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From Tokens to Systems: How Crypto Became a Financial Stack
Recorded: Jan. 15, 2026 Duration: 1:21:27Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent HTX Space discussion, industry leaders explored the evolution of crypto from simple token launches to a robust financial infrastructure, highlighting significant trends in growth, project launches, and the ongoing shift towards real-world applications. Key insights included Bitcoin's rise to $96,000, the introduction of innovative projects like Stable and Kimba, and the need for improved security and integration in the crypto ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Спасибо. so
а All right, everyone.
This is John with HTX.
Thanks for tuning in on another edition of AXBases.
Today's topic is from tokens to systems.
How crypto became a financial stack.
Give me a couple minutes. we're going to get all
the speakers up and uh everything going if you do have questions for us you know definitely ask
those in the comment sections we'll take a look at those if we have time we'll ask me your questions
and yeah like feel free to comment questions for any of the guests today and anything about the
topic so yeah
and again thanks for joining the htx space we'll get started here shortly thanks а а All right. Thank you. so
Продолжение следует... All right, we're going to get started here in a couple of minutes I went ahead and sent some
invites out so let's see here Scott and if you can please accept your invite I went ahead and
sent that out if you're I see you in the room but not sure if X is having some problems or
not and everyone else seems like it's good and good to go
i will get started here in about one minute and uh thanks for joining again make sure to comment
any questions you guys have on the space if we have time we'll definitely get to those
and today's topic is from tokens to systems how crypto became a financial stack
and just go a little over the market here in a second.
So we've got Bitcoin trending up at 96,000.
Ethereum's at 3,333.
And a lot of privacy movement right now.
We have Zcash, Dash, and Monero.
All interesting coins been really going up lately so the privacy meta is is there but yeah
this is going to be a really great space so we'll go ahead and get started and we'll try to get the
other one's speakers going as soon as possible so uh everyone of course welcome today's uh chat
again the session is from tokens to systems. In the early days, crypto was mostly
about like launching tokens, riding hype cycles. But you have today, it's a whole another ecosystem.
It's about building a real financial stack. Money rails, stable coins, privacy, security,
and markets that work together to create an ecosystem. With us today are many leaders from every block and layer in the ecosystem of crypto.
And we'll go ahead and give them a chance to introduce themselves.
So first off, Brian, hello, how are you doing?
Hey there, John.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me at HTX for including Stable today.
Yeah, perfect.
If we're going to go ahead and do like a little roundtable. Thanks for on HTX for including Stable today. Yeah, perfect.
If we're going to go ahead and do like a little roundtable, so whenever I call your name,
like for example, Brian, just give a little bit quick introduction of yourself and your project.
That'd be really great.
If we can keep it to like, you know, less than 60 seconds, that'd be great.
Thanks.
Sure thing.
So I'm Brian Mailer.
I'm the CEO of Stable.
I come from a background of both traditional finance and
crypto. I previously led the ESVC fund at Block One. That was a billion dollar ecosystem fund.
And a little bit about Stable. We're building a layer one that is focused on payments with
Stablecoins. The idea is relatively simple. We want to make sending money straightforward and
predictable. Today, even though USDT is widely used,
the infrastructure supporting it is fragmented,
costly, and confusing,
and we solve that by using USDT as our native gas token.
Thanks so much for that great introduction.
I'm going to throw the invisible microphone over to Scott.
Hopefully, you got connected.
I don't see you, but I'll have to try this.
You know, knock, knock.
Are you there?
Yeah, I'm here, guys.
Coming in from the Midnight account.
So hey, everyone, I'm Scott.
I'm the VP of Ecosystem over here at Midnight.
Midnight's a privacy enhancing layer one.
They got spun out of Impact Output Group,
the core developers behind Cardano,
about six or seven months ago now.
We really focus on how we enable rational privacy through the ability to do select disclosure on-chain through field and unshielded transactions using some of our fancy ZK tech that we've got.
My background, I guess, prior to living the life at midnight, I'm
one of the ecosystem team over here. I was a partner at Ally Ventures for a number of
years and did venture building before that. So yeah, thanks very much for having us, team,
and excited to be on the spaces with everyone.
Nice. Yeah, I'm really excited to have you guys here because Cardano ecosystem, you guys
have a great tagline i love midnight the idea
of it and it's just really great to have you here so thanks for taking the time out uh passing it
over to uh i'm going to mispronounce your name but caspador how are you doing hey thanks for having
me you said it right perfectly so thank you for having me in this space. It's a real pleasure to be here. I'm Caspar Dor. I'm here primarily as a community representative of Caspa.
And I've been involved in the Caspa ecosystem for the last three years and working closely with the community members and obviously closely following with the protocols technical developments.
with the protocol's technical developments and for those that are not or let's say are less
familiar with caspa caspa is a proof of work layer one which is built on ghost deck protocol
and this has been initially proposed by mr jonathan sampolinsky and what caspa basically
is doing is enabling high throughput and fast confirmation while still being true to the
decentralization without obviously compromising the security so caspa focus has always been on
scalability at the base layer while staying faithful to the proof of work principles
and on top of this i'm also involved with the Casplex,
which is the very first based rollup layer
to EVM compatible built on Casper.
Thank you for having me.
Perfect, yeah.
I've seen some great videos online about your ecosystem,
how fast it is about comparison to other blockchains.
So it's really glad to hear that and good videos.
Awesome. Go ahead and turn it over
to Chloe with HTX Research. How are you doing over there? Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Thank
everyone for having me today. And really love so many good projects who are already launching HTX
or not to be on today's space. And then wish we have a really good space tonight. Thank you very much.
Great.
Thanks again, guys, for joining.
We have one last person.
I'm going to try to see if he got connected.
I'll shoot my arrow over to Tomer.
Are you there with Kimba?
Are you there yet?
Hey.
Hey, yes, I'm here.
Thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure being here.
Briefly about myself and Kimba.
So Kimba is a universal interoperability
communication protocol. That all mumbo jumbo basically means that we can connect every
disconnected financial ecosystem centralized or decentralized to each other using an SDK and an API. To simplify, we can make bridgeless and oracle-less transactions
between your bank and Ethereum,
and between a PlayStation network to a Polygon,
Polygon to Solana, Solana to near, near to your bank,
to PayPal, to Revolut, whatever you you would like to think of
during this unique technology backed by mastercard and uh three patents in the pipeline
also myself um an og i think in the space just because i'm old that's so i've been around for a
long time um in the industry since 2016 exclusively investing in blockchain projects since 2019.
Before that, I was investing in equity like Brian.
I'm also coming from the old equities stocks world from the Web1 era and matured into Web3.
My VC fund is called Prime with a three instead of V at the end, prime.vc.
And that's about it.
Writing in my spare time for Forbes and Cointelegraph about the Web3, DeFi innovations, blockchain infrastructure,
and mainly also RWAs as of late.
So yeah, that's about me.
Looking forward to having fun.
Great introduction.
And again, guys uh thank you
guys for taking the time out to be our be part of our panel and uh you guys that are listening
we love you guys as well make sure to pound that like button on the post and also follow all of
our great speakers give some love back to them i got a couple questions we're going to dig into
this pretty quick so uh my first question is uh you know, when crypto started, like we said,
it was mostly about individual tokens, but, you know, it's obviously progressed into something
more better and more ecosystem driven. So when did it start becoming a real financial stack
instead of just about individual tokens? I'm going to turn it over to Brian first and then Tomer with Kimba. I think it's a great question to kick things off.
I would say in the early days, as you said, crypto is mostly about those individual tokens and
it was used in pretty simple transfers. The real breakout moment that I think we all try to
identify was when things started doing like a real system. Most likely occurred, you know,
about 2020, 2021, when stable coins became
widely used and people started relying on crypto for everyday money movement, not just the
speculation side of things. That's when the focus really shifted things like payments and settlements
and on and off ramps, but also, you know, some more institutional things like custody and compliance
and the user experience, all those plumbing tools
that you needed to make crypto work at scale.
But as you can see now, like most recently
with like JP Morgan's, JPM coin,
institutions are getting more serious.
And then there's regulation clarity
is obviously improving what we're seeing in the US
with the Genius Act and now the forthcoming legislation.
But I would say that also the market demand
is really starting to show that the infrastructure
is dictating that there needs to be a predictable product,
but also reliability.
So, I mean, I think that's a little bit of like
our focus here at Stable is that we wanna make sure
that Stable coins are continuing to grow in everyday use,
but also be used as real money.
And we're just here to build those rails
to make the system fast and predictable
and get some moving parts out there for other users and businesses to start putting into play.
I have no argument with what you said, even though I wish I had some arguments.
But maybe, Tomer, do you have any arguments against what you said or you want to throw an invisible chair at him?
I mean, I'm just trying to start a fight here.
Well, I'm not sure that trying to start a fight here but well i'm not
sure that we're going to fight here today i kind of agree with uh with everything that was said
um but you know i think that initially you know crypto when it started was a very interesting
experiment you know like the proof of concept of bitcoin basically let people let the people vote
if they are allowing something to be fair that no one can control.
And if we'll give it value, then it will exist among us as a means of trade that stores value.
Strangely enough, it succeeded.
I think that the internet generation, of course, you know, we all grew online, you know, in open source and wanted to share with each other and using the power of many to create something awesome.
That thing finally worked, you know, and the experiment was very, very successful.
And then I think that I'm not sure that it was about individual tokens, you know, when crypto started.
was about individual tokens, you know, when crypto started.
So basically when Vitalik, you know, presented Ethereum,
which was, you know, the real deal,
smart contracts into this decentralized ecosystem,
that made the whole change.
You know, it's like, you know, the stories, you know,
when God, you know, he created monkeys, you know,
and then, you know, they gave us,
then we got, we animate from the apple and we got the consciousness. Suddenly we're no longer monkeys. Here we are. Suddenly we can decide things and we can understand that we exist. So Vitalik did the same with Ethereum and it unlocked the whole world of innovation that just by adding the, if this, then that ability to blockchains, creators starting creating their arts all over the network and they needed these cryptocurrencies in order for their products to operate. a token the utility is supposed to be that we're creating something as a community and the token
that we're having is basically will be the the means to use that tool at least you know that was the original idea and then of course greed came over to the industry and now everybody are
launching tokens for nothing with no utility they will tell you governance and dow for every
that they make and it's supposed to be a reason to launch a token.
Mainly it's due to greed,
because they want to raise money quick from the industry,
become rich quick,
without thinking too much about the utility, unfortunately.
So it became a real system when real value was presented on blockchains.
Excuse me if I'm not focusing on Kyma, you know, mainly now because it's not the thing and I don't want to sound like a commercial.
But basically when we created all of these ecosystems where these funds, these tools can run and live on and actually give users usage and purpose, you know, that changed the whole internet game for everyone.
The internet, as you remember, I'm an old guy, as you can see, bald, old, you know, I turned 41 three days ago.
So, you know, I remember the internet the first days, you know, we had, it was a read-only space,
only huge companies like Sony, Warner Brothers, you know, they had, it was a read-only space. Only huge companies like Sony, Warner
Brothers, you know, they created websites. And then things became easier. Suddenly, people could
have servers in their own bedrooms. And they learned HTML, you know, and they started releasing
their own versions of websites, beginning of the Web2 era. And then blogs, content management
systems. And then, what do you know, social media presented themselves. You just need to have an email and a password, and suddenly you can post videos on this internet thing and become famous like Justin Bieber on YouTube, and you can become famous overnight on Facebook and Instagram by posting videos on your opinions.
by posting videos and your opinions.
The Web 2 era.
And look at us now.
We're in the Web 3 era when we said this thing is too strong.
We cannot allow anyone to hold it.
We need to give the many the rights to hold it.
No one human can hold this thing
because it gives too much power to a certain group, right?
A bank can decide to block your funds
and suddenly they're not there.
Facebook can decide to block your account and everything you did for 20 years doesn't
exist anymore because it's centralized.
So the concept of Web3 really needs to kick in and mature just to become the web, the
internet that we use today.
So it becomes a real system instead when everyone can use it, it's accessible to everyone, and when things are becoming fair and transparent.
Mainly when we're passing what we used to call back in the day the grandma test.
If you give it to your grandmother, the product, and she can use it, this is the time when it's ready for the market.
This is the time when it's ready for the market.
Everybody will be able to use it.
The real economic system becomes, when we will pass the grandma test,
we're almost, almost, almost, almost there.
At the moment, unfortunately, due to memes,
it's still kind of a huge casino that we're all having fun with
while having some real projects emerging here and there.
Yeah, they say that slowly but surely, right?
It takes time to devolve.
And also, you can't expect the sun before the sun comes up.
So I actually agree with what you both said, the stablecoin aspect of having something stable
and having something that can be done by banks or any big institution on the other side you know you have more like decentralization ecosystem driven
and about having something that's built for like different ecosystems i i actually agree with both
what you guys said so no no arguments or chairs thrown here um i just want to go ahead and toss
it over and also when you talked about decentralization, I know, Castor, one of the things you really highlighted in your introduction was about how Caspa's ethos is about decentralized ecosystems.
So this kind of prompts my next question.
What part of the crypto stack has matured over the past few years, even if users may have not noticed it?
So this one's going to be for caspa and then
midnight scott um sure i i'll review this from a caspa point of view because um in the last let's
say for the last years the public attention of course went to the shiny things right on the defy narratives and all these
meme casinos that we were discussing earlier but in the background we were quite we are not
were quietly moving from um assuming that blockchains must be you know strictly linear
assuming that blockchains must be you know strictly linear to something better and here
I'm obviously talking about Caspa and this is the the things that matured in our opinion for
the last few years because as I was saying Caspa launched four years back and it follows a block
deck architecture and this is a clear example of the of this shift right and basically the dag allows parallel block
production while obviously maintaining the proof of work security consensus so on and so forth
so if we are talking about financials as well you need a very good base layer to be secure not
centralized and uh following the nakamoto consensus right so So the result of CASPA is obviously a high throughput,
low latency confirmation and with strong security
without relying on different layers,
committees and trusted intermediaries
because the voting and the DAO
and exactly what the other speaker said at the beginning
are now shiny things promoted as being
the ultimate goal but in fact it's not in my opinion so most users did not notice the evolution
because obviously this doesn't change the surface of things right and the experience is not felt
immediately by the users it basically changes the constraints and changing the constraints
by the users.
It basically changes the constraints
and changing the constraints is obviously far more important
than shipping new features.
And what I mean by this is once block production itself
can scale the entire categories of design straight
of disappear in this, and I'm going to finish in a second.
And this also makes developments on Caspa work for example new developments new
things that are never seen before like vprogs possible so in my opinion and to cut it short
the the stack that matured is like what matured the most are is seeing this breakthrough and break new technology appearing, not yet visible to everyone.
But I'm sure that if we are talking about monetary system, if you are talking about transactions, security, decentralization, people will turn their head and try to figure out which is the best, let's say, stack to use, right?
So this was my, let's say, this is my view on the question.
Yeah, actually, I mean, one of the things that really sticks out to me when Ethereum launched is
it always talked about decentralization with the nodes and also how Vitalik was like the ethos behind it was, you know, there's a lot of things great in the space, but this is going to be the most decentralized ecosystem with Ethereum.
And one of the reasons why I had trouble scaling, because, you know, it was so decentralized supposedly, you know, and Vitalik did all this scaling measurements and like upgrades to help it become more scalable.
did all this scaling measure measurements and like upgrades to help it become more scalable um but
yeah like i think that i think that's a really good perspective in alpha that you dropped is that
you know it's under the hood that things don't people don't realize what's going on they just
see the shiny object or what's going on above the technology it's easy to understand so yeah i mean
it's great to hear of course and if we are obviously following the cyberpunk movement right
Of course, and if we are obviously following the cyberpunk movement, right?
That is what it's all about.
Instead of shiny things, see the real usage and reality,
performance and breakthrough technologies.
So, yeah.
Yep.
I'm going to throw the mic over to Scott with Midnight.
Do you have any insights about what he said, or do you disagree with him?
Yeah, for sure.
I think, it's funny, Casper, you mentioned the cyberpunk.
I'm probably going to say the least cyberpunk thing ever,
which is one of the things that I've seen evolve over the last couple of years in crypto
is the compliance layer and how we manage risk.
We just wouldn't have seen all of these stable coins come in and play
and all these institutions come in and play if the compliance analytics providers hadn't matured to a level whereby they could comply with
like American European Asian regulations for this capital to move on chain and act
in the way it does and it's just something that, one, the original cyberpunks probably didn't really
want happening.
It's not really their jam and I kind of get that.
And on different chains,
you can enable different levels of compliance,
including on top of midnight.
But if you're speaking to the enterprises,
they wanna know where the money came from.
They wanna be able to see what happened
and they wanna do so in a balanced way.
So I think that's something which maybe the regular user doesn't necessarily see in touch, but it's certainly unlocking a lot of the more TradFi use cases.
And then the other area, I think a shout out to like people who've been around for a long time and Tom, you said you've been doing this for a long time as well.
Like wallets used to be super janky like wallets were terrible um and they were like
people's first experience of using blockchain like you'd come in and you'd be like what the
fuck is this like how am i doing a transaction what am i signing what do all these numbers god
damn mean um and now there's like you know the teams like dynamic and Wallet Connect doing great work.
Some of the custodians like BitGo and Copper at the enterprise level, like it's just 10, 50x better
than it was a couple of years ago, which just gives people more comfort and control to play
on blockchains and on crypto. And I know wallets, they get a beating
because they're still not quite there yet
and they've got a long way to come.
But they have come a real long way
in terms of driving that adoption
and making it fun and easy to use.
And I would add on top of that, if I may,
with all the elements out there, right?
AI, it's even easier for everyone to integrate the existing SDKs into whatever they need to, right?
So that definitely drives adoptions and risks as well.
So but still, it has matured a lot from the I've been in this space since 2017.
So, yeah, I've seen a lot and you are 100% I'm in agreement with you.
Amazing.
Yeah, I mean, I actually like the insight about the wallets.
And I think that when we first joined the wallets, we were just atrocious.
I can't explain to you the frustration when I first joined.
I was like, why is this so difficult but you know what they say like you can't struggle and and you can't
appreciate how things are now until you realize how bad they were before so uh i love the progression
of how everything is evolution wise i've grown up especially the wallets and uh you know i have to
say something about what casper said is like you know decentralized ecosystems is a really key i
you know like one of the reasons i i think this is what i saw online a while back you know blackrock
which is like a huge corporation they picked you know ethereum because they said to build on their
one of their ecosystems because it was so decentralized you know other blockchains may
not be so decentralized if you want to say that word but i think it's really interesting to have
some of these big, large institutions like
BlackRock really think in that perspective, maybe because of security, maybe because they
just love Ethereum.
But yeah, I think it's an interesting perspective.
And thanks for your thoughts.
I'm going to turn over.
I have a couple more questions.
So my next question is, do you think crypto today is about building financial infrastructure or is it still mainly about trading?
You know, everyone's building new DEXs nowadays, new sexes are coming along.
So, you know, which one is it? Financial infrastructure or trading?
We're going to go to Tomer with this one and then Brian.
Yep.
So, yeah, first, I must agree with the you know the guys that before me
know what was said you know the guys from midnight so definitely like wallets were so so bad back in
the day you know and what we have today is like you know looking at uh at an iphone 17 pro max
and like you know we used to have like the ones that you used to put your finger and circle it
around you know just to get a number so the industry is definitely in a better place today so
kudos to everyone who joined late you did not have to suffer that much um now to the question
um if we are building at the moment uh a financial infrastructure is still about trading
Building at the moment a financial infrastructure is still about trading.
I think that the real serious builders around here are creating innovations
that probably are the biggest revolutionizing ideas that have been created by men
since the Industrial Revolution and since the Internet Revolution itself,
definitely thinking that it's a new, it's not thinking,
it is the new financial infrastructure of the world.
It's the next evolution of money, 100%, not even,
it's not arguable anymore, I think.
It is there, and this is what is being built.
But not only a financial infrastructure,
also important to say that we are basically creating systems
that are enabling everything to be settled
without arguing on them in a permissionless, trustless manner, right?
Using a decentralization.
So not only money, not only a financial infrastructure,
but a complete decentralized autonomous technological infrastructure
is being built.
Something much more interesting than the obvious financial infrastructure
that we see today.
Is it more about trading?
I do not think that it's more about trading,
but it's mostly used by the industry's participants
participants as a trading realm.
as a trading realm.
I'd say that probably 95% of the industry that we have today,
the participants in the industry that we have today,
90 to 95 are mostly using it, you know,
as a speculative investment or a casino,
trying to become rich overnight.
Unfortunately, many bad actors who are launching a rug pull project just to get rich are also using it for that purpose and enjoying the lack or very, very weak, let's say, regulation and compliance that this ecosystem still enjoys from, you know, for the good and for the bad of it.
Bad actors are here also.
So I think that it's mostly being used by the retail, by the users themselves as a speculative realm to gamble on tokens and on the next 100x, the next 10x, maybe in this horrible market,
then maybe gambling about the next 10x at the best,
but definitely being used more as a trading platform than an actual financial infrastructure.
Although if you would look at the more professional industry, the more professional industry, which are basically the ones who are creating the volume on these chains, then it's definitely being used as a financial infrastructure and it's being built and created towards this decentralized financial infrastructure and forced future, empowered future.
Then definitely, if we're looking at the professional industry,
let's say, I'm not sure if I would call it institutional,
because it can be angels, it can be investors,
we're using it as a financial infrastructure.
If we're looking at most of the users in terms of numbers and not volume, it's definitely the biggest casino that humanity has ever had on the internet with the global participants all around the world that most of them are also enjoying anonymity. Then for the institutional, I vote financial infrastructure for the retail users, definitely voting the
trading.
Yeah, I mean, it's one thing I wanted to highlight is that I
know a lot of times this has come up as like you call trading
like or the casino, but actually think like one of the things I
think we're mentioning and not forgetting to bring up is that,
you know, in stocks, they have the same thing,
you know, like the traditional tradify market,
they do have crazy stocks that are penny stocks that people, you know,
they buy investor money and they hope that it goes up.
They hope they invest like that. So I think it's not just in crypto.
I think that's a worldwide ecosystem, like not just obviously in that.
So I have to push back a little bit on when people just say it's like a casino,
I think it's a little bit different.
But as far as the fact that...
If I may answer to that, I don't want to throw a chair at you, as you say,
but maybe a chair will be thrown.
So sorry, man.
But I truly believe that there's a huge difference between launching a token
in terms of the things that
you need to go to pass through and actually launching a stock on the stock market. As one,
you know, who had in the past, again, an old dog who did IPOs. The moment that you get to an IPO,
you know, the process of companies being born is completely different. A normal company, you know,
will usually be born after creating a product. They will raise maybe 100K by valuation of a million from investors and angels initially,
and then they will build a product and then they will create the MVP. They will go to an alpha,
close beta. Then the beta will be public. They will generate income and money and they will
have some traction, real traction that can be measured and audited by uh by real financial
you know institutions you know one of the big fours and under countries you know and institutions
who decide if it's fit for an ipo or not maybe they will have a series a series b and then they
will have an ipo you know when the company already has something behind it you can see it's traction
you can learn about the product even if it's a penny stock you can see its traction, you can learn about the product, even if it's a penny stock, you can learn what they do, you can read about the patent, you can, if it's, I don't know,
some kind of a biopharma company. So unlike in crypto, then in crypto, you know, it can be
for anonymous kids, you know, with pictures of both the Piaht Club and CryptoPunk that are
creating a deck full with stories made by ChatGPT and raising money by a valuation of $300 million,
they go out
and raise 20 million dollars launch a token and it becomes a rod so there's a little bit of a
difference between launching tokens and i completely agree that the stock market is also completely
manipulated of course but it's a long conversation um but there's a difference between uh investing
and even in penny stocks than investing in a in a meme coins that
are being generated click hold on but Toma and so like uh like take take us back take us back to the
mid 90s like how much traction financial audit proof of uh you know it being a sustainable
business did like Netscape have when it IPO'd like, I think it was like two years it was in existence before it IPO'd, like crazy wild valuations in it and it raised.
Do you not think that tokens as they are now with their lack of like investor
disclosures, et cetera, we're just 20 years behind in that sense in terms of how we
stack up against traditional markets and IPOs?
Because like some of the things you've described, yes, they exist in the IPO market,
but some of the more robust token launches also adhere to these kinds of
maybe not full disclosures, but looking at providing information,
providing updates, doing research, taking the money, etc.
So there's almost like a gap rather than the hard rule
that ICOs are properly crazy compared to IPOs.
There's just a timeline difference in terms of where we are
and how mature we are as an industry.
You're completely correct, my friend.
And you hit an open nerve.
Sorry, man.
Did you lose one?
You know, we've all been, you know, through it.
Well, not all of us.
Some of the people were not born there.
But, you know, those of us who remember the dot-com bubble,
well, this is exactly what you're talking about.
You know, when people used to throw by valuations of billions of dollars,
money, you know, in companies that had nothing
because the venture capitals, you know, of the day and the angels,
everything that had the WW in it, they said, ah, this thing is the future.
People will look at the TVs and, you know, they will be doing everything through this TV with a keyboard and a mouse,
you know, this computer thing that you go online on the Internet.
And by that, the young generation of back then, you know, used to raise money.
Of course, you know, that all of the VCs and the big players know how to take them to ipos there was a different uh standards when and how you can go to
the market and everything crashed 99 of the industry was eliminated names that many here do
not even know about and the money was flowing to these tiny companies you know that became titans
and actually created the internet that we all use today, right? Like eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, Cisco, and the rest of the companies that created the Internet and this computer generation that we enjoy to be part of today.
But it took the funds of 99% to be eliminated so these can flow to the right ones,
right? It's basically a natural selection process that the markets did. We, unfortunately,
are still not there. Imagine if we were there, right? And all of the money, the $4 trillion
almost that we had in the industry was flowing into the real builders and not into the scammers and the dumpers and the pump and dumpers.
Do you guys understand what kind of a crazy innovation we could have had
like over here if the money was just flowing to the right builders,
to the right project and not, you know, to false promises?
But humans, you know, will be driven by greed, dear friends, you know,
and they will keep doing it and they will keep trying because everybody,
unfortunately, many, not everybody,
but many of the players think about themselves so they can get rich, you know,
and after them, you know, they don't mind what will be left for someone,
if any, unfortunately for us.
But if these funds were growing, I'm telling you as a VC,
as an angel investor, as a writer that writes about these things
and as part of the community like you guys,
you know, we used to live like with nothing,
you know, in a tiny computer in my basement
that we could already be years ahead of us.
So many projects like eliminated
because the founders were great developers,
amazingly, you know, scientists,
computer scientists who created crazy innovations.
But they were very bad marketeers.
They could not attract money for their token because they were not marketing it right.
And people who were great marketeers but didn't know anything about development went on and took billions and dozens of billions of dollars out of this ecosystem instead of them
being fed with these funds.
If we had the sense to learn from the mistakes of the dot-com era and do something similar
in our ecosystem, I think it would have been much more beneficial to all of us.
Luckily for us, exchanges like HTX and some other fellows in this industry are doing great EDs.
I know how hard it is to get to HDX and some of the other names here with tokens, as one who took many tokens to launches, doing great work.
But even them cannot see everything that is coming from the ones sitting behind the computer somewhere around the world who sends them information and promises with the various numbers.
So, yeah, with that, now we're experiencing, I think, the rain, the flood is here, and I believe that many will be eliminated and hopefully the funds will be flowing to the ones who need to survive so we can all thrive in this new Web3 era.
Wow, such a great insight, you guys.
I actually, I don't know who said about the internet bubble.
That actually is like a really great thing I was about to mention,
and I'm glad you did.
I don't know if that was Tomer, but Tomer, I had this question as you as well.
Like, I thought it went off topic, but it was really great.
Alpha, you guys dropped in.
Good insights.
Tomer, do you think it's infrastructure or trading?
Brian, you meant.
I already spoke enough about it.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Brian, sorry.
Yeah.
No, thanks.
I guess a few things to touch on.
One, I think much earlier in the conversation,
when talking about the biggest mistakes,
I would say Scott from Midnight said the quiet part out loud
regarding the wallet and the technology that was in place.
And I think that then dovetails pretty much
with what Tomar was saying in terms of like
what the early days of crypto were
and given the parallel as it explains to the dot-com bubble.
But I would say from the infrastructure side,
which is where I would focus on having built another layer one,
is that it's very synonymous with the early days of the internet,
not necessarily only the investment side of it,
but also the technology side.
When things are new, it's tricky to get that user growth and that development.
So if we, I'm not sure I remember the early days of the internet, not sure how many people here do as well, but in the early days, there wasn't really much to do.
Websites and browsers hadn't been invented yet.
So that's kind of parallel to the wallet.
You really just had, mostly it was like chat rooms and then like message boards.
And so the user interactions and the user experience was pretty not great.
And I think once there was better tooling and better environments and better buildings that
were a building that was going on, then you started to see the greater adoption. And then
that's what led, as we talked about with the investment cycle, I think that was that that
leads to kind of a lot of more clutter in the ecosystem. I think the parallels will exist,
whether it's with the internet as we talked about
or as we're talking about with blockchain,
but then also we see that same thing going on with AI.
So I think that's a natural progression.
Unfortunately, it's a tough part that we all have to accept,
but that's kind of how these large scale
or like technology that changes the way
that we interact with things typically go that cycle.
There's a boom and a bust and then hopefully a reemergence.
But I would say, you know, from us, like we're looking to solve that real world problem
with blockchain right now, because again, part of what we inherited where there was
a two coin system, you want to move money, you have to own another token.
And I think that's not how any other money moves in the world. If you want
to move money from your wallet and you want to send it across, whether it's a swift wire,
as we talked about, or an ACH in the US, you don't have to have a second currency value to pay that
bill. And I think that was a friction that was designed into the system that can be easily
removed. And I'm not talking too much about stable, but that's one of the things that we did
was that we were addressing a longstanding problem
where let's say you want to send someone $100 in USDT
and you help them get on board with a new wallet
and you send them that wallet
and they're excited to receive that money.
But when they go to move it,
they then can't do anything
because they have to get whatever their layer one token is
to start
paying the gas fees. And then the experience in giving that gas fee for someone who's not
crypto native is pretty daunting. And it's usually where a lot of people just draw the line and just
stop using crypto because they're like, this is too complicated. It's easier and faster.
I just pay the fee to send it on another platform. So I would say the infrastructure is really what's,
whether it's the wallets that we talked about or, you know, some of the non-necessary products that were built,
I think that would be what changes how crypto is used and people feel more familiar with using a
product that really puts users at the center. So whether it's removing the gas token or figuring
out how to handle some real distribution cases such as payments or payroll
or mittens or even commerce i think that's where uh crypto will stop feeling like an experiment
and will start feeling more like the infrastructure that people you know come to rely on every day
so that's kind of a broad approach that i kind of think of things in it's interesting right brian
because it's almost like the innovation around gas tokens. So at midnight, we've gone a slightly different route. We have a resource token that
is emitted when you hold our native token, you can pay for transactions and it decays over time
and it disappears, which on the one hand, we hear enterprises like, and that's golden. There's the
other approach of not having gas fees or allowing this be paid in the token
that you're transferring.
And then there's almost like you didn't, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but
it's like an older school way, which is wild to say, even though crypto is not that old,
of this idea of using the native token to pay for transfers and being exposed to the
volatility.
So we're seeing an evolution of how people pay for transactions on chain.
seeing like an evolution of how people pay for transactions on chain.
I don't want to like hijack,
but does anyone think like that will change over time?
Like have we settled how that works or are we going to move in a different
direction? I don't know what you guys are seeing if Brian, Casper.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's hard to jump in again,
but I think we go back as we mentioned earlier, like the grandma test or the mom test. I think this is really where it is, I mean, I think, sorry to jump in again, but I think we go back, as we mentioned earlier, like the grandma test or the mom test.
I think this is really where it is, is like, if you're saying using crypto is better than sending fiat, meaning that it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week, available to anyone in the world.
But then, you know, you're presenting this perfect product.
But then if you start saying, well, there's actually all these asterisks that we haven't disposed. One, you have to use a different currency and these
networks. And if someone has a preference for one, then it doesn't work. And I think that was
kind of one of the things that held back crypto adoption was that it wasn't as easy as it was
made to be seen. And so kind of the example, if you need to, let's say you're
going to send a lot of transfers. So you buy a bunch of a layer one token, that's a volatile
gas token, let's say for equivalent of 20 US dollars. And you're like, okay, that's fine.
I can pay a hundred transfers out of this. But then the price of that layer one token
drops to, let's say $10. You no longer have the ability to send the hundred transactions
that you kind of had made
the justification for rather now you have 50 transactions, but then you have to take into
consideration network spikes or congestion on the network. Well, it's going to cost you twice as
much. So now you're down to 25 transactions. So now it became a lot more expensive when people
told you, oh, it was going to be way cheaper and easier. And that's kind of one of the things I
think that we will see the networks adopt to in terms of like, that volatility wasn't
necessary. Understanding the volatility, and as I think Tamara was mentioning earlier about like,
investing tokens and tokens that are a store of value, that's part of that game. If you want to
invest, whether it's a penny stock or a volatile token that's launching for, you know, from speculation
purposes, I think that's the assumed risk.
But I think in terms of moving money,
you shouldn't have to play a speculator.
You should be able to understand how much you're paying
and how much it's going to cost,
whether it's today or tomorrow,
not gaining the system with different rates every day.
And I think that's kind of like my thought is like,
we remove, we kind of section it off
or like payments will work in a much more open sense and if people want to speculate and
invest elsewhere that's their prerogative and they're more than welcome to do it i love the
idea of removing the asterisks it's like a really well like phrased what we need to be doing as an
industry very very cool yeah it's a great thing to see things come together and make it faster,
easier and simpler for everyone. I think that we all can agree on that. Yeah, I'm going to turn
over to Chloe. Chloe, same question. Infrastructure or trading? How has crypto evolved?
Yeah, for my size, I think nowadays, meme coins are really important for onboarding
new web2 users, including retail users to trade and marketing hot sports.
And right now, there's also a lot of meme lately in these years, like Dodgett and PayPay
and Bulk.
And then we also find that there's a lot of meme in BSC really launched a lot and give a lot of wealth
effects to HTX users.
And so Airtrack, it may have a lot of attention right now.
And also at the same time, the institution guide funds and long-term capital focus on
fundamental infrastructure, such as like stable coins and their one chains. So now they are recently, we already launched you,
the ticker name on HTX and increase like 80%.
It shows the money demand of the stable coins
and remains like really high.
And many large capital players,
such as like, you know, like Tesla,
like rein investing really a lot and paying a little
attention to this kind of like stablecom projects to increase safety and security of their funds
yeah I think that both two ones are both also important yeah I think it's a good it's a really
tricky question I meant I meant it that way infrastructure or trading, but it can be both, right?
So it's a really good point that you guys all made.
I'm glad I got some really great insights in alpha.
Thanks, Chloe.
I think my next question is going to be kind of negative.
So hopefully we'll get some throwing chairs at each other again.
So what are the biggest mistakes the industry has made in the last cycle?
And what did we learn in the hard way, so to speak?
I'm going to throw my micro over to Casper.
Go ahead.
I thought you were going to throw over to me a chair.
But the biggest mistakes, in my opinion, so you know the thing.
Fast and cheap is not good. Or you might have some, let's say, corner cases where you can deliver
something time to market very, very fast, but with severe caveats.
And again, this is my personal perspective as a community member of Casper.
Right. So in my opinion, since 2017, because I
caught all the craze, I see your IDO, pre-sales, the casino thing that
we are still talking about, right?
Memes, everything.
I saw all the scenarios unfolding in front of me.
And as Tomar was saying, like, let's build a shiny page and everything is up and ready.
We are going to gather millions of dollars and we will deliver this whatever project that
doesn't do actually anything so uh for the last few years in my opinion all this uh this hype
around stuff that are not tangible the fast the let's say the um pressure of the community to
see something delivered instantly without thinking about
security without thinking about scalability without thinking about um how to actually
deliver something meaningful um drove us where we are today in terms of again the topic meant for
the casino so if we are um following and trying to catch the shiny things,
what AI made page and some promises put on paper
by some random guy,
we are deleting what crypto in this space means.
Of course, depends on what lenses
or let's say what hats you are using or wearing, right?
Because if you look at this from, let's say, a DGEN person,
you're happy with this.
You have more room to play.
You can just see what's happening there.
But if you are looking at this as an actual investor
or as Tomar was saying, as a VC or angel investor, right?
You are being, of course, you have the maturity
of not being distracted,
but the normal user is being distracted by all the pods that are flying
and floating around without an actual use case.
So in my opinion, the mistakes were delivered fast without considering,
as I was saying, security, scalability and actual working product,
promoting, let's say, projects and ideas that maybe don't have a go-to-market defined.
Maybe they are just a shiny PowerPoint without doing anything.
without doing anything and my impression and my belief is that the community as a whole
chased the wrong thing instead of actually chasing the innovation and actual usage and development
of the projects so real life usage versus shining again things is not, let's say, followed or not so interesting to the normies.
If you are a person that knows his way around and if you know what to look for,
then this is not something that is concerning for you.
But the space is full with people that are not let's say so into doing their own diligence
and we also and i'm not going to mention anything because it's not the space for this but
we saw bridges failure failing we saw layers two or halting or layer ones halting we saw
or halting or layer 1's halting.
We saw governance being manipulated.
We saw everything.
So instead of delivering fast and cheap,
better take some time, analyze, build,
and then come and say, we are doing this.
So the mistake is that fast and cheap is not always good.
And we've had this for quite some years.
Such a great perspective, I have to say that to sum it up,
fast and cheap doesn't always mean good, right?
It's just you get what you pay for.
So obviously within not just in our industry,
but every industry, I think there's a value attached to any monetary ecosystem.
So yeah, it's a really good point.
Also, I wanted to turn it over to Scott and Midnight.
Go ahead, same question.
Yeah, sure, thanks.
The biggest was maybe, yeah, let's go with the piece then.
So last cycle, we saw a lot of crazy yield opportunities
and also crazy valuations and how everything came in,
both from a retail and institutional level.
And for me, that just signals that we as an industry
were unable to price risk effectively.
Like we were getting crazy yields for a day or something like that but the chance of it imploding
were crazy high and we didn't really scrutinize
where that yield came from, what was going on on that side of things
so I think that's what we did not great at
it created a lot of speculative opportunities coming back to all the casino comments
but it didn't really do us any favors in the long run where I think net probably more people lost than one on that side
of things. And you can see now that people are looking behind the yield, like where does that
come from? And then also more on like the private company side, like where does the value in this
new company or new startup like come from? and we're getting better at that. Now,
what that will actually probably mean is that valuations come down. I don't think that's a
particularly bad thing if it reflects the true like risk adjusted return that you can expect.
And that's like the main thing that I can see on that side.
It's quite a tough pill to swallow because it probably
means that we're not all as
well off as we think we are and it also
means that we're not as valuable as we think we are
but we can
grow into these
valuations over time
and it will just see more opportunity for
RWAs to come in
backed by real yield and real products.
Yeah, it's a really great perspective as well, Insight.
I mean, you know, DYOR, do your own research.
We say that a lot, but a lot of times most people don't do DYOR.
So, you know, I think it's a great perspective.
Also, you know, I think it's a great perspective also you know um i think
it's not only do your own research but also always so think about the risk involved in everything you
do so not just within crypto i think it's in within any financial uh investment so you have
to look at both ways yeah that's a really good point and i think we all have learned from these
so-called mistakes in crypto.
And I think it's only something that as the industry matures, it only will get better.
And maybe the newbies won't do their own research, but eventually they will.
But yeah, it's really great stuff.
I'm going to go ahead and wrap up.
We have some individual questions and then we're going to go ahead and wrap up the space.
But that's all the main questions I have because we're running out of time.
So what I'm going to do now is we're going to do individual questions first uh per project and then also i would like you to answer the question and then also tell people where to go
get more information about your project like should they join your telegram or your discord
if you just want to point them to a website is fine too either one um but yeah we'll go ahead
and start over with uh brian my question to you
with stable is you know stable coins were supposed to be simple but they become the backbone of
crypto economy and uh what did the industry underestimate about building the real digital
money which is stable coins today which is there's so many stable coins it's getting i can't even
think about them all but they're it's trendy, right? Go ahead, Brian.
Sure.
Again, thanks for having me.
I would say, you know, you're correcting in terms of stable coins are supposed to be simple and easy.
And now they're, you know, at the front and center of everything.
But I think that's obviously the use case brings them to the front and center.
And with that, more attention becomes more opinions and more ideas.
But I would say, you know, originally at first stablecoin seemed simple you were to peg it to a dollar and you're basically done um but as people started using that scale became clear that
issuing the stable coin was just that small part the tip of the iceberg but the harder part around
it was like how does it move how fast does settle? How predictable are the costs? And then how does it integrate?
And I think that was the part of what was really underestimated was like the integration part
and how to make sure money moves across borders.
So I think that was one of the big things that were underestimated, but then also the user
expectations.
I think that people expected things to work lightning fast, like the internet that they're
using it on, but they underestimated how slow and how congested general purpose networks
were.
But then also you have to get into things like clear rules for regulation purposes, custody
management and systems and institutions.
So I'd say the complexity of the integrations was by far the most underestimated thing of getting stable
coins into a form of like real digital money. I think the idea was relatively simple, peg it,
manage the money externally, and you have this token. But the ability to get the breadth or get
the depth of the integrations was wildly underestimated. And then to answer your
second question, you know, stable is growing. We're launching your second question, Stable's growing.
We're launching StablePay in about a month's time.
But I think the best place to keep in touch with us
is here on X.
So it's x.com slash stable.
Pretty simple.
But we put out some good releases and notes.
But also, you can sign up for the emails.
We put out a good publication.
And again, thank you to everyone at XTX and John
for having us today.
Great.
Thanks for your time today as well.
And make sure to follow Brian and also Stable.
Definitely check it out.
It's something that everyone uses nowadays.
Stablecoins is very easy to understand.
Check out their website and all that jazz.
So thanks again, Brian.
My next question is for Tomer with Kemba Network.
If stablecoins are money, Kemba is the rails.
What is the biggest bottleneck today
when value moves across change?
So the biggest bottleneck to today,
there are a few bottlenecks.
It's hard to say the biggest,
but I'd say that uh probably the biggest is uh security
that uh is definitely being underlooked surprisingly by many of the by many of the
creators in this industry which basically prevents the growth of the ecosystem, because
the big money, guys, even though we think that we're great and cool, and we have like
3.3 trillion dollars now in the ecosystem, by the way, which out of them you wouldn't
believe, but less than 300 billion is actual dollars.
You can see it by the stablecoins in the industry.
It's like tiny, tiny, tiny.
It's like smaller than NVIDIA
and many other companies in the S&P 500.
And what prevents the industry from growing,
exploding and attracting more liquidity
from the real world,
from the serious money that is outside,
out there in the world,
is security.
Probably one of the biggest bottlenecks that prevent value to move across chains and from
the centralized world, where the big money is, to the decentralized ecosystem that we
to the decentralized ecosystem that we are a part of.
are a part of.
That happens due to smart contracts and oracles,
who still we all rely on still to bridge assets.
This is an old technology that is still being used.
And hackers really like to hack into bridges and oracles
because they need to hack into one software,
which was written by men,
and then they can just trick it to give it all of the money that it manages,
because a bridge manages, as you know, money on various sides of the bridge in order to move the assets.
And that's why bridges are getting hacked all the time,
and tokens are getting stolen and dumped on the market by the hackers.
dumped on the market by the hackers.
And again, we are facing another scandal
that prevents growth in our ecosystem
and makes things harder.
Kima's solution basically relies on no smart contracts
and no oracles.
So it's the most secure way known to men today
to transfer assets.
And I think that we definitely help this bottleneck. the most secure way known to men today to transfer assets.
And I think that we definitely help this bottleneck.
The centralized world, centralized bank, for example,
the European Central Bank,
we were speaking to part of their partnership program and some others.
Again, I don't want to sound like commercial for KEMA,
so research about KEMA network and the technology
if you'd like.
But basically, using our infrastructure,
everything can communicate with everything freely
and knowing that the chances,
there are many mechanisms on the way
that prevent or eliminate the chance of a hack to happen.
It makes it almost one to infinity
in order to try and trick the whole network.
And basically, you need to hack to all of the blockchains
and decentralize the players in order to trick us.
So this is one of the biggest bottlenecks
and we're completely solving it simply with one SDK
into the centralized world with a simpler one API.
Yeah, so basically that's a bit of biggest bottleneck
that I believe we have today.
Bullish.
Where should they get more information about Kima Network?
Just follow you guys on X or go to the Telegram?
Yeah, sorry.
First of all, you can also ask Chagpt.
It's probably the easiest, you know,
or any other AI grok or whatever you're using.
Just ask what is a Kima Network.
That's a K-I-M-A.
If you'd like to learn more, you can, of course, go to kima network that's a k-i-m-a if you'd like to more to learn more you
can of course go to kima.network but if you really want to learn probably chat gpt or grok or one of
our other other bffs ai's is the best way you can follow us on x to get news about what we do and
how we operate and what's new is happening in the ecosystem.
And yeah, that's it. Thank you for asking and for reminding me. Thanks, guys.
No problem. Thanks for your great insights and throwing the chair at me. I blocked it, by the way, so I'm OK. Don't worry, there's no hospital.
All right. We're going to go to Scott with Midnight now. Here's my question to you.
As crypto becomes more connected and compliant, is privacy becoming more important or is it going to be more threatened?
Thanks.
Yeah, for sure.
The ask that is that the choice to be private is going to become more important.
to be private is going to become more important. Like there's lots of information that we're happy
sharing publicly and there's some information that we want to remain like fully private and
there's some that we want to remain private to a select group of individuals. And I think that like
gradient is going to become more and more important on chain. So as examples like people running
payroll on chain, you probably want each individual
transaction to be private so that the team who work with you can't see how much you earn.
But for reporting purposes, you're probably really happy with the CFO knowing that it's your wallet
that's receiving the money and how much has gone in between them. So I think just using simple
examples like that, that we think are great fits for Unchain,
we can see how that differential level of privacy
is just like really clear and really simple
that that's how I see the next sort of 12 to 18 months
really panning out.
The fully private stuff that we see,
and obviously Monero is probably like
the most high profile of it.
I think if you want to play with the enterprises
and you want a big institutional money on,
that's just it's a non-startup.
We need to have this level of differential privacy
so that we can work with regulators in a manner
which both protects the users and enables sensible use cases on-chain.
Yeah, that's really great.
I have to say that privacy meta is really still here,
and so I'm glad you guys are thinking about this idea.
And I think it's something that we all can appreciate.
When we send a transaction, we're not going to get,
know everyone how much money we have.
But yeah, thanks so much for your time today,
Scott and Tomer and Brian.
Scott, where can they learn more about Midnight?
Guys, follow us on X,
follow us in Discord.
The two places that all the good things happen.
Perfect. Thanks so much.
All right.
We've got Casper up next mike caspa for you
um i have a question in a world full of layers twos in modular change what does proof of work
still matter for the crypto ecosystem thanks thank you for this i think i can speak for one hour but
i'm going to keep it short so or at least short um having multiple layer tools multiple layer ones
you have segregation you have trust assumption and you have so many point of potential failures
right so as we all know a modular chain um separates the consensus the the DA, the data availability, execution, so on and so forth.
And this trade-off is basically adding complexity and trust assumption.
Just a side note, I'm a huge fan of proof of work, so of course I'm biased, but I truly believe in what I'm saying.
So, of course, the proof of work consensus obviously matters
and not only matters is still the place to go
because it is the only consensus that anchors
the digital system to an objective external cost.
What I'm trying to say is that this does not rely
on governance committees.
You don't need any social coordination to vote
or do something. Basically, it's poorly decentralized.
And we live in a world that is dominated by modular stacks and layered execution.
But at the end of the day, someone still has to be the final arbiter of the truth, right?
And proof of work fulfills this role without permission and and
in a pure secure and scalable and decentralized way so of course we all know that or let's say
not know we all believe or have this initial thought that the proof of work are slow uh limited
and they only provide the the minimal settlement of transactions and
everything that is happening on chain but caspa challenges this directly caspa as i told you at
the beginning uses a block deck which is parallel parallel block execution production and mining
caspa delivers fast confirmation high throughput
and obviously focusing on nakamoto style security so this doesn't make proof of work just relevant
it is a highly competitive consensus in environments where speed and responsiveness actually matters.
I'm not sure how many people know, but CASPA had the fork last year. We are at 10 blocks per second,
which is 100 millisecond block and purely done by proof of work via miners across the world.
This is no centralized entity.
There is no central X account to follow.
There is no official, let's say, committee or group of people
that are doing and steering what CASPA needs to do.
I don't know how to emphasize this enough,
but you should should for those listening
and never heard of caspa i highly encourage you to to to look into it and see what what caspa is
but coming back to the question um uh what often missed is that the proof of work is misunderstood
is that the proof of work cannot scale but caspa is doing this and is doing it natively and with sufficient
throughput and strong ordering guarantees,
you can obviously introduce native programmability without doing the
segregation of the modular things without fragmenting security,
bridges and size systems and so on and so forth.
And because as I was mentioning at the beginning of my response,
this is critical because each and every additional layer increases trust,
assumptions, and weakness the overall stack of the layer.
However, Casper approach shows that the proof of work,
you don't need to choose between security and usability or
security and speed or usability and speed or any combination of this caspa can provide all of them
and it the protocol is designed in a such way that removes any artificial constraints
that are let's say believed to be on the proof of work so at the end of the day the layer twos are not inherently bad I'm not saying layer twos are bad you should throw them away depending on the nation and the need you can have one or tens of them depending on what you want to achieve but they are becoming problematic when they are used to compensate the base layer limitation instead of extending the capability of the base layer, right?
And for example, this is a bit in, and I'm going to finish in a bit.
This is, for me, it's a bit contradictory because I'm also a business developer for
Casplex, which is the very first layer to evm on caspa and you would
say uh ah so you are saying caspa is best but you are still discussing about layer two
it's not like this because once the proof of work base layer like caspa can scale natively the layer
two uh stop being the patching limitations but basically what they are doing they are extending the capability of the layer 1
and CASP also has the vprogs the virtual programming that are coming up which is going to allow the usage of CASP so it's going to provide the ZK proofs and they can only be verified on CASPA without affecting the cost gas the let's say competition to be in a block and again CASPA has 10 blocks per second and fully proof of work and it's going to come up to 100 blocks per second.
I'm not sure if this is well understood by the listeners, but this is a major, major break to technology.
And to finalize and close my talk, you can follow Caspa on Twitter.
Again, there is no official account about caspa but there are so many good
community members and promoting sharing and showcasing what caspa is you have so many
resources available out there and you can just search for caspa on twitter and you will see
high accounts trying to explain what caspa is doing and is trying to achieve.
And if you want a webpage, you can go to caspa.org.
And if you want, you have all the links there for Telegram,
for Discord and everything like that.
Thank you so much, HTX, for having me.
Thank you so much for our speakers.
And it has been a real pleasure being with you guys.
So much.
Thanks for the great information and Alpha. I have my last question with Chloe with HDX Research.
Do you see capital shifting from the meme style assets
towards real infrastructure in 2026?
Thanks.
Yes, I definitely believe that Sablecoin
and a lot of other kind of infrastructure
will do a lot of interesting things, including AI and robotics, including stable chain plasma.
I know a lot of robotics projects will launch this token this year.
So I yeah. So so besides this, I really bullish on both the app, including prediction market and also trading terminal.
So that's what I want to say.
Cool. Thanks so much.
That about wraps up this space for today, guys.
Again, I want to shout out to all the speakers from today's space.
They took their time.
They gave us Alpha.
We got to give them some love.
So again, make sure to follow Brian with Stable, Tomer with Kima Network, Scott with Midnight Foundation, and Kasperdor from Kasper, and Chloe with HTX Research.
Thank you guys for your great insights.
It was fun.
I had an amazing time.
I hope you did too.
And we will see you next time on HTX Space.
I'm going to wind down with a little bit of trance, chill music. So we will see you next time. HGX Space. I'm going to wind down with a little bit of trance chill music.
So we will see you next time.
Thank you, guys.
Bye-bye.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you. Играет музыка. all right guys you guys went to the space you guys heard some alpha now make sure to follow
htx i forgot to say that again guys follow htx on x or visit htx.com for all your trading
abilities we have futures we have spot we have all the things you want to do we have htx earn where
you can earn yield while doing stable coins again guys thank you guys so much for your time i hope
you enjoyed it we'll see you next time i'm going to wind down one more minute of trance Það er hann.
Það er hann.
Insights
Project L
Brian Mailer introduces Stable, a new layer one blockchain focused on payments using stablecoins, aiming to simplify money transfers and enhance the user experience.
and we solve that by using USDT as our native gas token.
Thanks so much for that great introduction.
I'm going to throw the invisible microphone over to Scott.
Scott from Midnight announces their privacy-enhancing layer one blockchain, which aims to provide rational privacy solutions through advanced cryptographic techniques.
So hey, everyone, I'm Scott.
I'm the VP of Ecosystem over here at Midnight.
Midnight's a privacy enhancing layer one.
Caspar Dor discusses Caspa, a proof-of-work layer one blockchain designed for high throughput and fast confirmations, emphasizing its commitment to decentralization and security.
over to uh i'm going to mispronounce your name but caspador how are you doing hey thanks for having
me you said it right perfectly so thank you for having me in this space. It's a real pleasure to be here. I'm Caspar Dor. I'm here primarily as a community representative of Caspa.
And I've been involved in the Caspa ecosystem for the last three years and working closely with the community members and obviously closely following with the protocols technical developments.
Tomer introduces Kimba, a universal interoperability communication protocol that aims to connect various financial ecosystems seamlessly, enhancing cross-chain transactions.
Briefly about myself and Kimba.
So Kimba is a universal interoperability
communication protocol. That all mumbo jumbo basically means that we can connect every
P
Today's discussion centers on the evolution of crypto from simple token launches to a comprehensive financial stack, highlighting the industry's shift towards building integrated systems.
Thanks for tuning in on another edition of AXBases.
Today's topic is from tokens to systems.
How crypto became a financial stack.
Bitcoin's recent surge to $96,000 and Ethereum's rise to $3,333 indicate a significant growth trend in the crypto market, alongside a notable increase in privacy-focused coins like Zcash and Monero.
any questions you guys have on the space if we have time we'll definitely get to those
and today's topic is from tokens to systems how crypto became a financial stack
and just go a little over the market here in a second.
The conversation highlights a growing trend in crypto towards building real financial infrastructure rather than merely trading, with a focus on stablecoins and decentralized finance.
So I actually agree with what you both said, the stablecoin aspect of having something stable
and having something that can be done by banks or any big institution on the other side you know you have more like decentralization ecosystem driven
and about having something that's built for like different ecosystems i i actually agree with both
Tomer emphasizes that the current innovations in crypto represent a significant evolution in financial infrastructure, marking a shift from speculative trading to real-world applications.
it is the new financial infrastructure of the world.
It's the next evolution of money, 100%, not even,
it's not arguable anymore, I think.
The discussion acknowledges that while the crypto market has potential, many participants are still using it for speculative trading rather than meaningful investment, indicating a decline in genuine utility.
Unfortunately, many bad actors who are launching a rug pull project just to get rich are also using it for that purpose and enjoying the lack or very, very weak, let's say, regulation and compliance that this ecosystem still enjoys from, you know, for the good and for the bad of it.
Bad actors are here also.
So I think that it's mostly being used by the retail, by the users themselves as a speculative realm to gamble on tokens and on the next 100x, the next 10x, maybe in this horrible market,
Caspar points out that the industry's focus on fast and cheap solutions has led to significant mistakes, suggesting a trend towards prioritizing quality and security in future developments.
I'm going to throw my micro over to Casper.
Go ahead.
I thought you were going to throw over to me a chair.
Brian notes that the complexity of integrating stablecoins into the financial system was underestimated, reflecting a trend of increasing sophistication in crypto financial products.
with stable is you know stable coins were supposed to be simple but they become the backbone of
crypto economy and uh what did the industry underestimate about building the real digital
money which is stable coins today which is there's so many stable coins it's getting i can't even
Host
Kima Network
from
Kima
