I'm just pushing it to all of our communities
I don't know if you can see the Kento group chat anymore, I think I'm just staring at
I'm at the start of the screen.
I'm at the start of the screen.
Okay, I'll be right back.
I just want to confirm, is my audio working?
I dug up a microphone this time.
I did a podcast last week, and the difference in sound quality was just brutal, so I had
to go down to my basement and find an old microphone.
If you want to push it to your community as well, Keegan, and then we can just wait another
minute or two, and then we can get started.
It goes by Alan, I believe.
Alright, we can likely get started.
A lot of people will catch up after the fact.
Welcome to our 10th Region Radio episode.
Region Radio is a podcast where we bring on our partners to discuss what exactly we're
doing together and how that relationship can grow over time.
Today we have the pleasure of having on a team from Kinto, a decentralized and KYC compliant
So, why don't we kick off with some intros?
Alan, we'll start with you, just sort of who you are and how you got into the crypto space.
Yeah, this can be a pretty long story, so I'll try to keep it reasonably short.
I'm a co-founder and CSO at Kinto.
I originally got into crypto because I was at Bridgewater on the macro and FX team, and
a few things happened at the same time.
One, just incidentally, I happened to have met some folks and be friends with some folks
who were early on the team at Consensus, and so I was talking to them about what was going
on with Ethereum back in like 2015.
And then also at work, I think around 2015 too, is when the yuan started floating the
peg, and it was a big deal.
There was like a 1.5% devaluation, which now doesn't seem like a big deal back then,
was big news and currency markets, and we were looking at various different markers
for outflows of capital from China, and one of the things that caught our eye was that
Bitcoin was really highly correlated with the onshore and offshore yuan spread.
And so we ended up doing a bunch of research on Bitcoin, and I did a lot of that.
Didn't end up going much external, because at the time, when my boss asked me how big
this market was, and I was like, oh, the entire market's like $10 billion, and he was sort
of like, why are we even having a conversation about this?
But fast forward a year later, and I was already moving over to crypto, initially built some
projects that were order execution management systems, so more centralized trading infrastructure
for crypto, and then after that was at a DeFi protocol before starting Kinto.
So you've definitely dipped your toe in the water in terms of experience pre-crypto and
Scooter, let's just go to you real quick, if you want to give a quick intro.
Most people know you, but some may not.
I work on the business development side of things, so I work with both on the institutional
side, and also work with other protocols, a lot of tokenizers, in order to build products
My background, well, in a past life I worked in the trades, and I got kind of bored with
that, and I dabbled in crypto since 2017 or so, and at some point I ended up investing
in the early round of Revest, and I just kind of stuck around the community after the big
crash in 21, and in 22 Revest made the pivot to resonate, and Rob needed some extra bodies
on the business team, and ended up asking me to come on, and the rest is history.
Alan, just shooting back over to you, could you maybe give us a high-level overview of
what exactly Kinto is, and also the why behind Kinto, why you guys started, why you're so
passionate about a KYC-compliant L2?
So at the highest level, I think our goal is pretty similar to what almost anybody working
in DeFi is trying to do, which is want to onboard the bottom-panch system onto decentralized
rails, and Taylor and I spoke yesterday a fair amount about the history of economies, and so I
know that we have some common ideas about why decentralized rails would be better in a lot of
ways, but then sort of the how there in terms of what we see as the problems in crypto, where we
wanted to make infrastructure that solved big problems for adoption, and so that means
infrastructure that can make the user experience 100x better, and infrastructure that can also
open up the design space, particularly in terms of financial applications by another 100x.
And so the way that this all ties into having or ending up at Kinto, which is we're at KYC
L2, but we're still open.
We have what we call user-owned KYC, which we can discuss later on in this, but also we're kind
of designing around user experience in a lot of ways, and that means like improving user
experience for a bunch of different cohorts.
It means improving user experience for existing crypto users.
It means improving the onboarding experience for new users, and it means opening up a kind
of zero to one way, the ability to use crypto for entities that otherwise in the current
existing sort of paradigm crypto can't really get involved.
And so for the user experience side, that means number one user experience problem, which is
not something you normally think of as UX, is safety.
Obviously, it's hard to have a worse user experience than losing all your money due to like an
exploit or a hack or whatever, and there's a lot that we do on that front.
One is obviously having everybody go through this user-owned KYC process reduces the riskiness
of the network inherently, but we also have built in a bunch of other stuff on top of that.
There's native account abstraction.
This enables a lot of features that can reduce the risk of like phishing attacks, help you
manage your permissions much more easily, and also means that anybody gets access to a multi-sig
wallet, you know, like a nose is safe, but just in your regular wallet.
In addition to that, we have like an insurance pool that we've built in that works a little
bit like the DIDX stability pool.
We have things like Chainalysis running on all the bridges.
We have hyper-native, if anybody's familiar with that, running with the ability to basically
prevent suspicious activity.
It looks like the beginning of a hack before it happens, et cetera, et cetera, which is
obviously relevant for any cohort, including the existing users of crypto.
But then on the other traditional UX side, having native account abstraction makes onboarding
way easier for people who are less crypto-native, and that means you don't have to use, you
know, if you want to, you can use your existing, you know, MetaMask wallet or whatever as a
signer for your smart contract wallet, but you can also use your device biometrics, and you
can basically have all the experience of self-custody and all the benefits of crypto without
having to deal with a lot of, you know, what we kind of take for granted as the crypto-UX
nonsense for onboarding, and it gives you that gaseous experience and, you know, something
that will look pretty different from what crypto is today for people who are going to be
joining crypto a year from now or two years from now or five years from now.
And then lastly, I'm sure we'll talk about this later on, the KYC happening at the chain
level basically makes us usable for traditional finance, you know, institutions and firms
and funds that cannot really do stuff on mainnet Ethereum or on a lot of the existing L2s.
And then on the use case side, you know, I'm sure we'll get into that more as well, but those
same users are facing problems that now people who are trying to do anything that touches any
traditional finance asset or infrastructure are facing, where if you're an RWA issuer right now,
one, to the degree there exists such a thing as an RWA user, they have to go through this redundant,
you know, KYC process for all these various different applications.
You have to do it for TruFi and then again for centrifuge, et cetera, et cetera.
And obviously that gets solved when with user-owned KYC you can control that information
So you can choose to share it if you want to and then not have to go through each of their own
But more importantly for those folks, regardless if you're an RWA issuer of your own
underlying asset, of your jurisdiction, of your own compliance approach, there are always
some constraints onto whom that token can be transferred.
And this is kind of the fundamental reason there's this issue with the RWA space where there's
all these isolated pools, but you don't see equities being used as, you know, collateral on
Aave because they kind of can't be, not until you can basically enforce a lot of these transfer
restrictions on chain, where once you have the ability to put inside of the transfer function
of your token that if the recipient is insert any relevant criteria here is not a credit
investor, is a US person, et cetera, et cetera, then you can actually go use real world assets
on chain and open infrastructure, which is kind of, I think, the big unlock at the real
world asset space is looking for as well.
And so one of the things that is also part of UX is opening up new design space and creating
Like I have a mortgage that I would way rather be just paying in a smart contract on chain.
I have, you know, some equities in an account.
And right now, if I wanted to move ETH into my equities, I have to do like four transactions
over the course of four days to go do that.
And so there's kind of this idea of this unified financial system that's enabled by these
new design use cases that we're working toward that basically we think is an important step
once we solve all these problems with UX and we solve all these problems with the design
space of actually doing traditional finance applications that interact with crypto.
So we kind of have this unified financial system.
And in order to have the financial system be fully settled on decentralized rails, it
has to be one single system that's all accessible from your decentralized rails.
Yeah, I know that makes sense.
So essentially, you're just building a massive foundation or infrastructure for capital to
start being unlocked in terms of real world assets.
That's the best way to condense your answer, I would say.
Yeah, I mean, it's something I don't want to miss out on here in terms of like the use
case stuff is creating an environment where it's much more difficult to, you know, do
phishing attacks, exploits, et cetera, et cetera, is also just like a way better UX even
for traditional crypto users and traditional.
And I say traditional here, I'm saying traditional deep applications, which is to say, like
regular crypto applications, like I will be much more comfortable interacting with those
things from my Kinto wallet than I am through my, you know, MetaMask wallet, et cetera.
Yeah. So you mentioned the KYC compliance happens at the protocol level.
What exactly do users need to do in order to register and make sure they pass that KYC
And then what do I guess people building on top of Kinto also need?
Does the whole team have to be docked?
Is it just the founder, things like that?
So it's just something I want to note here that's really important is, you know, your
wallet on chain is not docked.
None of the PII is stored on chain.
All of the PII, that's personal identifiable information for anybody who's, you know, not
deep, deep in the KYC space, like we are, but that's like your name, address, date of
That is not stuff that people can see on chain.
So you get to pick from a list of approved providers.
So you get to decide who is storing your PII.
And then from the point you go through KYC and that provider interacts with the chain
to basically mint soulbound NFT to your wallet that allows you to interact on chain, whether
it's deploying code or capital or whatever.
Then you can, if you want to, share that with, you know, financial services on chain or
protocols that have to KYC you, et cetera.
But you control that information yourself from your wallet.
That is not something that's visible on chain.
That is not something that the network holds whatsoever.
The only things that you can see on the network are non-PII information that are relevant
to transfer restrictions, like somebody's jurisdiction or somebody's accreditation status
if they've elected to go through an accreditation.
As far as, like, the actual user experience of that, it'll be something that's familiar
to anybody who's gone through any kind of KYC for centralized exchange or for, you know,
some kind of payment app or whatever.
And so that's, you know, you provide some basic information.
You do, like, a liveness check with your camera.
And, in fact, as I'm on this probably before we're done, we're going to be launching the
next phase of our prelaunch programs so people can go and go through the process themselves
just in case it isn't live by the time we're done.
I'm sure you have a link to our Twitter somewhere on this.
But if you go to KintoXYZ or at KintoXYZ Twitter, you'll be able to see the announcement.
And when that goes live, you can go through it.
It takes only a couple of minutes.
And this is, for context, the third phase of our prelaunch program.
The first two were a constricted number of spots, and we have about 13,000 KYC-verified users
This one is probably the most exciting, and it'll be unlimited but for only 9 or 10 days.
And if you go through it, if you want to link your existing wallets as signers for your
new smart contract wallet, then you'll get rewarded for, you know, your on-chain history.
And a big part of that is basically giving special awards to anybody who has been affected
by a DeFi exploit in the past.
But we also have some other fun stuff for folks who might have been, you know, users
of some of our launch partners in the past or really active in the Arbitrum ecosystem
because we're very close to the Arbitrum team, that kind of thing.
I also just pinned that at the top, by the way.
So anyone listening that wants to go check out what their different phases are, just
hit that link up top, engine.kento.xyz, and you'll be able to find that.
So I want to ping it over to Taylor for a bit.
Taylor, maybe you can touch on how Revest and Kento are now working together and sort
of what that looks like moving forward.
Yeah, there's a lot a lot to touch on there.
So, yeah, there's a bunch of very special synergies between what we're doing and what
You know, one of those things would be with respect to security, like Alan was saying
That definitely reduces the possible attack surface.
And we couple that with what we're doing with respect to things like tokenized T-bills,
building directly on the T-bills themselves.
And those assets are held with some qualified custodian.
And so in our system, even if there were to be a hack, God forbid,
you know, the hacker doesn't have those funds, those T-bills, KYC to them, obviously.
So, you know, whatever they're able to get out of Resonate system, they're not going
to be able to do anything with that.
So when you really pair that with what Kento is doing, which really kind of reduces
the attack vector upfront by, you know, making it an environment that's basically
really not a great place for a malicious actor to do their thing, then I think we
got a pretty ironclad product from a security perspective or a smart contract risk perspective
that we can, you know, shop around to, you know, traditional finance, right?
So yeah, we couple very nicely with respect to that.
On top of that, you know, Kento's got a lot of great eco-partners that, you know,
some of which we're already partnered with, like Centrifuge and Bakkt, and we're going
to be working with those guys to, you know, really add some extra reason to, for a traditional
firm, you know, a hedge fund, an insurance company, to play around with those products,
So, you know, there's kind of a so what problem in the RWA sector right now with respect
to some of these products, you know, if you're, let's say you're an insurance company,
you know, you've got kind of one tippy toe maybe in our world.
There's not a lot of great reason to, you know, tokenize a part of your balance sheet,
your fixed income balance sheet, you know, if you're not going to do something with
those assets on chain, what Resonate does specifically is it allows, you know, an insurance
company to tokenize that balance sheet and then, you know, get a return on the expected
earnings from that balance sheet and then be able to go do something with that on chain
and be able to, you know, also custody that in the process so that there's, you know,
some disintermediation there, you know, they can pretty much, you know, do whatever they
You know, if they can trade perps, they can, you know, just get some exposure to some digital
assets, whatever it might be, but it really lets them, you know, really at the end of
the day, what they're interested in is juicing those returns, right?
And so if we can provide that, then we can, you know, really become, you know, really
a gateway for, you know, trad five firms to, you know, come play in our waters, right?
So I think we pair very nicely with Kinto and also, you know, Kinto's ecosystem partners
So I hope that does that answer the question?
Basically, it's like a two party thing, you know, Kinto's providing the KYC and compliance
side of things for sort of supplying the principal protection side of things.
And so they meld pretty well together if you are an institution, you know, not really knowing
how the space works, maybe you have a slight idea, but now you've got two parties that
are sort of having your back on two pretty big things.
Yeah, and I'll add to that real quick to something Alan had said earlier.
So the way that, you know, our respective systems work, it really makes it very easy
to, you know, get a traditional firm in and onboard them, you know, not just quickly,
but onboard them to like multiple ecosystem partners, multiple tokenizers, and then be
able to pipe that collateral back through our system.
So, Kinto really, their setup makes it very easy to do that.
And, you know, from our experience, and I'm sure Alan can speak to this, you know, onboarding
these firms to, you know, a KYC process is like not the, it's not the smoothest process
And it sounds like, you know, what Kinto's put together, like, is going to greatly reduce
in time across different tokenizers.
And that's going to be, you know, hugely beneficial.
I can't even speak to, you know, how much on the business development side of things
that plays a role, you know, for sure.
Yeah, just to touch on that institutional interest.
I'm going to shoot it back over to Alan.
Have you guys found it less difficult to gain investors' attention since you are a KYC client?
And then just sort of a follow-up to that one.
If you have found it less difficult, what kind of institutions are using Kinto as, you
You know, I think to take a step back, I mean, before we even started Kinto, we went and
spoke to a bunch of folks more on the tradify side.
The contacts were really close with the guys who run the SALT conference.
And so we had a, you know, big rolodex of people we could go talk to and ask questions
Basically, we came to the realization that, you know, when we're going to these tradify
firms and we're asking them why aren't you doing what you always do with new markets,
Like why aren't you deploying capital into this, raising capital from it, providing services
We kind of came up with two major buckets of concern they had.
One is smart contract exploit risk, which is something that they had difficulty underwriting.
I think I've already kind of spoken to that side a fair amount.
And the other is compliance risk.
And most of the compliance risk was centered around things related to KYC, like KYC, KYB,
KYT, basically, and that kind of counterparty risk.
And like the form that takes varies.
But for some like traditional finance firms, they don't even want to hold capital on a
network where they can get dusted with tornado cash.
Again, if you recall that like when tornado cash got, you know, sanctioned, there was
some guy who has like a sort of like troll went and dusted a bunch of famous people's
wallets with these now, you know, OFAX sanctioned funds, which is more of a headache than it's
worth for some of these folks to even do a pilot program in crypto.
But then even if they are on chain, they can't go lend on AVE because they can't prove to
a regulator that none of the borrowers in AVE are, you know, Lazarus group or something.
And so they can't really do things on chain.
And this kind of created this cycle where they would hire somebody to be, you know, the head of
digital assets or whatever that person would have an interest in building some kind of pilot
And then at some point, they would get just absolutely laughed out of the room by their
And then they end up in these private blockchains, which, you know, give them the compliance
guarantees that they need, but obviously aren't actually accessing any new markets for them.
It's like you can go do a bunch of HELOCs on a private blockchain.
But if you're not accessing any new markets or any other infrastructure that other people are
building or any new pools of capital, there's not really that much reason not to do it on a
And so like a lot of what we're doing here is kind of creating the first environment where those
players are comfortable interacting, but it's still open.
And in this case, it's still attached to the Ethereum ecosystem, which is kind of the beating
heart of all the innovation and infrastructure in DeFi.
And so this is going to be, you know, the first place they can really, you know, participate
in in a DeFi economy that isn't just going to be them in their own little private blockchain.
And so like the profile of that is for, you know, you're I mean, a lot of a lot of tried by
And I say this, although I'm obviously going to be focusing on the ones that are paying.
It is still the case that there are a ton of tried by firms who know who know less than
But the number that are actually surprisingly sophisticated is much higher than it used to
And they are, you know, in their innovation teams doing things and trying to build crypto
pilots and hiring, you know, people to try to do the digital asset thing like they they
recognize this is a big enough deal that is worth figuring out.
And, you know, that's, you know, credit card companies, banks, et cetera.
But they're not going to get into crypto.
Those tend to be sort of the earliest adopters from capital deployers on like the risk ladder.
You kind of go from there to like larger, more traditional funds to like larger asset
And at the end of the day, you get the sovereign wealth funds and stuff.
But it's even the case, you know, speaking to, you know, capital deployers for crypto
and stuff, we've spoken to multiple crypto funds who who no longer run their unchanged
strategies because of the compliance risk.
Obviously, some of that has to do with, you know, a current lack of clarity in a regulatory
environment around crypto and, you know, what the requirements are.
But like we're not at this point just talking about, oh, these folks who are new to crypto
are like nervous and have these crazy compliance burdens and like can't go interact on a theory
One, like there are crypto funds that have historically run on change strategies that
now don't think they can do it if they don't have KYC counterparties.
And so even those folks would be like more likely to use Kinto or can only use Kinto
in order to do stuff on chain.
There's just some nuance to this.
But like for, you know, your regular user, we're going to be natively cross chain, we'll
So we're not trying to go and fragment liquidity by, you know, deploying our own fork of
Uniswap and Ava and stuff.
And then we're also building infrastructure for these kinds of funds that want to interact
with the pools of capital and other chains that will allow market makers to basically
facilitate those transactions as KYC counterparties as well.
So you touched on the phase three earlier.
Can you maybe go over the different phases and then what it'll look like when phase three
Yeah, so first, a big picture of kind of where we are right now.
Mainnet is probably going to be totally live and, you know, doing things in April.
Leading up to Mainnet, we are doing four phases of prelaunch.
And people who participate in the prelaunch phases will earn endgame credits.
And those endgame credits can be used for the initiation of the DAO, et cetera, et cetera.
Those are like nontransferable credits used for that initiation ceremony to allow people
who are early adopters and users of Kinto to participate in creation of what's going
to be our governance structure, which you can go check out in our light paper, what
our proposal for that kind of stuff is.
The first phase was just people could come and do KYC.
The second phase, people could then set up their wallets, which are the smart contract
wallets with multiple signers.
And again, those can be your existing crypto wallets as signers, or you can use any kind
of passkey, which includes like your device biometrics, social login, et cetera.
Phase three, you're going to, of course, any of these, you can do all the previous ones.
And this should be open in the next hour or two.
You can, if you link your old crypto wallets to be signers, it will go look at the history
of those wallets and then provide extra incentives and rewards based on your on-chain history.
And then maybe you could call these your fortune.
It's modeled after Omakuji, which is like a Japanese fortune thing.
And one of the things that we really want to reward that is folks who have been affected
And so we're going and looking at basically major DeFi hacks in the past three years.
And anybody who's been affected by any of those, we want to like particularly welcome
to Kinto because we're building a safer environment for doing DeFi.
And so that'll be open for the next nine or 10 days.
And at this point, we have around 13,000 KYC verified users.
The previous ones were all limited in spots.
This is the first one that's uncapped, at least for that time period where it's open.
And then the last phase before launch will allow people to deploy capital ahead of time.
But before the network is live and that would be during March.
And basically that applies a multiplier to all of the credits that you've earned in the previous phases.
That's really interesting.
The point where you're basically giving extra incentives to those that have been hacked.
I think that's even from a marketing standpoint, a really great thing to sort of publicize.
Moving on to sort of your competitors.
What makes you the most unique or the most standing out against these competitors?
And then do you even have competitors?
I think this is the first that I've seen personally, KYC compliant L2.
Yeah, it's a great question.
And this is an interesting thing that came up a bunch of times when we were doing our last raise,
where if we go talk to crypto native funds, they're like, oh, so it is basic competitor.
This is like to arbitrum what basis optimism.
And the answer is not really.
And the reason the answer is not really is that not a single trad-fi investor that we talked to thought it was anything comparable to base.
Because if you don't have universal KYC at the network level from block zero,
then you aren't really unlocking the value prop in terms of being able to interact with any kind of traditional finance infrastructure that requires any kind of compliance.
And so we don't really do folks like base so much as a competitor.
And then the other side is you have a lot of these 100% KYC, but totally private networks.
Onyx or whatever, which obviously is completely different because we remain permissionless and open.
Anybody can go through the KYC process and start deploying code and build apps, et cetera, et cetera.
There's no whitelist that we're maintaining internally.
And so the closest thing to us is probably a KYC to Avalanche subnet, but even they are whitelisted.
So there isn't really anybody who is doing what we're doing in terms of maintaining the benefits of being an open network of being permissionless.
In terms of innovation, because we believe that open networks win.
And also that part of the benefit of being on a blockchain is the ability to interact with other infrastructure and the composability and the money Legos aspect of it.
We were the only ones really doing that and doing what our innovation around this idea of user-owned KYC that unlocks the benefit in terms of design space of having KYC.
In terms of safety from having KYC without compromising on the openness and the permissionless aspect.
It must be a unique position for knowing that you're basically the only one building the solution that you're building.
I mean, as I said before, when we were thinking about doing this, one of the things that I wish there were a way to have all these guarantees and still be an open network
and still be on Ethereum. And we were at a position, this is sort of at the end of last year, where L2,
tactical infrastructure has been significantly de-risked.
But it's still the case that at least to date, the majority of existing or the big existing L2s, you're like an optimizer, arbiter, et cetera, are just general purpose EVMs.
They're just faster, cheaper versions of Ethereum.
But one of the cool things about L2 is you get to inherit some of the security guarantees of Ethereum and still be a part of the Ethereum ecosystem while also making modifications to how the network works in order to make it more suited to certain design space.
And once we had the idea of doing what we're doing, one of the first things that came up is surely somebody else is already doing this, right?
Like, this feels so obvious. And if we couldn't find anybody who was doing it, so like, yeah, that was kind of how we ended up building this.
No, that's awesome. I kind of want to shift away from more so the vision, but going to the community.
So we asked all of our partners this that we bring on, what does community mean to you at Kento?
I mean, part of what we're doing here, if I've been in crypto since, I'll say 2016, and I'm really blown away by how much we've achieved, particularly in DeFi.
Like, I know there's a lot of applications for crypto, but my personal interest in it is basically in terms of decentralized finance and creating more transparent, fair, resilient infrastructure for financial systems.
But in order to step change from where we are to know where we want to be, which is onboarding the entire financial system, like, if we're not here to do that, like, what are we here to do, right?
We need to basically massively grow who we consider the crypto community.
And one of the things that I think is like really great about the existing community and something that crypto has an advantage on in general, in terms of, you know, by default, you know, almost every project has a Discord where you can go find a ton of the users.
And something that, like, we experience already is, you know, we have users already who are helping other users get through the onboarding process and get through the KKYB process.
And then even outside of our own personal community, there is this thing, as I mentioned at the beginning, I think that, like, for the majority of, you know, DeFi projects that I would like to interact with at all, we have the same mission.
Like, there is a broader community around that.
And, you know, there's this thing where my girlfriend really likes climbing.
And I'm like a pretty outdoorsy guy. I used to be like a hiking trip leader and do trail maintenance and stuff.
And I never liked climbing because it was just, like, so intimidating.
Like, it just seems like such like they had their own jargon and lingo and it was like a very technical thing.
And it made it like sort of a difficult community for me to, you know, feel a desire to crack into, which maybe not do climbing, even though I probably would have liked to ask an activity.
And I feel like something that we need to work on in crypto is, you know, making crypto more approachable.
And I think that, like, 100 percent keep our means, you know, still do the with hats, still do the Pepe's, et cetera.
But we got to we got to make from a technical process the onboarding simple enough and like familiar enough to people who are used to using Web2 that, you know, your your, you know, grandfather can do it or your dad can do it without you basically telling them that, you know, once they write down this
12 word phrase on like a piece of paper, that is their entire life. And they had to protect it and then like maybe encode it or like maybe put in the safety deposit box and then like put it somewhere.
But don't tell you. And like if anybody ever has a cell phone camera within a room of it, you have to burn your wallet and go find a new one.
Like, these are absolutely bonkers things to expect people to do.
And I think that there is a risk where when your community is super weird, has super weird technical requirements, it becomes sort of something that you like.
And like I do like it. I am still going to use, you know, my metamask wallet or like a ledger as my signer for my Kinto wallet.
But we also need to have infrastructure where somebody can just go and onboard without having to do a bunch of external research into like what the heck they're doing at risk of, you know, losing anything that they put into the system.
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I completely agree. I think it needs to become a lot easier because I had to sit down and like show my parents how to use a metamask wallet, what a disk scan was, what a hardware wallet was, what Uniswap was, all these different things.
And so I think if you make it really, really easy for the consumer to just literally hop on, you're going to see a lot of adoption.
So no, it's good that you guys are thinking like this already. I do, however, want to switch it to my last and final question is your future.
So where do you see Kinto? And I know time in the crypto space is hard to really peg because it moves so fast.
But where do you see Kinto in six months and two years and then maybe a longevity one of five years from now?
Yeah, I mean, I'll even give like the quick 20 year answer, which is obvious here.
I would the entire, you know, fetch system to be run on decentralized rails.
I would like those rails to be Kinto. Obviously, that's a bit of an audacious thing to shoot for.
But that's sort of the North Star and then kind of going instead from now to there.
A lot of like our immediate value prop is on the project side to asset issuers.
Like in part because you can't really do stuff with DeFi infrastructure for real world assets on Ethereum mainnet.
The vast majority of the people who are actually doing anything in real world assets are the issuers.
And so like a large cohort of our initial projects are going to be those kinds of issuers with a few pieces of infrastructure for blending against them, et cetera.
And those are kind of your your ondo, your backs, your centrifuge, your TruFi, your, you know, caller protocol, like those kinds of things.
And then infrastructure like you guys, I think that was the first time we spoke.
I was like, heck yeah, because I think that to your point, you have to be able to do things on chain with these assets in order to justify doing that, having them on chain.
And it has to be easier to do those things on chain or cheaper to do those things on chain or only possible to do those things on chain or else there's not really a point to the product.
And so when you have things like what you guys are doing or things like what caller protocols is doing where, you know, like a caller protocol and state function of this, they're doing callers, which is a derivative to allow you to borrow a really high LTV against underlying asset.
That's a bespoke deal normally in TradFi.
So you're going to spend money and time with lawyers and like work in order to do that.
Being able to do the smart contract is just cheaper and faster than it would be doing in like a TradFi setting.
So a lot of the initial applications are kind of more of that.
And then obviously our focus going forward from there is going to be on a lot of infrastructure for those things.
Probably lending is a lot easier from a compliance perspective than trading on chain.
But we want to get to trading on chain and then making trading on chain accessible to everybody and not just qualified purchasers and stuff is a fair amount of work.
One thing that I mentioned earlier on, actually, and one thing I'll add there is and then also getting these, you know, innovation teams at these, you know, larger traditional financial institutions to be building pilot projects on Kinto that then they start onboarding more and more stuff onto.
Another thing that I expect to happen kind of in the two to five year timeframe is I mentioned at the beginning that, you know, we're not trying to go deploy a fork of Uniswap and a fork of Abe, etc.
We want to make cross chain functionality.
You know, made up to the network, easy for everybody.
And then also usable for folks who do have the counterparty requirements through this, you know, intermediation with a market maker.
With that said, it's also the case that if you are in the position of Abe or you're in the position of Uniswap and you're pretty dominant in your vertical, there's two ways for you to grow your business.
You either launch other products, which they've each done a little bit of Uniswap more than Abe to go back to those examples, or you grow the size of your addressable market.
And both of them have made efforts to grow the size of their addressable market in order to be able to service these pools of capital that care about counterparts.
You know, you have this like Uniswap X thing that has like the tag or whatever the terminology is for it with KYC.
And then you had, you know, Abe try to do Abe arc.
The problem with those things is if you aren't doing a network level KYC where anybody can build infrastructure on the network and everyone you interact with on that network has access to the tooling to, you know, enforce any of those transfer restrictions, but also, you know, is already KYC, etc.
You end up with a similar problem to the one the banks have where the only way you can do it is sort of in this isolated, you know, environment where you aren't accessing the benefits of being on chain in terms of composability and access to new markets.
And so, at some point, the easiest way for them to have a version of Uniswap or a version of Abe that these institutional, you know, folks who care about compliance can use is just going to be to deploy on Kinto.
And then going from there, it just is the case that the universe of capital that cares about those requirements is a lot larger than the universe of capital that doesn't.
And so that means that, like, at some point, I would want those, you know, the version of Uniswap that Uniswap has deployed on Kinto in order to be usable by institutions and same thing for Abe.
The market for those things is larger, so those should ultimately become the more liquid version of those things.
And then, you know, once you have that kind of size, you know, TVL on chain and that amount of infrastructure on chain, then you kind of start unlocking the really cool stuff where it's like, OK, now we're just going to be like, I'm going to go get my mortgage issued on chain against an on chain version of my house title.
There's something like VisibleX is working on with the bank, Milo. Now I'm missing because the end state here is you want to manage your entire financial life on chain, not have this thing where you can go to speculation on chain, but like your day to day financial needs are all met through banks.
That is like, I really don't like having to deal with banking.
Yeah, I don't like banks either.
Taylor, do you have any closing remarks or input here before we close it out?
Yeah, I just want to say, you know, you know, right now we're going to be dealing with like the tokenized tea bills and the future returns on that or the forward returns on that.
But to speak to something that that Alan touched on, you know, there is a lot of capital, let's say, on the sidelines that are looking to break into new markets and that process can be greatly hampered by traditional rails.
So I think with respect to that, some of the stuff that we're working on is in that realm to sort of, you know, provide an outlet for American capital to foreign markets.
I'll just say dealing with invoices where there's a receivable involved, let's say.
So a little bit different than, you know, what like Goldfinch, for instance, was doing.
And that I think there is, you know, an immense amount of possibilities there.
And yeah, we hope to work really closely with the Kento guys on some of that stuff for sure.
Awesome. Well, Alan, thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to come on and talk with us about Kento.
We definitely look forward to building with you in the future. So maybe we'll have another one of these region radios as Kento progresses and as Revest and Resonate progress.
Yeah, it'd be good to do a scooter just talking about the history of money. I feel like we've gotten a good rent on that meeting recently.
Oh, yeah, we had a good, yeah, we ran long about 30 minutes talking about the history of money.
We'll have to do that again for sure. Yeah, we'll have to do that.
All right. Well, thank you, everybody, that came out to support.
The recorded version should be up tomorrow, so you'll be able to listen to it then. Awesome. Bye, everyone.