device is more efficient than than one one calculator at a big data center.

I think another very interesting aspect that that you're bringing up um with with that statement is that uh when we take a look at regions that currently don't have um compute right um for them it's not just about uh placing a data center there and and start offering the compute because it's start like the project starts way earlier um even if we take a look at something like Dubai Saudi Oman like the GCC. Um those countries uh would like to invest millions and billions in data centers but have the uh very big issue that the energy grid and and their setup um on how to source that energy is lacking

behind. So that needs to be built first and then they can eventually also start start building uh that that specific uh data center which will require um such a lot um of of energy. The other answer to that is that the hardware itself is more efficient because it never had the um mobile devices never had the privilege of of being plugged in, right? Um and you need to be able to carry around these powerhouses and and be able to use them for 24 hours, right? I mean, think about that. It's already quite quite crazy. Um but the other thing is with data centers you add a lot of overhead with cooling.

You add a lot of overhead with the whole data center not being completely used like there are additional overhead um to to be calculated in there. Will you be able to uh run a uh cloud um or run a compute cluster uh all consisting of of mobile chip in a data center more in a more efficient way. Well probably yes I agree with that. Um but ultimately by by offloading this completely in all the households you can also profit from from these things like solar power and whatnot. Yeah.

Thank you. Um may I ask a question to our host? Um Raptor just brought up an interesting topic. Energy is compute. Comput is Bitcoin. Comput is AI. And uh just recently I saw quite a shocking story about uh I believe it was Nashville and Tennessee but don't take me down on that. There are um mask is building those huge for x.com for xai uh these huge data centers and comput centers and they are putting a gas generators that are burning gas like I don't know 35 huge gas generators there polluting the entire area really

harming the local population cancer cases as people dying they do it without all the authorizations it's like really really shocking at what lengths AI companies go to be able to get the energy they need to run to fund the operations and I'm curious to see on power ledger side you're all about energy trading sustainability renewable energies and so on do you see any trends emerging when it comes now to the increased consumption from AI and from well Bitcoin but that's probably not to the magnitude of what we on the eyes side.

I think that the the the hunger for energy is supplanting every other uh factor or consideration and countries that have less bureaucracy and can put more generation online fast are going to be like the bigger players in the AI race. So what you're talking about there is like a workaround to try and get more energy generation and the the amount of roadmap for uh generation to meet the growing demand for AI is like staggering. I mean it's actually unattainable because you cannot build that much infrastructure that fast. But there's so many things wrong with like the conversation around energy like the

the conversation about energy transition doesn't exist. It's it's a complete misnomer. We're in a state of energy expansion prior to AI and now you know in an accelerated form and you know Ralph's comment that you know centralized power is cheaper. I I wouldn't disagree with that. You're if you look at the total cost of energy not just the levelized cost of energy from the generation asset that is like transmission cost and distribution. You know, if we add all of that up, the way that um a lot of distributed power has been put in the grids was through subsidized um feeding tariffs, which is like a blunt price signal, which they build it indiscriminately wherever. So, if you look at Germany, they built the

generation in the north of the country, whereas the people are in the south. So, then they had to spend billions in transmission and distribution lines bringing electricity to people's homes and businesses. And Germany has the most expensive electricity in the world because of that. uh and all high income obviousity countries that have a lot of variable renewable energy did it through subsidized feeding tariffs and all have very high electricity costs and I think that that grid is you know that system is why we had the blackouts as well in Spain and Portugal and the kind is dropping now that the kind of net zero strategy is broken and you know is it it's just not fit for purpose and I think we're we're seeing I I I don't

that it's kind of hit the mainstream awareness yet, but AI is really pushing that the conversation to its limits. And I think you're going to need um like a kind of uh doge for energy to actually get the amount of generation on board that countries that want to be big players in this space or to start to participate in the in the first place because it's not just I want to have like compute online. It's like I don't want it to be subject to the Patriot Act and for an American company to actually um be owning that and the American government to get access to data that might be very important to a particular country. So I can see other reasons not

just about energy where that is going to be um significant. I don't know if I answered your question. many many follow-ups but I might just I might just turn the conversation to Stefan and ask why do we care about inflation data like so what if it's wrong and okay the price of bits are going up but the data associated with it why is that important to us do we really care um no not anymore because we need to find other money anyway because it's so high no um seriously um I think we do care it's a form of taxation right I think inflation is a way that the government issues and prints a lot of money and what it does is debase the

existing holding and if you look today savings there's no point savings saving dollars right why because we look at inflation and that's only the cost of goods the cost of goods go up maybe 3% according to trueflation it's now down at 2% 1.9% actually and so if you're seeing price of consumer goods go up that much then that allows you to keep you know your your food on the table, keep the family happy, etc. But it doesn't keep up with asset appreciation. And what we're seeing is money printer drives asset appreciation. We're at an all-time high again. We're above COVID times where we're printing more money.

The M2 money supply is greater than it was during CO. And so what does that mean? That means that asset prices are all going to go up, including crypto assets, physical assets, stocks, etc. And so what's how do we educate people that they can participate in that? And I think the best way to do that is allowing them to permissionlessly participate in other financial opportunities that they haven't been able to hedge a hedge. Right? What is that? That could be NFTTS, that could be memecoins, that could be Bitcoin. You can choose whatever asset and the people can choose whatever asset they want to invest in and that we need to continue to thrive. certain assets will rise to the top and allowing people to

participate in that I think is really why we're all here or that's why I'm here at least. Well, well, I would say it's in addition to that architecting the ground permissionless systems is particularly important because we all know that the CPI in any country has now become a political matter itself. the very definition of that and it has always been because then if you can point to this if there's something which is not objective it is there's an aspect of it which is objective but you can make other people believe that it actually is objective because I said so uh then you can manipulate you have a cover for whatever uh information manipulation you would like to undertake in order to convince people that uh even before you get to

the narrative transitory inflation that inflation is 7% it's not actually 7% % how do you decide the basket? How do you decide the weight of the basket? Uh and the transparency of that and the stickiness of that uh CPI CPI is basically a meme, right? Uh and uh and so the adherence to that is a benchmark of how we make decisions itself, it becomes problematic. Uh and you know, even though it takes I think it uh we we think that humans are much more rational than they actually are. And so we think that if we provide objective data that people are actually going to do something with it, which is just not true. Uh if you just look for example in the United States and for years we were all told that for example Joe Biden was uh never been uh never been fitter right

and anyone with two eyes and ears knew that that was obviously not true but you weren't allowed to say it until it took the activation energy moment required 50 million people simultaneously seeing that this was not true in order for uh there to be a critical mass of decision-m around that. Right? So what does that tell us? Objective truth alone uh without critical mass is uh so objective truth is actually a social construct right the ability to action objective truth requires is requires critical mass of humans mutually reinforcing one another's belief uh and so creating permission systems to create alternatives to to create competition around CPI right to create composition around what that best should be and gain

adoption for that could also go wrong you could also get a worse definition uh but uh you could also potentially get a bigger a better one. And you also saw this happen, for example, in China where uh anyone with eyes and ears and a nose in 2008 could walk around Beijing and be like, "This is not fog because, by the way, we're in the middle of a desert. This is uh health harming pollution." Uh and so they censored all the data around this and the only folks that providing data was the uh air pollution monitor on the top of the US embassy uh providing very inconvenient hourly updates on the AQI in the capital. and certifying this was not fog and uh and that was the one permitted diplomatically protected uh

data source. So, you know, it's also true. That's And I think that's why sort of I got I mean, we got into this, right? It's like how one one entity is giving you the narrative and telling you this inflation is so high. It's only transitory and why is inflation so important, right? Why why would you go after such a boring topic? Who cares about inflation, right? It's not. But actually, it's turns out that this is the one single metric that gives every government the right to print money. It gives them the right to define interest rates, how much you pay for money. And ultimately that is then the tax that is burdened onto everybody.

And if they can drive the narrative with that one single source of truth, they've killed everybody else. And now finally true inflation has come to the top that we have now got banks, institutions, analysts, hedge fund managers, family offices all using trueflation as the source of truth and they don't believe the government numbers anymore. And so more and more these institutions are beginning to find and trust an alternative source which wasn't there 5 years ago. And now today we have it here. And so that is how as and and I can say the same with Bitcoin. 10 years ago nobody believed Bitcoin, right? How many treasuries do we have now running Bitcoin? Salana wasn't even here before, right? You didn't have pumped up fund.

You didn't have meme coins, right? You didn't have any of these assets that were created that are today being adopted worldwide and is changing the system. Our system is changing and we need to come to terms with that and I think the world is not ready how this change is going to come. Yeah. So what you're saying though is that the people that are waking up and actually getting the alternative data are making better decisions and um stopping their assets from being depreciated and are actually in a better position to um to make money and at the very least not lose money.

So the subscribers to the true flation data set and by the way it's permissionless. It's free. So anybody can go and get anybody can create their own index. So it's all that data is available for anybody to go build their own index. We've created a totally different basket. We've created a velocity where it's updated every single day. You don't need to wait one month for some guy to get on a stage and tell you how in infl how high inflation is. You have a 45day lead time. And the investors that are subscribing to the data are taking advantage of that 45day lead time. They're buying Bitcoin when they see trends shift. They're buying bonds or not buying bonds when the trends shift and they're buying Dixie

dollar selling dollar when trends shift. So those are just some of the indicators that they're leveraging our data for. Thank you Ralph. You're in the game of investing. Tell us about a couple of your more recent investments that have a decentralization theme and why um did you make those investments and why are you excited about them? Um first of all I have a favorite sentence of the evening. Uh inflation is another form of taxation. Uh I would like to take the sentence from me away.

I mean this is quite simple but really good. Uh because then you you start to care about inflation because we care very much about taxation. Uh and we are happy here in souk usually. Um but um but this is really a very good way to think about it. Um now now coming back to to investment topics. Um as said before I'm very interested in utilization of Bitcoin. So products which are building on Bitcoin where you can do something with Bitcoin. Uh I mean Bitcoin is the the best asset we ever created. Uh uh I just checked on LinkedIn. Lily still has only the word Bitcoin. They are LinkedIn. So she's with Sana but Bitcoin is the first thing

complimentary. Yeah, it's assets long as infrastructure. I I fully agree. You know, I I personally believe we have only one new digital asset. This is Bitcoin. Uh everything else what is cryptocurrencies is a derivative of venture capital private equity in my personal opinion. So when I buy Solana then I believe the team behind Solana that they will drive value to the to the blockchain. uh when I buy bitcoin I believe that there's only 21 million bitcoin that no one will find satoshi nakamoto and that this is an asset which is not under inflation.

This is a big difference. So and now projects which are bringing bitcoin to other blockchains to unlock the potential for defy and similar things I find super exciting. So bitcoin o is one of them but we look into into different ones. So this is the decentralization number one and and the second thing on the other side on the AI side um humanentric AI. So how can we find out what is deep fake? How can we protect ourself in the future? I mean when we see now videos created with the voice attached, I mean you have no chance anymore to to understand what is real and what is not. So we need to find

technological solutions who help us to navigate in the future what what is real and what is not and we're looking into different startups at the moment exactly in that area because I believe in in 2 years 3 years we will have a big big challenge on that side. Yeah I agree. Yeah, I think there's a lot Omani Tech is one startup uh here based out of Switzerland by the way with great backers behind uh they're trying to to get a a hash out of videos and pictures and verify the hash that this video or picture is real at the end of the day and you have a database where then can look at is this video or this picture really deployed by this identity which

is defined behind. So it's a bit the other way around. You verify if it's true. Uh and so you need to verify is this what you're seeing really true? Uh so those are the topics. Great. Oliver, you look like you wanted to say something. I'm just playing around with some thought in my head and uh uh well both of you Stephan brought it up. um how Bitcoin and decentralization is changing the world but at the same time how things are becoming more centralized in the decentralized space. We have now all these ETFs. We now have the sovereigns getting into Bitcoin and other cryptos. We have um more and more institutional money. We

have the treasuries. While we all in the crypto space for a long time for us it was always something anti-establishment but now we came to a point where we are looking okay is Trump pumping his bag and what are the big corporates doing what is Black Rockck saying so from being on the edge on the fringe we are now transitioning into mainstream and um I mean for many of us there was always the assumption Bitcoin will only get big once large capital is deployed and in a position to benefit from it. So on the one hand side this makes me personally even a stronger holder of my Bitcoin.

But at the same time like how will this change our industry? We will not be independent anymore. We will be at some point part of the establishment and part of the fake inflation numbers and we will be a gateway for those big financial institutions and ultra rich families to well inflate the money away from normal people. So that is also for some and for us as industry something we have to struggle with and find our answers to and yeah make sense of it. Do we go now on with the edge and go into more and more crazy stuff NFTs and public fund or whatever? Do we try to do something as

anti-establishment by expanding our industry into other areas or do we double down on what works now to Bitcoin and everything like Yeah, I don't know. I don't have the answer. Oh well, maybe we I'll put that question to the pallet. Yeah, I mean I think we're going to go I think we we need I think both are going to live in parallel and both going to work in parallel. I think we're going to see centralization around the creation of ETFs. I don't see the problem for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is limited, you know, and and it's who funds the miners. I mean, Ethereum might be slightly different. It's proof of stake, right?

So, the more people you more money you can aggregate, the more you can stake, the more direction it goes. Um, I think I'm more excited around the permissionless route. We need to go the traditional route. We do need to be compliant. We need to go and find new paths. We need to bring products to market without boundaries, without costs. Today, to launch an an index, for example, or an ETF, you need a million dollars, you need 12 months, you need lawyers, you need accountants, you need auditors, etc. to do that. To launch an memecoin, you can do that instantaneously. To launch an index, you can do that instantaneously with no cost. that you could pull in all real world data, get that launched, get that validated in the market, and then you could decide, do you want to go part of the real world or stay in the

decentralized world and the permissionless world where everybody should have access to all of these opportunities? What industry do you have out there where 20-year-old kids can have five, six billion dollar companies? Even in Bitcoin miners, I mean, the miners were so young kids that made lots of Bitcoin in the beginning before any of us even talked about Bitcoin. They were old gamers that were playing games and they used these Nvidia computers and they were mining in the background and they made thousands of Bitcoin and now they're today 30 years old and they don't, you know, they've made wealth that you have not seen anywhere else in the past. So I think we should continue to drive that and we're not going to ask if we ask for permission, wait for approval, get the government to give us

a permission to do something, we're not going to get there and I think the society will lose hope. Um I I couldn't agree more. I mean waiting for regulation brings you to nothing at the end of the day. And I believe the way how we regulate to today uh with KYC, AML and similar things uh costs billions of dollars uh takes us also to nowhere. When you would do this in a more efficient way with AI and with the data behind it, we would be much smarter at the end of the day. But um what should I say? I'm also not the biggest fan of pumpf fun. Uh um when

when I heard about today that they want to raise a billion dollar on a $4 billion valuation with the token sale 7 billion. Okay. Um probably it's not the best investment. Buy buy some Bitcoin I would say on that side. But do your own research. It's a lot of the things we have seen pumping maybe NFTTS a few years ago. look where the NFTs are today. Uh it's always an interesting experiment. It's then the question what in the real world comes out of the experiments and and I believe we need this experiments to get to somewhere. Uh because these experiments are in a in a space which which is not regulated until the regulator steps in and tries to regulate it and then it's gone at the

end of the day. But it brings us to the next level. But if you also look I mean pumpf fun is just one example. I know everybody laughs about memecoins, but if you look at the tooling that has been built around all of this, the rapid deployment of liquidity, the rapid capability to work and interact with these tool with these coins on in Telegram in all sorts of, you know, sniping capability. I mean all of these tools that weren't available beforehand have are have now become massive I mean I wouldn't say mass adoption because it's a very select few but for the few that are using it it has become tools that can be scaled up into other products and into other services even the US president is using it yeah maybe he's using it

really do you have any comments on coins in relation to what Stephan said why everyone always looks at me uh well I think that Um uh if you look at the infrastructure that's tested live, uh infrastructure has held up for that. Uh I don't know what other market has the world's number one asset gets dropped on it on a Friday at 9:44 p.m. Uh and 24/7 365 well 24/7 training throughout the weekend and handles all of that across a multitude of different venues uh and 1500 different validators across the world.

So, when I think about that from an infrastructure standpoint, I think that's pretty awesome. You know, uh NASDAQ was closed the entire time and all of Wall Street was closed the entire time and the only thing that was open uh was the internet and therefore financial markets on the internet. And I don't think that crypto is only going to be for let's call it these sort of truly cryptonative assets. Uh I don't think that's the only thing that these financial rails should be used for. that should be used for all of the assets that people want to use, find value in, and the definitionally the range of assets that are going to exist on the blockchain in some tokenized or even just sort of natural form, cryptonative form is definitionally larger than the

hundred trillion dollars worth of assets in the traditional finance world. Uh because there are entirely new uh things that can only be financialized when you have uh internet financial routes, blockchains. Uh so it essentially the larger market and the more liquid market and uh the broader distribution market is in every way going to be larger than the financial markets we have today. Uh and unlocks sort of longtail buy side and longtail sell side which I think are so significant I'm not even sure I called them longtail anymore. Uh so that's ultimately what the infrastructure is here to be able to do.

Uh and I think that you know if you can test that with something which is uh I see you know mecoin's essentially production test net uh fodder you know and if you can test it with that like you know would you rather test it with that or would you rather test it with uh your home mortgage no one wants to trade your home mortgages are the weekend anyways but like what would you rather test it with? Just a question for you. NASDAQ dealt the the threat from crypto, right? How do you feel? They said they want to go 247.

Well, how do you think their infrastructure will stand up to a 24/7 trading market the way that your infrastructure now can handle that? Well, I think that they have various rappers of uh things around them that ultimately are just monetized by lawyers. Uh one of them is uh just all of the existing um uh underlying kind of like analog financial infrastructure. You've got your transfer agent and your clearing agent and then we got the DTCC and the clearing agent, the transfer agent and the broker dealer before uh uh before you can actually be on NASDAQ and then who can actually be on that's how you get on NASDAQ. Who can actually be on NASDAQ? there's like a whole other set of things uh you need to get to in

order to uh be able to be on NASDAQ. And so there's uh it's not to say that all of that is unnecessary or bad, right? There's I would second and say some of that is um the world has moved on from uh uh from fax machines. Okay, so that's part of it. Uh and so there's part of this switch which is we now have a better solution in the same way we like people still do deliver newspapers but usually we and we still do get physical mail but mostly we use email right so there's going to be a big shift just to better infrastructure that is more fit for purpose and then there's also part of these rule books that are oriented around infrastructure that is outdated.

So then some of that should probably go away. Uh and then there's also you know some part which is probably actually the minority which is just sort of nonsysical rules things that really truly don't make sense. So for example with tokenized stocks we announced X stocks uh which is uh rap broker dealer product is going to be permissionless onchain first a day distribution and crack and some other very large exchanges and uh the interesting thing about that is uh it is open to ex US these are US stocks they're open to exus but it is illegal for Americans who have access to the tokenized US stock like okay how did we get there Well, cool.

Obama and biome. I don't know. It's like it's all of the above things and you know the the various thicket of rules that creates this very interesting phenomenon is like probably this thick and has been uh heavily credentialized by very smart people with JDS. Okay. Uh so you know how do you even start to get through that and just say okay the core thing that we need to have here is we need to have rules around disclosures and rules around uh ownership and there's some very you know important governance things to have if the core like nature of the asset is to be equity like in that you get a share of the offside.

Okay. So there's very important rules to put around that that are ultimately decided by humans and this is it's not like code of code is law is not sufficient necessarily. Uh and then there's other part of this is really just about the infrastructure that can simplify uh the back end for money to move and that's not an insignificant thing. We have been very lucky to get the insights of um founders and entrepreneurs and pioneers in um the real world sorry in how blockchain is powering the next wave of real world infrastructure. I'm going to ask the panelists a closing um comment uh before we finish up and the question is what

are you focused on uh between now and the end of the year just to give people an you know what what it is that you're doing in your business or your protocol um please Alexander would you mind going first yeah sure so um we'll have our mainet launch actually this year this means that uh that will certainly be one of the focus uh points but Uh the other thing is obviously growth and making this as visible as possible. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For us, uh I didn't know where to start. It's just running, running, running. So many things to do, hundreds of things to do.

Every week, every day, we have 10 agent ideas. What we wish we could develop and what we are building on. So that will just continue. what I'm personally the most eager for this year of launching a first set of real autonomous agents that intact with blockchain technology and making that as a proof of concept work that's my biggest excitement and apart from that also on the fundraising side on the token launch side uh that is the second big big big topic great you Ralph um I'm trying to follow up what AI is doing This year I'm trying to learn every day and it's going so fast that I

see I don't have enough time to see what's happening. So I I believe the next 5 years it will change all of our jobs, all of our environment and I think it's key to be this year only close to see what's happening. Thank you. Yeah. So indexf check that out. Um, that's what I'm talking about. 8 billion $800 billion. So, there's a thematic index market of $800 billion.

Um, it goes through that process that I talked about earlier. You need, you know, million dollars to launch an index. You need approvals. You need licenses. You need compliance, etc., etc. It takes you 12 months to get that to market. And then you don't even know if the market wants it. based on the trends and the speed and the evolution of trends, we've spent the last four years bringing real world event data to the chain. So now that we have all of this event data, how do we allow anybody to create an index? So you can go and create your index. We have people coming up with only fans index, you porn index, we have, you know, rainy Brazil coffee stress indicator index. So we have all of these creative ideas that people are

coming up with that some will professionalize some will be a fad will come today tomorrow and then exflation. We have eggflation you can trade eggs today predicted going up tomorrow or down tomorrow and then I'll be able to buy long eggs maybe even heads and shoulders dandruff shampoo someday. So that's the market that we're launching. It's live now. You can go and start trading up or down on specific indexes. Beautiful. Thank you Lily. uh Salana's going to be the best place for capital. Uh that's this is an order of operations. You want to have the best network. That takes time. Then you want to be the best place for developers. And this is additive, not uh not uh a choice. And then the next thing is be

the best place for capital. I think that blockchain has always been about uh financial infrastructure. uh we went through this period of 2122 when people thought that consumer and web 2.5 was web 3 and it's not. Uh this has always been about markets and that's what I think the purpose of every blockchain outside of Bitcoin is and so we've got to get indexes a lot. That's actually pretty cool because this uh if you have an index then that can become an oracle feed and then you need to have an oracle feed in order to be able to create a market around it. I sense there's going to be some follow-up conversations for the panel. Um, please join me in thanking our wonderful panelists tonight for this very [Music]