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🌋 HEDERA DEFI: POWERED BY CHAINLINK AND BONZO FINANCE!
Recorded: April 1, 2025 Duration: 0:40:59Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlights Bonzo Finance's launch of a lending protocol on Hedera, strategic partnerships between Chainlink and Hedera, and the rapid growth of DeFi on Hedera. Key trends include the importance of reducing friction in transactions and the potential of stablecoin payments. The collaboration between Chainlink and Hedera is seen as a driver for innovation and growth, with Bonzo Finance aiming to become a central liquidity layer on the network.
Full Transcription
What is up everybody? Solomon here. Super excited to be with Genfinity interviewing a multitude of
builders across Web3. Super excited today to be diving deep into the weeds with Hedera DeFi,
which is powered by Chainlink and Bonzo Finance. We have leaders from Chainlink,
Bonzo, HBAR Foundation, exploring industry collaboration, the future of DeFi and the
HBAR network. We do have a special guest here with us from Chainlink. And I always like to
start these out with an intro since we have a new guest um we have will reilly who's
head of web3 sales within the chain link ecosystem will if you could kick us off with an intro of
yourself and your role within chain link that'd be great yeah of course uh and thank you for the
intro so uh obviously william reilly i've been at chain link roughly four and a half years i've been
in the crypto space around eight.
My time at Chainlink has encompassed a number of different things from working with data providers, node operators,
as well as hands-on with centralized finance players
that do crypto-related things.
You can think of exchanges or asset issuers.
And now most recently, I had up our core Web3 team
and we engaged the broad sector
of Web3 as a whole in DeFi,
roughly encompassing 2,000 plus users,
a multitude of chains,
including our fine friends
over at Bonzo,
as well as Hedera.
So lovely to be here
and excited for today's conversation.
I'm going to go round robin with brief intros because we never know a new community that might be watching. So Charles,
CEO, HBAR Foundation, can you give us an intro of yourself and just talk a little bit about what
you do within the foundation? Yeah. So Charles, CEO at the HBAR Foundation, essentially,
what we're here to do is empower founders or other teams that are wanting to build new businesses and build economies
on the Hedera network. So everything from, you know, just we're kind of the entry point to the
network. If you want to come to us, we can talk about how we work through the process of grants,
technical integration, linking you up with partners, some of the best ways to get integrated
with the community and, you community and grow your business.
So our focus especially is really finding those founders that have great ideas
that they want to build on the Hedera network and just really kind of supercharging that process.
Awesome. Thank you, Charles. And then Brady. I have to preface, Brady. It's great to see you.
I've done a bunch of interviews with Brady in coffee coffee shops brady great to see you not in a coffee shop love an intro of yourself today not in a coffee
shop today i'm at home with the blue background um so my name is brady gentile i'm the co-founder
and ceo of bonzo finance labs uh i've actually been in the hedera ecosystem for quite a while
now i was working at hedera and the Hashgraph organization
for about five and a half years.
The beginning of last year saw a gap in the DeFi ecosystem
and all of the economic and technical pieces were there
to be able to bring lending and borrowing
initially online into Hedera.
So our team has essentially taken Aave, which
is the battle-tested both economically and technically
code-based for lending protocol that's one of the most popular
across Web3, adapted it to Hedera,
and we launched that with supply functionality
in November of last year and then enabled borrowing
functionality. with supply functionality in november of last year and then enabled borrowing functionality and uh
you know now we're continuing on our path to become what we're describing as the liquidity
layer of hedera and i'm sure we'll get into that a little bit later in the interview for sure you
know i kind of want to kick it off here because there's kind of a long-standing relationship
between the chain link and hedera ecosystems and i guess i'll ask you, Charles, given Chainlink Labs is a Hedera council member,
and you're obviously president of Hedera. It'd be great to hear from you just some perspective
as far as what it means for Chainlink to be sitting on the Hedera council.
Yeah. I mean, having Chainlink really early into the Hedera council was a really big deal.
That was kind of a huge milestone. It was the first Web3-centric company to actually join the council in kind of a sea of very well-known
enterprises. So this was kind of a really interesting point in having a Web3 and crypto
company join the governing council. It made a lot of people uncomfortable, which was good.
And then they quickly learned like, hey, there's a lot of stuff we can learn from this group. And, you know, so it really started to signal something a lot more powerful. So, you know, Chainlink being obviously a huge provider of all decentralized infrastructure, our governing council started to recognize that it's fairly institutional grade, improving every day. And for them being council
members, it means that they actually have a real voice in the direction of our network too. So
from technical, strategic, and an economic standpoint, it's good to have their voice in
the room. And now as a governing council member, and that's kind of what governing council
membership means, is those members get to shape the roadmap on how we work in the future. So it's not really just a
title. It's, you know, a real seat at the table to help get long-term alignment with Hedera.
And on our side, it helps us really deepen the technical integration between our two ecosystems.
And we can do that collaboration in a really intentional way that isn't just by accident.
So it was a really big deal early on and that relationship is improving and growing, you know,
every day. So we're excited. Well, I would love your thoughts on it as well. Yeah, thank you. So
like Charles mentioned, we've been a longstanding member of the council.
I believe we joined around May 2021.
Us at Chainlink, we consider this a great honor and responsibility to be one of the stewards and participants in the direction of the Hedera ecosystem.
I mean, really, this is the studded council to be a part of. We've got tech giants yes geez you know physical hardware
players tokenized asset issuers banks i mean these aren't just you know um your your average uh
crypto joes uh participating in this con this council i mean it's very diverse and you know
we are unified in our mission to make hadera a a better uh ecosystem however it's it's fully remains and has that
ethos of decentralization at the governance level fully intact um and i think that's that's what's
really really valuable here in terms of our participation you know i've had the fortune
of sitting in on some of these um you know meetings in the past. And for Chainlink, you know, our goal and our foundational principle
is rooted in security and cryptographic truth in everything that we do.
So this is where we really try to take, you know, inject our firm opinions here
and ensuring that Hedera is moving forward in a very secure and, you know, highly reliable way.
And, you know, in this regards for DeFi adoption, such as the, you know, the folks over at Bonzo,
as well as Tradfly players alike. So really a great honor and super excited to be,
you know, one of these standing members.
Awesome. I think we've seen a lot of kind of like evolution of these networks too.
And Charles, I guess I would love if you could touch base on this.
I mean, Hedera historically positioned as kind of an enterprise ecosystem,
but rapidly obviously expanding into DeFi retail driven use cases.
What does the retail landscape kind of look like today?
And there's been a lot of recent milestones as well.
Where do you kind of see it heading in the future?
Yeah, I mean, this is a really, really exciting time for us.
I mean, I think a lot of people have seen Q1,
especially kind of the increase in activity on our retail side,
whether it's USDC or TVL or whatever it may be,
getting more ERC equivalency.
I mean, these are the things that we've been working on
really hard in the first quarter.
Hedera has always been known as a network
that has huge throughput, predictable low fees,
obviously very ideal for enterprise
that needs to kind of do financial models
with predictability.
Now, a lot of those traits are proving really attractive for DeFi and consumer
use cases as well. So obviously Bonzo here and Bonzo integrating with Chainlink has been massive.
And it's being built with real sustainability in mind, not just short-term hype, which we love and
we appreciate. So I think you will see DeFi on Hedera really blend a little bit more into the
mainstream consumer experiences. So you'll see more tokenized loyaltyedera really blend a little bit more into the mainstream consumer experiences.
So you'll see more tokenized loyalty, a lot of the real world asset tokenization coming on,
financial access tools. And then obviously with Chainlink, this is all going to have a
composable infrastructure, better trust guarantees behind it. And really this just happens to be a
case where even though we have that enterprise and institutional grade technology behind us, it works really well for consumers, too.
And that's kind of how it should be. Like, why shouldn't a consumer be able to have that level of technology in their own hand?
And that's what we're really excited about moving that direction.
Awesome. Yeah. And William, I would love to ask you, given the existing synergies,
and we'll get into the Chainlink scale program here as well, I'm sure. How do you envision
Chainlink enabling retail ecosystem growth on Hedera? Yeah, great question. And so from my
perspective, retail experience is ultimately interfaced with the likes of a player like Bonzo.
So that's where the retail experience is really rooted at. But in terms of what Bonzo has to
build and deliver for this retail experience is their developer experience. Exactly what tools
are they using? How reliable are they? How familiar are they?
And this is where we really pride ourselves at Chainlink as being the number one option in market,
not only from security, but as well as developer experience, ease of integration, as well as peace
of mind of what you're getting. Chainlink's battle-tested infrastructure has delivered over $20 trillion worth of value executed across its Oracle networks.
We've delivered 16 billion data points to Chain.
And this is all consumed by, you know, thousands upon thousands of developers in the ecosystem because they can truly trust it and, you know, be comfortable with what they're building with,
with Brady and the Bonzo team,
if they're using a service that they are staying awake up at night,
wondering if it will fail on them,
this really hampers their ability to go to market with a large retail
adoption with chain link.
Ideally Brady is getting lots of sleep or at least not losing any because of his engagement with Chainlink.
Brady doesn't sleep.
Yeah, right.
Who sleeps in crypto anyway?
But in terms of Chainlink Scale program, just focusing on this topic for a brief moment, we're very excited to be partners with Hedera
as they're adopting the Chainlink Scale program.
This ultimately allows for bootstrapping
the Oracle network and infrastructure
that goes onto a blockchain such as Hedera
and allowing folks like Bonzo really quick
and easy access to this with low barriers of friction.
So really excited to have Hedera a part of the Chainlink scale program.
And, you know, this is just the very beginning
of a very long relationship.
So I would love Charles.
And I think I'm sure everybody can probably agree up here.
We've seen kind of like a maturity aspect
within especially some of these networks.
And Charles, I guess from your stance,
I would love if you could touch base
just on the future of collaboration in this industry
and where you particularly see maybe promising areas
between Chainlink and Hedera kind of interacting in the future.
Yeah, I mean, I'm super, super bullish on collaboration.
You know, early crypto,
it was all about being a maxi cunt throat competition.
Now we're starting to see that a lot of the real value is coming from that composability and teams and different technology
working together. And so, you know, Chainlink and Hedera is kind of that perfect example where,
you know, Chainlink brings fully trusted data and interoperability, which is huge.
You know, on the Hedera side, we bring sustainable,
predictable performance, ABFT security, a really unique governance model, which actually
is highly respected in the industry. And in traditional industries, they really like that
we have a strong governance model. So together, we can really start picking away at those high integrity use cases. So traditional financial institutions, they love using people like Chainlink and Hedera.
RWAs that really need precise price feeds and decentralized trust at the same time, that can only be done with us working together.
So, you know, the future isn't really one chain, one protocol, maxis everywhere.
It is going to be cross-chain, interoperable, and very collaborative. Hedarin Chainlink, I really
believe can be at the center of most of that. So, you know, collaboration is something I'm
super bullish on, and I think we need to see a lot more of it in the industry.
Well, Brady, I know, you know, we talk about kind of like,
you know, critical kind of infrastructure to kind of propel out these ecosystems forward.
And I would love if you could maybe just give us an overview of what Bonzo Finance does,
how Bonzo is contributing to Hedera's expansion in kind of the Web3 retail space and maybe even
beyond, because I know you have some interesting viewpoints as you know traditional entities come on board so yeah no doubt I want to add to what what Charles had
mentioned also all of these tools are being given to builders and developers to be able to paint
the vision that Charles just described today we're far away from that vision of interoperability being just ubiquitous across the entire space.
And I do think that it's up to us to take what's being given in terms of infrastructure,
and especially infrastructure that's enterprise grade and very robust, and start to build
applications in a way where a lot of that complexity and workflows are obfuscated for
the end user to make it just a completely
seamless experience. And so a lot of what we're doing and the way that we're thinking is it is
about cross-chain and recognizing the importance of that, but it's also about automating the
workflows that are taking place by users and making that as seamless as possible and obfuscating
all of this complexity that users experience
today.
So that's kind of the lens that we're strategically thinking through as we kind of evolve as a
product.
And as a product to dive into what we're helping contribute to the development of is Bonzo
is starting as a lending protocol.
So we're based on Aave V2.
Aave was chosen just because it's been battle
tested across the industry economically and technically. With minimal modifications, I think
trying to keep everything as intact as possible is really important just to ensure the integrity
and the security of the protocol. Lending inherently is just incredibly risky,
which is why for Chainlink,
for example, all the third-party infrastructure that we're using, it's really important
that we're using infrastructure that's incredibly robust. Oracles for a lending protocol are so
critical to its operations, where if you have an oracle that price feed that shuts down or
is delayed or has issues, that's going to cause potentially
catastrophic issues for all of the users that are utilizing the protocol and have active positions
for lending and borrowing. And so I do get better sleep knowing that this is on Hedera and on
Chainlink. And what we're offering is a lending protocol, like I said, based on Aave. Users
can take out over collateralized loans. So essentially supplying any supported asset as
collateral into the protocol. You can just supply and earn interest on what you've supplied,
or you can use that value supplied to borrow other assets that are supported by the protocol.
So every supported asset is effectively interoperable in this way.
And we're seeing a ton of usage.
So at launch, we were, I think, the fastest growing DeFi protocol on Hedera.
we're now ranked number two right behind saucer swap and we're seeing about 33 million in liquidity
We're now ranked number two right behind SaucerSwap.
with about 30 percent of that being actively borrowed you know we're starting with lending
but going back to the concept of thinking through this strategic lens of workflow automation
and reducing complexity we're on a path to become the liquidity layer of Adara,
which means we want to ensure that not only do we have a large aggregation of liquidity for this
lending layer, which allows for other DeFi protocols to come online that offer different,
more advanced functionality that use this layer, but also expanding the offering into other products,
such as bridging using layer zero and Axelar within the Bonzo interface. And then also a
vaults functionality, which is going to allow people to be able to utilize automated strategies
that don't just touch the lending side, but also actually route liquidity out to other DeFi
protocols across the ecosystem. And these vaults actually are going to automate a lot of the
operational complexity of managing liquidity. And then with the bridging component, being able to
seamlessly supply liquidity from other networks into these vaults and again, route it into other
places in the ecosystem. So that's kind of the grand vision of what we're thinking right now.
Obviously a big core focus is ensuring that lending is online working.
We're adding more assets and supporting Hedera and its economy in that way.
But very excited about the future in the next year.
I kind of want to open it up a little bit too,
because you mentioned something that I think is like super interesting when we talk about like
mass adoption of the technology. You basically mentioned, you know, abstracting away complexities
for user experience and all the things that opens up. So in that kind of vein, you obviously have
to nail the infrastructure. Like the infrastructure has to be in place to be able to make things simpler. I guess the question I kind of want to ask is from
your standpoint, Brady, how Bonzo is, I think you guys were the first to leverage Chainlink
price feeds on Hedera. How you guys are leveraging Chainlink infrastructure to enable to like scale
securely. So kind of in the vein of what you were talking about before and how this is going to just impact Hedera network adoption as a whole.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, to your point about automating workflows and scalability, if you look across the entire tech industry, not just in Web3,
there's large enterprise organizations that are literally became as big as they are because they were able to
automate workflows for people. And when you look across Web3, that's probably one of the biggest
problems that exists in the space is like everything is so incredibly manual and there's so
many different touch points that people have. And if you can start to compress this down
into a more seamless workflow for the end user,
reduce complexity, increase the value
that they're getting out of the product,
I think that's a great focus area for whatever it is that you're
doing or building in the space.
And I think with Chainlink, they're
providing a suite of tools that are
going to enable a lot of this workflow automation. We're excited to explore cross-chain interoperability that they have, which came
online recently. And then from PriceFeed's perspective, as we expand and scale, there's
going to need to be support for assets from other networks that are living in Hedera. So as we continue to expand,
being able to utilize more and more of what Chainlink's offering
and being able to do so in a way that's very reliable and trustworthy is super important.
And from a price feed perspective specifically,
that's going to be a critical thing in terms of like increasing liquidity like
direct impact is like more liquidity on the hedera network and more blue chip assets on the hedera
network and things for people to do awesome yeah no i uh i kind of want to open it up to all three
of you uh gentlemen up here and uh we have seen i've said this before in so many of these podcasts, like it seems like over the past nine to six to nine months, we've seen more announcements of real world adoption than we've seen, you know, and since 2009 to 2000 kind of 24, just in general, probably cumulative.
So I guess, you know, this is for all three of you guys.
What do you see as the biggest drivers of real world adoption today?
What trends are paving the way for a future where blockchain is seamlessly integrated
into our daily lives? I know that's a really low hanging fruit question. I'll start with Will here.
Yeah. So at least from my perspective, I think some of the things that are key to actually
getting this type of adoption is, you know, it really boils down to reduction of frictional points.
So first reducing friction
of the actual transactions themselves.
Additionally, tapping into liquidity
that was previously unconnected.
I think this was what Brady was kind of referring to
and looking at what we're doing at CCIP and being connected
to about four dozen chains today ultimately allows all of this liquidity to be unified
and tapped into across various ecosystems.
And another important thing is just ultimately lowering the barrier of entry for market participants.
This is where
user experience comes into. A lot of folks are looking for phenomenal user experience.
They are less interested in the tech behind it. They just don't want to have any type of
risk or failures within that experience. And I think that's what we really pride ourselves on is ensuring that, again, the folks that are using Chainlink Infra,
they don't have to worry about that aspect. And then the folks over at Hedera, they're providing,
you know, a high-performance blockchain. This also improves user experience. And then lastly,
Bonzo is built on top of both
and ultimately allows them to provide that UX
that allows for a wider set adoption.
So I think these are the important factors here.
Brady or Charles,
whoever wants to take what's kind of driving
real world adoption, at least in your guys' stance,
whether it's network specific or just kind of broader,
maybe tied into both. Charles, maybe go with you. Yeah. Brady kind of hit the nail on the head,
the trust, simplicity, and utility. Really for a DLT, a blockchain to be part of everyday life,
it really does have to be invisible, frictionless trustworthy useful uh that's where you know these
infrastructures like hedera and chain link become really critical um you know we we try to enable
the real world use cases that have clear benefits so you know faster settlement verifiable data
uh tokenization and reporting and then consumer apps that have a really seamless ux that's where
people like brady and other builders come into come into play is how do you build the experience for the user?
And again, Brady hit it. One of the biggest drivers to Velocity is trusted automation.
And once you have data flows that go from a physical world to digital world that have
guarantees and then smart contracts execute with that level of
confidence. That's really where the flywheel starts to spin. And a lot of people know, I think
back to technology very historically and going from like TCP IP to WWW was 10 years. And then
after that, I mean, yes, everybody had the internet, but it was still another four years until Bank of America put a payment portal online.
And it's like those, obviously, with this technology, we have a much higher velocity.
And it seems like it's going a lot faster because we're able to talk about it in real time and share information.
But in reality, I mean, we are just at those stages where, you know, we've now we've now got use cases that are becoming more, more automated,
more easier for users to have.
And now these institutions are starting to trust the technology and we're
hitting that, that quote unquote bank of America moment where it's like,
who's going to be the first big institution to take this thing global.
And like, it's coming, it's coming to that point. So I think, you know,
the flywheel
is in motion, and we're getting there, but it is that trusted automation, making it really easy
for consumers to use. And then the other thing that drives a ton of this stuff is just ubiquitous
computing. I mean, when you have IoT devices, 5G moving into 6G, you've got all kinds of ai integrating with everything you have to have
verified trusted data and then you'll always have to have your uh what i call your proof of humanity
you're gonna have to be able to prove who you are in the future moving forward and that's going to
be a really important thing i think uh just as a total quick sidebar like i i forget who i was
interviewing but i think it was one of the like the ex-chief architect of Coca-Cola.
He was talking about
the inception of the internet.
I think it was Pizza Hut,
if I'm not mistaken,
that had one of the first mailing lists.
I don't know if it was in the-
That was me.
I always use that analogy.
Pizza Hut launched a website. You couldn't do anything.
It basically just collected email addresses for four years. And then Bank of America started an
online payment portal, I believe in 96. And then guess who's the only pizza company with 300,000
email addresses and it's Pizza Hut. I'll have to make sure I give you a shout out every time.
Because I've referenced that like two or three times and I'm like, I forget who, so I know who it is. Yeah. But that's the thing. It's, you know,
getting some of these large companies to just start, I mean, get in the tech. I mean, now we
have a lot of companies that are kind of playing in the sandbox, but, um, learning, testing it out.
That's kind of one of the superpowers of the governing council is, you know, we have these
meetings, everybody gets to play around
with those sandbox ideas and where can you safely play and then you start integrating things like
chain link like bonzo and like these things can actually be used in a lot of these businesses to
to save on cost to generate even net new revenue which obviously is a cfo's uh favorite three words
so um yeah we we try to do what we can.
Brady, I would love maybe just briefly if you could, cause it's probably an expansion of what
you're going into before, but what do you think right now? I mean, are the biggest kinds of kinds
of trends that we're seeing for real world adoption throughout this space? Yeah, I think
to play off Charles's point I I've always said I would be terrified to live in a world where
both AI and blockchain aren't evolving at the same time. Because with AI, we do need some
layer of trust, semblance of trust, proof of human. It's going to be a crazy world in the next,
you know, five to 10 years, just with how fast AI is advancing, especially generative AI.
And I think in general, like in terms of mainstream adoption, this is the largest industry that tech has ever tried to disrupt in terms of how capitaled it is, how entrenched in regulation it is.
In the past disruption across tech,
it's been things like e-commerce or media.
This is the biggest industry that tech has tried to tackle.
And so I think that in itself warrants
that it's going to take a really long time for this transformation
to take place longer than we've seen historically. And typically what you see with emerging tech is
everything starts to look like a toy at first. So, you know, today we've got sushi tokens and
dog pictures and like all of these various assets and things that are just, you
know, they look really silly, especially for someone from like an outsider perspective
and reading news reports and seeing this stuff.
It looks silly.
But at the end of the day, I think, especially from like a technologist perspective, all
of the underlying tech beneath that and those sort of potentially silly looking assets
is really incredible. It's really powerful. For us, for lending and borrowing,
I've learned so much about how Aave works, for example, how over collateralized loans work,
how these decentralized finance tools and transactions work in this trustless, automated way.
how these decentralized finance tools and transactions work in this trustless,
And it's really incredible, powerful tech.
And today we're using a lot of this stuff, this underlying tech,
with assets that as an industry we've created and we've sort of applied value to.
But over time, you can use a lot of the same underlying tech,
especially as it matures and evolves with real assets.
And we are starting to see sort of the beginnings of that today.
And then my question as time goes on is always like,
is this disruptive nature for this industry going to match the disruptive
the disruptive nature that we've seen in past industries that tech has like gone after where
nature that we've seen in past industries that tech has like gone after,
the question is is it augmentative to the incumbent or is it supplanting what it is that they've built
and i go back and forth all the time on this um ultimately i do think that business models that
are built um you know foundationally with web3 in mind, so like homegrown Web3 native
protocols, are ultimately going to be able to extract the largest amount of value from the
technology and be able to pass that value on to end users and do so in a more efficient,
cost-effective way. And so I'm curious to see how incumbents revolutionize their business, cannibalize their businesses to adapt to this new world that's coming.
And also new players that are entering the market that are actually going to be a threat to incumbents and push them even further as they start to eat their lunch to like, hey, we really have to figure this out.
So, yeah, next like 10, 20 years
is going to be super interesting. You know, the lowest hanging fruit, I'd say in terms of mainstream
use cases that I've seen from like a technical perspective or a regulatory perspective and like
an end user perspective is obviously like payments and stable coins, I think is just something that
everybody's tackling really quickly from all of those different perspectives. So excited to see that kind of come to fruition and see stable coin payments come online and all the
flexibility and value that that offers. And yeah. Awesome. I wanted to ask you, Brady,
because you guys have done such a good job at educating the community on aspects of DeFi or
aspects of what Bonzo is doing. What's the best way for people to educate community on, you know, aspects of DeFi or aspects of what Bonzo is doing.
What's the best way for people to educate themselves on what you guys are building?
How can the community get involved and contribute to Bonzo and Hedera's ecosystem growth?
Yeah, education is a huge part of sort of our overarching mission.
So, you know, this functionality is brand new to all the users across Hedera,
whether they're retail users or institutional users. And, you know, for example, when decentralized
exchanges first came online a few years ago for Hedera, there was so much education that was done
by SaucerSwap and other teams. And it was super important to front load a lot of that,
to get people as educated as possible,
to answer as many questions as possible,
because that pays dividends long-term.
It ends up being your community,
educating other users outside of the core group.
And that just grows and grows over time.
The documentation for the website,
so docs.bonzo.finance is a great starting point.
There's a lot of educational resources there with regards to how to get started,
how things work functionally, the risk frameworks, which includes a lot of information actually
about Chainlink and the price feeds and oracles.
And then honestly playing, so playing with these technologies
is the best, absolute best way to learn.
So jumping in and just trying it out,
understanding how it works,
basically learning by playing across the entire,
like any emerging tech is, is going to be the
most valuable thing anyone can do. And just staying very curious about, about how everything
works and, and new things that are being introduced to, to the ecosystem and to new
products that are launching. Awesome. Thank you, Brady. I'm going to ask you guys the,
the standard question I always ask as we ramp this down. Forward-looking statements. What excites you guys most about the future of this space? I know that both ecosystems have had so many milestones. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, fine. If not, just forward-looking statements and what excites you about the future of this space or within your ecosystems.
And I'll start with Will.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, ultimately, super excited for a number of things.
Equally excited, you know, as Brady pointed out, on stable coins.
I think with a lot of the potential changes and changing environments
with the regulatory landscape is extremely interesting and exciting.
I think it's going to really open up a new wave of innovation and adoption,
specifically in the North America's region.
Personally, I'm really excited about BTC-FI.
It's a bunch of untapped liquidity that's sitting over the bitcoin ecosystem
that is really looking for a new home to make use of this uh this value and uh in general um you know
i also i'm pretty excited about uh ai ai agents and commingling with uhchains. We have a number of interesting use cases
with Chainlink and AI.
Specifically, last year we performed work
with Euroclear and Swift and UBS
on aggregating corporate actions data via LLMs
and providing accurate outcomes of those data sets, essentially solving
the hallucination problem that comes with some of these LLM usage and providing an Oracle output
to change. So really excited to see these types of things kind of come to fruition and mature.
And I think it's just going to really open up the floodgates for, you know, mass adoption as a whole.
Awesome. Charles, I'm going to move to you for forward looking statements.
What excites you about the future of this space?
Yeah, you know, about seven, eight years ago, there was a saying that was, you know, what the best what's the best use case for blockchain and crypto?
The first the first best use case is speculation.
And we're still looking for the second. And I'm really happy to say we've completely surpassed that. And now the foundation
is being laid really for blockchains and DLTs to be the trust layer of the internet. Individuals
can own their own data. Assets can move freely with transparency and security. Systems can really coordinate with each
other in a much easier way. The good thing is Hedera has always been built for that future.
Manson Lehman had that foresight decades ago, well, more than a decade ago. And now it just
feels like a lot of the rest of the world is catching up. So seeing that alignment happen,
it's happening in happen, it's happening
in policy, it's happening in enterprise, the consumer behavior is starting to turn, the velocity
of decentralized applications joining the network, all of that's really starting to come to fruition
and the original vision of what Hedera was built for and those solutions are starting to happen.
So I mean, that's what gets me up in the morning is that it took a long time to get here, but I can tell you that the use cases are expanding
rapidly and that velocity is only increasing. Brady, we're going to close down here with you.
So forward-looking statements, what excites you about the future of this space, Bonzo expansion,
wherever you want to take it? Yeah, I think, you know, Bonzo expansion ties into expansion of the Hedera
economy, and it's been so exciting to see all of the updates and changes and
the urgency, I think, out of, you know, these leading organizations within the
Hedera economy, like HBAR Foundation just driving the ecosystem
towards the right direction. I mean, like one of the biggest ones for us is as a lending protocol,
we're so reliant on stablecoin liquidity. If you look across any lending protocol across Web3,
stablecoin liquidity is definitely one of the most utilized assets just
because it opens the door for a lending protocol to perform so many different types of advanced
functionalities. It's also the most sort of borrowed asset and its stable nature enables
a lot of flexibility for a lending protocol. And so we saw crypto.com and Binance support for Hedera Native USDC recently,
which was just such a huge impact and a quick win. And we've got bridging coming online
very soon with Axelar and Layer Zero. And, you know, all of these like core pieces of critical
infrastructure that allow builders to create incredible experiences for end users is what excites me most.
And the whole ecosystem is just moving at such a rapid pace.
And when we're given access to these tools and infrastructure, it just opens the door to these new variables for all the different types of things that we can build and automate and make available.
And that's inclusive of a big part being liquidity and that, you know,
continuing to increase. And I think that's going to continue to increase even further as the year
goes on. So that's what I'm most excited about. Well, I definitely, before we hop here, wanted to
mention, and again, Brady, you guys do such a good job at kind of educational aspects so you can go to bonzo.finance to learn more um about what uh brady and and the team are building and kind of
uh defy on hedera and the documentation section as brady mentioned um at bonzo underscore finance
on x definitely check out uh chain links twitter feed i'm sure most people are following at chain link or go to a
chain dot link. And wanted to give a huge shout out to Zepsi and the whole H bar foundation team
for allowing us the opportunity to do a podcast like this. Definitely check out the H bar foundation
at H bar underscore foundation, and then not wifi, but, orbarfoundation.org. That being said, guys, really, really appreciate your time today.
Hang out with me here for a second as I ramp this down to make sure that I get the recording.
And nice meeting you, Will.
Yeah, nice to meet you guys as well.
Thanks so much, guys.
Thanks, guys.
