Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
$KDA | Kadena News #3 🎙️
Recorded: Aug. 18, 2025 Duration: 1:00:39Space Recording
Short Summary
Kadena is making waves in the blockchain space with its innovative layer one scalable proof of work blockchain, attracting major projects like Uniswap and Morpho, and expanding its ecosystem through strategic partnerships and community engagement. The focus on decentralized identities and the intersection of AI and blockchain highlights emerging trends that could redefine user interactions and enterprise adoption in the crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I hope everyone's having a good Monday.
Welcome to Kdenena News. My name is Stuart Popejoy. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Cadena.
And this is a recurring series we do to keep the community ecosystem projects and others updated.
New folks coming in to check out Cadena and talk to smart people.
A little bit about Kadena.
We're a layer one horizontally scalable proof of work blockchain built for business.
I'll be your host of these episodes where we'll go over some of our latest news.
And we also have really exciting guests.
Today we have Chris Nagoy who I'll introduce in a second after we get through the news.
Super excited to talk to this extremely intelligent person,
and I'm sure you're going to get a lot out of it.
So let's dive in.
Start with some recent news in our ecosystem.
Some projects, project news, chips, use cases,
KDA mining without need for hardware.
So it basically broadens access to mining and mining rewards.
Their platform is now integrated into DeFi Llama for TVL reporting,
which is great because it adds TVL to our ecosystem.
And that's always a good thing for a platform.
So excited about that.
And then our EVM testnet continues to scream,
move forward quickly.
A bunch of projects announced.
Big ones were Uniswap and Morpho.
Uniswap Dex, Morpho Lending, coming to Cadena EVM Mainnet,
thanks to Oku. Other projects are Via Labs, Relend, Dia, Morki. So, you know know we launched testnet in at ecc in june with 70 partners and that number is only
been going up um so uh engineering team is working hard on that and we're moving towards uh a testnet
v2 in uh in cadena news uh some stats chainweb surpassed 6 million blocks in July.
We have our KIPP council, which is deciding on the various future directions for Cadena.
It includes members from different projects and departments.
Roadmap initiative this year is to get more feedback from the
community to help improve the future of Cadena. We had a cabinet poll for a developer advocate
program to launch a developer advocate program to onboard and support new developers building
on both PACT and EMEM. Our CBO, Annelneliese Osborn was in DC while the Clarity Act and Genius Act were passing
and hooked up with the digital chamber to help educate DC during that critical week.
Our team went out to ETH Vietnam, had a great turnout.
We had a workshop side event for EVM developers, amplified the grant program,
and our nascent DevRel program connected with local developers in Vietnam. That's DevRel
becoming a much bigger focus, and you're going to see a lot of exciting new things
coming from Kadena with DevRel shortly. Vietnam, meanwhile, has become a top 10 area for blockchain
development, so it's great to be out there.
We do have more bounties added to Wonderverse,
which is opportunities in our community work for developers
to help us come build out tools, infrastructure, and other useful resources.
So check that out if you're a developer.
There's money to be made.
MetaMask Snaps officially launched at long last.
You can buy, sell, and receive native KDA through the wallet. Supports the 20 pack chains in production and can be
used with Cadena Cabinet. So it's a great time to get involved with Cabinet too. And
our own native wallet adapter now includes support for Metamask Snap as well as Magic Wallet.
All right, so that's the news. So now I'm super excited to introduce Chris Ngoi.
And one thing I just want just to give you a kind of general
general note about these spaces and our advisors is it's a bit of a shout out to our CBO Anneliese Osborne,
who one of the first things she did right as soon as she showed up was start working on the beefing up our advisory board. And these Cadena news shows have really shown the kind of caliber
of the kinds of people that we now have on our advisory teams,
thanks to Anneliese's hard work. And it's really a different era for Kadena as a result. Last time
we talked to Nitin Gar, and Nitin is just one of these, like, he's like a human encyclopedia of
everything going on in crypto, and he really knows how to talk about how
cadena is bringing a unique advantage to all the things we're trying to do in
crypto so today with Chris Nagoi we're gonna go on a different route because
Chris where he helps cadenas he helps us see what we're missing see what's hard
to find out there and what's coming next. Of course, with a focus on real world assets on enterprise adoption, but Chris's exposure
and experience is far more vast than that in crypto.
So super excited to have him on here.
Chris, are you with us?
Yep.
Thanks.
Thanks for inviting me.
How's it going? Can you tell folks, give people a little idea of your background just so before
we kick it off and get into it?
Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, maybe a little bit about myself. So, you know, I've sort of started
my career very much in banking and sort of started as an accountant, was horrible at it.
And then found out during the period when I was,
I was running quite a fair bit,
I was in touch with quite a lot of the folks at UBS.
And I still remember that they sort of rolled a piece when I went to have a meeting there.
Loved it.
And I was like, this really cool team.
And then I joined of innovation team,
blockchain center of excellence within the team itself,
looking after BD globally for,
BD and product globally for blockchain.
And then all of the other emerging tech ranging from AI
and privacy tech for Europe.
And then spun up a couple of companies for them,
joined one of the companies looking after a sort of product for the UK, a company called
Finality International.
They are in a way the wholesale CBDC for the UK.
And then I subsequently came back to Singapore to look after AI, blockchain and crypto for KPMG before joining Libera.
The sort of two liners around Libera is essentially its standard charter tokenization capability.
And we've done quite a number of really cool partnerships across the board.
across the board,
with Fundbridge and Wellington Management
to launch one of the highest rated US treasuries
in token form globally.
And we also, together with China AMC,
launched one of the first retail money market funds
out of APAC.
So that's kind of us in a bit of a nutshell.
Awesome.
Cool. So Chris, I just want to get into it with you because there's so many things we could talk about and i really feel like you have
insights that are going to be you know so i this is going to be more about the world of crypto i
mean you know we can talk about cadena too but um this is more kind of giving people an idea of what's coming next and you know and
what people might be missing uh with all the hype surrounding various things you know whether it's
privacy tech or zk or ai or you know finality and settlement um so one thing i know you know some about and I want to I want to I want to wrap with you about is AI. So AI and blockchain,
you know, depending on who you're talking to, is a no brainer or a head scratcher. And I think
neither of those are the right answer. And you know, and a lot of it is really some form of
robo trading or, you know, intense or some kind of, you know, market aggregation,
Dex market aggregation or lending aggregation, the kind of stuff that's not really on blockchain,
sits in front of the blockchain. And I'm not saying that's not useful, but that's where the
vast majority of what we see is going on with AI. You know, there's some interesting things with
kind of giving people access to
hardware and trying to, you know, make kind of more decentralized plays there. But when you and
I were talking before, you had some really interesting things to say about what was going on,
other things that are going on with AI and emerging, and especially surrounding things
like identity and things like that. So I wanted you to talk.
I found that super fascinating when you were talking about that before.
So I wanted you to just, you know, see what you're seeing out there in this kind of in in this area that I think people aren't necessarily paying, you know, of course, because it's very new.
But it's something that's really good.
And you have background with DID and with, you know, a lot of the stuff where identity touches blockchain. So, you know, I think,
I just, I just thought this was something really interesting that you could, you know, kind of give
us a picture of where these technologies are converging as a kind of new place for AI and
blockchain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think that's a really, really good starting point.
So maybe just to take a step back a little bit, I'm going to sort of just preface this
as a little bit at that.
I think AI as a space is emerging really, really quickly.
I mean, I don't know if you guys tried ChatGPT5, super interesting.
Like every other week, I feel like I'm trying to learn something new and
playing catch up across all the developments that's happening here. But what's really interesting,
I think the convergence with blockchain specifically, I think a lot of the use cases
and a lot of the discussion is really surrounding how AI is augmenting a lot of activities happening on the
blockchain whether it's you know a gent and tick or i think you sort of mentioned about you know um
you know how do i so create those trading bots and whatnot but i think what's actually really
interesting and and maybe a little bit more of like you know when people ask me in my classes
like oh what's the alpha here?
I actually think what's really interesting is if you look at, you know, just taking a step back, the internet has effectively proliferated information significantly over the years.
Now, generative AI will 10x that. Now, what's the real, what's the sort of piece that is worth noting because of the 10x of all the
information that's going to come out we're also going to see a huge jump in a lot of the crimes
that's happening in the world today and what and and that sort of you know leads to a lot of fraud
and because essentially that reduces the marginal cost of pushing out a lot of these
strategies. Now what's really interesting is if you start to look at some of the conversations
that's happening around the DID and VC space, the approach essentially is when we think about-
Hey Chris, just for people who don't know what DID is can you just give us a you know a two-liner on
that ah yeah sure um so uh in in short uh did is decentralized identifiers um and that's a um
in in a very short manner um it's just identifiers that are on the blockchain that gives you the ability to...
Not just the blockchain, right? So isn't it a W3C standard?
Yes, that is correct.
Yeah.
That is correct. Yeah.
Yeah. where it sort of gives you the ability to enable, you know, self-serving digital identities.
Cool.
And this is really important because when we start to think about identities,
it's typically, you know, controlled by a central authority.
And these central authorities are the ones that manages
your own personal information
and a lot of the online interactions.
You mean like social logins and stuff like that,
like Google or an Apple or Facebook?
And the most important thing,
and as with all things on blockchain,
the really important piece around DIDs is around control.
This idea that as an individual or as a company, I have control over my DIDs and can manage them independently over the issuers of these DIDs to your account.
So I think I'll just sort of wrap back into sort of the AI side of things.
So the question I think, you know,
everyone talks about when they think about AI
is how do I fight AI with AI?
And I think what's really interesting
is there's actually an emerging question,
which is, you you know instead of
trying to detect ai misinformation a much uh more appropriate and and and and easier framing is how
do i enable verifiable data um that can be easily sort of used in a decentralized manner.
And that's kind of where a lot of the DIDs and verifiable credentials come into play.
Right.
So is anybody working on, I mean, are you aware of like an enterprise or any of these
other blockchain areas?
Are people starting, are you starting to see this stuff emerge?
And specifically with AI, what's the link there? Yeah, so you know I think when we start to look at some of the activity that's happening
in the DID and VC space there's quite a fair bit of actually large enterprise that's looking
at this as it stands. I think the important thing here is from an adoption perspective,
you know, this has always faced a fair bit of
issues around the actual adoptions of DIDs and VCs.
And the problem with, you know, the adoption of DIDs and VCs over the last,
you know, five to 10 years is really because of the economics and the differences in interactions across the board.
Now, I think what we're seeing actually is, you know, across the government entities, as well as the banks, this has now, you know, come right back into focus on, you know, trying to figure out, you know, from a sort of trusted authorities perspective,
can these reputable organizations issue these credentials
so that you can use the exact same data points
and verify them when you're trying
to sort of do various transactions.
And I think that's quite an interesting sort of construct
that's happening today.
So if you look at some of the activities that's happening across the board, you know, I'm working with, you know, various governments around Asia.
at various projects around decentralized identity and how to create a mechanism for you to do
identities in a much more decentralized manner so that you know you can create various trusted
nodes across the network that can issue credentials to individuals that can be used
issue credentials to individuals that can be used in a repeatable manner across the network.
Now, we're also sort of seeing a lot of the previous economical questions around, you know,
who's actually paying for this resolves itself because currently this is heavily subsidized
either by, you know, the layer ones or layer tw, or the government entities that sort of trying to supercharge
verifiable identities across the network.
And is that,
because I do remember,
you know, right when we were kind of just,
when we were doing our ICO in 2018,
there was a lot of talk about DID.
And then at one point, I think there was, you know, there was talk about integrating
DIDs with NFTs and SOL tokens, you know, so it keeps kind of coming up.
And as you said, I think it kind of comes up and then it goes away and then it comes
up and then it goes away.
In the ways they're looking at it now, are we talking about more like a federated?
Because the whole point is not to have, you or a Google or even a government do it. The
point is to have decentralized identity, right? So is that more like a blue sky kind of federated
thing? Is it the kind of thing that could live entirely on chain? What is the kind of
decentralized outlook for DID these days?
That's actually a really interesting question. And I think where I am sort of, my current thinking is actually on is, you know, the
convergence on standards and the convergence of networks is a human sort of condition.
So, you know, I think looking at how DID has evolved over the years, I think,
you know, the fundamental piece around why it hasn't really picked up over the last five to
10 years was actually around, you know, I think it started from a place that's incredibly idealistic.
But I think when we start to look at, you know, creating the network effects and creating a
network that actually makes useful
identifiers it's going to be a more federated model because that's kind of where a lot of the
use cases converge and the moment you know there is a network that that sort of crosses the
threshold of the tipping point then the whole sort of the did sort of becomes significantly more
important there's sort of a couple hypotheses that I've come across that I think is quite interesting.
The first is when you start to look at a lot of the tokenized real world securities that's
currently growing quite rapidly across various networks today.
The problem with a lot of the tokenized securities today is love the KYC requirements.
And that's actually a humongous impediment for a lot of the Web3 native folks.
So when we start to look at, you know, how we can enable maximum accessibility of a lot
of these security tokens, but still manage the eligibility of the purchases, DIDs and VCs
become a really important lever for you to do that.
Because when you think about how tokenized securities is operating within the blockchain,
the whole premise there is this maximized accessibility.
But how we manage the eligibility and suitability of the actual investor,
you know, that specific mechanism hasn't necessarily been built out yet.
Now, the actual payment leg for that...
...VCC... Can you repeat that last thing? Weability of the tokens can be managed via a combination of DIDs and VCs.
And we're sort of seeing that today play out.
The second use case that I'm seeing quite a fair bit of folks that are sort of at it is actually the healthcare space.
So actually, Singapore actually is quite a nice example within this.
So during COVID, they actually sort of launched health certs.
It's actually just, it's actually sort of represent
of the COVID
sort of
evidence on the blockchain.
So across some of the, networks, uh, you know, we're seeing, you know, anything that
is a little bit more personal and a little bit more sensitive becoming quite a good use
cases that lend itself quite nicely within the construct itself.
the self-plant nicely within the construct itself.
Yeah, going back to RWA, yeah, I would imagine that would have a lot of legs because, you
know, as you pointed out, and as, you know, it's pretty clear to any observer, you know,
the push for tokenization, The whole market access, yes,
but from the sell side,
it's really accessing markets.
It's like they want to access those buyers
and the friction surrounding KYC.
Do you have any idea,
have you read any projections
about if we were able to
get, like, a seamless DID in place, like, what that would mean for the addressable market of RWAs?
So, it's more anecdotal than actual sort of, you know, hard evidence. But, you know hard evidence but but you know some of the sort of conversations that i'm
getting into you know the estimates range anything from 30 to 50 percent increase the actual
addressable market and the reason is because we're sort of seeing quite a lot of interest
specifically within the web3 wealth to get more exposure to rwas and this specific
wealth to get more exposure to RWAs.
And this specific group of investors are finding it quite challenging to go through the KYCs that are very
extraneous.
Just to give you a sense, you know, within sort of Libera, we are working with various RWA
projects and some of the timelines, you know, in terms of the onboard you know in terms of the onboarding in terms of
um you know the the sort of kyc processes that the anecdotally we see across our competitors and even ourselves can take anything between one week to you know two to three months so depending
on the complexity of the onboarding and kyc you're trying do, it does take actually quite a fair rate of time.
Now with the IDs, the thinking there is,
especially with some of the changes in regulations
you're actually seeing, the UK being an interesting one,
we think that this is going to reduce the time dramatically
at least by 50 to 90 percent yeah and so the and then the we're talking about ai the the i the main
at least by 50 to 90%.
Yeah.
i think the the point here is that with the explosion of information it's an explosion of
fraud and an explosion of impersonation yeah so it's it's all it's it's also democratizing or you
know massively expanding people's ability to identify themselves kind of affirmatively and accurately.
And how, you know, like, you know, because of course it could just sound like a tech promise, right?
Oh, we're going to fix that, you know, just around the corner.
How do, how, you know, like, cause you know, a DID like, you know,
it's not like fraud doesn't happen in blockchain, right?
You know, somebody, you know, there's social engineering,
somebody fishes you, they, you know, they, they, you know,
the $5 wrench attack and they get access to your phone and just say,
give me your password, whatever. I mean, that's not,
there's never anything we're going to be able to do about that. But like,
but you know, there's a lot of, you know, SIM sim swap there's a lot of different things that people uh you know we don't it is
interesting that i think you know as far as fraud and crypto goes it's more in the realm of just
kind of you know garden variety theft as opposed to like true identity stealing you don't have
people like you don't hear about like, you know,
the head of some like, you know, you know, massive standards project being impersonated
and all of a sudden, you know, or like, you know, a whole mining collective being like,
so we don't see the kind of impersonation and identity theft in blockchain. So that is,
it's true that that is better uh in blockchain than the real world but
just asking the question just so that we don't get too kind of you know tech evangelist here
how do how would so if i'm a degen you know i'm a you know i'm a relatively tech attached
person but i'm not like you know i'm not a, I'm not all the way in there.
I'm somebody who owns crypto. I'm somebody who wants to buy RDAs. And I just don't want to get
robbed. How do, how, how, how is it that once I've established a DID, a fraudster can't just,
you know, I mean, I guess it's just like wallet technology and things like that,
that will keep it secure for you is that how it works yeah yeah
um actually just just before i go into that and actually um you know maybe it's for the benefit
of of everyone here i'm actually just even before we get into the fraud um you know i think she's
quite important for you know buyers of rwa or any any specific tokens to understand actually what's exactly
the risk that you're getting into.
Early today, you know,
next day,
is actually really interesting and really important to understand
and the reason is actually approach tokenization is you create some form of spv in i mean i've
heard spvs in in the marshall islands in you know bvi in caymans in jerseys and whatnot. And what happens is money would go into the SPV,
money would go out of the SPV to buy these real world assets,
get stored in the SPV, and then when they issue out the tokens,
they say that this specific SPV is actually tokenized funds.
So I think what's really important is when we start to look at the actual legal construct,
that's actually just as important as the actual technology itself.
So the question of what exactly are you buying is actually an important one.
And the test here is where exactly is the register of ownership is the register of
ownership natively on blockchain or is the register of ownership in a spv or in the actual fund itself
and are you actually part of the record of owner in this case? So, these are hopefully some guiding questions for the audience to have a think,
because that specific trail of questions sort of leads into most important point of all,
which is when there is some form of crisis event, you know, we'll start to see who swims naked.
And that's the point in which, you know, the question around things like the record owner,
you know, the investor protection all becomes really, really critical for you to think about.
all becomes really, really critical for you to think about.
Now, coming back to the identity element,
I think that sort of adds on in terms of exactly who's owning what.
So the really most important thing is other than the actual legal,
so the technical construct on how a lot of these tokens work,
and authenticate myself in a way that, you know, gives me access to these funds.
Sorry, it's a bit of a roundabout way, but I thought...
No, I think that's really interesting, though. That is actually, this is the first time in an
RWA discussion, the former topic you're talking talking about about fund structure and where the ledger I mean that's that's
really interesting and how you know because I'm sure a lot of people you
know in in our audience are you know heard about Robin Hood they've heard
about all these tokenization you know like the market is just growing in leaps
and bounds and you know so I don't think people are really aware of this peril that isn't about like it's a rug pull.
It's not impersonation.
You know, it's like that like, oh yeah,
no, it's going to be on the blockchain. I can verify it myself. Where is the state of the
maturity of the market where you can know these things about various RWA funds?
various rwa funds that's a really interesting question um um maybe just to sort of highlight
and give a couple examples where um this is actually quite worrying to me um you know i i
have a sort of um i had a conversation last week and a friend of mine was actually sort of really worried that this is all going to be quite dangerous over the course of the next 12 months.
And the reason is because, you know, just between the couple of us that was having that conversation, we're sort of seeing quite a fair bit of structures that resembles that
of some of the activities that was happening in 08.
And you will start to see participants that are buying equities or ETFs via regulated
institutions, custodying it via regulated institutions.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, issuing these depository receipts,
but, you know, calling it various names.
I've heard of the term called deprecated equities before,
or synthetic equities with phantom yields you know i think the moment you start to
hear terms that looks and sounds and feels um quite dangerous that's kind of the point where
you start to you know you should start to be quite careful on you know whether or not the underlying
actually gives you rights over the actual products that they say that they're giving you exposure to.
Because to the point around the things like what's happening with Robinhood and a couple of the
token as equities, if I remember correctly, I think OpenAI came out very publicly and said that
some of these tokens don't actually represent rights over them. So just to sort of, you know, in the same vein of, you know, if it looks
like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck. The flip side is true, which is, you know,
if it looks quite, you know, too good to be true, it also sort of, you know, feels a little bit dangerous around the sides it's probably you know quite problematic
in terms of something that you should be allocating to as well so i think that's kind of like the you
know starting point which is you know we're seeing quite a favorite of activities that worries quite
a lot of folks in them on in the market and we And we think that this is going to be quite problematic
as more AUM piles into these that promises higher AUM.
Now, how do we actually determine what's actually good
and what is not?
A couple of ways.
The first is if you're looking at the actual RWA itself
and you intend to be onboarded, coming back to my earlier point, I think the legal and governance structuring is really, really important.
You know, the question on where exactly is the register of ownership?
You know, what exactly is the legal mechanisms for you to have recourse i'll give an example you know if um assets is actually looked after
by a trustee versus that of just a spv in itself the legal protection that you would have with a
trustee looking after your assets is significantly more than just an spv and the reason is because a
trustee is a third party that would have control over your assets.
And it also ensures that, you know,stepping their, their sort of authority.
From an investor protection perspective, you know, structures with Krusty gives you a lot
more protection if you're trying to buy these assets directly.
Then I think you start to move into, you know, um, I would call different flavors of the finest so you can essentially go into you know
work work together with other sort of you know participants and the piece here really is you
know i think there's a couple of you know uh uh variations uh, uh, variations, but essentially number one, you start to look
at whether these specific entities have licenses.
Um, second, where do these licenses come from?
And third, uh, and this is a really important one is it's essentially a track
record, um, of the company itself and, uh the sort of folks that are sort of backing it.
Because what you also don't want
is you also don't want to buy into a fresh company,
but actually the folks that are running it
have a track record of being slightly in the gray as well,
because you don't really
with full investor protection on that front and then finally i think you know we start to look at you know the more d5 elements of you know buying these rwas then actually you know you essentially
need to trust the activities and analytics that you actually get on the chain itself.
So that sort of comes back to analytics around the transactions,
analytics around proof of reserves.
These are all the things that become incredibly important
so that you have some form of protection for yourself.
So it's a spectrum.
And depending on you know what exactly
um you are sort of buying uh you go into you know more and more sort of technology based
um monitoring tools i think this is fantastic information because you know the i think
I think this is fantastic information because, you know, I think the hazard that investors, crypto investors especially, because, you know, like most of the people I would imagine on this call, you know, you see something like RWA and it's a whole new asset class that you're getting access to.
oh, it's stocks, so therefore, or whatever,
it's some kind of already understood financial instrument.
So therefore, oh, that's going to be way safer than some MEV riddled decks over here.
And in fact, the opposite might be true, which leads me to,
but so do your own research out there, guys. Don't think that just because something's in RWA that it's going to be true. And which leads me to, but you know, so do your own research out there, guys,
you know, don't think that just because something's in RWA that it's going to be safe,
you know, it's, it's, it's still a big world out there. And because it's hot,
that means that people are looking for suckers. That's just always going to be the case. And it's,
and it's no different with RWA. And, and I, and you know, the other thing is, I think it's,
you can kind of use your nose in the sense that the good projects are going to give you all that information.
You're going to see that you're going to be able to easily answer these questions.
And so if you can't easily answer these questions, maybe pass because the market is maturing.
And I think eventually we will have a lot better reporting about these kind of things so it's still a new market so be
careful yes but it does lead to an interesting thing that you know with that
I think you could talk about here that's you know in a slightly different vein
which is the whole intersection of D5 you know say Dex's or you, you know, say DEXs or, you know, you know, fully on chain lending or any of these things
with, you know, enterprise or, you know, tokenized, like, where, how do you see the market maturing
there with like, kind of trying to bring, you know, the things that I think we find innovative about AMM or kind of advanced AMM,
trading structures and decentralized lending and all this stuff.
Everybody talks about this, but where is the market actually at with this kind of convergence?
Sure.
I think actually we are very much at an inflection point and we've seen quite a fair bit of convergence.
Actually the starting point here, and this is a really interesting one that gets me in hot water and both of the aisle,
is Web2 and Web3 are a lot similar than we all think.
And I think what's really important is there's a lot of things that's happening in the Web3 world that has a Web2 analogy.
There's a lot of things that's happening in the Web3 world and the crypto world
that has a Web2 analogy.
So when a lot of people tell me and ask me like, oh, how should I be
structuring this?
That my starting point is actually you shouldn't be reinventing the wheel.
And there's quite a fair bit of already existing structures that probably
addresses what you're trying to achieve.
So that's, I think, really, really, really important because, you know, having
an understanding that actually you're probably 90% there already just by copying what's already
happening in the web tool world, that's kind of quite a fair bit of activities that you
can already do. So, you know, the pieces that is really important and sort of, you know, we're seeing quite a fair bit of activity across the board is the convergence between the two.
What's really neat is a lot of the Web2 folks are essentially, you know, been exploring blockchain over the course of the last, I don't know, decade or two.
You know, they sort of really boil down in a couple of things, right?
The first is, you know, when they think about how it redefines money.
So redefining money is really sort of
bucketed into three main categories. One is central bank digital currencies. Two,
you're seeing a huge amount of banks doing this. It's tokenized deposits. And
three, this is kind of where a lot of banks are also now very interested in,
which is stablecoins. Now I'll just put one point around stable coins
because a lot of people are very very excited about stable coins and there's a lot of people
are essentially saying that stable coins is going to take over the world um i think what's really
interesting is probably to also appreciate that the economics for stablecoins as it stands actually still significantly
more sort of costly than sort of money transfers via the financial ecosystem because the question
here is actually less of a speed question and more of a network topology question.
And the really important bit is actually you can take a look at,
you know, some of the data that's coming out of chips.
For every $26 that comes, that moves in the chip system in the US,
only $1 is actually moved in the banking system.
one dollar is actually moved in the banking system so there's a huge amount of you know
savings from netting across the network that a lot of the folks in the stable coins
uh sort of network don't actually get access to because they need to back their transfers
and stable coins one is to one so a lot of these balance sheet type sort of savings do not exist so i think you know
just food for thought yeah when we start to think about the actual sort of benefits of cable coins
um you know there's obviously a lot of opportunities especially for corridors across countries where a
lot of banks are not existing um you know i i literally just did a bank wire transfer of 20 US dollars.
The wire charges are 30 US dollars.
It's insane.
There's definitely still opportunities.
I'm not sort of, you know, saying that there isn't, but I think, you know, when we start
to look at, you know, some of the network topology specifically, and especially within
domestic payments, you know, these are some of the things that you sort of need to think about.
The second sort of piece is really sort of the redesign of assets that a lot of people are looking at.
And, you know, as we're sort of all, the banks specifically are very, very interested in collateral management.
The banks specifically are very, very interested in collateral management. The banks specifically are very, very interested in collateral management.
So anything that essentially increases the velocity and compresses margin across the
collateral management piece is something that is really interesting for a lot of the
market players today.
So I think that specifically, when the banks are thinking about it,
that's, you know, a key focus. And then they obviously look at, you know, some of the
tokenization capabilities and opportunities that are coming out. The problem with a lot of the
sort of asset tokenization initiatives and things out there is there's a whole host of supply of assets to be tokenized.
I can't tell you how many times I've been asked, you know, Chris, can you tokenize my island or building
over the course of the last three months?
The short answer to, you know, can I tokenize my island is what you want to tokenize it for.
The problem is this bunch of assets that wants to be tokenized.
The problem is, you know, from a demand side, who's actually buying it?
So how I explain this is tokenization increases the mobility of the asset, but it doesn't necessarily increase the liquidity of the asset.
Because liquidity is predicated that there is a demand and supply.
Tokenization increases the mobility that more people can now get access to it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that more people want
to buy the actual asset itself and we're sort of seeing that play out as well so coming back to my
point around dids you know we think that this would you know um you know enable a lot more people to
participate in markets like this as well and then finally you know from asset perspective
And then finally, from an asset perspective, a lot of the TradeFi folks are also very interested in the investment in cryptocurrencies as well.
So right now, obviously, a lot of the activities are focused on BTC and ETH with a lot of the treasuries company.
But I think over the course of the next 6 to 12 months, you're going to see that filtered
all the way down across all of the other sort of cryptos out there as well. Because what you're
also going to start to see is the acceptance that there is a whole host of market. There's a whole
host of communities like Kadena that also have a specific niche that people are sort of, that it's very valuable for.
And we're gonna sort of see a value accrue
to these communities that are sort of strong
and built in a robust manner.
And then finally, I think I briefly alluded to that,
we're gonna see a whole host of activities
around the DIDs and VCs.
And the really important bit there is really to understand where does the digital handshakes happen?
Because the digital handshakes is where the risk and reward happens.
So when we start to think about, you know, the activities that happen across the board,
that's kind of where it becomes quite interesting as well.
So one thing I'm hearing here is that, you know,
the, I, one of the things,
especially more on the enterprise side of the, you know,
or the people are more focused on, on the tokenization side,
let's say, is, is you hear people say you know these
things like d5 and tradfire about to converge it sounds like we're a ways from that because
you know for instance i think a lot of the you know a lot of the uh uh you know like collateral
management a lot of these use cases are happening on Canton and other private blockchains. And, you know, not to not to disc Canton or anything like that, but DeFi properly understood happens on a public chain.
Let's just establish that because, you know, and a lot of the things we love about DeFi are, you know, require the public chain, you know, and and sadly, you know know i know you have a lot to say about privacy
and how we're going to get zk uh you know or where is it where we're headed with that because i think
that's a core you know i think you and i agree that that's a core enable everyone agrees that
that's a core enabling technology we're going to have to deploy to public chain to make you know
this kind of convergence happen but um you know it still seems that like you know that tokenized assets
right now when they emerge onto a public chain it's going to be you know through some you know
it's going to continue to be through some kind of gargantuan uh infrastructure uh of you know
issuance infrastructure you know tas and with whoever else is involved in the pipeline
that's, you know, 100% centralized until it gets on chain.
And then at that point, it comes.
And that's fine.
But, you know, like, I think, you know, people are like, oh, my God, it's right around the
corner.
And, you know, it's I think DeFi will continue.
You know, that market is there, but it's like a secondary market.
You know, you're good.
The primary market is going to be
the issuer the spv and oh just a quick terminology you know for the folks when chris says spb for
people that that's uh because that has a meaning in some crypto circles it's different the special
purpose vehicle i assume there's also spax and all sorts of other so these are you know purpose-built
uh organizations that you know as you said, are in the Caymans
or something that are designed to issue, you know, a particular tokenized asset.
And again, buyer beware, you know, that these are the kind of things you want to look at.
You want to see exactly if you listen to Chris, you're going to get into this stuff, you know,
do your homework um because yeah
because i i think people you know you mentioned 2008 and you know crypto is so volatile and you
know so many there's so many rug pulls in crypto and there's so many you crypto is seems like this
incredibly dangerous space relative to the financial world but let's not forget that there's
plenty of shady stuff that goes on in the finance world too and as though and as as
the as the worlds combine you're going to have a higher level of sophistication uh you know on the
people who are trying to take your money so you know it's not going to get easier it's going to
get harder but the promise is there's going to be more assets to buy the market is going to get
bigger uh you know crypto is you know stable coins are you know, crypto is, you know, stable coins are, you know, can't
be stopped at this point. You know, the future of decentralized everything is really bright.
But, you know, until we're at that nirvana where we all have our DIDs and, you know,
you can just go online and do everything. You know, you got it. You got to watch your back a
little. Well, Chris, maybe, maybe. Incredible. I feel like we could go on, you know, I,
I've gone for another hour easily. Um,
but I really appreciate you coming on here.
Do you have any final thoughts you want to give our audience? Yeah, sure. Um,
actually maybe, maybe just two thoughts, just building on what you have said,
right. Um, I think maybe it's helpful for,
for the audience as well to hear some of the things that i'm seeing especially from the enterprise side um the
question around public and private comes out a lot um i did that you know when especially when you
speak to governments um you know i'd say it's split you know quite closely to 50 50. so a lot of the governments right when they think
about the choice between public and private they actually sort of you know are still very wary of
the public chains but i think where sort of my starting point with a lot of these government
entities are is the question on do you want to build on the intranet or do you want to build on the internet
exactly and i think that's kind of a once again you know a nice analogy once again coming back
to web 2 versus web 3 there's a whole host of analogies that sort of represents the thinking
that's happening there and i think you know coming back, you know, a lot of the adoption that happens, I think kind of like, you know, the building it right, you know, and, you know, even with, especially within the Xokadena community, it's really important.
It's really important because I think what a lot of these enterprises are actually doing is they're actually looking at the innovation that's happening.
And then they're essentially saying that, look, how can we sort of incorporate that and actually work together with these chains to make sure that, you know, it's done in a robust and sort of enterprise manner.
And we're sort of going to start to see a lot of the enterprise use cases
and once again it's going to probably resemble very much of the market between open source as
well as enterprise software the same way we're going to see quite a lot of the activities
happening on the enterprise site versus more on the sort of, you know, DeFi sort of side of things where, you know, a lot
of the innovations that's happening, whether it's AMMs or even flash loans, you know, a lot of the
institutions are looking at that and thinking that's really, really interesting. And then sort
of my final piece around sort of, you know, doing sort of your homework as well as making sure that you protect yourself
actually comes up a lot when we speak to a lot of the institutions, whether or not there's
a lot of scams that happen within crypto.
I actually think this is a result and symptom of the spotlight effect because it is so transparent within the ecosystem.
Sure. You find out about, right. Yeah. Yeah. Word gets out. It's true. I mean, so many things,
you know, there are so many shady like trades that get shut down or like traders that get
arrested. You'll never hear about it. I mean, you know, there's, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. And then actually, yeah, it. I mean, you know, there's, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then actually,
London whale thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If anything, crypto is more transparent than the financial.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, just food for thought. I think that's really
important. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think, and, you know, and just, we've been, you know,
looking out at the broader world, you know, of course, at Cadena, that's our focus, right? Because, you know, give you the very best security that public
chain could offer because, you know, with the proper kind of permissioning system in a public
chain, you know, and these are the kind of things that they still struggle with. I mean, the Bybit
hack was a good example of how not having native multisign Ethereum continues to cause people
massive problems and security problems and
then scale because the other thing is that availability is existential business risk.
You know, if your entire product depends on easy access and, you know, and trades happening
when they're supposed to happen and settling happening when it's supposed to happen and
you don't have the scale, then, you know that that represents unacceptable business risk and right now the situation with
ethereum and layer twos you know it's not something that you could that you know that
goldman sachs or one of these other people could go and put a big structured product on there
where like you're saying you know uh it liquidity is important. It's not just in crypto. Liquidity
is important with anything out there. And a key thing with liquidity is that you've got to have
a market that actually works. And then when you show up, you know, and that costs don't spiral
out of control when you least expect it. So, you know, so these are all the things that, you know,
we're working on in Cadena and why we're really excited to work with enterprise people. And we
really want to make public chains safe for enterprise that's like our ultimate goal is you know we call ourselves the blockchain for business
because our ultimate goal is to quell that all those fears that you know which are 100 understandable
that organizations have and you know and that's why we need to have more conversations with people
like you so we can you know we can bring z with people like you. So we can bring ZK technology, we can bring DID, we can bring all these things and make
it a place where people, they'll enjoy the, like you say, the transparency of public change.
So we're obviously zealots about this kind of stuff.
But it's great to have you on here, Chris, because I think it's always refreshing to
look at the big picture with everything that's going on.
And so really appreciate you having you on here.
And I thank everyone for joining us today.
We're hoping these Cadena News X spaces are useful for not just getting the progress we're making,
but a glimpse of what's to come in the market and with Cadena and why we're excited about the future of Cadena and
blockchain. So you can check out our 2025 roadmap page at cadena.io roadmap. You can follow us here
on Twitter. You can engage with our community on Telegram or join our Discord if you're a developer,
especially for DevRel and things like that for technical support or any issues with wallets or
buying KDA or anything like that. And finally, a reminder,
if you're interested in our EVM test net,
you should check out the EVM developer portal at evm.cadena.io
and get more info about our $50 million grant program at cadena.io
slash grants. So thanks again, Chris. Great talking to you. Thank you. I hope we can bring
you back and we continue the conversation. Sure. Thanks a lot, guys. Feel free to reach
out. Bye. Bye, everyone. Thank you.
