CVA Podcast: Frederik Gregaard, Cardano Foundation

Transcript

[Music] hello hello this is your host ferrez ahmed ready to kick off another bite-sized episode of the crypto valley association podcast let's discover together the growing trends this fast moving space and try to shed some light on the mysteries it contains we are joined by frederick gerard the recently appointed ceo of the cardano foundation an independent standards body that oversees and supervises the advancement of cardano one of the leading decentralized public blockchains so let's dive straight into the hidden world of enterprise adoption federic thank you for joining us how are you doing i'm doing really well

awesome well and let's dive straight in why don't you tell us how you first found out about blockchain technology and what got you first involved within the space sure very happy to do so it's a bit of a boring story right but essentially i'm a technology banker so i'm coming from building and implementing technology for banks asset managers wealth managers large treasuries and so forth and my big passion in the last 15 to 20 years has always been around bringing trust back into banking and capital markets at this part somebody always starts laughing in the audience so probably somebody on the podcast will have a good laugh because how do you actually do that so i've been living through

the financial crisis i've been on a on a trading floor when everything went south and you took orders and post-its and i've seen some of the impact we've done in banking and i fully believe that we need the function of banking we need to function the finance from the t-shirt we're wearing to the watch we are wearing everything is embedded in finance and i think if you kind of think about it for a while right this is something like it goes along the lines like this right so the fundamental currency of commerce is not the us dollar or the swiss franc it's actually trust and how do we bring trust back into the financial system to do that we really need to trust equation so when i was looking at it from a banking site and

and bitcoin bitcoin came around and the first couple of uh digital assets i was really heavily pushing towards and saying i want these companies as my clients i want them in my bank i want to service them i want to start building infrastructure around that and i was basically not allowed to do that my comp happened straight away said no no this doesn't work the uh you know there's surely graylist that there was different you know soft opinions out saying that these kind of companies were you know only for money laundering or for terrorism or the silk road and all those things but i felt there was a deeper thing behind it so i was you know started pushing for it i lost a fight in the bank i tried to do what i could around the ecosystem and around the early days to

to support with my knowledge and then first actually when i then joined pwc later to really push towards having an army of changemakers so how do you take 250 000 employees and try to really solve this hard problem about trust in capital markets and and banking you know it was very clear at that time that that blockchain distributed ledger technology and so forth is is a part of the solution so somehow i just you know kind of waded straight into it by looking at what was the real problem and suddenly i discovered a technology who could or had the potential to actually mitigate some of that and build some rails and some infrastructure which is actually how it should was supposed to be if we had this kind of opportunity maybe 50 years ago

thank you for that i'm glad you've kept the faith in in this technology and so if we move on to cargano and now firstly well congratulations for being appointed as the first chief executive officer of the cardano foundation right surround our applause and maybe you can give our audience an insight into what the cardano foundation is about and why you decided to join sure so the kadana foundation is an independent not-for-profit organization that oversees and supervises the advancement of the cadano ecosystem so what does that really mean so there's a lot of third generation dlt projects out there and i think we need them all we probably

need even more than the ones who's already out there working on it and the first and second generation who's upgrading right now we definitely also need them because the problem we're solving is huge and it's not just about financial services even though i'm so embedded in it so the governance structures of cardano is slightly different than many of the other projects and there's actually three entities around the project who makes a huge effort here so i just explained a little bit about what we do in the cardano foundation but then there's also our brothers in in out hong kong limited ira hk and these guys are actually building the first version of the technology stack and then there is inworker who's basically

you know tasked upon how do we drive a lot of the adoption and how do we drive a lot of use cases and how do we basically bring it out to the masses so there's like a trinity here of companies who's actually working towards the same vision or towards the same purpose and what i'm hoping for what i'm going to push very hard for is that this is not just going to be a trinity we're going to see a huge ecosystem of institutional or product development companies and other companies joining this ecosystem not just as users on the protocol but also as shapers so in short what you can say is that the qadhan foundation's purpose is is to ensure that we are building principal systems for generations to

come and that means that we're not trying to build something who's going to have a huge adoption and make an impact in just our generation but we want to build infrastructure for the next generations to come so they have a place where they can build applications they can do transactions we can give access to people who don't have access to financial services today and so forth in the future it's a big task and there's a lot of ethical problems in there there's a lot of governance problems in there there's a lot of things who on the short term might seem as being you know not the right way to go because it's not about pumping any kind of token but it's really about ensuring that there's sufficient trust and we take the right choices but people will

think about this as one of the initial foundational layers of technologies the future to build them and so is there a usp a unique selling point that really attracted you towards cardano instead of another cryptocurrency uh company that's developing some example oh that's a very good question so i believe that we need a new architecture of the entire internet and perhaps even a new architecture of the whole financial system of the world economy and when i was looking as you know i'm only going to take over this role in the in the future right so when i'm looking at it from my pwc eyes and looking at it and thinking about you know

how do we you know what kind of protocols does my institutional clients want my central banking clients my tier one or tier two banking clients or the asset managers who is you know you know building tokens and doing portfolios on it and to be honest it's it's very hard to kind of you know to find that one project who stands out from the rest of them when you look into the open projects so when you don't look at the centralized change but we look at the public change and and that's probably because a lot of these things have not been done before we got ethereum and we've got bitcoin who really rocked the world and really you know showed us what's actually possible

but there was a lot of scalability problems there was a lot of issues in terms of sustainability about environment about consensus algorithms and so forth and now i see a you know maybe 10 projects who's doing really you know who's pushing forward with that each of their versions around a third generation blockchain technology and what i really think that the cardano does really well is that they have a really strong security architecture that allows you to keep your identity to yourself but also allows you to basically be able to prove to anybody whether that being the prosecutor or or you know a lawyer or a judge or whoever that might be that you have an immutable record to document

your behavior i mean you think about that in banking sense you don't actually has as a consumer or as an enterprise any way of of proving your behavior transaction behavior at all that's all stored in centralized third-party intermediaries today right so actually the bank will have your transaction history and you can print that out and do to them being audited and so forth you have that but i think this is one of the main things that blockchain will allow us to do and when i look at the architecture of cardano and how they actually have split the different layers and connected that i thought this they're onto something and the academic research the kadana foundation has done and basically taking a step

back and not just done a hack hard fork on ethereum or something like that but they took a step back and said you know how do we solve these things and went into the research i thought that was very appealing for me now the issue obviously is when you're coming from research and you know bringing foundational research out into you know the masses and the public that normally takes you 20 years and cardano is trying to do that within five to six years you know that's alone is quite groundbreaking but i like the architecture behind cardano but i also like the architecture among many of the other peers but i think is this there's something around the vision combined with the architecture towards the use cases and where they have not cut corners which i think is truly unique about

cardano and i'm very much looking forward to kadano actually launching his full potential and his full product so we can start actually testing that in the enterprise environment because we are one of the projects who does not have the full fledged tech stack available out there yet okay well within your role as a new appointed ceo i mean you'll have a lot of impact within this and maybe you can tell us a little bit more how how do you plan on spearheading enterprise adoption are within cardamom sure so i think about it a little bit in the in the area of that trust is probably the only legal performance enhancing drug out there whenever there is trust in people in communities

in companies in societies and governments good things tend to happen and i think one of the things i'm really going to focus on a lot is that you know we are not just a project which is you know who's launching and and then that's it and then you know it went really well and we got some adoption so we're looking at how can we stay around for the next 50 to 100 years and when you think about that then you have to really start thinking about merging the existing way we mitigate trust the manufactured trust as we do today because the whole financial system including the whole commerce commerce system today is actually living on manufactured trust

so we basically you know have all these intermediaries from the big four to the lawyers to the you know the whole systems whose me who's basically manufacturing the trust but it doesn't bring us to abundant trust and in that last part we have a like a huge gap who's emerging and this gap is emerging based on you know all the new technologies whether that is drones or the uber reviews or you know the centralized way we're using ai to change our behavior gradually we don't really feel it ourselves as slight movements gradual movements what's happening right and and i think that's that's exactly where things starting to get really

interesting so i'm going to apply a good chunk of what we do in the traditional manufactured trust world look into what can we do by using technology so instead of saying we just need a lot of auditors coming in and and clocking hours and do their spot checks which they do by the way really well right we should not do spot checks anymore we should not if why would we put people in to to control things which is billions of lines of code there we should use technology so i would use the existing frameworks of the manufactured truss systems to go in and and build trust around that i would you know work with the community the huge cadance community

around how do we ensure that the community trust the ecosystem how do we build that ecosystem by being you know very you know communicative i believe in brutal honesty about you know if you say the truth and you say the truth every single time where you're allowed to say the truth then in the end good things happens right because you know it might not be what people want to hear right but if that is the state where you are then you're also asking for help and there's a huge community who is willing to help and then last but not least i think the enterprise community what they're looking for is assurance that whatever technology stack

they will be choosing that this is also around in 10 years time in the same format and in 20 years time in the same format because let's face it most of the large institutions today when they choose a technology stack they will stay with that technology stack for for decades and obviously that's not exactly how we look at the you know the leading edge of technology today we're thinking about we change apps every single day maybe right we download a new app every week and try things out well if you're responsible for a whole country's monetary supply and stability you don't just change system because you want to try something new you take something who is tested validated and you know it's

working and not doing you know a you know funny update so therefore one of the things which i also really find appealing and where we have to do a lot of work is basically around governance system of cardano which is being developed right now we're going to launch in the new year and i think there i'm going to also have a big saying and also have a big look in there to ensure that that fits within also what institutions want from us so it's not just about features it's not just about you know can we comply with it what is the minimal technology needs by the company that they connect with us right it's also around the whole trust equation okay that's very very interesting and you spoke a little bit about the skepticism

that that your peers your colleagues when you're in the traditional side of things had towards blockchain technology cryptocurrencies maybe you can tell us a little bit about what types of encouragement you're looking to provide to these traditional players to build on top of cardano and is there a level of education that needs to be uh put in place in order to do this yeah so i i remember the first time i had to explain you know a room full full of senior auditors my blockchain in this case it was bitcoin or something you have to pay attention to i think one of the biggest issues we have with some of the new technologies like ai and like elt-based and dlc-derived technologies

this is actually extremely hard to explain it's really hard to say you know what why is this different than you know what we see with cloud computing today and i am confident that we need to increase the level of you know understanding by not just the auditors and the governments and the central banks and that's been actually happening very a lot in the last four or five years and also we've seen a lot of like large large projects coming in and suddenly all the regulators are coming together to understand you know this multinational world dominating company who's issuing uh something who looks like a

blockchain and they want to issue cryptocurrencies and everybody you know like and one-fifth of the world's population would be able to settle and clear with that what does that actually mean and so on i think a lot of this is happening already today and i'm already participating in that both in talks with governments and and controlling bodies but i think the other part will then be what's specific around cardano or other of the projects because all of our consensus algorithms even though they maybe fall under one or two buckets they work very differently what does it mean in terms of you know how does it fit into fatf how does it fit into you know the united nations sustainability goals how does it fit into the current regulation how do we ensure that

you know if if you as a company choose to build on on cardano that which is an open project so anybody will be able to pick that up and do a fork of that right and continue on that that if they suddenly weaponize you know drones and the the foundation of the architecture of how to control that is actually the is our blockchain you know what does that mean does that mean that this large enterprise who has you know you know multiple thousands of employees and and maybe millions of clients that they're suddenly being associated with something like that right so i think there's a lot of work to be done around this new way of thinking on on on business models right and i don't have a full answer to that

but uh one of the things is really to continue on the educational path to continue to bring to people's attention what is the differences between centralized large companies who is controlling and kind of capturing your business and your architecture towards these open blockchain projects where they're always saying you know what about the security and i'm saying yeah but you know security is not a procedure or mechanism it's an architecture blockchain and dlt and the derived technologies will be coming from dlt will start by defining the ground state the ultimate non-random reality and the ground state is you your private key is a bit like your dna identity and

will allow you as i said before to basically be able to also prove that you didn't do certain things without actually having to ask big centralized organizations to speak on behalf of you and prove that you didn't do that and there's obviously a little bit of a of a problem here when you have to go and ask other people to to speak your case where there might not be an incentive to do so or might not be surety that they can do that because you know how much are they how much of of you do they truly know right you probably know a lot more than they actually is willing to to say right but how much are they willing to to fight for the individual probably i think this is uh this is where well it's going to get really

interesting right and in certain ways i think the ultimate resource is the individual and blockchain will power the individuals in a way where we see today that the individuals are not empowered anymore we are the you know what we are what is being sold right you know we are kind of the commodity in the equation of today i think it's going to be a fundamental change we're seeing and that's why i'm also calling out to all of the peers of cardano but also the the big fours and all of the central players i mean this is a totally new way of looking at architecture we're going to probably bring us together in a way we've not been able to do think about what covert 19 actually did is it brought us five or six years of digital adoption in

half a year right so everybody was suddenly able to do video calls and you know people could use the e-banking tool where they normally went to the cashier and people were buying groceries online and people were filling out documents and you know we got all of this adoption but we didn't we didn't really change the underlying architecture of how that works and that is kind of the empowerment we'll be looking for and that's why this these open projects are going to be so big but it's going to be a paradigm shift in how we think around security because normally we'd like security to be in a centralized place we like to put that vault and the swiss mountains where the days and you know kick them like we're

kicking out the tires of our car before we drive it out on the on the street to see you know get that feeling that it works right now suddenly security lies and decentralized distributed codes and lines and millions of lines of codes and how do we understand those right that's what we you know it's a larger ecosystem it is really important that we stand together not just the new and the old world but the whole world going to bring things where we actually can work together across our cultures across our differences and we can send you know instead of the centralized power we see among certain companies and nation states that we can decentralize that i mean how great would it not be that we

would actually have surety around how many people who actually have covert 19 from different countries and the neighboring countries and how the methods and so on that we actually can trust each other's data and i think that's that's what we're going to see here with some of these open projects we can do that in the future no maybe it would definitely help a lot and uh yeah in a dream world would be it would be true and maybe if we if we continue on on that tangent of openness and and you you describe how the repercussions of if there were a fork were to occur of the cardano blockchain and i know you have quite some thoughts about the whole public yes private blockchains would you like to comment on

that a little bit yeah sure so being originally coming from investment banking and trading and so on you know for me security was very much around that you know your counterpart and you know exactly how the infrastructure is and you know exactly down to the the last detail about how things work so what the apis and what is the counterpart relationship and so forth and i think that's why we're seeing if we take that a bit forward we see that it's the centralized or the private blockchain who's getting adoption right now but if you think about blockchain and what is it what it truly does in a private blockchain we won't get that different security architecture i'm speaking about we won't get all the advantages we won't

be able to take the existing manufactured trust levels and start closing the trust gap we are seeing emerging right now by then because we're just you know changing a little bit on on how we structure data and and yes it might might work but there might be like thousands of other ways of getting that to work and this faces a lot of the implementations we've seen in the centralized field could have been done in another technology stack maybe cheaper or even faster as well but in the public side i feel that if you have a really good principle system which is publicly available under scrutiny from the whole world so everybody can go in and actually see

what's happening and actually be part of either developing it or claiming a bounty or maybe even exploiting it so we can get those you know security loopholes closed you can always build a side chain on that which is closed right so you can always you know you you kind of ensured that that you have as many eyes as possible on it and if you then basically derive the incentive structure that people actually do go in and check your code and people do go in and actually look at your architecture you will have a beautiful opportunity of not having just the world's leading experts to basically validate you but you will have willingness to have capabilities to do so that's why i really like your

point about education before that they're able to go in and check this and able to and go in and look at this and then suddenly we're actually bringing people together because we're using the fully distributed power of the human society and their brain power or at least have the opportunity to do so to check what you're doing and to improve what you're doing and then you can always have a centralized you know part on that and i think that's one of the parts which i'm really appealing for me with the cardano project is that there is so much interoperability so there's so much focus on what you will also see coming out here and that will be some announcements in the next couple of months around some really really fantastic interoperability around

not just e5 but also how to get back from centralized blockchains into the public blockchain or even also interoperability with ethereum and so on these these kind of announcements is super important for me because it shows a part of the vision uh around the project that is not about one you know one takes world domination it's about we need multiple systems to be the foundation for a brand new infrastructure of the world which is coming faster and faster unfortunately some people say happily but i think some of the accelerators is is like the global pandemic we're seeing now and so forth right so it's yes

it's been speeding up quite a lot yes i see that definitely and so as we as we certainly reach the end of this episode where do you see the future of the blockchain space i think for the blockchain space to really come to its potential what we will see on the short term is that we will see a range of the third generation blockchains succeeding and being able to prove that they tackled you know the very famous pro you know problems we have around the first and second generation of blockchains and i would say we will see a whole market around user experience so you know the blockchains we have today the user

experience is not very good but for them to really scale and go out there we need them and i'm not talking about you know like when we say user experience we're speaking about private persons can you can you work with it can you work with the wallet because then you're already down into the crypto coin and crypto asset space right and the wallet is it's just a normal piece of technology right and it's nothing to do with blockchain they might you know you know have deep roots and and touch blockchain and whole assets right now what i'm speaking about how do how do we get much more traction in the developer community how do we get much more traction in the enterprise developer community how do we unders how do we ensure that the csos of the world and feel comfortable about

open projects and to do that we need to give them tools to work with where they can play around with the blockchain and the underlying lectures and the underlying consensus and the underlying security architecture of it that they that they start to understand it but it can also feed back to us and how it works and that they're also incentivized to do so so i think there's going to be a big push towards enterprise user experiences and and how to actually get engaged with this and then i think you know obviously on the on the longer term we're going to you know really have a focus on also environmental friendly and secure solutions like what we have for chile but others have other things right we're going to see much more regulatory

certainty so you probably noticed that the swiss government just came out with a another great news around how they look at it and brought certainty into at least the swiss space right but we also seen that here lately the the us has brought some certainty out around cryptocurrencies and other things right so we will see much more certainty and the european union is also working on uncertainty right and then i i really truly hope that compared to when we looked at where the internet and how the internet developed where we saw like this huge army of weakened soldiers sitting and coding in way and developing that this is all now being centralized in a very few companies and also have centralized

power really i really hope and i'm going to do everything i can to really fight towards that we are going to bring much more power to the edges and allow much more you know not just in financial services where the smes will get access to financial services they wouldn't have access to before due to you know the old financial world and but also the small banks and so forth you know they get access to these rails which normally would only be you know basically for the tier one players right i'm hoping we can you know push power to the edges and so on but it's going to be a large battle where it it might be that it's just going to be swallowed up right

we will do everything we can to make the world a bit better and to empower the individual as well to build businesses and thrive on these things have access to them yeah so here here is to a better world and yeah thank you so much for those valuable insights and do you have anything else you'd like to share with our audience today no just uh keep uh keep watching this space if you wanna uh be a part of the cardano project uh reach out to our community managers and follow us we would love to to interact with any enterprises or anybody who has a has a valuable feedback or good opinion or but most preferable people who want to build on what we already have launched

and then i said before i'm not in the chair yet so i'm very much looking forward to actually being the future sooner than later and um yeah so we can get some traction huh yes i think it's going to be super exciting and there's a there's a lot of work waiting to happen but if we do this right it's going to be to the the benefit of whole humanity yeah that's that's fantastic that i'm so lucky to be able to be in a project where i can where i can say that the hours i'm spending might actually help the humanity as such yes i truly hope so and good luck to you within that role i'm frederick and all of you out there well there you have it a little bit more

about enterprise adoption from the caradano foundation and if you enjoyed this conversation feel free to check out more on our website crypto valley.swiss where we host plenty of events educational content and even provide information on how you can join our growing community so thanks again frederik for joining us and stay tuned stay safe and until next time from the crypto valley in switzerland