Sheraz Ahmed, Chris Murrer, Christopher Fabian , Aliya Das Gupta - Corporate Web3 Adoption

Transcript

all right thank you all for being here uh it's great and sunny outside so it's definitely very appreciative that you're all here uh in this room on a Saturday but we have a great lineup uh for you all here so I'm really looking forward uh to deep diving into this topic um maybe before we kind of uh start maybe Chris you want to kind of kick us off with a little bit of intro about yourself sure thank you and yeah thank you for joining us today uh my name is Chris Mir I'm head of legal at wallet connect uh which which is a feature that hopefully all of you use and love um before that I was a lawyer starting my career in the US in New York and Washington DC covering a lot of different topics uh including asset planning for people that wanted to have

their body frozen and their Consciousness uploaded to cyberspace uh so I kind of feel like that took me down the the Wormhole a little bit into uh New Concepts uh from there I moved to Switzerland uh worked a lot with banks that were being prosecuted criminally by the US government and Le that uh in I guess Lessons Learned to help crypto companies grow through their entire life cycle then move to a payments Processing Company uh to develop their digital asset legal system and now I'm at wellconnect thanks uh hi everyone I'm Aliyah Das Gupta I lead business development at Signum Bank in Switzerland um Signum if you haven't heard of it is the world's first digital asset Bank we work with

most of the crypto ecosystem outside of the US of course and uh prior to that I was at a leo1 protocol working on different solution application for blockchain cool I'm also Chris um I currently run a project called Giga which is working on it's a deepin project working on school connectivity and creating infrastructure in parts of the world that are disconnected um there's a big blockchain component and multiple parts of it and before that I helped set up the uh the un's cryptocurrency fund it's the largest crypto denominator Fund in public sector and prior to that I set up a bunch of companies which mostly failed but some of them did okay that does like um wonderful thank

you all for for being here um I think you know we're talking about corporate web three adoption we'll maybe make it a little bit larger and talk a little bit about kind of the the the banking world the governmental World Etc so it's kind of larger organizations as a whole um maybe we can start a little bit from uh from that topic and kind of understand um why today we believe that uh large organizations need web 3 why why are we even talking about this panel today I don't know if maybe Alia want to kind of kick us off here your ladies first kind of like why is web 3 interesting for a bank such as yourselves sure so I think uh everyone's kind of heard that big phrase right blockchain is a problem is a solution looking for a problem and I

think since kind of the big bull run of 2017 like I've seen a lot of different kind of pilot projects be implemented people saying oh yeah now this has blockchain and this makes it better like does it solve a problem or is it just built on blockchain but I think as the industry has matured a bit we really see the proper or really really useful applications in the finance world so um defi itself of course has proven to be incredibly successful as an application for blockchain but then also now starting to kind of bring that Innovation and power toward Wards the traditional financial institutions and seeing where crypto can actually bring a little bit more efficiency bring a

little bit more uh flexibility flexibility to um the way we work in the finance world but when we talk about web 3 I think it's maybe I'm going to be the controversial person on this panel because in a lot of cases we talk about web 3 where it's not very clear where it adds value and kind of bringing the corporate world into web three adoption I think it's really really important for us to address that question of where are we adding value what is the use case for this Beyond looking at just Innovation it's cool to do makes us look you know fresh and young and so on so that's my stance I agree and actually when we talk

we we're in 40 countries now when we talk to governments we don't say web3 or blockchain at all it's totally irrelevant to the discussion we're having with them we talk about technology that can help them make their you know their lives easier make them save money on things um when we set up the crypto denominated Fund in the United Nations the blockchain part of it allowed us to do Capital calls from investors and move money to invest e companies in 15 minutes rather than whatever it takes in the real world you know like I don't know days months bothering your LPS uh so there's clearly a Time issue there now when we're looking at paying for infrastructure and watching a school come online or a hospital come online and you can see that thing turn on and turn green the light turns green in it you can do that

payment automatically with a smart contract but if you start telling a government like hey let me let me educate you on Smart contracts you've lost the whole conversation what you want to do is say the thing that took your ministry you know 40 days to finalize an invoice on you can now do in seconds and so I think that's really what what I see as the big shift in this cycle that we can get out of the like fetishization of blockchain and crypto and blah blah web 3 and get into practical which is the only way the industry is going to really grow and maybe just on that point Christopher theore you know we've spoken a lot over the past let's say eight eight years about education is one of the most important parts about blockchain here are you trying to mention that going down the route of educating some of

those States and the likes about smart contracts Etc is maybe the wrong Rabbit Hole to go around and it's best to just kind of keep it higher level uh and maybe educate them later down the line when the solution is is more apparent or what do you think how many clients do you go talk to and say let me tell you what tcpip does or like how you want to know how DNS works it's super cool nobody ever does that you're like here's a website here's an app so I think we're we all love it we're all in it it's cool the technology is one of the things that excites me but wow when you talk about that to somebody who's not in the field it just makes you sound super weird super scary super risky this is new stuff and if you're a government or

you're a big Corporation or you're a public sector like new stuff is bad and that's what we don't understand right everybody who's like building like we love new stuff but for them new stuff that people haven't tested is like the most toxic thing in the world and it's it's exactly the opposite of how we think I think fastic would would you like to add uh something there yeah I I completely agree with all the panelists thoughts on this uh there's this this idea sometimes you feel like Innovation is just like it's a theater or an exercise that some organizations go into and it doesn't have that stickiness that will uh persist and so a lot of uh what we do is exactly what they're speaking about is you have to come with this is a way to make more money or this is a way to

decrease your costs and use terms that will kind of resonate with them that don't use these kind of idiosyncratic terms that really like you were saying kind of make their hair stand up because it sounds like something that they've heard on the news which is scary and really what you're trying to do is help them solve a problem or make them more money fantastic and and Chris maybe to to follow on from that uh as as a role at at wallet connect a lot of the audience probably know wallet connect from a retail standpoint uh and J here we're talking about kind of the corporate larger organization side one of the key problems we've seen about adoption of blockchain technology is the uiux side um I feel like a lot of the retail uh individuals here are in the audience kind of they they they

understand what they connect they're able to kind of connect their their wallets now kind of to D apps and likes um do you feel like qix is one of the problems here kind of how are you fac ing that with corporates is it similar to the way in which you're doing it with retail or not um yeah no it's an excellent point and I think internally and wallet connect we speak about this and then externally we're very honest too we think the ux is a huge problem in the industry it's I think is a it it prevents a lot of people from joining and I think it also uh limits how much adoption can be happen within the industry um what we tend to say is like web 2 is the standard in that respect like a lot of things that we do every day feel so easy and there could be

problems are things that we disagree with how they're done but they're really easy and they're we're used to them and so that's kind of the standard that we hold the ux for and the UI um for all of the things that we build and that it's something that we try to instill in all of our partners like this is the end goal that we have to go to andas like I hope nobody kind of tried to cover their ears when you said web 2 is the standard uh um maybe aiyah Chris I don't know if you have any uh further thoughts on kind of the uiux side of corporate adoption yeah I mean um making block chain easy to use is kind of been the key problem of the industry right of course we talk about like speed and scalability security these are all like the key

topics that the developers think about but on the business side it's really how do we make it usable and um one of the things that we're doing at the bank of course is kind of creating a very web to interface to engagement with the technology and that sounds incredibly boring and that's a good thing because we're really trying to make the inside of your banking user interface really look exactly like it would if it was like UBS or you know wherever you bank today but inside that you see ah I can also you know buy Bitcoin I can also trade byy sell my tokens and I can also stake my assets but doing all of this inside a web uh a really web 2 interface and that I think is one of the ways to

kind of open up people to exposure bringing people into the space couldn't agree more so if you take a look take your phone out and just go or your phone's already out but take your go to www projectc connect. World you'll see one of the uis for our for our project so projectc connect. World it shows all the schools that we've mapped we've mapped 2.1 million schools around the world open up the map go to Brazil so just click on Brazil and you'll see a bunch of dots you'll see like a 100,000 dots green dots are schools that are online right now the red dots are schools that aren't online projectc connect. world right that UI represents three layers of blockchain chain like if the school is green that's reporting like it's that all that data

is onchain the school is also an onchain data object itself that is updated live and the reporting happens and through a smart contract providers are being paid but nobody in the government will ever see that you don't see that you go to that website we don't talk about any blockchain stuff you just see a bunch of dots if you're the government you draw a circle around a bunch of schools and you see how much money you need to pay them to be connected right or pay the ISP the service provider you never see anything about a smart contract you don't have to connect your wallet all of that stuff is in the background all you see is something just like the banking website like it's nobody's ever had a website like this for seeing their public infrastructure but it still feels familiar it's like a map it's kind of

like Google Maps you can navigate it and I think we need to do that for all of our stuff because the the world that we live in as kind of crypto native blockchain Native people is so complicated for somebody who's not like insane basically thank you for for that point I mean I'm just reflecting on on on what all all three of you have said right so for me it seems a bit like same same but different right it's kind of we want to make it look a little bit like web 2 but it's different because it's web 3 and the back end I mean why maybe we can just talk about like why should the the corporate web 3 world care or not the corporate world not the web 3 world the corporate world care about that it's web 3 on the back end of of things if things

still look like the the web two side of things I mean may I don't know who may wases one problem we were working on at my one of my last companies was uh we had customers that were crypto companies they had trouble maintaining bank accounts and so our job was to send them money but we couldn't send them money because their bank account was in Jeopardy and if any of you work for a crypto company this is a pretty common problem that I'm sure um you have tough experience with fortunately we have good players in the the industry helping with that um but web 3 helped solve that problem because we could send them value in a different uh way that they chose and we could do that 247 outside of the banking system um so we could talk about

how that was based on blockchain it was web 3 use all the vacular but really was you need value we can get it to you we can solve your problem and the great thing about for from my company's perspective is that we could charge an additional fee for that service because it was solving a problem for our customer it was something they wanted and it generated more revenue for us without any complaints and so like that was really what you had to boil it down to when you had to talk to leadership at the company I worked for solving problem for our customer we're going to make more money in the background there's going to be some things that you know really smart people are working on but that's why it feels like web 2 when you talk about it like that because it's things they're used to but it's the

technology that makes it possible I can give you two sides of the coin here so a situation where web 3 actually brought some ease and efficiency to a system and also where it did and it didn't make a difference and no one wanted it at all so um on the good side we've got at Signum bank for example um you might have seen the headlines a couple of weeks ago where we tokenized uh a new sh new class of shares um with a really big Global asset provider called Hamilton Lynn I don't know if you guys have heard of them they're huge they have almost a trillion dollars in assets and typically if you

want to participate in any of their funds you need to have 125k as your initial Buy in with the tokenization of the of their product suddenly the the threshold to buy in became $11,000 and that is just crazy that is like someone like me can participate in a fund like that and that is literally a use case that changes the way we engage with um Finance in access to finance and so there there's an example of where web 3 adoption made perfect sense for a really corporate use case right um I can give you an example of where it didn't make sense as well we I used to work for a Leo 1 protocol and we were looking for problems that we

could solve with our great technology and we went into Timber tracing how to move Timber from Malaysia to Europe and make sure that this Timber actually is where it comes from is sustainably sourced isn't part of I don't know any kind of illegal logging setups things like this and out in the field the the guys who were actually logging all of this Timber we're doing it manually there was a little receipt and the receipts were sent to the office and then there was a guy at the office who would look at the receipt and put it onto the blockchain and then we suddenly had ah yeah now we have this Timber on blockchain to trace how it's moving from Asia to Europe it didn't really solve a problem there was still manual

intervention there wasn't really any way to verify the data that was going into it and it was cool cuz these guys you know could walk around and say yeah yeah our supply chains on web 3 but I mean there's a reason that it's not a global standard today because there's just so many holes in the process and web 3 wasn't the solution for that specific problem yeah I think that the other the flip side of the problem is what what these what Regulators or what um you know big corporate uh Risk Managers are worried about and so is there also a way to solve against that so when we set up this crypto denominated Fund in the United Nations $40 million of crypto mostly eth a little bit of BTC it took us three years to get the asset

classification done for that like it just takes a while right to get the lawyers and the comp patroller and the finance people to say this is okay and we had very senior people say things like if you ever classify crypto as an asset in the UN you will destabilize the world financial system and I was like awesome show me where that button is like I'll just we don't have to go through this I'll press it now the way that we and so and those folks aren't on web 2 they're like that that Finance type of person is on web zero I mean when they think about things they're not dealing with a web 2 interface on their day-to-day they're dealing with ledgers that are like Generations older than that in their hearts in their heads like that's how they think about things so if you can

talk about risk it really helps from in in in the case of working with governments and public sector if you can say this actually reduces your risk exposure you can see stuff more clearly once you do the kyc and the AML stuff then when you have this asset and you're moving it around you actually can trace it you're going to be your your accounting is going to be better your audits are going to be cleaner U and so I think we also came at it from that way of going the to the web zero route looking at what actually people were afraid of and seeing if there were ways that this technology could address that but it meant not take talking about any of the cool stuff it just meant talking about the boring stuff and doing that over and over and when we said we're

going to be moving money through smart contracts through the UN we had a year of legal telling us we and we got stuck and we had no idea why like why is legal stopping us because they thought that a smart contract is a legal contract like people got really upset with us said we were we proposed a new type of contract in the legal world and we're like well no it's just but even that language is offensive I mean even those words are are you know they set people off so for us it was all about going you know to the very most bottom layer and rewording web 3 to be something that was about the functionality and drisking and that's what actually got things moving yeah I mean Chris you want to talk a little bit about that as well I mean as a lawyer kind of the regulatory

kind of legal hurdles that you've seen in kind of the corporate adoption of web 3 yes yes smarty um so a lot of it is you're dealing the lawyers by their nature work on precedent so the the idea is like you're basing decisions analysis and recommendations on things that have existed and a history of how past situations have been applied to the law regulations you're dealing with and what we're dealing with every day are brand new things uh that are really hard to analog analogize to things that have existed before and so this is the hard thing um I think there's you're bringing up something though that I I try to like instill in people that I speak to is we

have to be really like thoughtful about the terms we use um so smart contract may be something we really love um but if this particular term cause trouble for someone you were working with with a stakeholder so before we come up with a new term like really think about like what are the potential implications of this new term we're using um and so a lot of that is you're dealing with people who are used to looking backwards for answers and they get stuck on these terms um and so this is something that like I really really implore everyone in the industry is to think about the terms um think like I know this makes sense to you um is this something that you think will work when we're kind of outward facing to other Staker stakeholders in the

industry have anything else to add yeah it's just we we come up with nerdy funny things andare ands unec and retrospective and so when so a new thing which to us is cool because it's like o defi that sounds fun like that's the they're just most allergic to that so yeah I mean figuring out doing a translation backwards into the the organization world is is key for us yeah see I mean and Ellie I mean you're you're working at one of the first regulated crypto Banks right and when people hear Bank they're like oh wow it's like super safe Etc um do do have you felt the same type of kind of

like constraints kind of from the regulatory side you having a word that is very kind of traditional with a word that is a bit more kind of fearful as as uh both chrises have just mentioned that's that's a hard question because I think in Switzerland specifically we're quite blessed with Regulators that are willing to engage and that is not the case globally of course but here with finma you actually go to them and have a conversation and when there's a term like you know smart contracts that may not be super familiar you can actually take them on that educational journey of how this technology actually makes what they want to do easier so when you talk about like regulating like crypto AML is a big

Topic at the bank of course right and if you can really show how on chain you have so much more transparency than typical Swift banking it's it's something that you know Regulators should celebrate and today in 2024 it's crazy to me that we we aren't Further Along on that Journey somehow like the Swiss bank uh the Swiss Regulators they understand it and they're willing to kind of Say Yes okay we have a new set of um rules that can apply to this sort of transaction on chain and that's how we can value these assets and make sure that we're not engaging with criminal activity and so on but the fact that Switzerland's kind of still amongst the early players I mean now we have ma we

have Vara and so on in Dubai but globally I think that convergence of uh legality around the interaction with crypto assets I mean nich uh Chris you can talk to this more probably but yeah getting there is it should should have been sooner and yeah exactly I completely agree there I guess there's an example May hopefully breathe more life into this concept um so swaps is something we use a lot in the industry I'm not going to convince anyone not to use it today I'm sure um but swaps are a derivative um Financial product in the US which is regulated as a security and there's a such thing as a swap stealer that's supposed to get a license um so

like this is just it was something where and when that first came up I was like this is going to cause trouble just because we're using this term and it seems so intuitive it's like I have one asset and I just want to swap it with another like that makes total sense uh but there's this regulatory implication of that word for a lot of people and then sure enough the US SEC sued coinbase for a feature that allowed their non-custodial wallet to connect to dexes in swap Assets Now the great news is that the uh US court just kicked that case out or that claim out completely so like swaps is a little clear in the US on that basis but this is something that just caused trouble and perhaps we could have avoided if we used a different word fantastic thank you thank you so

much for for that I mean so we've spoken about kind of how overeducation can kill education we've spoken about the UI and ux implications giving a familiar interface that people know we spoken about kind of words that might be triggers to people are not are there any other kind of tips and tricks here that you want to share with the audience around how we can enable larger organizations to adopt web 3 I mean this is to anyone on the panel here is there anything that we're missing from that kind of uh uh Set uh there uh so one thing that has always come to me regardless of like what type of Technology you're adopting is think about whose job in that organization may be imperil or reduced

or jeopardized or they at least May perceive that if you're adopting a new technology uh so an example um just not in the web 3 space is we I was working with a global bank that was going to move all of their data to a cloud and so internally all of the the IT people that worked on data security uh where data was housed how it was managed they immediately thought like this man all of their jobs are in Jeopardy because they're going to that data storage management was going to be outsourced to another provider and this was a huge hurdle internally so like even if you had everything buttoned up with a terminology you're going to save money you're going to make money Etc you still like had a really core uh part of the organization that was concerned about their job which meant that they were

going to resist that transition and so getting them on board and explaining how this isn't going to imperil your job this is actually going to make a new opportunity for you and this is going to make the organization better as a whole uh these are just like really important parts in getting the organiz the entire organization on board and making sure the new project will be a success I mean I think also to like looking at where the world is going is a really good way to figure out how to get people to use stuff um and and I'm not a huge fan of Central Bank digital currencies I don't like them particularly but it's a trend that governments are for sure looking at and when we work with governments if we talk

about cbdcs there's I guarantee you in every government that in all the 40 countries that we work in there's somebody in their Central Bank who's looking at that issue if not you know having a white paper having a small sandbox site when we talk about the crazier crypto stuff that it doesn't fall into you know that's outside of their comfort zone when we can start to talk about the places where digital currency or digital assets start to help a government do their job well we can then bring in some of the things that we like that we care about some of the things from the open world and we can start to kind of point the ship in the direction that we think is correct that is about openness that is about interoperability um but we have to be following I think there's there's a a

tide that goes back and forth in the technology world and the the more you kind of Follow That tide the more you can get your stuff forward and when we were starting we were pitching like this is our product this is something that we built and that's like the wrong way to do it when you can say this is actually much closer to what you're already doing and it's just a an integrator for something it's just the edge of it but then you kind of get your stuff in there too that's how you get big adoption at least in the public sect um and at these big big institutions because they just the the things that we value again I think as like ego and excitement and you know newness and Discovery are not of value to Big institutions in general yeah I mean um also on in terms

of corporate adoption right I was thinking about this question as the others were speaking as well um so Signum oops uh last year we partnered with um I don't know if you guys have heard of Finance they're based here in Switzerland they're really really interesting company working on onchain asset management and it's the kind of classic crypto defi use case and then working with a COR a traditional Finance player like ourselves it was it was a journey to kind of understand why we chose to work with these guys what are the things that we prioritized as a corporation to work with this specific provider when in fact we know that there are several several

um onchain Asset Management Solutions available so for a crypto company that's building something that's cool that can make something that can ideally make traditional Finance World easier or more efficient or more profitable um it's to kind of think about the Enterprise grade solution at the beginning so making a solution that isn't you know build fast break things but really really taking into account all the Enterprise grade requirements in the creation of that solution that was I think one important factor the second was um governance so in crypto you always hear about drug Bulls it's got the scary reputation of things that can go wrong really easily how do we ensure safety of these assets

when we uh engage with an onchain asset manager so where can the foundation change the rules how can the foundation work with um the vaults that we're creating where can uh Signum kind of have some kind of veto access on at least the assets that we're managing you know these sorts of questions they're really important and you might not think about that perhaps when you're actually building your own solution but um for anyone to especially from an Institutional side to trust putting their assets on that chain or in that Vault like bringing bringing those kind of questions to the Forefront saying hey look I know you're worried about this and this is how we mitigate that risk and that's something I think that really

helps um get the bigger corporations on board and willing to trust something new fantastic thank you so much so we have another approximately 15 minutes left but uh we always kind of get cut short on the questions so I want to go actually long on the questions does anybody uh have any questions in the audience I think ncol I don't know if we have a mic Runner can throw it from here yeah microphones thank you who who is the one asking it's this for Chris I guess uh uh that

Chris sorry I'm starting an e-commerce platform and it's based on nft so I'm I'm touching the Sun I'm kind of a hybrid in between everything but wallet connect is part of our you know connection and then the last week these new AML laws come out and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle that because I don't have to AML kyc the buyers on the site I was going to do the sellers because it's an association I'm creating a registered Swiss Association but so I just kind of have questions on the AML side of things is there ever going to be a way for you guys to sort of handle that or is there because right now I don't think anybody can utilize your

wallet connect for anything Goods right anything uh you can't sell did you look at the law obviously last week or did you see the new you're talking about the uh Amendment to the EU AML regulation last week um yeah so I think um hopefully uh the rumors have been dispelled a little bit it didn't Outlaw non-custodial wallets or self- custody wallets um and defi is not legal based on this uh there was a lot of I think Sloppy reporting unfortunately on that um what's that transaction yeah so there's a limit so if you're using um so it's if there's a regulated crypto institution involved in a

transfer and uh you're C and I forget the the Euro threshold uh but you that institution has to do some kyc on the self- custody wallet that's sending or receiving crypto and so in your case if you if one of one side of the transaction is a regulated Institution for a crypto institution they may have to do some kyc on the self- custody wallet owner and so this is like this is a problem like for like practically how you going to implement that right no exactly so I think what I where

I was going with that is I think we have to build solutions that like don't touch what that regulation is dealing with uh so if you're not if you're not one of the regulated institutions in the flow or you don't involve one at all like that regulation may not even be implicated and so the idea is you have we have kind of the the defi system in the way that we envisioned is that regulated institutions are not involved we just have people doing peer-to-peer transactions and we're making the right connections between them that AML regulation may not be implicated at when yeah take it take um fantastic I think there was another question somewhere yeah right behind you

hello guys uh thanks for the panel so um one of this is a kind of a provocative question we can like debate here for hours you know but uh of course uh is is a simple question that I would like to hear opinion from you guys is uh one of the core values in my opinion of web Tre is uh to bring back sovereignty you know to individuals uh you know they have a control of assets uh online transactions data in general So like um I mean I would like to hear from you how do you feel that corporate adopt adopting web treat Tech can maintain the value of sovereignty you know in society thank you it's a very good

question's I mean it's like it's like waves in the ocean right so you're sitting on the beach and all of this new technology when when social came out as a big thing web came out you could see that that was a wave and the wave comes up on the beach it goes up to the high water mark and it pulls back and some of that sand gets wet and the Sun comes out and it dries it and by the end there's a little bit of wet sand and then another wave comes up and it's just like that and I mean this is the same thing there's no you know nobody's going to have full self- sovereignty and the utopian viewer that's just not going to happen just like not everybody's going to have the social Freedom that was promised with Facebook version whatever 01 not going

to happen but what we can do is we can watch that water line move up a little bit I think and I think we can push forward some of the things we care about that's my opinion on it it's not a institutional opinion but none of these Technologies do everything they promise but if we're smart and if we can build open source Frameworks within them that protect individuality you get the waves you get the water line a little higher I think that's a really really nice answer and much more positive than what I was going to say I was going to say um how do we protect web free sovereignty with corporate adoption and the answer is you can't because I work in a bank kyc is like our bread and butter there's not a single transaction that can come even in our

like distant Horizon that we can't know whose funds they are and how they got those funds and how they coming in contact with our um anywhere in our infrastructure it's just it's like that that's just the Line in the Sand that we can't cross but um what happens in Defi and as I think Chris said that's a really positive spin on it just I'll com so I I think kyc is like the it's like the monster everybody's aiming at right now I don't think kyc is that bad sorry like if if social was kyc if you actually had to have a real account the the internet would be a much less terrible place for many many reasons it' be much safer um what's interesting to me when I talk about building these

things that push that water line up a little more I was just talking to one of the people who works in in our team in in kyrgistan and he told me he was out in pretty much you know far away from Bishkek out in the farm areas and that farmers in Kyan are getting remittances in Bitcoin and that's really weird like just think about that that they're not going through they're not going through a stable they don't have like a different W they're getting Bitcoin they're getting raw Bitcoin and that's what their remittance is and that wasn't I mean that set the hairs on the back of my neck up um because it's not this is not somebody trying to pump anything so something changes in the world something changes a little bit and it changes a little bit in a lot of places and that's

really interesting but like I think the kyc thing is done you're moving crypto around you're going to have to be a real person otherwise you're going to be in an outside Wild West area yeah I I cannot improve upon those questions or those answers so they were greatly said I think there was a lady right at the top on thank you um one note first I hope nobody Minds it terribly it might be terribly cheeky of me um I usually call kyc in blockchain uh the equivalent of the red flags Act of 1863 I think where you had to you know a car can an engine can go very

fast but you have to have someone with a red flag in front of it Sho cows off the road because there's no infrastructure so this Society this brings me to my actual question with um the panel's Indulgence when it comes to corpor adoption if you don't mind and if you wouldn't mind sharing what was your experience in reaching or navigating the ecosystem towards decision makers and I'm sure you must have come across quite a lot of knowledgeable and very well-meaning and completely useless people along the way how do you navigate that best and how do you actually reach the decision makers I appreciate that the question comes to someone who comes from a bank that adopts it already and and they probably opened it because

there was no decision making through other means um but if if the panel wouldn't mind it's how do you reach the decision makers and large organizations to yes what's the what's your experience in reaching them because I'm sure everyone has a different rout forward thank you so I can start for me like I tend to when I've worked on web 3 projects with big corporates um really the message is it was something I had mentioned before is this will make you more money like it really come like the people at the top that's what they care about that if you want leadership to pay attention to you this will make you more money and this is how you do it um another way to put that if that's like too blunt is this solves a problem for our customers which they will interpret

in their head is this makes us more money um another way to put that is this is a faster way to revenue so the sooner you get Revenue faster um that's better for them but it also in a way makes you more money um so it all comes back to this idea so if you can figure out best way to convey that message um I think a lot of messaging about like this will reduce costs which then increases Profit just from the bottom um that I think that's also a great message it's just it the proof is harder I think it's really hard because there's so much cost up front like how do you measure that um and a lot of the cost saving measures have not always come to fruition anybody else on the

panel yeah completely it is you know where's the bottom line where's it going to hit my bottom line and even if you're talking about efficiency the answer is really like are we cutting cutting the number of compliance people and therefore more money or is it more people entering the door because we can process them faster therefore more money like what's what's the actual um like where where does the money lie that's obviously the most important one um but in terms of navigating and organization I think it's really important to kind of have both approaches so to really have have your like kind of the grassroot members of the team to be interested and

to be engaged with alongside having some kind of Big Daddy old corporate guy who can talk at that level at the top because both those conversations really matter um when it's the grassroot it comes in internally and upwards and that's nice but when it's reaching the top there needs to be someone who's had that conversation over there for that resolution to actually pass through and I think both players really really need to be um engaged with I think it's true and one of the big mistakes I've made in my last 10 years of doing this stuff is that I tend to go for the top person get their Buy in and then kind of run with it and not involve that middle layer and then they get always upset it's always

they're worried about losing their job or whatever you know the thing is which can be real fears and I'm I've I've tried to work on that because like my inclination is you just go where the center of power is and then you forget in these big organizations that it's kind of diffuse but I think the the last thing that maybe we didn't talk too much about is I think that the head of a big thing the head of you know somebody who's leading something either wants fame fortune or function the ones who want function are great like those are nerds I love them I'm a nerd I great build cool stuff they're rare then you want either fame or or Fortune Fortune we covered like there a bunch of ways to get to that but there are some people who are motivated by the story of this

by the this is you're you're going to be doing something great you're going to be doing something cool even if you're in government you're going to be the one who actually sets precedent and that might get you another job in a higher level or in another Ministry so I think that that's one to look out for as well that I've seen that we can use some of The Narrative of of crypto of web 3 of blockchain to to kind of tweak the the fame lever a little bit uh which you might not be able to do in other techs as well Tech areas as well wonderful very well said we have time for one last question I dot right in the middle go for it okay those are two very different things my

expectation is very very bad where what I like is very utopic uh I think I'd love to hear from from everybody else too but like I I think that what we're going to is a very very hyper controlled world in the financial side of things where you have a panopticon that's really ugly and that keeps you know in the under the under the rubric of helping poor people do stuff creates a lot more financial controls and I think that that's you know already happening and that's depressing to me um I think that Dows are a fake thing for the most part sorry and uh for the most part in the way that they're talked about because in in essence they're about replicating governance structures that are already there and just solidifying them I think that there are people who are doing Dows really well but in that motion is often

a lip service to something that I really believe in but doesn't get there I think that open source saves us as much as anything can from the water pulling back all the way and so I think that as much as we can stay out of corporate controlled currencies of government controlled currencies I think that's where we see the edges but it's uh I mean the future looks really depressing for a lot of reasons so my expectations not I don't want to end it on such a on a low note um but I think that as much as you can build as different parts of the world that are not controlled by these interests as much right now you create a slightly better future um and that's sort of what we're trying to do yeah I mean the thing with this whole kyc narrative as well that I was talking

about before is I mean I think at the core of it assuming you're a good actor you also don't want to be financing terrorism and you also don't want to be associated with I don't know the trade of dark Goods on on the Internet or whatever these guide these rules kind of support against or prevent from happening to some extent um and so looking at this as perhaps at Signum we work on a lot of kind of uh Innovation stuff as well like ideas of things to build whether we might actually build them today tomorrow or yesterday but um one of the ideas is to kind of have a sort of bankg grade digital identity that can be verified

across multiple institutions that gives you access to pools but then what it still does is gives you some sense of sovereignty so you do have an external person validating you but you have um you still own your own identity like it's just one of those ideas that's kind of out there it hasn't gained a ton of traction yet but um those are kind of the the small Sparks of Hope in the dystopia that Chris just talked about and I think that those are the things that as long as there are people like us in this room who believe in that Vision who believe that we can use web3 for something something positive and create this balanced solution that still protects against you know terrorism and

financing but still gives us some level of sovereignty I think that's a vision that's worth working towards yeah I I was sincerely trying to end on a high note and I'm unfortunately I think I side more with your like the reason I got into this space is because I felt like there was so much potential for people interacting peer-to-peer uh we weren't relying on um banking systems that could decide based on the whims of a government or pressure from a regulator or commercial relationship to stop servicing certain people um and the people that have those that access eroded tend to be um the ones who need it the most um you know more sovereignty more control over your

data these are all the things that got me interested uh the thing I do really worry a lot about is this panopticon concept um where governments just over time have been adding more and more reporting and supervisory regimes just in general and then what we're adding now is a public blockchain um to the system and it really does make me concerned well yeah no come on I mean look web 3 was a people first movement I think corporates adopting web 3 are essentially buying from everyone in this room you and I so if you end up kind of wanting something and we end up kind of envisioning a different type of future at the end of the day I believe that

governments and the corporates are servants to us in this room today so you can make uh the difference for the future that you want maybe that's a little bit lighter he he brought it he brought it home for us thank you thank you so much let's give a round of applause to our panelist thank you