CBDC vs. DeFi (Central Bank Digital Currency vs. Decentralized Finance)

Transcript

wonderful okay so let's get started uh so again uh hello everybody uh to all of our viewers and listeners around the world we have um a good attendance tonight um and uh a lot of sign ups almost 400 sign ups so this is a topic that is interesting for a lot of people tonight's topic as you know is um central bank digital currencies versus defy the question is what is the future of digital currencies and um i'm very pleased that we have such a wonderful set of speakers tonight for you to shed some light on this question

my name is chris evo i'm a member of the crypto valley association on the team there was an entrepreneur and a business consultant in technology but tonight or today i should say we are going to explore that topic a little bit more and as you know there is um let's say a little bit of controversy around um you know where you should place your trust uh is it the government is it a fully decentralized um set of projects and um how's the future of this going to look like so i would like to start with a tour de taba as we say in french

and have every one of you on the panel introduce yourselves quickly uh give your name your affiliation and perhaps already one or two thoughts on where you are so that uh our viewers can locate you on this map of opinions uh where you might be and uh i'm gonna also introduce uh specifically or i'm gonna start actually with uh sinju who's um co-moderating tonight with me and we our division of labor is going to be a little bit uh she's going to jump in more at the end when we do the q a um which we'll do as well and so we're going to give ample time to all the questions from the audience and to the opportunity to interact with our uh with our panel

okay uh so shinjuku can you get started and just talk about uh who you are where are you coming from what's going on yeah of course uh so my name is shinzo i'm the ceo of dystopia labs and i was a former head of growth at stuller uh solana and a director at tesos and i'm glad to be here i'm based in the us wonderful thank you very much um i'm just gonna go right to left on my screen here robin um yeah hi everybody uh good afternoon good evening good morning uh my name is robin renick i uh i'm here with a couple of hats on i suppose the first is is my professional hat which is as my day job with a research

analyst with a company called trilateral research we are primarily a research company specializing data protection privacy ethics and human rights our main client would be the european commission we currently work on about 30 horizon 2020 projects um and we also boast clients such as the european data protection board um the uk ministry of defence and the united kingdom research institute i guess my second hat here which is maybe a little more interesting is that i've been a manero contributor for the last five years i would say so a very active uh member of that privacy preserving

cryptocurrency community i'm sure you all know thank you very cool thank you and i think that's a very key uh concept here trust and privacy slash courtesy um for this and i'm gonna definitely also come back on the question of eu and a little bit sort of the geopolitical uh context uh because uh the concept of privacy isn't the same uh everywhere and uh so that's an interesting point as well thank you very much um all right you know hi everybody my name is chino i'm a regulatory lawyer and i'm heading the reg tech unit at signal signum is world's first digital asset bank and is exactly at the forefront of the digital asset economy

where we empower our clients to invest in digital assets with complete trust excellent so there's the word again trust and sigmund bank we'll just talk about also a little bit about banks kind of going into uh into crypto we've just had news as well in switzerland here that one of the sort of oldest uh private banks in switzerland also starts offering and i think they're actually working with you guys right at sigmund yes that's correct all right so very interesting also that you know like we're having service providers come in our fans helping banks so to speak which is a very cool uh concept as well um jason hi everyone uh my name is jason troopy i

am co-founder of basket which is a stable security coin based on a basket of global currency bonds uh that produces a yield so very relevant for the the topic today uh my background is i've been an entrepreneur over the last several years but prior to that i was an fbi agent uh in new york city so i worked complex crimes specifically cyber crimes uh in in the us worked with every major exchange bank um regulator and law enforcement agency uh that you can think of so i have a good government perspective uh which i'm sure will come up in this conversation as well and uh prior to that you know i i have a computer science background formally

trained um but i've primarily been really in uh cyber security and and uh you know building technologies oh and i i reside from uh west coast the united states thank you all right wonderful so good morning to you and uh great to have you on board here i think uh as we can as you guys can see already i think we have a very broad perspective um we're also kind of hoping to get maybe our speaker from the swiss national bank i'm not sure he might be a little bit later uh he might come in thomas moser chris actually yeah yes i'm here you're here at thomas i didn't see you i'm so sorry so that's okay my first tech failed tonight um

so thomas please uh you were uh you're here and i'm very very happy to to have you on board uh thomas like the reason why i asked you is really to be on board because you're you have emerged i think over the last one and a half years or two years as one of the leading voices on central bank digital currencies in europe and uh and also practitioners so you're not just a theoretician who kind of observes that you're actually uh on the on the board of this with national bank and you just published a paper that i want to also um really highlight for everybody and i think the title of the paper is how to issue as a standalone digital currency or something like that and we'll definitely want to hear more about this

but maybe you can introduce yourself quickly to the audience and just give your first perspective well thank you very much chris and thank you for having me so as you already mentioned i'm a ultimate member of the governing board of the swiss national bank which is the swiss central bank so i would be the cbdc part in the cbdc versus d5 and actually i would i guess i would also be your uh alleged uh trusted third party uh in this discussion um and as you said chris i mean i have been uh interested or it's probably be more fair to say fascinated by blockchain technology and now also d5 for several years so i'm

following it very very closely so thanks for having me fantastic so okay thanks to all of you guys um my first of question to you or to the panel really revolves around a concept that we've heard a couple of times already in your introductions and it's about trust um and it seems to me like we're just following the discussion if you just go one step back and look at it in a more on a metal level a lot of the issues that we're talking about tonight uh today actually uh intersect at this uh this concept of trust and um my question to you is like where does where does trust really have to where does it where does it get placed

um because you have to you know the expression you place your trust into somebody or something right so you kind of put that somewhere and a lot of your white papers or theories that you have is like um providing a location for that trust and a solution for for putting it there so i would be very interested maybe uh we could start with uh with jason um because like you know just taking from your perspective because it seems to me that you said like i worked in cyber crime and cyber security and now i'm working in uh in stable in a coin area you seem to have found perhaps something that can help solve some of those issues and can you talk to that a little bit sure

yeah okay to interrupt the audience is saying that it's really hard to hear you so if you could just move closer to your microphone that would be great okay no problem i keep listening closer like this is this better i hope it's better a little bit more game so here we go yeah chris thank you um i think about this a lot actually you know obviously with my background in cyber security but i'd like to talk just about trust in general and how people you know trust things and people and then and then we can kind of get into you know the trust of the world we live in now um which is the digital world so you know trust is really um it's localized it's regionalized and it's nationalized right you kind of have these different bubbles of trust

that you have you know during this time of covid you have your trusted pods of people that you you know interact with um you know that that you feel have the same level of um due diligence on their you know daily activities um you know that this has become this this notion of a pod right um and and so these trust circles happen again you know locally regionally and nationally and and it's very complex you know type of topic because you know how do you how do you actually trust someone you know we think about people actually contracting covid from their pods because they trusted that everybody was doing the same thing right um and so you know you know trust inherently comes from

you know experience with with either people or processes or technology right um so you know you spend a lot of time with a friend of 20 years and um you know them you know inherently and you can trust that they will do the things that they normally do because you've been around them a long time so so sometimes it's just it's you know similar to a bank i trust the bank because i've had my money there for a long time i've received you know some level of interest on my money although these days it's not much um but they've never lost my money and and if they did have some sort of breach i usually get my money paid back right so um again that that it comes with experience it comes with length of time now when you translate that over to the

digital world it's a completely different ballgame right you have someone like me where i don't trust anything that is digital in nature because i've seen every single type of thing uh that has either some sort of hardware software involved that that could be compromised in some way shape or form so then you actually have to um in the digital world you have to think about risk you know when i'm going to make a transaction online whether that's my traditional bank or through some sort of exchange or some sort of d5 you know swapping uh you know uh website um you know you have to think about you know how the security of that technology is being

formulated do you trust the team that's you know um that's that's working on that project and or do you have the technical knowledge to understand those white papers that you that you mentioned so it is it is a very complex thing and i think you know when when the crypto market really started to flourish is when you know people started getting smarter and understanding that they have to do the due diligence on the teams um you know that are in the space you you can't just you know well you can but it would be very risky of you to go to some exchange that you did no research on and and go put your cryptocurrencies at risk um a lot of people are a lot smarter now and so the things that i look at are

you know team the technology and then of course security into the digital space and we can talk a little bit more about that uh but i'd like to open it up to the rest of the group very cool thank you so if you talk about the team like you gotta trust the team like what if the team your team is your central bank uh thomas what is that is that where you should place your trust as a citizen as a as a consumer as you say like okay i know this team they're not always perfect but like they've been doing this since uh since a long time and i kind of forgive them for for giving up i think it's like like jason said it's many things but it's especially experienced so trust i mean has something to do with

reputation so when you talk about a team that could also be about the reputation of the team but reputation i think eventually comes down to accumulated experience so if you see that something has worked for a long time as jason mentioned maybe with a specific bank then then you tend to have trust and your trust increases and i think it's the same with central banks you know some of the central banks are more trusted some are less and it depends on the experience that people had with the currency issued by these central banks of course the problem with with trust and reputation is that it can be gone quite quickly you know you start making mistakes and you can lose that trust and it's very difficult to gain it again

but i think in the end it's it's it's really this that you that you just experience it that you see other people's trusting on i think generally people are extremely trustworthy and you really have to to to violate that trust to get a negative effect but but people are quite ready to trust uh other people and to trust projects if you know if they if they look good and i don't think that a lot of people will go into white papers i mean there are a lot of people who do not understand the technical issues but they see maybe the name you know they see that a certain person has has achieved some things in the past they see colleagues trust this specific product and and i think that's how trust builds and the experience if

there is good experience it will just accumulate and trust will increase okay so that's for that projects basically um but we're also obviously talking about whole economies uh you know being sort of transforming into more more digi digital economies and uh and banks are uh catching up on the on the one side to try and figure out what's going on uh to capitalize and also enable this kind of new um digitized economy that would be interested robin maybe from your um when you talk about eu projects and your regulatory aspects right when you when trust is good but control is better sometimes you know like you know was it ronald reagan you said that uh you know

you know in connection with the um uh soviet uh arms race uh the u.s arms race so you gotta have sort of this additional layer and a lot of people are seeking this in and governments are seeing this in regulatory uh aspects and uh robin what's your experience there when you talk about eu specifically perhaps as well as in relation to other uh jurisdictions right yeah i i guess i guess first before i talk about kind of the european perspective or at least my understanding of the urban perspective i think it's important to kind of understand the the sort of ontological nature of trust it it's sort of a vertical a horizontal and and it's multi kind of contextual

and dimensional right um important elements of trust are things like transparency accountability and verifiability which in a digital world are are in some ways easier to achieve um at least in the in the cryptographic world where where security is underpinned by you know mathematical rules uh it's it's easier to to verify whether or not something is what it says it is right um the problem with the world we live today or at least some perceptions of of for like a better word central bank or the central bank system is that it's very hard to look transparently into what they're doing it's very hard for any of them to really be held

accountable and it's very hard for the average citizen to verify any of the actions or decisions that are taken at a central bank level in terms of the european perspective i think it's it's it's basically looking at the trust stack right so so you know you have trust at architectural layers and network layers or protocol layers um and you also have trust at the human layer um we could talk about what that means at a human layer it's pretty complex and it's based on psychosocial phenomenon but there's also trust that the regulatory and policy layer and i think that that's what the european commission is very strong and and very forthright in doing they they want to set up agreed trust frameworks whether that's

with regards to data protection whether it's regards to data governance or whether it's regards to you know competition law or consumer protection law yeah um and i think what's lovely about the commission is is well at least my perception is what's lovely about the commission is that they try and and and and make the development of those trust frameworks a very inclusive process um so they have this better regulations toolbox which is essentially a way for the public to get involved in um the policy shaping right and i think it's very important because that adds a level of accountability and a level of transparency to the whole process um you know and in this space we've

recently seen the marketing crypto assets regulation come out or at least a proposition for the uh for the uh maker regulation and it's gone through a consultation period and one would hope that some of the consultations that they received by the commission would be integrated into the finalized version and i think that's important um with respect to building trust between citizen and state jason i'm sorry uh robin just means that um you can like uh people who are now listening to this or watching this can actually go on somewhere on the website in the commission european commission and actually participate actively in uh the uh or shaping at least to a certain degree the uh with the

regulatory framework for crypto uh assets like crypto uh regulation right that's that's what you're saying yeah exactly so there's been a number of what they call con well better regulation consultations so that the big one recently was the marketing crypto assets there's been a couple on uh eu digital identity which interface uh quite strongly with the aml kyc world and there was also a really interesting consultation on what that means oh yeah anti-money laundering and know your customer um so you know the whole concept of digital identity and verifiable may credentials may not be based on blockchain systems but it's essentially a way of creating a greater level of trust um as as individuals or

citizens uh navigate the digital world right um okay cool um for for uh regulatory uh aspects it's it's always interesting uh you know there's like people who like it and people who don't like it and it's like sort of one of those contested areas as well um i'd like to know uh from genos but you know as a bank um what do you need in trans-regulatory framework and what do you not need like obviously you're existing in switzerland apparently there is a framework that works you can actually have a bank that is focusing on crypto can you just give us a quick idea of like where you locate um regulatory uh as as an important piece of your

innovation or even the selection of where you're going to be chris could you please speak up a little louder because our attendees still can't really hear you well yes okay in terms of regulation and innovation and this is a interesting field or the intersection is very interesting and this is also where i do make my living at this intersection of regulation and technology which drives massively innovation and then here as in most topics and if you go too much in one direction or in the other direction you won't achieve the best results there is sort of to the middle the golden way on one side regulation

provides trust because regulation leads to enforcement leads to to supervision that means people can put their trust into regulated entities because they know in case of something happens there will be people accountable will be people prosecuted on the other side if the regulatory framework is too tight then you have not much opportunities to innovate to design new products to bring new products into the market to test it and with people and here and this is exactly what uh where i would like to follow up with robin who made a great statement and regulations uh if it goes through a consultation

and phase where actually affected industry participant can provide their input because they can already anticipate what would be the effect on on their side on the market on potential customers if we can have here an inclusive process where information can be can be shared because it's always easy to regulate something which already happened and went wrong right but then you're too late right so and now you can say okay we forbid everything we over regulate then nothing bad can happen but then also no can happen and sometimes you cannot regulate in advance because you simply don't know the risks yet one example is as example nanotechnology and in the very early

beginning when it started with regulatory initiatives there was not fully clear what sort of use cases of products can be and put into the market and here is some flexibility required and this provider is provided by principle principle-based regulation where we do have in switzerland and a very good approach because at the end of the day regulations also needs to take a risk-based approach into consideration and people or regulated stresses what is the specific risk and then based on this risk and measures should be taken rather than just to to overregulate it absolutely yes do you mind if i jump in there on that as well please have a comment there

so you know if you look at regulation and law and this is this this is for all globally but i'm going to be speaking mostly for u.s law you know most of the regulation is rooted in some sort of crime mistrust mistake or abuse right the problem with it is that it's compounding so as those mistakes happen or those frauds or those crimes happen over time you know the regulators add laws and they add regulation um but they rarely go back and review that so so they're not innovative in a way that is keeping up with uh you know the digital age and so you have all these you know

quote-unquote old laws that don't really apply to modern technology and in modern finance and you know this this even is applied to just kind of general rule of law um and and that slows down the the innovation in the space so so there is this golden kind of center that i truly believe where you know we can have a safe you know digital um you know payment system or digital transaction globally where we're still you know knowing the transactions we can trust the system but there's still some regulation and capability for when there is some sort of fraud or crime because we we can't have just a purely lawless

uh you know uh global monetary system uh and and it kind of was that in crypto in you know 2009-2010 right um and and it didn't work but now that the trust has you know now that traditional finance and and and governments have really taken to cryptocurrencies we're starting to see more trust which now we're seeing more volume in these markets and i think that's a good thing absolutely robin and thomas do you want to jump in on this as well i i think that's a that's a really interesting uh point and also the question perhaps you know what what is technology's role in this whole thing right we we have this we have this is a tech

uh question right it's like how do we how much can we actually build into our our our currencies and our digital currencies that actually uh perhaps even make compliance easier with with regulation but also kind of inherently are better than denser and other systems quickly and maybe thomas can answer this question because i'm a bit ignorant to this but as far as i'm aware there's no regulatory or policy frameworks which governs the actions and decisions taken by central banks with regards to monetary and fiscal policy or or is there i i didn't think there was well i mean that yes there is i i mean there is first of all a constitution and

then then the laws that give restrictions to what a central bank can do so it depends on on how how detailed you want to to go into um into regulations of let's say monetary policy but there was there are long discussions among central bankers also about rules versus discretion for instance so this is clearly also a topic in in central banking right uh thomas while you're talking about this um in terms of um central banks and their actions a lot of a lot of discussion has been recently uh going the direction of uh inflation of uh

you know printing money of of the whole stimulus uh uh packages all over the world and and and some people say um this is driving really uh people into uh into defy into into coins where um where they feel like there's more trust or there's some kind of stability that in a way the policy driven uh central banks cannot no longer provide in the same way that has been and has been eroded for a long time and now we kind of have a technological answer to this and uh and then sort of this the central banks and you could argue oh central

banks are now looking at their um you know their instruments basically that have at their disposal and they're saying well you know what we can also do this and we're gonna basically uh create some kind of competition uh out there uh towards those other coins how do you how do you how would you frame that as somebody who's really on the ground uh yourself yeah well i mean first of all as you said i think people have been clearly watching the the the large increase of the balance sheets of the central banks since the basically since the financial crisis 2008.

right now in the past this uh money creation had a very tight link to to inflation but that kind of broke i mean started breaking down in the 80s late 80s 90s most central banks moved away from monetary growth rules to to an inflation targeting now uh that the big inflation didn't come after that the balance sheet increase now recently with the covet pandemic we had another large increase in balance sheets and and i guess as you said i mean that story goes around that now people are moving into cryptocurrency stable coins now the interesting thing that i that i observe is that when you look at stable coins the majority of stable coins they link

their or they pack their value to the us dollar right that means basically they trust the federal reserve to keep inflation low so they are they are exporting or or delegating the monetary policies of the federal reserve system so that narrative doesn't really go well together for me if you don't trust the central banks don't pack the stable coins to a fiat currency right so that brings me good good point that brings me to maybe jason and your how do you do this at um at basket what's that yeah what do you plan for that's a really great segue into what what we've um at basket have built over

about a two year period so we've been very interested in stable coins you know well before you know the craze of last year and and the d5 swapping world uh where stable stable coins really got their high volumes um one of our exact points was you know don't peg a stable coin to a one-on-one it's it's it is actually inherently risky even if it is even us dollar or the european uh the euro and that is exactly why we decided to create a stable asset that is backed by a basket of global currencies that in some cases are unrelated um so so essentially you're hedging your

risk across multiple currencies globally and that allows you and you know obviously in investment and institutions use these methods in things like etfs and others uh you know mutual funds etc they use the same technique in the traditional finance world to to gain you know small marginal uh yields over over time well what's nice about that is we're doing essentially the same thing only we're allowing the liquidity capability um and we're bringing that liquidity capability to blockchain um so it's a it's essentially a digital asset that has you know true backing in the traditional financial markets um what's complex about this and by the way the the sec here in the us is

comfortable with this type of asset they've already approved other types of assets so it's very likely that that we'll we'll get through the approval process here in the next few months but the point is is we really wanted to create a stable asset with the yield because we're starting to see more and more uh the ability to drive transaction prices down by by doing that so think about payment rail systems you know for example if you want to send you know a payment to a developer in thailand which i i did last year uh through paypal you are looking at a eight to nine percent international transaction cost so you know you pay pay that developer two thousand dollars a month and they're taking you know 200 away

from them which in in thailand could be you know several days worth of worth of food for a family so um we were able to do this the same process using usdc for free so and they were able to get liquidity in in the same same amount of time and then also reduce that transaction time significantly down to you know minutes rather than than days weeks or months right in many cases so so that's that's kind of one area that we're thinking about the other area is in these d5 swapping pools so when you when you look at you know these paired pool assets with stable assets and ethereum stable asset and bitcoin et cetera et cetera the stable asset actually brings the

yields up for stable asset holders pretty pretty significant so adding an additional yield to that stable asset just increases the overall yield of of the stake state swap asset so so we're looking at that as well as as a function of of our tool um i would highly suggest that anybody who's building a stable asset not peg it to one particular asset class and that's exactly you know what we're saying thomas we totally agree with you and that's exactly why we're doing what we're doing very interesting and what what are the other perspectives on on the panel on this i mean there is disruptive technology in d5 for sure there's not very the markets aren't mature though

um and you get those different like com comp you know competing uh concepts here and i what do you guys say to to what thomas sort of discharged at home is that or like this this challenge was like uh how do you how do you claim to be independent uh if you're actually paying your your currency or your your coin to uh essentially central bank policies in a certain way and trusting them to to keep stuff uh on sort of a trajectory that's stable uh what's your perspective like uh rob and gino what do you what do you see i mean i'll jump in here and i'll be i'll be quite forthright please i think uh defy is like the worst of wall street combined with

the worst of of of the marketing world uh uh put into one big hot tomato uh uh money soup right what's even worse is that uh jason there with all due respect i'm sure your product is is fabulous uh but jason there is telling us to trust a pegged asset uh and trust the company not the government so so even worse than trusting the government who i think is benevolent for the most part we need to trust a corporation uh that's registered and and very light touch regulated by uh the american regulators i would not advise doing that at all right secondly i would not advise anyone

to use some of the wrapped assets based on ethereum essentially because it's a privacy nightmare and not only is a privacy nightmare but essentially you're leaving a data trail which is going to have huge ramifications once the ai and machine learning based algorithms are going to be trained on all the transactions on the network and then that is sold to the ad tech industry who is going to target you with their adverts uh and their behavioral manipulation right that's my view uh i would hope that cbdc's uh and at least that those in charge of designing cbdc's would recognize that risk but i'm not sure if they do so a dar a dark scenario i really

that you're that you're painting there and i think uh an interesting one to consider is that is that something that in the d5 space and i i gotta i'm gonna be honest i'm also in that space uh to a certain extent but i'm also in a space where uh uh in an eu project where we are designing processes for super computers to use artificial intelligence so that you know basically multiplying the for the power the computational power uh and putting ai and you're basically saying that uh this is gonna disrupt again the whole uh the whole industry in a certain way that stuff can now be traced and tracked that we don't currently believe cannot and uh but is that something is that a sentiment

you your clients you know what are they what are they what are they seeing are they just short term right now they're just kind of in on the in the craze and they just want to be part of it or are your declines of your banks like the geneva bank that you just uh converted so to speak um or who who are now also offering those assets to their to their clients what is the sentiment there and what would you say uh to robin you know to kind of who who put something on the table i think that's not easy to just kind of dismiss i mean digital assets are here to stay it's not a short term in engagement we have seen the numbers growing

massively and i'm not talking here about about market prices we have seen more and more use cases especially in the tokenization world and i do agree with robin and this is coming back to one of our main topics it's about trust and yes i can have trust in in the distributed ledger technology which prevents double spending but if a token is representing something off-chain then who guarantees that actually it is something in the real world is actually there and especially for for stable coins who are packed to a basket or a single currencies with all the pros and cons yeah who is guaranteeing that actually this fiat money backing this coin is is actually there

and this is where i fully agree with robin and you have not only to have trust in the technology but also trust in the intermediaries or in the parties involved in these processes and typically with stable coins you have an issue where somebody who has structured and designed this token somebody who has potentially somewhere a bank account actually having in one or several currencies this this underlying packed money and then it's the question okay if i want to redeem the underlying because at the end of the day there might be people for whatever reason who want to go back in the old world for a specific transaction or for a specific amount of money and they need to have trust that they actually get what they were promised to

get so very old problem basically you're talking about one of the reasons why why we started to have central banks in the first place right basically to uh to prevent uh or to be able to provide a certain liquidity in case of what you what you would call a bank run right that's kind of what you're what you're alluding to and i think we're also seeing this in the uh in the recent uh um discussion around the uh uh the tether coin right in in in in the us where where exactly that those questions were raised is is this actually backed by the assets that uh uh they claim uh they have and and it's a it's an age-old problem right uh i don't know i mean thomas you you probably have uh the history there all together but like that's where where this is coming

from and and jason uh i don't know if you've seen any any anything in that area as well uh in terms of crime or in terms of also like uh attempts to uh to utilize this sort of uh situation and and it's been in new york i mean that's right where it happens right now yeah i mean i i you know i totally respect robin's opinion um but i will say you know first touching on the ai machine learning uh you know i've been involved even in the early days of high frequency training uh platforms which we're using essentially you know not not artificial intelligence algorithms but algorithms created you know through you know correlation engines and things of that nature that have been affecting the traditional markets for

years those have since moved to ai and machine learning techniques that make them even more efficient and trade faster so so the traditional markets are already being affected by ai and therefore the the crypto markets will be as well and that is a very scary thing so i agree with you robin that um you know the future of just finance in general um will be run by machines only and um it's going to be very interesting on how um you know we how we're going to trust that system um that's no longer run by by humans um the the second piece is i do need to defend the the digital asset that we're creating so you know the difference here on basket is that we are fully regulated so if you

look at any other security token that's out there they are unregulated by those entities in the federal government which means you know companies like tether did not have a custodian here in the u.s for their actual physical fiat assets we have we have that so that means any investment we make in global currency bonds actually has to be um you know transacted through a transfer agent and a custodian just like in traditional finance so so we we can actually validate and verify all the money that we've spent in our digital asset so that's very you know unlike any other digital asset that's out there today and that's

the reason why we did that was for exactly that reason robin because you can't inherently trust corporations to to secure your assets and that's why regulation is actually in place to do exactly what we're doing um so i think we're a really good mix of trust but also still being having the flexibility uh and liquidity uh that you would get in the digital asset world um from a from a fraud perspective yes i am very very scared of the d5 world i can tell you that for a fact while i think it's really really strong that a community can get together and create uh you know create some market or some financial market

together i think that's really great as long as you have some sort of inherent security procedures and capabilities within that community that you trust where it's going to get sticky is that you know you start trusting you know communities that that eventually break down for whatever reason i'll give you a very basic example which was not a fraud example but it is an example that just happened uh just recently so uni swap just recently had a bunch of stable asset and ethereum and bitcoin and you know top 10 cryptocurrency pairs they were incentivizing users of the community to to essentially stake their assets in these swapping pools well at the beginning of december in 2020 they had about three billion

dollars worth of assets that are you know locked up in these in these liquidity pools um as soon as they turn the incentivization off at uniswap those assets drop 40 percent of the assets under that was being staked so this is not a fraud by any sense but it's a community that says you know is basically telling the the um the the corporation that if you don't incentivize us enough we're going to pull our assets and put them somewhere else and a lot of people switch to another swapping uh tool for that for that matter so it's not just fraud it's also economics as well right on immature markets perhaps to a certain to a certain degree right i mean that just they're really it's

really difficult to discover price on for for such assets right it's even harder than in the real world um maybe i i have we have a couple of minutes left i think i want to also give people the opportunity to then really ask questions um or to engage in discussion but uh robin i would be very interested uh to hear from you do you see any tech solutions so to speak to this because you also said you're a contributor to monero and you know maybe that goes in that direction of where you can actually do something on the tech and maybe not a tech fix but something that can be done um and then thomas maybe after that after after robin um not all not all central bank digital currencies are created equal either

right so there must be differences and and uh then you know what what's going on there but maybe first robin um i mean that's a really hard question i don't understand what we're looking for the solution to right uh i mean i look at a lot of d5 and i'm a bit of a cynic i mean it's essentially just peer-to-peer uh slot machines right uh that's kind of what i think it is of course there are some really powerful affordances uh you know in the line of financial inclusion and the democratization of financial instruments um but i think i think it's not going to end up being fair for all participants unless

unless there is a very clear and very concise uh regulatory oversight right if if we don't want the oversight uh because we don't want to live a libertarian dream um then all's fair and loving war and and and you know let there be no rules and and let the winners come out on top who will be the ones that have the most capital to start out with and the losers will be the the average joe uh i don't think that there's a solution for that because i think if we look at the history of the world uh there's always been an unequal distribution of power and and more now than ever an equal distribution of wealth right i don't i don't see that changing you see it more as an amplifier for

just rather yeah yeah if if you look around you know undoubtedly there's been a lot of good to come out of the blockchain revolution but there's also been an awful amount of bad and i think that's the the yeah i'd love to hear hear from from all right question um so robin um i know you mentioned ai big data and privacy i assume when you mentioned that you were talking about on chain data uh with like chain analysis and cypher trace like tracing um with like stable coins like uh being issued on like open networks that aren't private and potentially wrapped uh cbdc is like is there any way to fix that aside from like making the base layer

uh actually natively private because like the only other way is for people to use something like tornado cash and that's like not the ideal solution so i'm just like kind of curious when you talk about privacy in that sense because it seems very hard projects to have that when the base center isn't private no it's not very hard there are a number of base layer protocols that are privacy preserving whether that's the crypto node protocol but with smart contract whether it's the minimal window protocol or whether it's uh other privacy preserving technologies such as zk roll ups deterministic roll ups or even tarry which is being built as a merge mine of monero which is a kryptonite protocol and a smart contract supposedly will be smart contract enabled i think that there's

been again this is my cynical hat general uh willful ignorance in the space regarding privacy i think it continues to this day and nobody wants to discuss it because as i said they want to live blindly ignorant and continue on or they're malevolent it's one of the two i don't see it any other way uh so the solution to use the cryptography that is there that's why it was built uh it's why it exists uh and and to put the reg the regulation and the regulatory framework in place to ensure that data protection and the fundamental human right to privacy is maintained as we move forward whether or not it will i don't know yeah they're super interesting i think that uh this discussion

uh between really uh privacy like privacy being this at the core of cryptography but then also in this case driving as robin says uh you know driving certain problems that are already tendencies that are existing i find this an interesting uh discussion and also interesting controversy which i'm sure is something that also um is replicated in uh in the broader in the broader public and uh that's something i would love to hear about but thomas first uh before we go uh to questions i would love to hear about you know sort of your vision for central bank digital currencies as maybe addressing even some of the problems or issues that we've just heard about and also maybe comparing a little bit

uh if you know different currencies we've heard in china there's uh there's the digital uh renminbi is being actually sort of beta tested currently as we speak by consumers um we have in south africa we have projects we have projects all over the world most gender banks are on to on it and you you just published this paper together with um uh one of the uh inventors of um you know of of the digital cache that is well i think that's what it was called in fact uh so very interesting perspective i would love to hear what you think no thank you very much i actually the issue that robin raised about privacy i think is a very important issue when it comes to central bank digital currencies

because there's clearly the potential there to uh to to have easy mass surveillance uh depending on how a cbdc is designed so you say as you said a lot of central banks are are experimenting piloting um cbdc so you see very different things you see you see blockchains and non-blockchains uruguay for instance is not on a blockchain then you have a lot of a lot of central banks experiencing with permissioned ledgers a lot of enterprise blockchains which are very i guess very special that they also allow to have some kind of uh confidentiality for the banks that are but for me the the privacy issue is an

important issue and i think it's slowly gaining importance in the central bank community too so as you nicely mentioned the paper we just published together with david chum who is one of the i guess champions of privacy he's the inventor of blind signatures and that was exactly i think that's the only uh really advantage that the cbdc design has that we propose over a lot of other cbtc designs uh that it that it can provide uh this uh transaction privacy through david charms blind uh signatures i mean the other thing is that we are not using a blockchain so it's a very scalable we can do several thousand uh transactions a second

and one question i would be interested in uh robin so my understanding is that a lot of the the cryptographic privacy protection technologies used on the blockchain are problematic in terms of scalability and uh and performance but uh i would be interested in uh in an update on this view uh yeah i mean quick answer quick and easy answer is yes it's problematic from the scaling perspective you know especially if you're talking about cbdc which is you a national or global framework um that's exactly why we didn't use a blockchain uh line ignitions without a blockchain

yeah i mean but there are i mean mimblewimble is a really interesting protocol uh and it has this concept of cut through uh which essentially allows well at the at every block uh uh at every brock verification um it allows you to ensure that all inputs add up to all outputs and then you can you can uh essentially make a cut of all the previous blocks and it gets aggregated down to a hash and then that hash can be verified now if if obviously you need some evidential framework to be able to or an evidential framework in place to be able to look at transactions post some time and date mimblewimble is a little bit problematic so for cbdc's it

may not be suitable but but to answer your question yes as from a scalability perspective it's it's still an issue wonderful thank you so um should we uh should we go jump into the into the questions in a q a and um have some of our uh uh viewers uh actually ask those questions and then maybe at the end of this uh q a session we'll give everyone on the panel also sort of a chance to uh for final thoughts but let's let's jump into the q a yeah sure so i'm just gonna pick and choose some questions i think are relevant um and i will mention the name of the person that uh wrote it and i might be butchering it so uh sarah uh scoop uh wanted to know

how is risk scoped in terms of like cbdc's and stable points what's about uh risk sorry i didn't i didn't hear that how do you scope out risk uh when it comes to uh stable coins versus uh cbdcs all right who wants to take that one so so maybe just for cbdc i can say that within a certain currency that's exactly one of the advantages i think of cbdc because you do not have this credit risk and liquidity risk which you have with with private money almost by definition um so that's that's i guess one of the

advantages and one of the reasons why a lot of times if you have a systemically important financial market infrastructure you want the settlement to be in central bank money so that would be one of the advantages i guess for central bank money okay perhaps to add here um how to mitigate risks related to stable coins as we have discussed before also if json go to trusted issuers and who are regulated and where there is uh some oversight that actually the the real fiat assets are actually booked and available yeah this this really comes down to the due diligence of each individual do you know uh

participating in the the digital economy um you really need to if especially if it's not a regulated entity you need to do your research on you know historical transactions community uh technology security and and you know everybody has their kind of own formula for for their own risk some people are are very mathematical about it and others just have a gut feeling about it but but you definitely need to be thinking about those things when participating in these these networks now more and more we're seeing uh traditional finance participating in these networks so that's a good sign doesn't necessarily mean that everybody has to agree to that uh you know i totally respect people

that that want their full privacy but again you know you potentially are taking on more risk you know in in those environments all right interesting and uh here we are obviously i also have the role of tech of technology again and also in risk assessment and i think that's one of the that has been also one of the drivers of um peer-to-peer lending and these kinds of things where a technologist or tech companies actually believe that they can you know they can automate some of those processes uh using artificial intelligence and so on uh back to q a cool so next one is actually a thought experiment how would the crypto community react if the central banks start to acquire

bitcoin in a fashion that they become significant bitcoin whales uh similar to how they build up gold reserves to back their fiat currency that's thomas and very interesting question i like dan well we have no plans at this stage to invest in bitcoins but the fact that you had to say it exactly i mean we saw ellen musk gave gave a little taste of of what could happen and of course um um i mean i don't see that in the foreseeable future as a s asset that the central banks would use but i mean never say never all right so he's leaving now robert

just again just a quick note on that and and and this is my cynical hat as well probably a bit of a grump today but i think if if if governments did start purchasing bitcoin and use it as a reserve in the manner that they used to use uh gold as a reserve i think it may be destabilizing for the overall geopolitical uh uh landscape uh one of the one of the wonders of of modern monetary theory is it allowed uh governments to impose monetary policy which meant that they didn't need to invade each other for the scarce resources uh the minerals and the commodities etc and so on so i mean in a dystopian future if if all these countries were holding on to private keys

uh with all this bitcoin attached to them you might get a scenario when they start attacking each other because uh there's obvious wealth that they can go in and grab uh and i'm not sure what a fort knox would look like for a private key but uh i would imagine the cyber warfare would get fairly intricate and could lead to all sorts of negative consequences that's why grumpy bear cynical hat on uh i don't of know of cyber warfare uh i'm curious like what you guys think is the future uh stable coins and cbdc's because like right now it's being used as like a geopolitical tool already and it's kind of interesting to imagine like what the future would be like with as uh the industry evolves

well i can i can start with that uh you know we we have now at least the us government has released documentation that north korea has you know tried to hack multiple exchanges uh you know to to essentially accumulate digital currencies um you know other i imagine other nation states are probably doing the same in in some regions of the world that we don't know um so it's already been happening you know in that respect uh there's there's also a question here in the q a you know what's going to happen when uh quantum computing comes into place and uh you know can potentially break some of the encryption uh the public private key encryption method methods of these blockchains a

lot of the blockchains are thinking about that the the protocols are thinking about that you know some of them are creating quote-unquote quantum safe encryption mechanisms and um you know it's going to be a constant back and forth you know basically forever between the hacker and uh the the economies and that's just how it is traditionally you know you know take blockchain out of all of this you know that's that's what we've been doing for for years and years so that's going to continue to happen uh but but you know kind of my my primary point here is that we are getting smarter and better in this space you know what what i can tell you is if you look at the the the hacks that were happening 2009 2010 2011 all the way to 2014 they were much simpler and easier to perform for from

from a hacking perspective now you know not that uh you know hackers aren't getting better they sure are but we are getting smarter also on the technology so so we are getting into a a little bit better of a place my worry is the the individual consumer um you know as more you know not as tech savvy consumers come into the space you know using digital wallets and things of that nature uh they're gonna be at more risk you know from from just you know basic scams and hacks that that happen you know now with with traditional account accounts super interesting yeah the future of warfare um so to speak between the the crime uh side and the and the sort of the

it is um yeah i see a movie plot right there i mean for a couple movies actually but getting the private keys out of somebody's hand too bad most hacking movies are really terrible well here's an opportunity mr robot was great though right all right so we're gonna transition to the next question um the challenge with cedcs and centralized power structures in general is always the potential to misuse that power do you think there will be tangible reliable or transparent safeguards against the misuse of cbdc's for the likes of financial censorship and overstepping of authority

[Music] well i mean guess that's addressed to me so or anyone else who wants to jump in but i i don't see it to be totally new i mean it's it's it's true centralized power uh has clearly there's clearly possibilities of abuse at the same time there are also a lot of advantages of uh centralization and um for me one of the interesting issues to see now with decentralized finance is how it can can go against these tendencies that are that are there for centralization you see it with you know even with bitcoin

you have wallets you have exchanges they are centralized you need oracles uh and so on so there is a lot of centralization there too even in the in the d5 world and i think the issue with cbdc and central banks is just to hold them accountable you know there are laws uh there are there are different possibilities how you can hold them accountable but it's i think it's a it's a it's a real issue and uh it has been there in the past and it will be there in the future yeah i'm gonna agree with thomas i mean you know when it comes to centralizing anything even if you're the largest token holder of a particular blockchain or cryptocurrency um you potentially have that power you know regardless of a central bank

owning it or an individual and and uh that could be quite scary you know i look at mining operations for example you know especially for you know the proof of work protocols you know most of the bitcoin mining operations are coming out of china right does that can you know does that mean that they have a particular amount of power over you know the the big uh bitcoin protocol maybe um are they abusing it no not at the moment um but it is a potential you know if if they can potentially have 51 of the computing power then then they can you know fork the blockchain and and um use it for for whatever method i don't think that would occur but again we're getting to those points in some of these

uh proof-of-work protocols where that could that could occur um even in proof-of-stake you have you know if you look at the the differences of the the stake holders and you know kind of the commodity traders the stakeholders still have a relatively much larger percentage and portion of of the the staked assets in those protocols um so again you could consider that being like a central bank or a series of central banks that could control that economy so you we do have to be careful i think this this will change as volumes change you know as more adoption occurs and you know volume distribution flattens out across you know more participants then i

think we'll be in a little bit safer of a situation right or i would say less risky let's put it that way less risky not so much safer what are some ways you guys uh think can um different projects can decentralize because every project is pretty centralized in different aspects so you mean like they're so which what what part of the project uh is sort of the centralized part and how should that be distributed yeah so like in terms of like decentralization uh you guys were talking about the risks

tied to like centralized uh entities so if it's proof of stake proof of work how do you make sure the miners are decentralized how do you make sure the token distribution is decentralized in different things like that and then the projects that are built upon them how do you make sure that uh who holds the keys uh and it's like different things like how do you how do we actually evolve this industry so it becomes more so there is less centralized risk i mean if you know just generally speaking between proof of work and proof of stake you have a better chance of being more in uh proof of stake and that's because you can physically distribute the tokens however you want

as opposed to mine them with mining operations it's really hard to be able to to determine where the miners are going to end up right i mean i think initially the miners weren't you know primarily china based or southeast asia based um you know they were they were distributed quite nicely in in the early early days of bitcoin um i believe but uh with proof of stake you as the kind token issuer you have that choice where you're going to you know initially distribute the tokens or how you're going to distribute so you have a better chance there just from a basic distribution method now after that it really i think it comes down to participation you you really have to have some sort of app or protocol where the

exchange of the assets is happening on a scale to um the stakeholders are uh you know the the amount of stake that they have in the protocol changes significantly over time and flattens over time across the the participants right so it comes down essentially a lot of these things come really down to to simple or quote-unquote simple behavioral mechanisms where where you're where human decision-making is actually uh at the core and like sort of those mechanisms that we know from also traditional uh governance systems or so on and so on important interesting um i would say

maybe uh since you if you if you agree maybe two two two three more questions and then i'd like to go into the the maybe the final round where people where everyone on the panel is kind of uh gives their their view on also maybe their evolved view on on on where they're where they're at yeah definitely sounds great um let's see sorry there's a lot of questions um so i guess like uh the next question do you see a world where uh cbdcs can be used with d5 uh aside from being wrapped

like do you think cbs dc's would somehow work with decentralized finance and financial instruments here i i do think yes because uh apparently the the demand for stable coins uh seems to show to me that blockchains are looking for something like like a cbdc i mean you would have something better than um certainly a off-chain asset-backed stablecoin if you would have directly a cbdc on the blockchain and that that has been one experiment that we have been doing for instance at the swiss national bank together with the swiss stock exchange for the digital so i think there there is clearly a

possible ability for central banks to centrally issue a cbdc on a blockchain that then can be used on on a blockchain so that would be my issue yeah i agree i agree with thomas there um i i do think that there's a way to do that in fact you know the way that we're configuring basket you know we would prefer to buy assets in cbdc's if we could you know right now we're limited to buying currency bonds uh across you know and trying to distribute those bonds across you know non-correlated assets um but uh yeah it would be much faster and more efficient for us to to use a cbdc uh in that process so and and and then if you think about the

kind of automated market maker space this this kind of defy swapping protocol you can still go through all the kyc aml processes to stake your assets for and then you can receive the incentives from those assets for for staking and you can still do that in a compliant way i believe now i don't believe the u.s regulatory space is like ready for that yet but i think they will be i think once they've you know understand that a little bit better they would be able to do that so that means you could still create these autumn you know these these nice liquidity pools with uh authenticated users that are still receiving those same

incentives and it can all be tracked and and validated and verified through blockchain so so i do believe that that's a way that we will be going um it it will just take time for the regulators to kind of fully understand that because they're also learning about the technology um you know as well and and kind of catching up perhaps to add here what jason just said traditional aml frameworks are for targeting financial intermediaries because there are these identified regulated supervised parties so you impose obligations about identification about transaction monitoring but this concept of financial intermediaries it's not easily transferable to the d5 space

where it's hard to identify at all and such intermediaries and this is exactly where existing aml frameworks um are being challenged and at the end of the day if we have cdbc heavily involved in in the d5 space which i do clearly see a strong use case for that questions are actually okay how we do ensure that aml requirements are adhered to when this is exactly the space where and regulated but innovative player can breach this gap very interesting so basically panel agrees on yes uh but maybe let's hear robin uh yeah i mean i mean yes i believe that they'll be interoperable i think atomic swaps

already being developed and i think it'll be really interesting when we have kind of you know cross-chain compatibility whether it's a cbdc a stablecoin or or or you know open permissionless networks just i just wanted to touch on the aml question um because i i do think the incumbent approach to aml is is as gino says based on financial intermediaries and that is starting to break down now in these p2p environments i think that the financial services sector needs to radically rethink what aml should be uh as we move forward and i think it's not an easy question to have an answer for because uh one

thing that has been proposed or at least has been has been started to be discussed is some sort of regulation surrounding the generation of a public-private key pair which to police that would be very very very difficult and i don't even see how it's possible because you're ascending essentially to police mathematics so i think some you know elevated minds need to come together i don't think they're necessarily at the fatf i don't necessarily think they're in the existing regulatory circles they may well be i'm not sure um but i think an open discussion needs to be had between between the existing incumbent system and and and some of the new players

and i think that discussion should be very transparent uh and i think it should be held in public forums uh and i think it should work towards um you know modifying modifying the regulatory frameworks surrounding aml and ctf for the benefit of all not not just the benefit of of of the uh the investigative authorities yeah i agree with robin and i will tell you just from a kyc side too the kyc processes that are being used in you know these regulated digital exchanges is i think actually better than some of the banking institutions in fact um you know in terms of authenticating and verifying individuals uh that are doing transactions and so

there's there's much to be learned from traditional financial you know institutions um what's happening here in in the uh digital space what i will say about the d5 and c5 which is you know centralized and the kind of merger of those things not everybody's defy is the same i i don't imagine a completely decentralized financial financial model with full privacy ever working with any of the central banks it's just it's just not going to occur it's too high and again it doesn't necessarily mean that they they wouldn't do it it is just too risky um you know across the board and so if if your vision of d5 is that it's very

unlikely that cbdc's will be involved um but but there will be some cross-section like i mentioned in in you know automated market making and things of that nature that can be controlled in a way but still decentralized in terms of you know who's staking their their assets um i think that that is definitely possible cool uh syndra maybe the last question can could uh could everyone use the sort of the opportunity of that last question also to kind of wrap in their maybe their their final viewpoint or sort of closing a remark we i would say we should probably wrap up in about uh 10 12 minutes and uh so so take that opportunity as well to

reflect on that question and your your maybe also how you has your viewpoint evolved uh in in this last in the last hour maybe even go ahead all right so we have two options in terms of questions uh we can talk about licenses uh for different aspects of uh open networks um different parts of the stack or we can talk about the digital yet uh do you guys have a preference i think you should pick syndra all right um all right let's talk about the digital yen um there are many problems with it um i think it's one of those models where everyone looks at it where it's kind of fascinating

in terms of how it's being implemented but there are a lot of uh risks involved with it so i guess like when you guys look at us what that cbdc like how do you guys evaluate and like what would you do differently uh for like version two or like uh for other countries that are thinking about uh ces let's go what would you do well let's let's start with thomas he is uh he has just thought about this for the last two years so i think i think just central banks are

not there yet no one really knows uh the best way or a good way to to issue a cbdc i can i kind of we are all kind of watching each other and waiting for each other to go i mean uh the the bahamas uh came out um i think as the first ones with really a live cbdc we have the sand dollar but that's uh that's uh that's also a kind of an enterprise blockchain if i understand it correctly so i think we are just not there i'm not too familiar with uh with what the bank of chapman is doing in this this respect i have to say but when it comes to digital yen just one point that might be similar to a digital swiss franc is the yen

and the swiss franc above safe haven which means that there are a lot of people from abroad holding the yen and the swiss franc and unlike the us dollar being a relatively small country you you have an issue here that you have an appreciation of your currency uh always especially in times when when there are a lot of risks in the market so that is one of the issues we are also taking into account that could be a an additional problem and i think for for digital the end that would be a very similar i will say a positive thing about it uh is that it will allow for many of the unbanked people in

china to participate in the financial markets so so that is one of the things that that the digital yen will will allow for do you know what's your from a bank um my suggestion is uh to address also this this other question about licenses and and define i make that in parallel and yes the topic uh is is interesting but my counter question would be who would need to apply for such a license right because it comes back to this question of centralization of financial intermediaries because at

the end of the day you cannot license systems there must be somebody accountable someone needs to apply for a license an entity natural person usually not so it will be a legal entity and then you can impose the requirements to fulfill in order to get such a license and then we have to ask okay what is the specific contribution of the players in such a d5 space is it still financial intimidation is this sort of custody is it involvement in multi signature and this this is just a little bit too too early because they are very innovative use case but at the end of the day somebody needs to get this this license and then you can

exercise supervision that's just my two cents for that question so when i was talking about licenses like i heard uh in germany actually uh they're going to make um proof of stake validators uh get a crypto custody license uh because they're doing governance on shane so that's like tied to mining which is like tied to a lot of like um without with consensus and validation so it's like kind of interesting to see how like governments are starting to regulate different aspects of the stack and do you see that like happening like long term like everything will require a license and yes i do see that tendency and right

now um in the european union as there is no harmonized framework yet and several jurisdictions have different approaches you mentioned germany with the crypto custody license uh there you need such a license if you want to provide custody services for for third parties and then until mikka will enter into force other jurisdictions have different approaches but the the time where you could do sort of regulatory arbitrage going from country to country this is not sustainable it's not not scalable and then we come back to the trust right if you can say well i'm regulated and actually these are the requirements and we have talked about cyber security and here operational

risks in in losing or getting hacked private keys are gone this is this is posting a big threat of clients of such service providers and here with regulations then you need to also fulfill cybersecurity requirements uh and so on so therefore running away from regulation is definitely the wrong approach and the right question here is and what sort of regulation does make sense i advocate heavily for technology neutral and principle based because that gives flag gives you enough flexibility not to overregulate and also reduce space for innovation very good it's great answer great uh also great bringing together those those

two as two questions yeah yeah i i just want to touch on uh just for me to sum up on the idea of regulatory arbitrage because i think that's a really interesting topic in itself but i think you may find as central banks start to develop their own countries that instead of regulatory arbitrage you might get a form of monetary based technological arbitrage where where states kind of monetary and fiscal ideology manifests in their central bank digital currency and because we imagine that these central bank digital currencies will be interoperable people would be free to choose which system they wish to transact with at any point given in time depending on how

their beliefs align with the system so you know not engaging in any moral relativism the people in china may prefer to transact in in in you know their digital currency whereas more privacy conscious people may wish to to transact mainly in in the swiss central bank digital currency or or the german central bank digital currency and i think that would be really interesting because i think you would well you have the potential for some really beautiful systems to be built that are very uh open very transparent uh based on you really outstanding and and and and beneficial principles as as gino said and that's what i would like to see i

i have no reason to think that there couldn't be for argument's sake an open source permission the central bank digital currency i think it would be a very beautiful thing to you know to imagine uh whether or not i'll happen i don't know but there could be very nice awesome well i think we're going to wrap up questions now i'll let chris take it from here thanks very much and uh thank you for for leading the q a uh very beautifully and uh engagingly um so i think um i'm actually surprised how how many facets this question has and where it led us

um it is uh something that seems uh well there are two sides and then we kind of know there's a gray zone between uh cbd sees on one side and this sort of uh wild immature market that's that it holds so much disruptive um uh potential as well and we're all watching uh history unfolding right now and we're uh i think we have to be humble to a certain degree to say well we do have to really watch this and some of us are participating uh on different or i think all of us are participating in different ways in creating this this this uh sort of new world and

i think listening to each other and to each other sort of not just visions but also scenarios that can come out is absolutely essential in order to really build something where we all are many of us hopefully all of us can uh can thrive and have find a future that uh that you know is is something they want to live in um so the second point i've been uh not surprised by but um very appreciative of is the level of um intelligence the level of uh just willingness to share and contribute from everyone in the panel so i would like to take this opportunity and really uh thank you also in the name of

cva um for having such a great and high level discussion uh full of respect but also full of your experience your knowledge and we touched upon really sort of technological polls we touched on on the pragmatics but also on um almost really central philosophical concepts and um i would like to kind of leave it at that also i want to thank our our audience uh for everybody who is uh who's watching this and who's interacting i see there's a lot of interaction also on the chat on the on the q a which i think is a great thing uh and i would like to invite everyone to to keep you know going in this direction and to keep interacting and take all the opportunities you can

to interact with policymakers with with founders with projects uh don't don't be don't be afraid to reach out to everyone and and really bring in your voice it's absolutely vital that um we all build this together and uh we we create our own future in a participative way so thanks very much for being here and um keep following us on on social media if you can um if you want uh go to our website cba well it's called crypt great i'm advertising the website and i um uh i'm forgetting it um swiss where you can where you can also find a recording of this

in a couple of days from now uh upload it um and also biographies of the folks who participated so thanks