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IPO Season — Where does crypto go from here?
Recorded: Sept. 25, 2025 Duration: 0:58:19Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto landscape is evolving rapidly with significant fundraises, regulatory shifts, and the potential for localized stablecoins. As companies like BitGo prepare for IPOs and the SEC introduces innovation exemptions, the industry is poised for mainstream acceptance and growth.
Full Transcription
Thank you. you gm gm everybody how are you doing hey how are you home to Jeff, great to hear your voice again, buddy.
Yeah, it's been a while.
It's been a while for these, but to be honest, it was also a while for some of the ontology calls that we normally host with the team.
So it's good to be back on track.
It is, it is. It's been a wild time.
Yeah. Also, I was just listening.
Oh, I should pause it because I'm not listening now. I was just listening to your pre-recorded message. I'll let you talk more about it. But yeah, it's pretty rad. I'm only like a third of the way through. I was taking notes and I'll share those with you after I'm done with this call.
Yeah, it's much appreciated i i find those sort of things
really difficult right it's hard i i like talking to people live living people because you get the
reactions you can gauge what's happening but it's really hard when you just talk into a camera
yeah no i mean look there's stages to this this. There's doing just voice conversations like this one.
Well, actually, there's stages to that even.
Like there's you just recording something verbally.
And then there's you hosting spaces where, again, there's no visual connection.
It's just all auditory.
Then there's talking in a group, in a video call.
Then there's talking in a group, in a video call,
and then there's just staring into a black screen,
usually looking at yourself in that screen,
and then just going off.
It's just such a weird thing at each level.
It is, it is.
And, you know, I've done lots of lecturing
and public presentations and so on.
I've done very little actual video recording in that way.
So, yeah, a little bit uncomfortable. We're getting you into your creator era, Jeff, and I'm here for
it. I was going to say, if you wanted to, like, if you feel like you want to redo or do another
take of this, I'm happy to be on a call with you, right, on a video chat, and you're just staring at me,
and I'm just giving you the visual cues, like, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Like, I won't record myself or anything,
just so you could have someone to look at.
Yeah, no, no, that could be really useful, actually.
Yeah, no, it could work.
Or it could be a fireside chat, and I'm talking to you.
I don't know how this was planned, to be honest,
but I'm happy to help.
I'm with you, though. Even to this point like i would say i've been in my creator era for some
time now but even talking to a screen that's not something that i'm 100 uh comfortable with still
because most of the time i'm doing like streams or podcasts and there's at least one more person with me.
Yeah.
As he says, I'm always a little bit conscious, right?
Because I carry a little bit of weight.
I've lost a little bit, but I carry a little bit of weight.
And I'm always worried that I'm going to come across
like a British Jack Black or something.
And that's not what I'm going for.
The hair, maybe.
But brother, you look healthy.
You do not look bad.
It's been a long journey.
Yeah, I invited Barnabas also to join us up here.
I think he's up here as a speaker.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, Jim, Jim, guys.
Hey, buddy.
Good to hear from you too.
Yeah, thank you. And guys. Hey, buddy. Good to hear from you, too. Yeah, thank you.
And how are you guys doing today?
I'm doing okay.
Yeah, pretty good here.
Pretty good.
I'm in a weird position.
I'm now an empty nester, so my house is pretty quiet most of the time,
apart from my wife.
She's at work a lot.
Wow.
Wait, that's a milestone. i'm very far away from that
but that's incredible to hear congrats i think no i don't like it i don't like it's too quiet
you know as as as painful as like children can be in terms of like how
just all the things children do as they grow up and teenagers, I can't even imagine.
I'm not even there yet with my kid.
But I'm sure that when the day comes, it's hard.
It's just a big part of your life just gone.
Yeah, these are my mates, you know.
We hang out, we chat, we do stuff.
So, you know, all of a sudden it's a big empty hole.
Yeah, well, I'm wishing you the best in your, I guess, time of adapting to this new reality.
Yeah, do you know what? It'll be fine.
It'll be fine.
And at some point they'll come back and I'll be like, why on earth did I miss them?
What's going on here?
Well, the economy keeps going the way it is.
Our kids are never leaving.
They'll just keep coming back.
All righty.
Well, let's kick it off.
This has been fun.
As you can see, if you're just tuning into this,
we haven't heard from one another in these spaces for some time.
I know I've been traveling and, you know, especially most recently last week, I was at Base Camp.
That was quite, you know, different for me in terms of like the types of events that I travel to for this industry.
And, you know, I think even before that, like, a lot of stuff, life events happening.
And so we're happy to be back. We're catching up. But while we've been gone, a lot has been
happening. And actually, I do want to like, position some of this conversation from a changing
regulatory landscape. Oh, excuse me. You should probably not drink sparkling water while I'm hosting these.
From a changing regulatory landscape point of view,
in terms of where crypto is going next.
And by crypto, broad term, we could talk about cryptocurrencies, sure.
Crypto, broad term, you know, we could talk about cryptocurrencies, sure, but cryptography,
which is a big piece of what DID and ZK proofs are, that's part of that conversation too. So
I'm going to use that as the framing for this conversation, and then we can kind of riff
off of, from that, off of some of these topics. And so one of the first things I
want to talk about, which I think we can talk about more broadly from, you know, with other
examples, but that is in the news that Heather is planning a $500 billion valuation to fundraise, I believe, $20 billion.
Like it's going to be a B with a B billion dollar funding round.
USDT is their product, and they are one of, if not the largest stablecoin in the ecosystem.
So I'm going to throw it right back out to this wonderful panel of ours.
What does it say when Tether, USDT, is raising $20 billion in terms of where we are? Let's not
even talk about the market cycle, the regulatory space, because again, USDT, it's in the name.
because, again, USDT, it's in the name.
Where are we?
What does this mean?
What does this mean not for them, but for the industry at large?
We'll start with you, Jeff.
I've been pushing this, actually, to people I've been talking to.
I think we're in the regulatory story arc of crypto at the moment.
We thought we saw regulation before, but these companies, Tether, Circle,
they are so mainstream.
Even Coinbase, right?
These are becoming so mainstream.
And this is off the back of the changing environment
in the US, but also the changing environment
because of that around the world.
We've got lots going on in the UK at the moment exploring GBP stablecoins.
So, you know, finally, I might be able to have a British pound stablecoin that I can cash out and not get screwed on exchange rates every time I try and cash out anything.
The world is changing rapidly when it comes to digital assets. We're going to see more
tokenization. We're going to see more regulation. I'm really interested to see how this plays out
because the UK is rapidly embracing stable coins. Now, this is a long way from embracing decentralized exchanges.
This is a long way from embracing crypto in general.
But stable coins is going to be the thing that opens the door to institutions and governments
being able to regulate for something.
And we should have seen this coming, actually.
We saw this with MAS in Singapore.
They put a lot of clear-ish regulation in place for stable coins several years ago now. And so
it was always an easier pathway for governments to take on board. We've seen it in the US. We'll
see it across Europe. I think when it happens, you know the old meme, nothing and then all at once.
I think that's what we'll head to with stable coin adoption. I think it'd be rapid. And I think regulation will follow very, very quickly.
And I think there's some really interesting discussions around what that looks like
for people, for privacy, for ownership. And I worry about how much control companies can have with stable Koreans and how much pressure governments can apply to that.
But I think it's on the whole, this is the movement we want to see.
We've just got to protect decentralization at every battle we face.
And we will face them, I think.
That was a longer answer than you maybe wanted.
No, no, I love long-winded answers. And you know what? I would want no less from you,
because you definitely add a lot of context to your answers. I mean, I personally believe that
stablecoins are the Trojan horse for crypto into the general, I guess, financial system. Because again, it just seems
to reinforce this idea of like a digital dollar, which, you know, for the most part, I think,
for the US specifically, bodes well. It's really great. Tokenizing the dollar and then enabling a crypto market for
the world economy with the US dollar at the center of it. So I think it's a Trojan horse,
and I think it's going to play out really well. I do agree with you. I think when you start,
and no one ever said that Tether was decentralized. I don't think that anybody's arguing that. These are centralized bodies, right? And they're going to do what centralized
companies do. And I hope for those of us who are in the Web3 space or would consider ourselves
crypto natives, we're not, you know, kind of surprised if any of the things that, you know, Jeff was kind of talking about
do end up happening. But again, I think that's the optionality we have as crypto natives or
for anybody who discovers crypto through stable coins can then enable for themselves, which is
what other options are there that are more decentralized? It doesn't just have to be
one stablecoin to rule
them all. Barnabas, do you have any thoughts on this or do you want to pass on to the next one?
Yeah, I think I have just a little thing to say about this. And, you know, Tether is trying to expand its, let's say, the total supply and they want to push in money.
So for me, I think it's going into,
they want to just go into different areas,
like let's say AI, energy, media, like Josh said,
you know, they want to kind of like expand their reach.
And this is ambitious because the money they are going to get
is like, it's not just a payment or stable coin utility,
but a broader financial slash tech kind of like exposure
to multiple domains.
And also they want to leverage in policy and regulation.
And also I think for the competitive signal.
So they are competing with so many different stablecoins
and they want to kind of like have that leverage
and be the forefront, you know,
in terms of stablecoin adoption in the world.
So I think that's all I have to say.
You guys have said all the points, but yeah, this is my contribution.
Yeah, and I think for anybody in the US who's listening to this, I will say, I think for the most part, USCC has been gaining market share here, you know, as the stable coin of choice.
But around the world, USDT is still king. I would be hard-pressed to be convinced otherwise.
I know when I first started in this ecosystem, USDT had the market share in the US.
Sure, there were other, you know, crypto-native, decentralized, if you will, stable coins like DAI.
But, you know, USDT was the be-all and end-all for the most part.
There was little competition from any other stablecoin. So I say that because this kind of
growth trajectory from one of, if not the largest stablecoin, I think points to this changing of the tides, if you
will, in terms of what crypto can be within the next year.
You know, the conversation next year might be entirely different because for all we know,
we're buying from the app store or, you know, shopping for music or paying for
subscriptions on Spotify with USDT, USDC with stable coins. That's to say that these companies
themselves don't launch their own stable coins. So it's just a really interesting prospect for
what the next year can bring to us. Go for it, Jeff.
Yeah. And I think on top of that, when I was in, where was I? It might have been
Czech Republic. And I was talking to somebody who was looking at trying to introduce institutions,
traditional finance into the crypto DeFi world. And the big sticking point they had,
surprisingly, I expected it to be regulation
or something like that.
And it simply wasn't.
It was liquidity.
There just wasn't enough liquidity in the market
for these big players to come in and start playing ball.
Not even big players,
even just medium-sized TradFi players.
Just not enough liquidity in there.
And so we rely on people like Tether, I think, and to a degree also circle with USDC to bring
in more liquidity into this market.
I think we shouldn't understate what a positive this is.
Now, whether people will be happy to lose some of the volatility we see with more liquidity, I don't know.
People like the volatility.
Not me so much.
I'm quite old.
I prefer a peaceful life.
But lots of people like that volatility in crypto.
It's what drives them into it.
And I wonder how much that will change with more stability, with more liquidity coming in.
But just as an additional point, we need more liquidity.
So this happening, Tether getting more money in there, more liquidity coming in is going to be really, really good for making it more mainstream and getting more people involved.
I 100% agree with you.
And I think this next story just kind of ties into this because as I renamed the title of this space, IPO season is
upon us. And I think this all kind of fits in together. There appears to be some of the
regulatory filing from BitGo to basically do a NASDAQ IPO. They currently have about 90 billion.
Again, these numbers sound outrageous.
These are numbers that sound almost made up,
but 90 billion with a B, assets under custody.
And it is currently seeking an IPO.
That, again, this is just one of many, many IPOs.
I saw recently a tweet with about, gosh, 20 different companies that are, you
know, I think that that's still even underestimating companies that are preparing to go for an
IPO.
IPOs, for those of you who don't know, this is kind of the traditional or tradified markets
version of an ICO, where you go to market and you sell stock for
your business instead of just tokens in like what most of us cryptodegens might be more familiar
with. And in order to go about and do that, there is tremendous regulatory oversight to ensure that these companies are legitimate and they
obviously have a plan for how they're going to run the business in the future and be profitable,
et cetera, et cetera. But TLDR, it is regulated by traditional American U.S. stock exchange regulations, etc., etc.
So this is no small feat.
And again, this wouldn't have been possible a year ago.
I don't think anybody was even close to talking about anything like this a year ago.
So again, I'll go to you,
Jeff. What does this mean where not just stable coins, but exchanges and other kind of companies
that are bad at the forefront of innovation in the decentralized economy are going now for traditional investment from traditional finance, like in this case,
NASDAQ and the stock exchange?
Yes, I think I've got three comments on this, you know, Humpty.
I think number one is just, I find it hilarious, right?
We spent so many years talking about tokenize everything.
And now the exciting news is actually the opposite journey, almost that journey into
traditional stock selling for these companies, which I find really interesting that actually
there's a synergy backwards and forwards.
Let's tokenize some of the stuff in the real world and let's bring some of the stuff from
the blockchain.
Of course, it's the real world, their businesses, their companies, but actually go more traditional
route for funding as well.
I think the biggest win here might not be what people think it is.
I think it's talent acquisition, right?
I think it's legitimacy for businesses, legitimacy for companies that allows us to do something that we found very,
very difficult in this space. And that's acquire highly talented individuals to come in and work.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not criticizing the people who work in this space. I think there are
some amazing people who are innovative, quick moving, really good at what they do. But sometimes
we lack some people who've got that experience and that knowledge.
And sometimes we're just fishing in a small pool sometimes for talent.
There's a small amount of people in there.
And I think this legitimizes things and allows us to attract from a bigger pool of talent.
And I think that could be really, really important.
And then, you know, the second point, the third point, I guess, you already
touched on, and that is, you know, it also allows more funding to flow into the industry,
which means we can do more cool things, we can do more interesting things and more exciting things.
I hope it means we see a system that relies a little bit less on some of the predatory tactics we've seen in terms of funding and getting projects off the ground.
I also hope it might end up in the long run, resulting in businesses being able to wait to be able to release tokens.
I think tokenization is really important.
I think releasing tokens at the right time is more important.
And maybe that takes the pressure off to release them at the wrong time.
There's lots of, I don't know how the cards are going to fall.
I think there's a lot of cool stuff in this.
I'm most excited about the potential for talent acquisition,
but also for easing some of the financial burden people see as well.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
I would actually, I guess, double down on this
with things that I'm more knowledgeable about,
like Coinbase is a good example.
They are a Fortune 500 company.
They've got a foot in both the traditional finance space and the decentralized finance space, innovating in so many different areas.
hiring on the more traditional, you know, I guess, what would you call it, institutional
type of a setup, they're able to attract talent from across, you know, across the line, I guess,
from the traditional technology space. It will be very interesting to see when and if,
my opinion, when Uniswap goes public
and they're able to tap some of the best talent
from like JP Morgan and McKinsey and Google
to innovate and develop these markets in ways that are complementary to what people do
most on a day-to-day versus just serving the needs of a very small niche market,
which, again, I think both are valid. But if we're going to grow the ecosystem,
Both are valid.
But if we're going to grow the ecosystem, again, just really here emphasizing what Jeff has already said,
we need to bring in new players, both from the skill and design side, but also from the financial and liquidity side.
So I think that this bodes well for the entire ecosystem.
I will also say, I talked about this briefly on the pod that Mew hosted last week, which
some of the inspiration for this space comes from that.
So go listen to it if you haven't listened to it yet.
But that is, as we see decentralized players start to develop and tap traditional finance markets and vice versa,
right, where the NASDAQ starts tokenizing tokens and listing them on traditional markets,
you're going to see the value move both ways much more rapidly, which is something that we haven't
seen before. What does a tokenized stock look like?
And what does a token look like on the stock market?
This to me is going to be something that just changes the way that money works.
And money is such a very old, it's an artifact.
It's a historical thing at this point.
We're now changing the way money works.
And it's moving at the speed of the internet, which I think that to me, that's kind of the value proposition of all of this is the internet has changed a lot of things, but it really hasn't changed the way that money works. And with
crypto becoming or really kind of crossing this chasm into more of the traditional markets and
what most people are familiar with, the internet will now change the way that money works. Go for
it, Jeff. I love these conversations. They make me think about things that are just not even on my radar sometimes. And you spoke about Uniswap. So I do a lot with Uniswap. I love
Uniswap. I do lots of liquidity stuff and so on with them. Now, here's the question then,
Humpty. And this is a really interesting question, I think. I agree with you. I think Uniswap are
prime for IPO. They are such a key player in this entire space. I think they're absolutely prime for it. Now,
but here's the question. How do you reconcile token holders and shareholders? There's so much
discussion about things like fee switch for Uniswap. Do you turn it on? Do you not turn it on?
like fee switch for Uniswap.
Do you turn it on?
Do you not turn it on?
Token holders at the moment are in governance,
but with a hope, I think.
I'm a token holder.
I'm living hope that one day the fee switch will turn on.
And there's governance involved.
How does that get reconciled with a more traditional approach
with shareholders and directors and sharing profits in that way.
And is that a source of conflict?
Is that something legally and regularity becomes really, really difficult to solve?
I've not thought about it.
I'm not expecting an answer for it.
But I think it's a really interesting point that the people at Uniswap becomes potentially
a challenge.
Yeah, 100%.
I think that's the challenge, right?
And people smarter than me, hopefully, and I'm sure, are the ones that are tackling questions
like that.
I mean, that changes everything, right?
In terms of like how, I don't want to call it a dividend, right?
But like how dividends work in the traditional
market because the market pool or the marketplace grows tremendously. So this is definitely
something that needs to be tackled. I don't know how, obviously. And maybe that's why people hold
off. I don't know. Maybe this is kind of the foresight that these companies have had. It's like, if we turn on that switch,
it's going to be really hard to turn it off. So we won't turn it on until we have a clearer
regulatory kind of picture. And we've now ourselves entered a more traditional finance
market to then develop these together. Another thing to consider,
which I mentioned this in a separate space, is when you have this merging of the two markets,
which is DeFi and TradFi, how do you reconcile for a market that's open 24-7?
Because currently, the traditional markets close.
DeFi never closes.
Are people getting rugged over the weekend if, say, they're not using Uniswap?
Versus maybe more of a traditional platform where these tokens live?
I don't know.
And that's, again, the thinking that I don't think many of us
have had to think about before,
but especially those who are building DeFi businesses and products
certainly do have to reconcile now.
I guess I'll just add on to that, Humpty, as well.
You think about projects like GMX,
whose entire token basis is kind of on the profit share idea,
it becomes really difficult, right?
Maybe that's not even on their radar.
We shouldn't assume everybody's going to be looking at IPOs.
But yeah, it's a good one.
I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out.
Absolutely.
Cool.
Well, another one, and I feel like all of these are along the same lines,
but it seems like this is the through line for the last week or so.
The SEC unveils, quote unquote, innovation exemption for crypto firms by December.
So what does this mean?
It allows, it's a shift from enforcement allowing faster product launches under new crypto-specific rules to boost innovation.
I mean, Jeff, it hasn't been a year because I definitely feel like I say this a lot.
But I know that recently and for the last year I've been saying with the unclear guidance and almost criminalization of innovation
that's happening,
at least here in the US,
it's pushing innovation outside of this country.
And I mean, I don't know how many people
who are listening are from the US,
probably no one,
at least not on this space right now,
but maybe the people who listen to it afterwards are.
And other people might feel differently.
It might be like, well, it's kind of now going to stagnate our growth.
Because if you're living in a country where, you know, you didn't have that same slowing down innovation because you were getting all of
these lawsuits being handed out left, right, and center from the SEC because it was unclear what
people could do. And again, because it was no regulatory clarity, it was hard for people to know what the hell they were doing wrong or what they can do to improve products that are crypto adjacent or crypto native.
And again, keep that innovation home here in the US, where a lot of this has, you know,
being developed and a lot of companies, I mean, we look at a tornado cache, right?
A lot of times that regulation stops even things that aren't necessarily homegrown.
But even if they are not, right?
Like if you're participating in the U.S. market, it's a big piece to knock out and say, you can't play here. So what do you think about this in terms of now opening up innovation
for people to more freely participate in this economy
as a developer of these new crypto-economic systems?
I'll kick off, and then I'll step back and let Barnabas jump in
if he wants to jump in as well.
So I'm quite jealous of this Humpty, right?
I don't know if you monitored the news in the UK.
So the other day, Donald Trump came over.
He met the king in the fairy tale palace and all the nonsense and pomp and ceremony of the UK and all these things.
the nonsense and pomp and ceremony of the UK and all these things.
But then, interestingly, we obviously announced the, I think, about $100 billion or pounds
worth of investment from American tech into the UK, which was really good news.
We have some really good tech companies in the UK, actually.
Not crypto, but tech in general, some really good AI companies in the uk actually not crypto but tech in general some really good ai companies
uh it's all spread around sort of oxford cambridge and london so it's like a triangle of
good solid tech startups and good businesses um but at the same time whilst we announced that, nothing was announced around freedoms to develop or support
to develop or opportunities to develop or improvement in guidance. For instance, I'm still
locked out of so many blockchain platforms unless I use a VPN. The regulation is difficult.
I use a VPN. The regulation is difficult. The guidance is non-existent. The taxation makes no
sense. It's a mess. And so we announced this $100 billion worth of opportunity and investment.
But the infrastructure to support that for businesses, for developers, for projects,
for founders, for entrepreneurs, just doesn't exist, at least in the crypto space.
And that's a real shame. So my initial response is, I'm really quite jealous. I wish we had that.
I wish we had that regulation. I wish we had the clarity. I wish we encouraged innovation.
And I'll back that up by explaining why I think this is important. It's not just
because I'm in crypto. It's not just because I like Web3. It's because the UK, the US, the Europe,
the world in general has a productivity crisis. People are working lots of hours. People are
working very hard. Lots of people are working two jobs. Families are working. Everybody in the family is working.
And yet there's not enough productivity according to the measures of productivity.
And people aren't earning enough money according to the measures of what you need to live well.
We need a solution to improve productivity and to improve wages. I'm a firm believer that tech, in particular, I think Web3 tech, AI tech, will actually solve a lot of these problems.
And so I think it's imperative upon governments to be clear on their legislation, to be clear on their taxation,
but to go beyond that and support projects and support founders to succeed.
And so I think the world has to follow suit and start giving people the freedom to produce
and innovate.
Barnabas?
Agreed, by the way.
Barnabas?
Yeah, yeah.
I think I totally agree with jeff on what he said you know um if
you are backed by the government and the government give you like this go ahead to
start innovating stuff i think um sky's your limit but in so many countries you know government is
limiting founders creativity innovation um kind of like saying, no, we shouldn't do that.
And most government right around the world, they don't want that decentralization, meaning
they cannot control those things.
But I think U.S. has taken an extra, like the next step in giving people that kind of
like go ahead and, you know, for people people to be innovative for people to be creative in
just building stuff in the web3 space so um i think uh other i i hope other countries will
follow uh because that's the same thing that is happening here in nigeria you know the the
government doesn't want to give people that control and if you you say let's let's say you want to build stuff
as a founder they kind of like put these restrictions on you um they make it very very
difficult for you to kind of like make that platform come to life and for me i believe that
you know so many countries around the world are looking up to the us and i hope that we get to
following that full step and allowing creativity,
allowing innovation to kind of like follow so that people be free from this poverty,
will be free from that.
You know, like Josh said, so many families are working and there's not anything to show for it.
So I think this is an extra step for us to make things easier for everybody.
Awesome. Thanks so much for the input.
I want to recognize the folks in the audience.
GM to all of our friends who usually join us.
I see RTD, DeLon, Aaron, and Triumph.
And also GM to some of our media friends.
Heath Daly, I'm an avid reader of your newsletter.
Happy to have you here.
And Ashton, a new follower to my account, Crypto Coin Show. And I see you in the audience too.
Always welcome to raise your hand and come on up to speak if you're interested, if you have any
thoughts on the matter. While we transition now to the next part of our conversation, which is
equally exciting, House of ZK, or I think that's what it's called.
I mean, everything I'm seeing, it's H-O-Z-K.
But Jeff, what's going on at Token 2049 next week?
Not next year, next week.
And share with us a little bit of the alpha
in terms of what you and Anthology are doing there.
Yeah, so really exciting.
I'm unfortunately not able to be there in person.
Randy is there in person for us.
So she's representing us down on the ground.
I think she's doing a panel as well for House of ZK.
So House of ZK do some really cool stuff around the world
on different things, talking about zero-knowledge proofs,
the need for privacy, how we
implement this, just put that into positioning for people. Blockchain was amazing. We celebrated
its transparency. We celebrated its immutability. And then we sat down and thought, oh, shit,
it's really transparent. This could be a problem. And then we had to fix that because not everything
needs to be transparent. So zero knowledge proofs provide some of the solutions to that.
But beyond that, it also provides some of the solutions for going off chain and getting
information off chain to bring on chain to check without exposing too much data. So House of ZK
do lots of education, really education focused on what that means,
how that can be implemented, why it's important. And so we're sponsoring an event over there.
I think it's on Monday and there'll be some really cool panels. There'll be people from
institutions from some really cool areas. And I'm giving a talk on essentially placing people within that scenario of zero knowledge proofs and AI and blockchain and identity.
The entire session is around the theme is verifying intelligence.
So, yeah, that is quite a broad theme, but I think it's really important.
I like it because it's not verifying humanity.
It's verifying intelligence.
Because actually, from my point of view, as we get into the agent section of AI,
and agents are going to be doing things for us all over the place.
They're going to be acting legally on our behalf.
They'll be buying things.
They'll be selling things.
They'll be signing contracts.
They'll be applying for jobs
they'll be doing all these different things we need to be able to verify that that intelligence
artificial or real is allowed to do that that they represent you that they've got the agency to do
that and so my speech my talk a 15 minute keynote is around that topic on there. I think it should be really cool. It's something we're really focused on with Ontology
of how we can do that well whilst protecting privacy.
So, yeah, really excited to see how that plays out.
Did I lose you?
Did I get rugged?
No, you're there.
Did you hear me okay?
I'd finished. I'd just finished talking.
I finished on a dramatic pause, Humpty,
to try and get some applause or something.
Did I lose you? Am I back?
Oh, no, I can hear you, Umpty, perfectly well.
Oh, no. I can hear you, Humpty, perfectly well.
Okay, good. Sorry.
I could hear you the first twice you said you can not hear you,
and now you're a little bit echoey.
Do you want to try again, just to see if I can?
I think you're fine.
I think you're okay.
I think you're okay.
Let's go with it.
See what happens.
Okay.
Okay.
All righty.
Let's continue.
Sorry.
That was a rude interruption on my part. But yeah, so HasamZK, agree with verifying intelligence makes a lot of sense. because everything is getting removed.
Humpty, I'm going to interrupt you.
You sound like Glados.
I don't know if anybody's ever played Portal, the game, or Portal 2,
but Humpty just sounds like Glados.
I have no idea what he's saying.
He sounds like a robot, but
not one I can understand very well.
I think he's disappeared. I think
he's actually gone off. So
I'll just jump in. Well, hopefully
Humpty comes back. So
I think
the House of ZK stuff will be
shown afterwards. Certainly my stuff will be shown afterwards.
Certainly my talk will be shown afterwards,
at least on the Ontology channels.
I think it's really important.
It's really cool.
We're going to be promoting lots of things from Ontology
over the coming weeks.
Our release dates keep getting pushed back for things
because it's quite difficult
as we push towards account abstraction
and smart wall abstraction and smart
wallets and smart identity. I've just invented that phrase, but I like it. So smart identity.
And yeah, I think it's really interesting. As we wait for Humpty to hopefully get back online,
one of the things I would say is I just arc back to what we were talking about at the very start of this conversation
is the idea that we're in this regulatory era where regulation and compliance is going to become
really important. And interestingly, I spoke to a KYC, Know Your Customer, Know Your Business,
and AML, anti-money laundering company, who do a lot of
work in the Web3 space with crypto firms. And I spoke to them about the opportunities for zero
knowledge proofs and being able to do KYCs in that way. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
But there just currently isn't any regulatory appetite for that.
And I think this is going to be really interesting.
And one of the things we'll see as things improve with the regulatory space is hopefully we get chance, not just regulation to be imposed upon us,
but for the Web3 space to actually influence some of the decisions about how that regulation is done.
face to actually influence some of the decisions about how that regulation is done. Because
anybody who's gone through KYC or AML procedures knows that you do it every time, every time you
use a new platform. It's very frustrating. It takes a long time. It's very difficult.
And you expose lots of data to people that you don't necessarily need to expose. And so
zero knowledge proves, I think, will have a role to play that in the future.
And Barnabas, I did want to ask you something on stable coins, if that's okay. So before I joined
Ontology, I actually worked for a stable coin setup that was looking at producing stable coins
for the Philippines. The idea being that countries needed their own stable coins for loans and for transacting and so on.
And I saw a post on Twitter, actually, Barnabas, on X.
Sorry, let me get up to date.
I saw a post on X saying that countries in Africa potentially need their own stable coins.
So Nigeria would need their own stable coin in their own currency.
But when we tried to work with the Philippines on this, there was a little
bit of pushback from people saying, actually, we prefer to transact in USDC or USDT. And so I
wondered from your point of view, do you think there is a demand for localized stablecoins beyond
USD stablecoins? Do you think that's something we'll see develop as legislation becomes easier,
as regulation becomes easier?
Could you see Nigeria, for example, launching their own stablecoin?
Yeah, thank you.
For me, I think I believe we need stablecoin that is localized, meaning every country should have their own stablecoin.
But the problem is the adoption so if if you
come up with an idea of developing your own stablecoin um how many people are going to
or like that adoption i think is the real issue because i believe that in the whole world nigeria
is i think top there's a top five in crypto adoption we have a lot of users we have a lot of
people we have a lot of like founders in the web3 space but when it comes to stablecoin adoption
we've been trying they've been trying to talk to the government in um kind of like
establishing that you know the government should have control over the stable coin and so on and so forth. But the government is not even going into that direction.
So it's going to take a while for us to have
like a local stable coin since we are used to USDT,
USDC and so on and so forth.
Yeah, I think it's interesting.
And it's difficult that is that again,
it's that regulation that keeps things keeps things from progressing in that way.
And I'm a big DeFi user.
I'm a big believer that actually you need stable coins for DeFi to work.
And localized stable coins really help that.
But the regulation has to be in place.
Humpty, I think we've got you back.
I was just spitballing with Barnabas and just asking questions I find interesting that may or may not be topic adjacent.
But good to have you back, I hope.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Light and clear.
How weird.
Okay.
So a lot of weird things happened.
Apparently, the power at my home went out and then right back up.
I was connected to Wi Fi from my device. The space didn't get rugged,
but I can't speak on that account that's hosting it now, which is where I was speaking. But I can
now speak from my personal account, which I haven't been able to for up as to what's been happening,
but I think the last conversation, at least,
that I was trying to have was about verifying intelligence,
which I don't know how far away we've gotten from that,
but I was simply kind of emphasizing that point
that we've been making here for some time that agents will be as
I guess recognized valuable actors in the ecosystem as much as humans but just like
humans not every single actor is creating any value there might might be extractors, there might be some that are just trolling the system.
And for that, we do need ways to verify
the intelligence of those actors.
Maybe we apply that to some of the general populace too,
not just agents,
so that we can prove the intelligence of what we say
and what we share online.
Yeah, I'd prefer to keep away from that.
Again, I'm getting older, Humpty.
That gets harder and harder to prove every year.
But I think it's really interesting because, you know,
when you say that, when you talk about agents in that way,
it goes beyond, it copies what we've seen in identity, right? It goes beyond just putting an identity on them.
Who is this agent?
Are they legitimate?
Are they doing the right things?
And we get right into that conversation about reputation.
How has this agent acted?
What do you expect to see from this agent?
Is he acting in a way that adds value or removes value?
Is he acting in a way that can be trusted?
These are all really important,
and it's kind of just a replay of what we see with identity in general as well. We've seen
this play out already within the identity space. We've lost Humpty again. That's okay. That's okay.
He might come back. We never know. But yeah yeah, so just just to reiterate what Humpty is saying, I think we end up in a position where reputation for agents becomes important,'ve seen within the human identity space, moving into reputation being really important.
And we'll see that in the agents as well, I think.
Welcome back again, Humpty.
Yeah, it's not my best effort in a while.
I've had no issues with spaces now for a couple of months and today.
I mean, I can't blame spaces, to be honest.
This is more of a localized issue.
But yeah, you know, I wonder, and I know we're reaching the top of the hour.
So maybe this is a good springboard for next week.
But I wonder how we can productize this so that it can be not just recognized as an important thing for you
know humanity and and just everyone you know on the internet but that it is so such low effort
to get this done that people don't reject it or or or even assume that its value is not important.
And the reason why I say that is,
I've been contributing to the identity space
with decentralized identity and even privacy,
building some privacy products now for several years,
not as much as others who are in this industry,
but close to six, seven years.
And in that time, I've learned that some people don't care about privacy
um they they can't be bothered and i think it's because there's a friction point there
uh in terms of what privacy represents and how you enable it and what it it removes in terms of your
user experience um you know we are the product on most,
if not all social media platforms.
So people don't care that their information gets sold
and that they are then just a means to an end
for these trillion dollar enterprises.
So I wonder as AI proliferates even further, because it already has a lot, how we can ensure
that people care and that people participate willingly in this ecosystem, opt in even to
this future where we are all valuable contributors to the network
and we see the value of reputability,
not just from a human perspective, from an agent or AI perspective too.
I don't know how we solve that because I don't think we've really done a good job at solving it at scale
with some of the tools that we have for some of the problems that we have today.
I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's almost impossible.
So I was talking to a friend who works in cybersecurity the other day, and we saw a lot of parallels in cybersecurity to personal privacy and identity and data and things like that.
And in that people only care when it's too late to care, when they've had a problem,
when something bad's happened, when something wrong has happened. And, you know, I looked at
my personal cybersecurity at home on my personal devices. It's pretty bad. If I look at my professional devices,
it's pretty good. And so obviously, we're not going to have time to get into this too much today. But
my take home from this conversation that I had with a friend of mine was,
we potentially have to approach this in a similar way to cybersecurity has approached it.
And we don't approach individual privacy.
We enforce privacy or help privacy to be enforced from providers of social media.
So you take Farcaster, for instance.
You make it so Farcaster can very easily provide privacy and data security for their users,
as opposed for each and every user having to do it every single time.
You enable people building AI agents to just build it into their agents, rather than people having to do it each and every time.
And that's what security has done for the cybersecurity industry.
I wonder if it's a similar approach that actually for an individual, it's just too
big. It's too much for people providing services for individuals. Maybe that's where the solution
lies. I don't know. Yeah, I think that's the dilemma, you know, that we were faced with.
And maybe we'll just to be more on the nose the innovators dilemma that we're currently in so
let's definitely tackle this uh next week i think that we this is this is a great point to make and
a great point to explore so if anybody who's listening today is planning on coming back next
week the homework is um how do you solve for you know these these things that are privacy related uh as it pertains
to and reputability related as it pertains to ai in a world where most people can't be bothered
with it and as a side um as a side quest innovatorsmma is a great book, if anybody hasn't read it yet.
A lot of really interesting thought experiments in terms of how you can go about solving for some of these problems.
So that's what I will do over the weekend. I'll think about it. I'll compare notes with my crib notes from that book and bring it back next week.
and with my crib notes from that book and bring it back next week.
Just one final from me.
Thank you, Humpty and Barnabas, on that.
I was quite tired for tonight.
I was struggling, and I really enjoyed the conversation,
so I appreciate it a lot.
Really good time.
Thank you, Jeff. Always a pleasure.
Glad we were able to give you a boost of energy.
And next week, it sounds like potentially even more so,
especially with Token 2049 happening,
let's say we can't get the team on here
to have that conversation with us
because we do have a line with some of the folks
that are going to be out there.
We might make it a T 2049 type uh vibe here sounds like an excellent plan all righty thank you so much
for your time as well for everybody who's tuning in i appreciate you all coming on uh we'll see
you next week uh same time uh as usual unless something comes up but I don't think so we have a really good conversation lined up
bye everybody
