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TezDev 2026
Recorded: March 30, 2026 Duration: 4:20:28Space Recording
Full Transcription
Welcome back to the Tezos Explained series.
Today I'm with Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos.
And today we're going to be deep diving into Etherlink.
So to kick things off, what is Etherlink and how does it technically extend the capabilities of Tezos?
Etherlink is basically the EVM compatibility layer for Tezos.
It works as a smart rollup built on top of the Tezos L1.
So essentially transactions for Etherlink are posted on Tezos blockchain.
They are included in blocks by Tezos speakers.
They are maintained by Tezos speakers,
but they are executed by a roll-up operator.
So you have a roll-up operator,
reads all the transactions, executes them,
and then posts commitments to the state on the roll-up.
It's a scaling technology.
So it does two things at once.
It scales Tezos in terms of number of transactions,
and it acts as a compatibility layer for supporting EVM.
Why is Etherlink such a big deal for the Tesla's ecosystem?
I would say middleware is the main reason. There are a lot of companies in the industry that have
built tools which are now really necessary for developers or for people wanting to bring their
businesses on-chain. A lot of these have standardized around,
well, it's not that they have standardized,
but they support Ethereum, nothing worse.
And in supporting Ethereum for them,
supporting other EVM type of chains
is basically a change in a config file.
If you need to convince every single provider
to support another blockchain,
there's a very high cost.
And so by having this compatibility layer, we essentially access this entire ecosystem.
Do you view Etherlink as an interim scalability layer or as a long-term architectural component within Tezos?
What I would like to see on Tezos is Tezos X roadmap.
One big roll-up which supports many programming languages, anything you want to program in so like really a big neutral programming platform where you can deliver all type of
softwares and i see just you know it's something becoming over time just a part of that before you
mentioned around etherlink being powered by a test of smart roll-ups how does etherlink's
consensus mechanism differ from traditional optimistic roll-ups in terms of finality and security
assumptions yeah so there's no consensus mechanism in a role that's i would say what distinguishes an
l2 from an l1 is like the one has to care about its own consensus and its own security hello
welcome everyone gm can we still say that i heard that you know recently something has been banned
Can we still say that? I heard that recently something has been banned.
Welcome. I am Michele Drusolino, the Director of Operations at Trilli Tech,
and I will be your host for this afternoon.
Now, before we move on, I want to tell you a quick story.
When I was asked to be the MC for the day on this stage, I was very nervous.
be the MC for the day on this stage, I was very nervous.
So I asked for advice, Katie Haggerty,
who is our managing director at Trilitec and Nomadic Labs,
who unfortunately couldn't be here,
but is certainly watching the live stream.
Hey, Katie.
I asked for some advice, and she told me
to script less and be more spontaneous.
So I promise you that everything that you will hear from me today is completely unscripted,
off the cuff, from the heart.
Sorry, but we need...
Welcome to TASDAV 2026!
Obviously, today is not about me.
Today is about Tezos and the brilliant ecosystem that we have been building all together.
In fact, this is the fifth edition of TezDev.
It is our annual moment to take a step back from our day to day, to get in a room all
together and actually talk about what we're building. Today you will hear from the people who make it
happen, from the teams and Nomadic Labs and Trillitech, from our partners and
builders who are shipping products on Tezos right now. Now look around you,
we've got builders, creators, artists, community members, one or two still figuring out what a blockchain is.
But all of you belong in this room because every one of you plays an important part in pushing this ecosystem forward.
Now today's program is stacked and runs through the full stack from infrastructure layer all the way up.
Among the highlights to look forward to, we will have Arthur Breidman's keynote titled Tezos in 2026, Good Infrastructure is Just the Beginning.
We will have a panel on the next era of crypto yield with Arthur, Usher and others.
We will hear from Ben Elvidge about tokenized commodities and tokenized uranium. And I've been
told that there might be or not an announcement there. So you'll have to stick around to find out.
And we'll close the day with Art After Dark, which is an incredible, immersive, 360-degree immersive art
show in the room next door.
Your ticket gets you access to that,
so make sure you stick around.
So as you can see, we have a very full, exciting day ahead
of us.
Before we kick things off in earnest,
I want you to give a couple of public service announcements.
So you've probably already seen as you walked in the next door, we have the XP zone, the Tezos Experience Zone.
And this is where we have several booths from Ledger, Art on Tezos, Angie, Metals.io, etc.
And make sure they are all building super interesting stuff.
So make sure you take the time to go and talk to the various teams.
Also, this year, something we've never had before,
we have a special surprise for you.
We have a competition, TestQuest,
where with over $7,000 in prizes,
I've been told you could win an
an ipad pro apple watch dji dji osmo camera a nintendo switch ledger wallets and more
unfortunately i have been told i cannot participate boo but you can and you definitely should so make sure that you register you find
all the details and and take part now the day will be very full we'll have a number of presentations
and panels we'll have a couple of breaks in the middle one at 2 55 and one at 4 15 that is assuming
i stop talking and let the speakers get on with the job. And then from 6 p.m. we will have some drinks in the other room.
So who's excited?
Oh, come on, you can't do better.
Who's excited?
Let me hear it.
Okay, okay.
Let's kick things off with a deep dive on Tezos X, which I'm sure many of you have been following very closely.
So please welcome on stage Francois Thiré, Tezos X Product Manager at Nomadic Labs, with his presentation on native atomic composability.
So, say that you want to build an application on Tezos, right? And maybe you could start
with a marketplace on the layer one. So if you do that, at the moment, you will use a
programming language called Michelson and likely your app will support Tez.
But now let's say that actually you want to support
more tokens, for example USDC.
And Tezos currently supports USDC using Ethelink.
But the thing is, at the moment, your application
can't easily use those tokens.
The reason is that on the layer one and Eternix
there are two separated chains
and you can't communicate between each other easily
at least without using bridges
which kind of complicates the life of your users.
So if you are a builder on Tezos
you are missing some kind of opportunity.
But the problem is not the bridge
The problem is rather the fact you have two different run times running on two different chains
So instead
What if it wasn't true if we could run in the same chain?
Two different applications using two different
runtimes. On one side EVM and on the other side Michelson. And this side what about if
the cause between those applications your smart contracts could be made atomic. This is what we build and this is what I'm going to
present. So for those that don't know me already I'm a product manager for
TetherSex formerly an engineer working at Nomadi class for the past six years
and I've seen these two worlds living side by side without having the ability
to communicate between each other.
And this is exactly what we are changing today.
So probably some of you already know a little bit about Tezos X, but here it's an heads
So Tezos X for execution layer, so a place where we want people to build applications. It will feature two runtimes as I
mentioned on one side Mikkelson and EVM running side by side with the same roll up. And one
important criteria we had when we designed that is to make sure that if you come from the EVM
ecosystem or actually the Mikkelson ecosystem so so what is Tezos Layer 1 today,
this execution layer is compatible with both worlds.
And the advantage of using a rollup is that actually it can scale and this is something we already discussed a lot
but for example, you can have high throughput with a very low latency.
But supporting two run times is only the beginning and later on
Thanks to the current architecture, which is modular. We plan to support all the run times
So the way we we can have that having applications talking to each other
It's not only by having two run times running in the same roll-up. We need a way to have those applications to talk to each other. What
we call call contract... sorry, what are cross runtime interactions and those
interactions needs to be made atomically in a single transaction and this is what
we call native atomic composability.
So if we go back to the marketplace example we had earlier on, how it works? The situation is the following. You have a buyer on one hand that wants to pay an NFT, let's say with USDC,
but on the other side the seller wants to receive TES.
What we provide using with TezosX is a way to do that in a single transaction.
The buyer will exchange its USDC against TES using a DEX, for example, on the EVM side.
Then this TES can be transferred cross runtime in Michelson and can be used to buy the NFT.
The fact that it's atomic guarantees you that if something is failing in the middle,
everything reverts. So as a builder, you have nothing to take care of. The platform is doing it for you.
But let's take the other side now.
Let's say now that you want to build on or you already are building on Ethelink and you are on TezosX.
It works, your application is deployed.
But what about users that are not using EVM addresses, like using a Tezos wallet?
Thanks to the current architecture, you have the ability to have those users using your application.
So you have the ability to have an EVM application today being compatible with Tezos Layer 1 addresses.
You don't need to change the front end. You don't need to change the contract. It will just work.
There's a trick, though, that we will put this complexity in the tooling,
but be reassured, it's not that much complex and we are already building this tooling, showing that it actually works.
So your smart contract doesn't change and with TezosX actually your user base will grow across the cross system.
But there is another feature, actually,
that EVM can borrow features from Michelson.
We already know that EVM is the place to be
if you want to have defy in liquidity.
This is the case with Eternink.
But with Michelson, actually,
we can make contracts safer and easier to verify.
The reason is that from the start and probably most of you know it already, the design of Michelson
was made in a way that it's easy to ensure that your contract just works. We have strong typing,
we have tickets and it was built
with formal verification in mind. So actually Mikason is still a beautiful language. And
thanks to TezosX, it's composable. For example, you can have a Solidity application that will
be called a Mikason contract directly, there's something called a gateway that I will present later. You don't need to rewrite, you don't need to re-audit your app.
Let me share with you an example.
We are living in a world with AI agents now, and we are using them in general to do security audits.
This is what we did internally.
internally. And it was remarkably easy to realize that those agents were able to prove
easily some properties for Mikkelsen contract while it would take hours to ensure that an
EVM contract was safe. That's a real case example. And it's not the only one. And actually later, Jan will mention another use case showing how Mikkelsen is
made for that world. So if you are using EVM, thanks to
TezosX, formal verification can be a security primitive for
you. You don't need to migrate your app. You will extend it
So this is the only architecture diagram for this talk a bit technical so
You have in this diagram two things first Tezos X the execution layer and Tezos layer 1
Here because it's a roll up Tezos X
Settles on the layer 1 and you have a bridge from the rollup, TezosX settles on the layer one,
and you have a bridge from the layer one to TezosX.
But the important part is the kernel.
The kernel defines the logic of your application.
What we did is to have two runtimes within it.
On one side, Michelson,
where you can do formal verification, for example,
and on the other side, EVM,
where you will get DeFi etc.
We call it interface here because what we will explore with with TezosX is really one chain with two interfaces.
So for our pieces for example, you will have two sets of our pieces one for Michelson and one for the EVM part. The way we build this interaction is compound with two components.
On one side, we will give you automatically an address.
If you're on the Michelson side, you will get an address on the EVM side and vice versa.
And on the other side, we have a gateway that provides some kind of abstraction
other side we have a gateway that provides some kind of abstraction that
makes you interact with an EGM contract as if it was a Mikkelsen contract. And
it's rather easy, okay, and it's especially atomic. Here is an example of
what it could look like. If you are in LIGO, which is the example here, if you
want to call an EGM contract, it will work in two steps.
First steps, you will need to encode the parameters, and we will provide, at the tooling level, an ABI so that you can do that for you,
translating types from Michelson to EGM.
And once it's done, then you just need to call the gateway as if you were calling a smart contract
and it works
But it's not the only way for you to interact with other contracts
If you don't if you need more control if you want to have your own helper you can do it and
your own helper, you can do it.
And actually without going too much into the detail,
Actually without going too much into the detail
this is based on another famous protocol called HTTP.
And you have the full control on that.
Modulo some security features to make sure
that it's safe to do that work.
We are also working with other companies
such as BakingBad to have day one indexes and explorer
to make sure that it's easy for you to build
on Tezos 6. So the world that we are building is the following one. For your users, they
can use the stack they are familiar with. One wallet, no need to have two wallets, but
they can use both runtimes.
On one side, they have the ability to use Michelson's,
and it will give you some kind of formal guarantees.
And it will be available to every Solidity DApp.
And thanks to the AI agentic world,
it's much easier now to have your smart contract formally verified.
On the other side, you will have EVMs liquidity that will be available to every Tezos builder.
And everything is made in a way that it's atomic so that it's easy to use.
So it's not science fiction.
We are already testing this.
We plan to release this testnet in April 2026,
so in about a month or less, and we plan to submit to the community, TezosX as a vote,
an iterating upgrade for production by the end of Q2. So now that we have built the primitive, the question is, what will you do with it?
So I don't know for questions, but we have time I believe.
Hello, thank you, thank you, thank you Francois.
Are there any questions for Francois?
Anyone, please don't be shy.
Okay, maybe I'm going to ask you something.
In terms of needing atomic composability,
how much of this is actually a UX breakthrough versus a technical one?
It's actually both.
I think if you ask engineers six months ago,
what would be the technical challenge, they wouldn't know.
Because six months ago, the design wasn't clear yet.
And it was a big deal internally to have the right design.
But at the same side, this design shows that having the right design
at the kernel level doesn't give you the right UX.
And so this is why we need to work hand by hand with the tooling providers, so indexes, wallets, et cetera, to make
sure that at the end of the day, we have the right UX
level for our users. So it's really both.
Thank you. Any other questions? No? OK. Thank you
very much,ancois i have to say i understood about 75 of this i'm not technical so i'm very proud of it
again thank you francois again um now we'll switch gears and talk about staking
as you know there are many approaches to staking,
and the next presentation is going to focus on the architecture
of a canonical liquid staking token.
What does that mean exactly? How does it work?
So please, let's welcome on stage,
Mattia Borghwan, staff engineer at Nomadic Labs.
Hello.
So I'm Matthias from Nomadic.
And today, so I will talk about staking, but staking as an infrastructure and more precisely the liquid staking token that we are
building in the protocol itself
And how its architecture and how you can use it
soon I guess
So as with all other
staking Blockchains and in particular so withzos, we have direct staking that already exists,
that allows any staker to participate in the whole governance mechanism by selecting the baker through which it can stake its funds.
The stake is illiquid once it's staked,
but we have a full sovereignty over the selection
of the baker, the full process of the staking.
It's simple, there is no smart contract, no operator.
Everything is handled by the staker and by the protocol.
We have a second alternative that already exists,
which is to use a private liquid staking token,
through which you gain some liquidity.
Because most of the time, the solution
is to use a smart contract to translate, transform
your tokens staked into tradable tokens that are liquid.
And this allows to use those tokens through DeFi but it's operator
managed and using a smart contract which can have some risks and we will discuss that in a moment
and then we have what we propose now which is a canonical liquid staking token so it's
something that is embedded in the protocol to have liquidity, but so liquidity through a tradable token,
the staked test, STES, without any operator,
without any smart contract running,
it's all handled by the protocol
and managed directly by the staker.
So why do we want this kind of infrastructure
in the protocol?
As I said, mainly because we consider that
Direct staking is optimal, but some people may need liquidity in particular to use their token as would defy and
We consider that only the protocol can give guarantee
And guarantee neutrality of the usage of the system.
So as I said, through private LST, there is an operator,
there is a smart contract that can be upgraded by this operator.
Through canonical LST, there is no operator.
The risk is handled by the protocol itself. The governance, the upgradability is handled by the protocol itself.
The governance, the upgradability is handled by the protocol.
And we consider that it mitigates, reduces, removes even the risk completely,
this risk, this neutrality risk.
And it's not competitor to private LST,
or at least we don't consider it that way,
because private operators
can still build their systems and provide some very specific dedicated UX that may be
better for some kind of DeFi integration. And they can also build on top of the canonical LST
new features, new tools, new product.
New features, new tools, new product.
So let's go a bit into the mechanism itself.
So Canonical LST is based on the Accrual model, which is quite simple as you can see.
Here we have everything that is running following this exchange rate equation.
The exchange rate is very simple. It's the total amount of tests
in the ledger divided by the total amount of staked tests in circulation. So this means
that, for instance, when you have some rewards accrued to the system, to the ledger, the
staking rewards increase accordingly. If a slashing event occurs,
the total amount of TES will reduce and the exchange rate will be reducing
accordingly too. And the total amount of TES in circulation is only modified when
there is a deposit or redemption of token by a staker.
So let's go a bit more into the mechanism itself.
So we have this system enshrined in the protocol, and if you are a staker, you can, as you would
through any FA2 contract,
deposit some tests into a contract, something that looks like a contract but is actually
embedded in the protocol.
And when you do that, you have automatically some STES that are minted and accrued to the
ledger, to the wallet of the sticker and the TES that are added to the ledger of the system.
This test, this ledger is used to,
and is allocated across the bakers
that participate in the whole system
through protocol-managed parameters.
At some point, if a staker wants to redeem some STES,
STES that it can have minted itself or
exchange outside of the system as it could with any FA2 fungible token.
Once it does that, it will automatically trigger
non-stake request, which will transfer the test into the frozen
mechanism and
After some freezing period which is very similar to what we already do with direct staking
the test will be
transferred back to the wallet of the staker that did the
the end staking.
So let's discuss a bit about the allocation of stake
for the baker.
So as I said, it's deterministic, it's on chain,
it's handled by the protocol with protocol parameters.
Still, bakers can declare some parameters themselves,
some fee and capacity, and we want to ensure that everything is capped to ensure that no baker can get the control of the whole system, and to ensure also that there is still some room for direct staking and other solutions for staking that may exist.
may exist. As I said before, there is a slashing mechanism that is socialized through the exchange
rate. We won't punish a single staker through slashing. It's shared among all the participants
of the system. And as I said before, there is no upgrade of the system that can go without
a governance vote because the system itself is part of the protocol. So as anything in the protocol in Tezos, if you want to update it, you have to go through
an amendment proposal and the governance vote.
So in the end, the only privileged actor of the canonical LST is the protocol itself.
And through it, of course, all the bakers, all the actors of the Tezos ecosystem that
participate in the governance process.
As we have seen before, the accrual model is very simple, and this is very important,
because this opens these systems to institutional adoption.
Everything is computable through two values, the number of Tezos in the system, in the ledger,
and the number of S- the system in the ledger and the number of STs actually
minted and
This is accessible directly through the chain without the need of any oracle
And with it you can have your the net asset value of the token at any time easily easily a computer
Also, there is no
regular Airdrops of tokens. Everything is handled in the system
through this exchange rate, which means that it's very simple to use this system for tax declaration,
etc. And as I said before, the contract, the interface that is used to handle the stake is completely
compatible with FA2.1, which means that it's a standard in a Tezos ecosystem, and it can
be used with any tool, any wallet that is compatible with FA2.
So we think that this very simple design is what opens canonical LST to more adoption,
and in particular, institutional adoption, where simplicity and standard accounting is important.
So where are we in this project, and when can you try and use it?
So currently, we are preparing a test net that should be live very soon,
and will be a point to everyone to test as a staker or as a baker
We hope to have everything ready and activated with protocol V which we expect to see in September
We have some formal verification of the invariant of the system and the compatibility with FA 2.1
That are being worked on currently.
There is a white paper also that you can download and read if you want more details about the system.
So don't hesitate to flash the QR code.
And there are some discussions ongoing.
So as I said, we hope to have it active for protocol V,
which means that there is still some time to adapt some
parameters in particular.
And there is some decisions to take.
So there are some discussions already on Tezos Agora.
And I invite you, if you're interested into the staking, in the mechanism, in the governance
in general, to join those discussions, to participate, to give us your feedback, because
there are still some decisions in the parameters at least and maybe more to make.
In particular, we need to decide some of the caps, the unbounding duration, if we want stakers to be
able to participate in voting or not, things like that. So for all these decisions, all these
discussions, please join Tezos Agora, give us your feedback,
and as with everything that is Tezos related,
even if the feature is live, we can still discuss,
we can still improve it, we can still amend it
with the next protocol.
So of course, this is a project of all team.
I'm just a small actor in this team. So thanks to this team
And if you have any questions
Amazing, thank you I
Do you have a question?
Do you think that every major chain will eventually need the protocol level, like with second token?
I think if they want neutrality, they should.
Yeah.
Okay.
Any other questions from the audience?
Okay.
Let me just go around and pass the microphone.
Hello.
Could you elaborate on the socialized slashing?
Does that mean that everyone will share in a slashing penalty if one staker misbehaves?
Yes, exactly.
So everyone participating in the liquid staking protocol will share a slashing?
Yes, exactly.
But if you remember, a few protocols ago,
we have introduced adaptive slashing.
So in general, slashing is very rare first.
And it should be a very small amount that is slashed anyway,
unless it's a collision of stakers or some actors with a very large amount of stake that is slashed.
And in this case, this is clearly an attack
or looks like an attack,
and the slashing can be more important.
I cannot know this work,
but maybe you could say a few words about the invariance,
the formal verification that is ongoing.
Not so much.
I'm not completely aware of this full work.
I know that in particular, what is checked,
so what I know is that the FA2.1 compliance is checked.
For the invariant in particular, I don't know yet.
But, yeah.
Sorry.
Any more questions?
Probably not.
Well, thank you, Matthias.
OK, OK.
Next, we're going deeper into DeFi.
Specifically, what happens when you take a transaction latency from around 500 milliseconds to under 50?
It's a huge leap forward and it opens a world of opportunities.
So joining us, we'll have a panel.
Joining us will be Alex Skin, Technical Partnership Manager at Trillitech, moderating the panel.
Sylvain Ribstein, Software Engineer at Nomadic Labs.
And Dimitri Kovaleski, Founder of the Dex Engie.
Hello everybody.
My name's Alex Skeen.
I'm a technical partnership manager, actually product manager for Etherlink.
So we're here to talk about how Etherlink is now super fast for latency in a bit more detail.
So do you guys want to introduce yourselves?
Hey, I'm Dimitri, founder of Hanji.
So we have been building in Tezos ecosystem
for quite some time.
And Hanji is a fully on-chain spot club
decks live on Etherlink and some other EVM chains.
And yeah, excited to be here.
And hi, I'm Sylvain, software engineer at Nomadi Labs.
I've been there for the last couple of years,
and particularly working on the layer 2 space from smart hall up to ethylene now.
Cool, thanks.
So, I mean, can you give me like a 30 second sort of quick thing?
What is an instant confirmation?
What does that actually mean?
So, sure.
So, user interaction with EVM chain is you submit a transaction,
wait for a block to pick it up,
and then get the receipt of that transaction.
In FNINK, that workflow is less than a second, about 500 milliseconds. And with Etherlink, with instant confirmation, we were able to reduce that to 50 milliseconds.
This feature is already live on Etherlink since January. And currently currently for any users to get that kind of latencies, they just need to run a node, enable the feature, run a node close to the sequencer.
This is important for the latency, network latency, and enable that feature and use the available API.
Cool. I mean, you and I, we talked at this time last year, we talked about instant confirmations.
Can you remember the conversation, the sort of things, why it was important to you and what it meant for Hanji?
Yeah, I think I was pitching this thing last year.
Basically, it's super important for on-chain trading and for market making.
and for market making.
Basically, the faster the chain is,
the faster you know that your transaction landed,
means that the faster you know it,
the less risk is for you.
Because, for example, if you quote some asset pair
and there is like one second or 500 milliseconds
where you don't know if your transaction succeeded or not,
then you need to factor this into the spread you quote because there is significant uncertainty. One second or 500 milliseconds where you don't know if your transaction succeeded or not,
then you need to factor this into the spread you quote because there is significant uncertainty.
Basically, market can move in any direction in these 500 milliseconds,
and so you need to quote wider.
And as soon as we are able to make this distance in time as small as possible, so about 50 milliseconds currently,
then we ultimately allow our market makers to quote tighter and so we get better liquidity and
better spreads for the users. And there's something you spotted right straight away,
that an opportunity right, that you can we can make use of this. Yeah, I think because back then most focus probably was on throughput, but actually throughput
is, I think, to a high degree kind of solved because if you look at throughput numbers
that chains advertise and the actual throughputs that we see in like box for us, we usually have like 10 to 100x more throughput available that is actually used.
While latency is actually critical because latency affects trading like every day and affects the liquidity of the assets.
Cool, yeah.
And you know, instant confirmations is something we built because it was asked for from users.
And I guess it's just part of a wider system
of a lot of changes which have been going on, improvements
in Etherlink and on the EVM side as a whole.
Yeah, so what is nice actually with instant confirmation,
as it's not directly linked to the runtime that is used,
it's a feature built mostly on the node part
and interaction between nodes.
It's going well with the Tether 6 project
and in that roadmap,
and we are just a neat work to do
from making it available as day one on Tether 6,
and it's going to be available on day one of Tether 6.
Cool. And I mean, instant confirmations is not, I guess, a very new...
Quite a few other chains have been talking about reducing latency as well.
I think Flash Blocks from Base was one of them.
Yeah, so Flash Blocks, Base Flash Block andirmation has the same goal but a different approach.
So Bayes worked at the level of a block by submitting slice of the block every 200 millisecond
to be consolidated into a block every two seconds.
Whereas with Eterlink, we work at the level of the transaction by making the
second commit to any transaction it's going to include in the next block
broadcast that and so any node that follows the second circle can execute
the transaction that is going to be included so we have we measure 50
minutes gone for execution on the local node for blocks that is going to be included. So we measure 50 minutes for execution on the local node
for blocks that is going to be created in the next 500 minutes.
Cool.
And it's first come first served as well compared to, like,
I think it's gas auctions on base, right?
So one of the big difference with base
is the way transactions are ordered.
For example, for Bayes, they order transactions per on gas consumption and with a priority fee.
So small transactions with high priority is going to be included first into the block.
Where in Etherlink, we had fair in mind and we chose first come, first serve process.
So the sequencer is going to include any transaction
in the orders it's received.
So I mean, is first come, first served as important,
or is it this raw speed, which is to you
the most important one?
I mean, reduced latency is most important, I think.
But yeah, first come, first serve is also interesting. I think. But yeah, first-come, first-serve is also interesting.
I just wonder if you can go around it
if you send a lot of transactions.
So sort of you get similar factor priority fees.
I'm sure we'll find out, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I remember during the engineering,
it was quite technically quite hard to do.
Were there any speed bumps along the way?
What was the hardest thing you found to do?
Yeah, maybe the other thing is,
the hardest thing, I think it's,
so Ethalink is one sequencer, multiple followers,
and it's to make sure to have no divergence
between the ways the sequencer executes the block
and the way the followers execute them.
So with instant confirmation,
the sequencer is still executing the transaction
as a block at once, whereas followers
are going to receive transaction one by one,
so execute them incrementally.
This path was actually hard to get to make sure there was no divergence between the view of the observer and the view of the sequencer.
Yeah, that sounds tricky, right?
We made it in the end, right?
And I think it's been quite successful.
We did a demo and it was taking like 20 milliseconds.
If you're this close to the Sequencer in Tokyo,
it's quite fast, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's really fast now to execute your transaction,
to have the receipt of your transaction.
So what does it mean for Hange users now
that 50 milliseconds is there, ready for you?
Does it change the needle anymore?
Does it make the needle anymore?
So we're currently working on incorporating these changes
into our stack.
So we are investing effort in making our APIs more reliable.
And eventually, it should affect our market maker partners
so that they can quote faster and more reliable on our decks.
Does it mean better prices?
Yeah, at the end of the day it means better prices.
So that's the only way users can see it actually.
Another small stuff for users is that for 500 millisecond block,
all events happen in the batch that for 500 millisecond block,
all events happen in the batches for 500 milliseconds,
and it may look less continuous, as long as big.
And yeah, even though user frontend user
has additional delays, so it's less critical to be
like 50 milliseconds fast, still it can affect UX to be like 50 millisecond fast. Still, it can affect
UX, I think.
What else can we do with them?
What other use cases are there
that we have in mind for instant confirmations?
a user to
wait a couple of seconds to make
a payment, it's not an issue, but
for NG, it's important.
And I would say another use case would be in gaming,
where you have a lot of inputs coming at once,
and where you have to react really fast to any of the system
boots.
Having any latency is going to break the player workflow
and going to be annoying and
makes the game not really nice. I guess you can imagine like with this AI now
you can have interactions on chain on ETH link and get responses back.
Yeah, for sure. I think it unlocks a huge amount of other things. And do you think you could do
anything else with it?
Are there any new DeFi primitives we could use
using the reduced latency?
I think it's mainly about trading and quoting quality.
So it's probably less like different features,
but more than working deeply into one direction. And it's important that right now Etherlink is one of the fastest chains out there
to trade and to build trading related products. That sounds good. So you know from
I guess what comes next for the feature, you know, what do we, how do we, this is probably a question for me, right?
Because I'm the product manager.
From the implementation side,
what's left to do on the feature?
First is to enable it by default
for all nodes to have that feature.
So Public Endpoint will have it available
and everything like this.
And then extend the API available
that can use that incremental state actually. So any Ethereum RPCs that we
support that can have the interest of having the incremental state will have the possibility to query it.
And we are...
Another part we want to work on is we currently have benchmarked 95% of the transaction under 50 minutes gone.
And we just want to get to 99.
So have a nice number with that target.
And you've mentioned implementing it the main features to get it for end users so what's next I think an important part
is once you have this good latency you can actually build more complex products
for so for spot trading it's probably it's good to have as low latency as
possible but still you can leave i mean with slower latency i mean we saw that slower chains also have
spot trading but like for leverage training and for perp trading that's uh hey low latency is
especially critical because you need to be able to handle much higher volumes
and you also need to be able to handle liquidations on time.
So that's really important and we're also looking into this direction later this year.
Cool, thanks. And if you want to start using the feature now, what do you have to do?
Go read the documentation and what's the easiest way to get started documentation is an important part but there is just a flag to add into the
configuration of running node and with that with a note that you run and with
that you can use either currently draft if therePC called SendRowTransactionSync.
That will give you the transaction of the,
the receipt of the transaction you just submit.
Or use any, we have implemented two web socket stream,
and you can use any of the two to get the feature,
insert confirmation feature.
Cool.
I think, is there anything else you want to add?
Any last minutes?
Any thoughts?
I just say that it's really convenient.
We can just send the transaction sync
and get a response immediately.
You don't have to poll every time.
And wonder what happened with your transaction.
So yeah, it's just also better UX, I think.
Cool. All right. Thanks very much. Ado, do we have any questions?
Do we have questions from the audience? Yes, one here.
Hi, I have a question regarding the competition with centralized exchanges.
For now, they still capture a vast majority of the volumes compared to DEXs.
How much do you think this instant confirmation
allows you to attract those volumes
from centralized exchanges?
So I think it really helps with UX challenges.
So previously, speed was a high blocker, I'd say.
So now, I think with fast information,
speed is actually on par with centralized exchanges.
I mean, it's not on par technically,
but we see that some other perp-dexes
which have similar latency, like Hyperliquid, for example.
So I think they have 200 millisecond block
or something like this.
They are able to compete with Texas.
And so I think speed is no longer a blocker for Etherlink
Texas.
I actually do have a question.
How fast or how low do you think we can actually go?
So just to explain a bit maybe the benchmark, we run the benchmark in a VM with a node close
to the sequencer.
And on that benchmark we were able to monitor ERC20 transfers, so classic transaction, and about 80% of them
was 20 to 30 milliseconds.
And that time is mainly processes,
so there is almost no network latency.
And we'll see if we can go lower than that,
but it's actually already impressive, I think.
Almost real time.
Fantastic. Fantastic.
Brilliant.
Any more questions from the audience?
Anyone?
If not, I think we can wrap it up.
Thank you so much, guys.
Really a great conversation.
We're going to have a short break now.
We're actually on time.
I'm very surprised.
Coffee and refreshments are in the next room.
If you haven't checked out the stands, please, now is your time.
Please go and do it.
And I will see you back at 3.05.
Hi everyone, welcome back to Tezos Explained. I'm here with Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman.
Today we're going to be going through Etherlink.
Going through some use cases, trade-offs and looking forward to the road ahead.
So Arthur, you've explored scaling across blockchains for years.
Was there a particular insight that made Etherlink the right direction going forward?
Initially, I was quite focused on state channel type of solution.
So the most popular state channel that's known is something like the Lightning Network,
but it's not capital efficient.
There's a lot of games you can play as well with smart contracts in a state channel.
That's an interesting way to scale.
Plasma was an extension of state channels
i got a bit interested in that but i was a sharding skeptic as well for a very long time because
looking at the sharding solution from ethereum none of them seemed to really hold water like it
wasn't even clear what they were proposing my first idea around scaling was in 2017 i published
a blog post where I proposed something like
validity roll-ups. So the idea is using the around edge proofs not for privacy
but for scaling. It's an idea that since then proven extremely popular. So I had
this in the corner of my mind and then around 2021 two things became clear to
me. One was that there was a clear way of doing sharded data viability with error correcting code.
And you could pair that with the validity roll-ups.
But then on top of that, you also had the concept of an optimistic roll-up,
which are much more compute efficient than validity roll-up,
but still provide excellent security guarantees.
So when all of this came together, I was like okay now scaling is solved after that it's just
been about implementing it and what are some of the technical challenges in terms of implementation
of the technology that's a lot of work it's a lot of work and also like um you're doing very
security critical work so you know you can't afford to have bugs there's a lot of complexity
in our logic right in the zero knowledge role validity roll-up, you have to deal with complicated cryptographic primitives.
So those can be quite hard to implement, but then you can test them very thoroughly.
And also for your security, you only depend on the security of your verifier, which can be much simpler.
Then you have to care about the security of your circuit. That can be quite difficult.
But once you're there, you're there.
You don't have complicated state management and logic.
Optimistic roll-up is the opposite.
There's no complicated cryptography about it,
but there's a lot of edge cases and state and thinking about a game and all that.
So that can be quite tricky to implement.
You need to have your full machines.
You need to think about gas.
You need to think about a lot of things.
It's quite a bit of work.
So bringing it back to Etherlink, from a developer or user perspective,
what are some of the new capabilities does Etherlink enable that weren't possible on Tez or so on?
Mostly acting as an EVM compatibility layer.
There's a whole ecosystem now of tools and middleware that basically can just plug in any EVM chain.
So being an EVM chain brings you a lot
of benefits from this perspective you get access to bridges you get access to custodians centralized
exchanges wallets all of that so unlocking that is a massive benefit and it's something that
a lot of developers want to have it's also the case that a lot of developers today start by building in Solidity or for any Unicorum
type of environment and then choose a chain to deploy on later in the process. So being able to
come and say hey you can deploy on Tezos by using Etherlink is a much better value problem saying
hey wouldn't you like to rewrite your entire code base to deploy on Tezos. So there's been an ongoing
debate amongst the community.
Does Etherlink compete with Tezos or is it complementary?
And how do you sort of frame that relationship both strategically and technically?
Tezos and Etherlink are not competing with each other.
And also there's not Tezos and Etherlink.
Etherlink is just a part of Tezos.
Etherlink is the name of the VM compatibility layer for Tezos.
If you're using Etherlink, you're using Tezos.
You're relying on the security of the Tezos blockchain.
You're paying for gas using Tezos.
You're paying for transaction inclusion using Tezos.
Yeah, it's a part of Tezos.
It has a brand because people like new stuff.
And so if you give them new stuff, it's like,
Etherlink, it's new, come and check it out.
So what impact could Etherlink have on bringing liquidity and rebuilding a strong DeFi layer on Tezos? For a while, I think there was not a clear strategy around DeFi and Etherlink was a good opportunity to bring more DeFi.
One of the things that Etherlink brings that's quite important is low latency.
You get your confirmation for your transaction in less than one second and that has
proven to be a key part really really important part of d5 people do not want to wait you know
20 seconds to see the transaction being included or finalized they just want to be able to trade
quite quickly that's been very very important and that's something that is something can offer
there's plans to release tesling which offers you know some mickerson and tesos compatibility which will also come with a sub-millisecond latency but for now if you want the sub-second latency on
tesos that is a link and that's where it makes more sense for the defy to live it's also the case
that a lot of protocols exist on many chains a lot of bridges exist on many chains a lot of
aggregators exist on many chains you want to be able to tap into all of that environment.
So for all these reasons, it makes a lot of sense to make a concentrated push for DeFi
and Etherlink.
So what are the significance of fast withdrawals for moving assets from Etherlink to Tezos?
And how does that open up a new layer of interoperability and UX for the chain?
So the fast withdrawals will mostly work for its fungible tokens.
I think it gives people the confidence that they can mint their token on the Tezos L1
and then bridge them over to Etherlink for usage rather than necessarily create them
straight on Etherlink because they know that they'll have a convenient way of bringing them
back quickly if need be and then you know the two can be arbitraged fairly efficiently.
I still think it makes a lot of sense for assets which are minted to be minted on L1 and then bridge over,
because it gives you the possibility to really quickly dispatch.
So if you're going to have a hub-and-spoke type of model, you kind of want your hub to be on L1.
Final question. Looking forward into two to three years, what do you as some of the most like impactful use cases for etherlink i think it's important to be open to anything that's going to
come uh there's some applications coming to this link i'm excited about there's a marketplace for
compute for germinating ai art that's quite interesting coming up one area i've been
focusing on um is using d5 for real stuff as opposed to DeFi for DeFi's sake. Yeah. Using DeFi for uranium trading, for example, is super interesting.
So yeah, this kind of marriage between DeFi, but actual like meaningful finance.
Thank you very much for your time today.
Welcome back to Tezos Explained.
We are joined today by Ben Elvich. He is the product lead for Uranium I.O.
Thank you very much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
Well, let's dive right into it. So can you tell me more about Uranium? There's been a recent surge of interest.
Can you tell me more about what's driving it?
Everyone sees the need for greater energy security, but also more power needs.
A lot of things that are driving society are power intensive.
And certainly now we see with AI as well, increased demand for power.
And I think if you want that combined with clean energy, nuclear is the only proven solution.
Therefore, if you want to have more nuclear capacity, you actually need a large stock of uranium to do that
because uranium is the base material from which nuclear fuel is created,
which then powers nuclear reactors.
And so naturally, with increased demand and appetite for nuclear power,
you see increased demand for uranium, which makes the market super interesting.
Why has retail access to uranium been so difficult?
It's a market that historically, until we launched in December of 2024,
that's only been traded in terms of the physical material over-the-counter or OTC.
And because of that, the lot sizes in terms of minimum amounts that can be traded have been very high.
Typically, that's about £100,000 in weight,
which a current spot price is between seven and a half and eight
million dollars which for most people is pretty inaccessible not just in retail investors but
also smaller hedge funds and professional investors as well the other option would be to invest in
one of the listed vehicles these are closed-ended investment trusts and they typically trade a
discount to the actual underlying asset value of the uranium held.
We think that through tokenization, not only do you reduce the operational burdens and the capital barriers,
but you also get more effective exposure over the long term to the underlying asset if you're looking to invest in uranium.
Maybe for those who just joined us or are just learning about this topic,
you can explain a little bit what uranium is and what uranium IO is, what XU308 is.
XU308 represents beneficial ownership of the physical uranium.
So if you own, let's say, £500 in weight equivalent in XU308 tokens,
you could actually take physical delivery of that,
which is very different to a lot of typical approaches to tokenization at least historically where different vehicles and entities would be created and different assets
essentially that would reference the price what we've done is use blockchain technology
and infrastructure to improve the market and how the market operates rather than creating a new
asset if participants in the market have surplus inventory of uranium, they haven't got
enough to trade in those minimum lot sizes, they can actually use our capability to tokenize it
and free up that capital and they can hold on to that uranium, they can sell some of it or all of
it and they can also use it to borrow against and use that as collateral which can create more
capital efficiency. Now that you mentioned it, tell me more about borrowing against XU308.
So there was a recently announcement coming from Uranium.io
mentioning Morpho, mentioning Oku.
I think it's super important because we're moving a market
that has gone from being only traded over the counter.
The first phase is creating a more transparent and efficient spot
market. And then how do you make capital allocation and people investing in uranium have even greater
efficiencies by using all the benefits of being on blockchain rails to enable people to use the
uranium they hold that is collateral and borrow USDC against it meaning they can take advantage of
short-term investment opportunities whilst also retaining the longer-term exposure
to uranium you don't have to miss out on other short-term opportunities that
you may want to invest in you can actually do both now with with this capability through Morpho and
Oku. And can you tell me more about the reasoning behind Morpho? Why was Morpho chosen for this?
Yeah, I think Morpho was chosen because they've sort of proven themselves
as a leader, really, in that peer-to-peer lending protocol.
So it was really two reasons.
One, they're established and open source and audited,
and that's great from a security and reliability perspective.
And two, it was just seamless and very easy to do.
So that also meant that it was
not a huge resource left on our side as well essentially took care of all the hard work and
all the thinking and we were able to really configure that to meet our needs in the specific
use case of uranium and can you tell me more about how oku fits into all this so oku is the front end
so when you go to uranium.io you go to the borrow section and then you you actually
click the button to start the borrowing process that front end is oku and oku has built what we
consider to be a really good ui for people to access the underlying capability and contract
that morpho have everything we're doing on uranium.io is to make investing in uranium and
interacting with the uranium market as seamless as possible.
Tell me more about Tezos Layer 2. What makes it a good choice for tokenization?
The Tezos Layer 2, so Etherlink, was really important and it has been a great platform for us to build this on because to reach the scale we want to reach, we need something that is low cost, will scale with us seamlessly and is very reliable.
And Etherlink so far has ticked all those boxes
from speed.
All right.
Hello, Aaron, where are you going?
You, ah, okay.
We are, we just lost our moderator.
So good luck to us.
Welcome back.
I hope you're all hydrated and caffeinated and ready
for the next part of Test Dev 2026.
So we're going now to talk about one of the most discussed
topics in crypto right now, intense and cross-chain
infrastructure.
There's a lot of happening here.
There's a lot of noise too. There's a lot of noise, too.
And this panel will be a great opportunity
to cut through it and understand
exactly what's working today.
So I would like to welcome Aaron Mallet,
Senior Growth Manager at Trilitech.
Oh, I see you wanted to do the big entry.
Then we have on the panel Anastasia Kondorova,
DeFi technical lead at Trilitec,
and Alessandro Lossi, senior product manager at Dune.
Please give it up for the panel.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you very much for the intro.
Yeah, we're here to discuss intense RFQs
and the future of bridging.
I think it would be good to probably start with a bit of intros.
I know that we just have one quickly,
but Anastasia, how about you kick it off?
Sure.
So currently, I work at Trillitech,
but I was around Tezos ecosystem for like seven years
already, building decentralized exchange,
landing farms, different DeFi primitives for Tesla cell 1.
Yeah, that's pretty much about me.
And then we've also got Alessandra from Dune.
Yeah, and I'm a product manager in the data team at Dune.
So Dune is a data analytics company supporting like a 100 plus blockchains.
And what my team does is working on the data in,
so working with the different blockchains to ingest the data
and then everything that happens in the backend
so that you guys can query the data easily.
Amazing.
Well, I think before we get into Intense and RFQs,
it would be good to understand sort of like the basics
and the background of bridging
and sort of how do we get to where we are right now.
So Alessandro, how did swaps and bridging work before Intense and what was broken about it?
Yeah, I think that we have come a long way in crypto. So I think we started the pioneers of
like swaps we had back in the day like EtherDelta and ZeroX that tried to replicate like a central limit order book
model that was already present on traditional markets and bringing it to crypto.
But of course, like being in the early days and not many participants or like sophisticated
participants being in the market.
We created liquidity problems,
and then liquidity brings it very expensive for the users to transact.
And then there was Uniswap.
We all know that pioneered the very well-known AMM model where you don't trade against other people,
but you have a deterministic formula that tells you exactly how much you're getting of a token
given the liquidity in the liquidity pool.
I think that that worked very well and still works for a lot of the cases, but then
especially given the fragmentation that crypto has seen with many different blockchain layers
and many different tokens, it's hard to get the same type of performance there for all across the spectrum and
that's I think where this has brought to now developing intents and bridging I
think the most known model was the lock and mint so you want to bring token to
another blockchain you lock them into a smart contract and this protocol mint this token on the other layer for you.
but it created a lot of security problems and there have been many popular acts that
made a loss in the billions of dollars for this type of bridges.
So that's definitely required a new mental model to pass on that.
Yeah, definitely.
Anastasia, are there any charts you can sort of run us through?
Actually, yes, there is one.
Here we can see that Warhol was one of the biggest DEXs,
one of the biggest breaches at some point of time.
But then because of the hacks and because the market needed a new model,
we can see that TVL on such lock and mint breach
has dropped significantly somewhere in 2022.
And then, would you say at the time, could the protocols tell that a lot of the volume was fake or manipulated,
or was it more around it became clearer in hindsight?
I think at the point when airdrop hunting started somewhere in 2023, it was visible that there is a lot of fake volume.
But on the other hand, despite its bad activity and its abusing of the system and its abusing of the protocols who want to try to distribute their tokens fairly, thing, that the infrastructure was stress tested, and it became clear that something
is wrong with the current bridging systems,
lock and mint, and also pull-based bridges
were not good enough.
And that's why some protocols, something like Akros,
started to think about better models and and started to think about intense.
I have a few charts here too. Here we can see a layer zero messaging, amount of messages that
happened on layer zero in different period of times, and we can see a huge spark on 2023 because
of the airdrops and everyone was hoping to get layer 0 token first.
Same we can see with other bridges, I guess, that's the users and daily transaction on
Orbiter, yeah, and same for StarkNet somewhere in 2023, and same here for the base bridge. So the pattern is quite
clear I guess. Thank you. I guess let's jump into intents. So Alessandro how would
you explain an intent in one sentence? I think that intents can be summarized as you tell the system what you want to get,
and you don't have to worry about how to get it, so what happens under the hood.
And Anastasia, what does the user actually sign?
So what does the message look like under the hood, if you will?
So basically, user says the amount that he wants to exchange,
and he specifies the limit, like what price will be fine for him.
Like, he would not agree to pay more than this.
And basically, he just requests a quote,
and there are solvers who suggest prices,
and the best one is just executed.
Actually, this approach came from TreadFi.
RFQ model existed there for a very long time, and it fits perfectly to crypto.
Yeah, you just touched on RFQs. What does RFQ mean?
What does RFQ mean?
RFQ is
request for quote
which basically means
the user specifies what
he wants and there are
dealers
in case of crypto
it's solvers who
provide a quote for user.
They probably know the best
venues where they can
buy this asset for the user and
they add some margin on top of it so they make money out of spread.
Okay. Alessandro, so obviously within AMM, the trade moves the price against you in real time.
How does the RFQ solve that specifically for the new bridging systems?
I think that for bridges specifically, with a solver, you can tell them where you want to have your funds, like how much and in what chain.
And basically, they front the tokens for you on the other chain.
And basically, they just worry about the settlement itself in the backend.
And this is very easy to say,
but it requires pretty sophisticated actors
that need to run expensive infrastructure
and strategies across multiple chains and multiple protocols.
So I think that we have been in the right moment in time where our space has matured
and has attracted or has developed internally, like participants that became very sophisticated and able to do
this type of service for the user because you can say is a new type of
like an intermediary that helps you to have a better quote on your on your
activities. Okay. Anastasia, would you say it's a healthy open market
or is it dominated by a couple of firms?
Unfortunately, I have to say that it's dominated
by a few participants or a few solvers.
And these solvers can be the same on a few protocols.
It could be different on different protocols.
The thing is, for example, if you can look at this chart,
which shows solvers on the CovSwap,
and we can see that one of their solvers
receives like 40% of the whole volume,
and they fill most of their requests.
Same we can say for ACROS, same we can say for
Near, for example. So that's mostly the problem because when there are only few dominated solvers,
it means that users sometimes do not really receive the best code, but rather what the market can
suggest. And the reason why it happens is that, for example, ACROS requires you to stake tokens
to be eligible for solving.
Same for, for example, one-inch fusion.
They also require you to hold some governance token for that.
And some protocols just require you to be waitlisted.
So that's the reason.
Nier tried to solve it because anyone can join Nier Intents
and to become a solver.
But still, there are parties who have more liquidity.
Maybe they negotiated some better rates
on centralized exchanges for them.
And they just win most of the cases.
So Alessandro, the old
bridge model had smart contract risk.
You could audit the code.
Would you say currently
the solver concentration risk is more
or less visible to users?
I think
that it's an evolution
so it has solved
some of the problems
inherently smart contract risk but it has solved some of the problems, like inherently smart contract
risk, but it has taken now
the user has some counterparty
risk sometime, and
I think particularly
so in a
pure smart contract world, like both
AMM and bridges,
you can be sure that smart
contracts are active like 24
7 and they go automatically.
So even if you want to fill an order that you maybe don't get the best price,
but you're mostly sure that you get your orders filled.
But when there is a counterparty, then there is always some uncertainty,
especially I think in times of, say, distressed moment
where there might be some sweet market moves or parts where maybe the counterparty is busy
to manage their position and they kind of overlook the solver activity, I think that can create some
problem for the user that might not be able to fill their orders. So I believe
that maybe like an hybrid having these two ways that coexist can give the
user the level of sophistication that they want while using the intent model
and then you still have to rely on the AMM or other bridges in case of that the other part doesn't work.
I think the other problem is that some tokens are not very liquid and they are not very trusted by solvers.
And that's why solvers may not have the capital in these assets,
and they may not be able to provide best rates for the user.
And specifically, it's a problem with the new chains,
where liquidity is lower, the trust of the chain is lower,
and it could be a problem.
Yeah, I mean, you just touched on the cold start problem.
I think also just looking at RFQs in general,
where would you say this model breaks down for both users and also solvers as well?
I think I raised kind of few things already.
That's when we have chains that are new
and they don't have a lot of liquidity there
and solvers have to trust these chains to hold their capital
or they need to find good places to hedge.
Other thing is when it's a token, this is not very liquid.
Stress on the market, as it was already mentioned.
Or maybe like a too large of order.
So you have a situation where maybe the solver
doesn't have the inventory to fill all your order,
and that can be problematic as well.
Yeah, that's true.
Actually, intent best works for mid-size trace
rather than super small or super big.
I think, touching on Near Intents, so they went from zero to about $6 billion in volume in 2025.
What would you say actually drove that?
That's a nice question.
I think they were lucky to be in time with their solution when the hype around privacy token started
and they were integrated into Zcash wallet and if we look at the charts here we can see that
somewhere in the summer the biggest one of the biggest assets traded on year intense was Zcash
and they generated most of the volume. Later, since they kickstarted well,
more solvers started to join and provide good rates
for other chains.
And basically, they were one of the first
started to support native Bitcoin.
They started to support Tron.
And that was their main advantage at that point of time.
If we look at the data right now, we see that the distribution of assets shifted.
And most of the assets that are traded are stable coins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a very small portion on Zcash.
Honestly, also great for Dune to be providing the data as well.
In terms of Alessandra, would you say, is this a replicable playbook?
So to find an undeserved asset with a captive user base and sort of build around it,
would you say that's a good strategy for other protocols to follow?
I think it depends.
I think some of the, maybe I talk about blockchains.
The blockchains that are left out sometimes
are for non-EVM's chain to source...
Because even for a solver,
you need to build the proper infrastructure
with the proper smart contract and everything on the blockchain.
So that's also why Nier became popular,
like unifying many, like supporting many non-EVMs chain.
And yeah, I think in general,
finding a niche of users that you want to target,
I think it's always a strategy that at work
and then you can expand from there
once that you have established a solid base.
Okay. And then sort of wrapping up now, I guess.
So, you know, we jumped five years into the future.
Would you say the average person knows what a bridge is?
Or has bridging sort of become invisible for most users?
I'm pretty sure it will be super invisible for the users.
For example, when we use our cards to pay for the things
or when we send Swift,
we don't really care what happens under the hood.
It's just an infrastructure that runs on its own
and we don't really think on what's going on,
We know how my euro is sent to, I don't know, some bank in the US and switches to USD.
how my euro is sent to, I don't know,
So I think it will be super visible for the users.
Maybe it's not going to happen in five years.
Maybe we need more time.
But as long as more people start to using crypto, more institutional join, maybe more banks adopt digital currencies,
we will see a big shift on making the bridging invisible for the end user.
And Alessandro?
Yeah, I definitely agree.
And I would say that also maybe in the future, even users will not be able to do transactions.
They will have their agents managing all of them for themselves.
So then it's going to even bring more like a bridging
and knowing exactly where you want to go,
like as a thing of the past.
Would you say agents fundamentally
like benefits from Intense? Or do the old bridging models work better?
I think agents can be more rational and have to find what's finally the best way to perform an action.
So if Intents and the solvers are going to give them the best quote and that's the best way,
they're probably going to do for that. Or if you find another route that's, I think, yeah,
more rational and less influenceable by humans.
Well, there's actually one more thing.
So Intense are actually coming to Tezos.
So if you want to find out more information,
head to tezosintense.com,
and you can find out all about that's coming later this year in 2026.
And that's all we have time for today.
Thank you very much.
Amazing. Thank you.
Thank you, Anastasia, Alessandro, and Aaron.
We did it on purpose.
Everybody with an A in their name.
Okay.
Now to our next session.
Have you ever heard about AI agents?
Well, unless you've been living under a rock, I bet you have.
They are the hottest topic out there right now.
Everybody's trying to figure out how to best use them.
Jan Regis-Gianas is our head of core engineering and nomadic labs,
and is here to share how AI agents are actually transforming software development in practice.
I'm super excited about this one.
The title of the presentation is actually Stop Pedaling,
which is either very zen or very provocative.
And I guess we're about to find out which.
Please welcome Jan to the stage.
Hello, everyone.
How are you today?
Great?
Yes, not too sleepy.
There will be a lot of pictures in this one,
so I hope it will keep you attention.
OK, so where can I change the slide? Sorry. Where is it? How can I move to the next slide?
So, most teams using AI agent today are putting a motor on a bicycle.
It works.
You go faster, but during this talk, I want to suggest that you can just get off the bike.
Because if you stay on the bike, you will go a bit faster,
indeed, but you will still be working under the same
constraints.
You will still follow the same path.
And at the end of the day, you will just do the same thing,
but a bit faster.
Sometimes there are some radical changes.
And if you, for instance, you are a mailman and you are given a bike,
and every day you have to, you know, to deliver the mail,
what you will optimize is actually the distance because your muscles are at work.
So you want to be very careful. You want to really optimize the path to optimize the distance.
And if at some point you get a long turn, actually it will just waste an entire morning,
for instance.
While if you give a main man a car, it's a different game, completely different game.
Why? Because now you don't care about the kilometers, you don't care about the distance,
you will actually optimize maybe time to delivery.
You will do multiple deliveries during the day.
And if at some point you take a wrong turn, well, you just do a U-turn and you just waste two minutes.
So, the first principle I want to talk about is this idea that when there is a radical change in the cost structure of your operation,
you should not optimize the whole process.
You need to redesign one from scratch.
So, here we are.
Here is a model.
Software development today is an assembly line. Input ideas, output software, and in between agents.
They are fast, they are tireless, and also very cheap. That's given. Agents are super fast. That's their main property, what really matters.
So, if you look at this picture here, you will see that agents and humans can work together on the line.
And you can also have humans
that are on top of them, steering
the direction,
checking if the work
is done properly, checking if
we are doing the actual right
software.
And this image
will stay with us during this talk
because once you accept this axome,
the fact that agents are super fast, the interesting question is, what determines the quality of
the output?
And the answer is not the agent, it's actually the input.
So that will be the main message of this talk, and I will come back on it.
But before that, imagine what you can do with such a sampling line.
So for instance, on Thursday, I was preparing this talk,
and I was asking myself, okay, which ideas I should present today
that I've been able to put at work with agents.
And in only five hours, I was able to build a verifier
for Michelson scripts.
I will come back on that, and I will explain why
it took only five hours.
But before that, let me, as there is a saying in French, so we are in Cannes, so I will allow myself,
ne pas confondre vitesse et precipitation. In English, don't confuse speed and haste.
and haste. So speed is indeed the main property of engines, the fundamental property. And
you don't want to fight against this speed because then you will fight against the tool
itself. But speed without structure is worse than useless. It's dangerous, especially when you build critical software
system as a blockchain protocol.
So the principle that you need to keep on top of your mind
when you are using agent is garbage in, garbage out.
And with agent, garbage out at full speed
in unpredictable ways.
OK, so should we use agent?
Yes, but we need to ask ourselves some more specific questions. How do we gain trust?
How can we make the output of agent reliable? And the answer is an harness. So an harness
is a system that you build around agents in order to make their output reliable.
So, how does that work? Well, there are three principles. The first one is specification
and knowledge. I never use an agent. I never let an agent write a single
line of code before making sure that there is no ambiguity about what I want to build.
So it's very usual that I answer 50 or even more questions before starting anything. Because the moment you let some freedom to agents,
the moment you let some uncertainties,
you will get an arbitrary answer.
You will get something that is probably wrong.
So you want to give them zero degree of freedom.
Also, what is very important is to make sure that you give them the knowledge to build
context that creates a very strong input.
In order to do that, you need to give them the knowledge of your project and make sure
that this knowledge is of great quality.
So what you need to do is to do some knowledge engineering. Make sure that inside your Git repository, for instance,
you have Markdown files indexed and optimized for agent
navigation that will allow your agent
to go through what you already know about the system
that you are trying to build.
That's the first principle.
The second one is architecture and code quality.
An agent is very good at doing something very specific.
If you have not a good decomposition of the problem you are trying to solve,
what you would get is actually some mixed and old-backed
solutions.
What if you have a beautiful architecture,
it will focus on one concern at a time
and actually fix it very well.
What I really like in code quality,
what I'm trying these days, is to use something called
literate programming.
I don't know if you're familiar with this concept.
It's this idea that you write a code with actually a lot of comments because you explain
inside the source code why it works, why you are doing things like this or not in the other
way.
Inside the code itself.
So that local to this code, you got the answer
why it has been built this way.
And I can tell you when the agent is building its context,
this locality is very effective.
So architecture, code quality, are
very good to build this famous context so that
then you will get good input and then good output. And the final ingredient,
the final principle is the feedback loop. I hear a lot of engineers telling me,
oh look I have given this prompt to the agent and look that's so bad the code it has produced.
It's perfectly normal. These are stochastic processes. With some error rates they are
hallucinating. But again their fundamental property is velocity. If an engineer comes to you with a
bad code it's really hard to say, you know, do it again.
With an agent, there's no problem with that.
And you can iterate five times and get a good answer at some point.
Because even if you have, let's say, 10% of errors and you iterate five times,
you have 99.9% of chance to get something good.
But how do you know it's good?
You need to know that in a deterministic way.
You need to use tests, validation, proofs, static analysis,
all these tools that give us confidence
and deterministic confidence
about the code that you are producing.
And when you have that, you just need to let the agent work
and take a nap.
So OK.
Maybe you could say, OK, yes, that's a bit abstract.
And I want to come back to something very practical,
as I've told you before.
Last Thursday, I was just wondering, OK,
I have to give this talk at Test Dev.
What should I advertise?
Let's build a verifier for Mikkelsen Scripts.
What is that?
So it's a program.
You give it your script, your informal specification, and then it will prove that this script is correct with respect to a formal specification that you would have built with the tool.
you would have built with the tool.
So it means that you get a guarantee, mathematical guarantee,
with a proof verified on machine that your script is valid
with respect to the specification.
That's huge.
And it took me only five hours to get there.
Why?
Because the input was excellent. The input was excellent because Michelson is a smart contract language that has been designed from the beginning to be a good language for formal verification. Why? Because it has a very control flow that is very simple.
So if you build a verifier tool,
actually it's super easy to generate proof obligations.
It has high level values.
So it means that you don't fight against the encoding,
you know, some pointers or
some encoding in bytes
to reason about it. You just get some lists, maps, and a lot of high level values like this.
So it's super easy to reason about that kind of high level objects. So that's the point. If you use an agent, if you provide it with very good input,
you will get very good output. And so that's the target system I want to build today. Okay, with turning this toy verifier into actually a real tool that maybe could be very useful to the Tezos ecosystem.
It's a tool that will allow you to start from your Mikkelson script, your informal specifications and you interact with the agent in order to
refine the specification to something that makes sense that has no more
ambiguities and when it's done well you just get it run why because the agent
will produce proof and you have deterministic ways to verify that this proof are correct. So there is no other way to trust an agent.
It comes with a proof that it's correct.
And in this pipeline, I won't detail it,
but at the end, what you got is actually
what is called a proof in the ROC proof assistant.
It's a certificate that you can just read and
you know that the script actually is back free. Okay? What I want to emphasize on
this diagram is not really the diagram itself. Simply that in the front end of
the diagram you have some agents, some non-determinism, some interactions with agents that can be a bit stochastic.
But at the end, you have only deterministic tools
that will provide validation.
So that's one data point.
But there are others.
For instance, Zeina Dargai from Nomadic Labs
ask ourselves, OK, can AI agents reduce But there are others. For instance, Zeina Dargai from Nomadic Labs asked herself,
okay, can AI agents reduce the cost of using mechanized formal methods
in the development of the Tezos protocol?
So something that is real, that is used in production.
And the answer is yes.
She did four experiments.
I will present two today.
One is proving that the token module
in the layer one protocol behaves correctly.
This token module is super important
because that's where everything regarding test is done.
You really want that to be done correctly, right?
And what she was able to do is to take the property based testing that we already had
in the code base, all the design docs that we had, all the properties that we have written, and use all that to generate a verified model.
What's a verified model? Again, it's something you can trust because it's mathematics.
Mathematics on the machine. In a very verified way, you know that this object is valid.
verified way, you know that this object is valid.
She also took what has been presented by Matthias earlier,
the liquid, sorry,
liquid staking, white paper.
And she took also the design docs that we had,
all the properties that we had, and she
was able to build a mathematical model, again,
on the machine, verified, and mostly perfect.
The same architecture applies.
We provide some input to the agent.
This input is, you know, a lot of documents in natural language.
You work with the agent to refine, to formalize it on the machine.
And then you have this possibility
to just let the agent work because you know
you have a deterministic tool that will verify that the agent
is not doing anything wrong.
So I want to draw some conclusion now.
And this conclusion is about the relationship between Tezos ecosystem and formal methods.
We have been investing a lot in formal methods in the day and it's paying out.
We can see that with Mikkelsen, for instance, it is a very well-designed language.
That's not an accident that it's good for formal verification.
It has been thought that way.
It's the first principle.
So you take the basis, and you are able today
to leverage it in order to get code produced by agent that you can trust.
So the culture itself that we are following the Tezos engineering work is actually the
harness.
It's the design of Michelson that is the harness.
It's this methodology based on first principle,
on math, on properties, on formal semantics,
that is now a big advantage for us.
So in the past, Formula Method was a luxury.
Now it becomes probably a competitive advantage.
And the Tezos ecosystem has invested a lot
inside this Formula Method approach.
So today, we have a factory.
We have very good input,
and the only question is if we want to be assembling by hand
or just run the line.
So I've been talking about how to build software right,
I've been talking about how to build software right.
And the next talk by Arthur Bretman will be about how to build the right software.
So it's the second part of the equation.
You probably want to hear it.
But mine is done.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, Jan.
And thank you for helping me warm up the audience
for the next talk.
Now, we're going to have a very quick round of Q&As.
I probably start with a question for you.
Now, what is the advice that you would give to developers
today?
What should they be doing right now?
Right now, I think the longing fruit that has the most impact
is to import all your knowledge inside your Git repository,
simply as markdown files, well indexed,
so that agent can navigate efficiently.
And you will see immediately the effect on this
on the output of your code agent.
That's what I've noticed in many occasions.
It's extremely powerful.
So you don't need all this linear GitLab, et cetera.
You just need a Git repo with text files
and let your agent work with an harness.
and let your agent work with an harness.
Any other questions from the audience?
Anything else?
No? Okay.
Well, thank you, Jan.
Thank you very much.
Okay, okay.
So now for the highlight of the day.
Now, if you've been to previous events,
you will know that Arthur's keynote is a tradition here at Tasdev.
And this year, he will be talking about good infrastructure.
He's just the beginning.
Very, very curious about the content of his presentation.
Now, I thought a lot about how to introduce Arthur.
And then I realized that probably he's
the only person that does not need an introduction.
Please, let's welcome on the stage
the stage, the co-founder of Tezos, Arthur Breiman.
the co-founder of Tezos, Arthur Breiman.
All right.
Thanks, everyone, for coming.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about infrastructure
and product on Tezos.
And I don't know if this is a highlight.
I tried at each TezDe dev to do a bit of an update
on where we are.
And I think if we follow the Tidos ecosystem closely,
not a lot of this will be very novel to you.
But it's still important to do it.
So the chain evolves at the first thing.
Well, you kind of know that.
That's really core to the value prop of Tidos.
It's a chain that's been evolving since its
launch in 2018. It's gone through so many upgrades and so many improvements. And so,
you know, the past few days I've talked about this scaling roadmap and, you know,
every year there's still some stuff to be done and there's still some
stuff we have done. And I think it's the first year where I feel like most of that roadmap has been done as opposed to remains to be done.
There's a few things we need to do, but by and large, we're pretty close.
So what do we have today?
We're down to six-second block time on the blockchain, on layer one of Tezos.
And that doesn't mean that transaction takes six seconds.
It can be much faster than that.
But it does mean that you get consensus in about 12 seconds.
Different blockchains vary up there, but I would say it's pretty good to get your finality
in 12 seconds.
Throughput boosts.
So a lot of the throughput work has been focused on Etherlink.
And Etherlink can now do 27 million gas per second,
which gives you about 1,300 TPS.
Can we do more?
Yes.
Do we want to invest tons of resources into making this more?
Not necessarily.
There's always trade off in terms of what we want to do.
I don't think anyone right now looking at Ethelink
is saying, oh, I need way more than 1,300 TPS.
And therefore, this is not for deploying.
It will keep going up.
Like, we keep having improvements.
There are things in the pipeline.
It's not a number one priority, but expect it to keep going up.
One thing that Dimitri mentioned earlier, Dimitri from Hanji,
was talking about how people have been focused on throughputs,
but they didn't see it more important for trading use cases.
And this is one area where we had a lot of improvements.
So instant confirmations now on ETHELINK give you,
say it's 50 milliseconds, that's conservative,
it can be faster than that.
But 50 millisecond latency via the ETHELINK sequencer.
So you can see a centralized exchange tick, like Bitcoin,
you know, the Binance ticks, and then immediately you're
able to do an order and in 50 milliseconds have confirmation
that your order is there or cancel it.
So it gives you a lot of, it gives you a much better
environment for an indexes, and that's been quite important.
And this is really state of the art latency.
Like you're using this, you're faster than Solana.
And you're faster than Solana can get,
because they kind of insist on this model where
they want to do everything in the layer one.
This is something that having a layer two gives you.
They give you very low latency.
There's weird workarounds you can try.
There are difficult workarounds you can try to do this
on layer ones. They've been talking about them. You can try to do this on layer 1s.
They've been talking about them.
I mean, I was talking about them years ago.
They've been talking about them in the Ethereum community,
but nothing has really come out of this.
The DAO has kept improving.
So as part of the Ushua protocol,
it's going to go to about 10 megabytes per second.
Again, plenty, plenty, plenty of space
for increasing bandwidth. So we're
there. Can we improve the dial further? Yes. Do we need to improve the dial further right now?
Not necessarily. And then emevee protection. So that's one area where we, so the etherlink
sequencer can guarantee the block results. What we don't have yet, and I'll talk about this a little bit,
is a blind sequencer that doesn't see the transaction
and has to approve the transaction
without actually seeing the transaction.
We do have decentralization in the sense
that it can be visible if the sequencer misbehaves.
So if the sequencer misbehaves, people
can bring proof of that and elect a new sequencer. You don't have a yet cryptography guarantee around this. So some major milestones
incoming. So first, new execution layer. So meet Tezos X. I've been talking about Tezos
X for a while. So what is it? It's going to have two interfaces. One is the AVM interface.
So everything that you've seen on Eselink
becomes so suited to Tezos X.
And the Mikkelsen interface for all of the applications
which have been developed historically
for the layer one of Tezos
and which going forward are also going to be developed
in Mikkelsen.
You've seen the talk from Jan. I would say that now more than ever there's also going to be developed in Mikkelsen. You've seen the talk from Jan.
I would say that now more than ever, there's a better reason to build in Mikkelsen.
Because in the past, you could have said, well, you know, it's Mikkelsen.
There's some languages, but it's a bit more difficult.
And it's harder to find developers.
You can do all of that.
Now you have coding agents.
And the coding agents will be happy to code in Mikkelsen for you.
So they'll be happy to code in EVM, but they will also be happy to give you formal
proofs of your code, and they can do that more easily if the code is in Mikkelsen.
So in some sense, raising the bar of the average developer by having really good coding agents
make it more favorable to have these nice languages.
Until they become so good that they don't even care what language they use,
but we're not quite there yet.
And I'd like to emphasize that this is a shared ledger, right?
This is one ledger, one set of accounts and contracts.
And so you'll have contracts, of course, which are written for the EVM,
contracts which are written for Mikkelsen,
but they can call each other in a single transaction, right?
It's not two separate zones.
You can have a Mikkelsen,
you make a transaction to a Mikkelsen contract,
it goes and calls a DEX that's running EVM code,
which then goes and calls a Mikkelsen contract.
So really, you can interweave your execution
through both interfaces and runtime environment seamlessly.
And that sits, of course, on top of the data availability layer,
which will be able to include transactions
so that they're not all posted to the L1,
which lowers the cost of transaction,
and which itself is, of course, secured by the layer one.
So really think of it as a single economic layer with multiple interfaces.
So you'll have the same assets and the same liquidity across Mikkelsen and EVM.
So if you have a DEX with lots of liquidity on the EVM side,
and you have an asset that's written in the Mikkelsen contract,
it can benefit from it, and vice versa.
It means you can have cross-interface composition
in a single transaction.
That's what I was saying earlier.
You make one transaction, you can call any contract anywhere.
So really, as a developer, you can choose any language
without having to worry about adoption.
You don't have to think, oh, geez, my contract should be in EVM
because I need to have such and such compatibility.
Use any language you want, and then we provide the compatibility.
That also means no forced rewrite or mass migration
for existing apps.
It should be fairly seamless and fairly straightforward
to redeploy your contracts on this layer.
And essentially what this does is that it creates
a new distribution surface, right?
You get all the distribution you could get from having this EVM
compatibility, which makes it easier to get integrations
without abandoning your Tezos native logic.
So you get the benefits, the development benefits,
I would say, of using the Tezos logic,
while at the same time being legible
to the rest of the crypto
ecosystem with EVM interfaces.
So you get the best of both worlds.
One aspect of the design which was very important was creating minimal friction
for layer one apps.
So the past is clear here and the choice we live was a builder.
You can stay on layer one, you can use layer one as much as you want.
But also almost all Mikkelsen contracts can be redeployed directly as is.
You can take your Mikkelsen contract, put it on
Tezos X. It means the existing tooling will work as well.
Whereas we're talking about the wallets and the Block Explorer.
It's a minimal change. And you'll have simple
interrupts with layer one
via bridges like we have had with Etherlink
and via fast withdrawals.
So what about Etherlink?
Well, Etherlink by itself is evolving into TezosX.
So what I've been describing is not something
that sits above Etherlink or is different from Ethelink.
Essentially, it's a merge, right?
So you're getting a renaming, if you'd like,
of Ethelink into TezosX with support for both EVM contracts
and Mikkelsen contracts.
And that is, TezosX is the name of our execution layer.
If you will, you can say that the x stands for execution.
What did we get out of this status x is throughput boost,
instant confirmations, fast withdrawal.
So really high throughput, really fast transaction
and at a minimal cost because you can withdraw
and exchange with the L1 with very little friction.
So I would say, when we have this,
we're pretty much there, right?
So adding the Makelson interface is what gives you Taser
stacks.
Now let's look a little bit at the timeline.
We used to have a timeline in years,
and now we're talking about this here.
So the testnet is going to launch next month, and you can please try it, try to break it,
try cross-interface calls between Mikkelsen and EVM contracts, deploy, test, break things.
In June 2026, it will be proposed for a governance vote, so it will be an Etherlink upgrade proposal,
and if approved, TLSX will become reality on the mainnet.
And then finally, in the second part of 2026,
we're planning a migration to RISC-V.
So this version of, you know, Tezlink was written,
it's a newer implementation of Tezos,
which was written directly in Rust.
So for a while, we thought we would use the OCaml code,
compile it to RISC-V.
Because it's written in Rust,
we're able to run it in a WASM interpreter.
We still think it's better to use
or fancy RISC-V interpreter,
but it's not entirely there yet.
So second half of 2026,
Rollup Engine can migrate from WASM to RISC-V,
which will make adding new interfaces easier,
because then we really have more choices of languages.
And we'll see where the demand is for those interfaces.
And speaking of seeing the demand,
we do have some adjusted priorities.
When I say we here, I'm talking about entities
like Trilitech, Ornom Nomadic Labs working on a core development.
So over the past year, in terms of development, what has taken priority was throughput,
latency, and the UR optimization. And that was following market signals. The market was really
telling us very strongly they did not really need more development interfaces. What they really
wanted was lower latency. That was a big, big demand and throughput.
So we focused on that, following the demand.
One thing that didn't have much demand, unfortunately,
was just this JavaScript GSD.
So there's not a strong demand for this.
And so we put it on ice for now.
We'll see what happens to it.
Perhaps at some point we see a renewed demand for JavaScript.
But right now it's not
really what the market is. There's been a lot of, I would say, with regulators becoming more
comfortable with crypto, there's been a lot of institutions building on crypto. They have cared
about latency, they have cared about throughput, they have cared about cost, they've cared less
about building new things in different languages. I also think that going into this JavaScript project, there was this idea that coding assistants
were becoming very, very prevalent and that they were better at JavaScript than other
languages, better at Python.
And I think it's a matter of also like skating with the puck is going to be.
In some sense, we're getting past the point
where the agent really cares about the language
because they're just getting so good that they are fine.
And if you're writing JavaScript,
you're writing for a big audience of developers,
but if your audience of developers is a coding agent,
you should be writing your development environment
knowing that it's going to be used by a coding agent. And it seemed to be fine with Mikkelsen and EVM.
The blind sequencer, so I mentioned that, it was one of the design goals originally
of Isolink or Tezos X, was to have a sequencer that would have to approve
or use the proof transactions without seeing them, and then after that the
transaction would get decrypted. And that gives you guarantees in terms of MEV,
because if it can't see it, then it can't sandwich it,
then it can't reprioritize it, it can't do any of these things.
It's a neat technology.
It would increase latency a little bit.
There hasn't been strong demand for it.
So you do get that property in the sense that
you have a well-behaving sequencer,
and it's possible to detect misbehavior in a sequencer
and to call a sequencer out on misbehavior.
So the fact that you can do that is enough.
We haven't seen the demand where people say, hey,
I would really deploy my DeFi protocol
if only I had this protection.
It's just not really there.
And data availability sampling, likewise,
I think we've had a target of 100 megabytes per second.
It's quite achievable.
But for now, 10 megabytes per second bandwidth
is more than enough.
Even if we had the combined amount of all the transactions
on all the blockchains, we would be quite fine with this.
So the priorities for core development are evolving, but also the model with which
those entities are supporting the ecosystem is also evolving. So the first thing is that the
market for base layers has changed over the past years. And base layer infrastructure remains
necessary, but it's rarely sufficient to attract people. And there's intense competition between
L1 and L2.
We went from a world where there was no scaling,
there was no room for transactions to work,
where there's a...
I mean, also, we went from a world where, to be honest,
there was a lack of any good quality software in blockchains
to one where there's a lot of contenders,
there's a lot of good blockchains out there,
there's a lot of block space out there. So lot of good blockchains out there, there's a lot of block space out there.
So if you see yourself in a market of selling block space,
well, there's a lot of it out there.
And so in that respect, I think ecosystem entities around
Tezos must adapt in how they can create value for the ecosystem.
Now, of course, the quality of the technical offering
remains key at the end of the day.
Fundamentally, Tezos is a blockchain,
and what its entities do is try to make it the best blockchain possible.
And I think to some extent, it is a fantastic blockchain.
From a technical perspective, if you're looking at Tezos,
there's very little to criticize here.
It's one of the best offerings you can find out there today,
if not the best offering.
So that remains key and that remains important.
It needs to stay like this.
It wasn't always like this, by the way.
I think TISO started out far ahead of the competition in 2018.
We had a lull, and we had to work to get back,
I would say, as a leading protocol in quality.
So it needs to remain robust, scalable, reliable.
It needs to be a platform that builders can really trust.
So that means no shortcuts, nothing being just close enough.
And what's important is preserving credibility
because it's one of the big assets that the Tezos brand or the Tezos
chain has for itself. It has a lot of credibility. It's been running
uninterrupted for many years. It's been very solid. No one looks at Tezos and
doubts the quality of the chain and that needs to remain true. So
infrastructure is necessary but really it's product that creates pool. So yes, those years of infrastructure work
were necessary because, again, I would say Tezos
stopped being some of the top offering around 2019, 2020,
fell a bit behind, and had to be modernized.
And that modernization took some efforts.
I don't think today Tezos could be a contender
if it had 100 blocks,
if it could do dozens of transactions per second.
So that work has largely been done.
Again, I've pointed out that the roadmap of Tezos X,
there's still something to do.
But by and large, it's been done.
And so now the binding constraint is demand,
distribution, and products that users return to.
And it's not something that's unique to Tezos.
It's been generally an issue in the whole,
in the entire crypto space.
And the upside of this is that, you know,
if we have products with real usage,
they can create a pool for Tezos.
And, you know, that's not something new in some sense.
We've always known that we needed to have
really good products, attracting people to
the chain, making people use the chain.
What I think has been missing is
trying to
target the right metric.
And I think we've played with
different metrics and we've had metrics such as
does this thing create good headlines?
Are people excited about it? And then there are metrics which are more formal,
how many active users, how many wallets, how many volume, and a lot of blockchains end up
like trying to game those metrics and playing with them. But the one metric that's really hard
to game and the one metric that's probably the healthiest to follow is revenue. And for a few
reasons. One is, you know, payment is the clearest proof that follow his revenue. And for a few reasons. One is payment is the clearest proof
that a problem matters.
If someone is willing to pay for it,
well, maybe they could be confused about their own problem.
But if they repeat the payment, if they keep paying for it,
probably it does something for them.
Maybe they are entertained.
Maybe it solves a problem that they have.
But clearly, they keep coming back.
And the point of revenue is that it's really helpful
in separating real demand from polite interests.
If you have a great idea and you tell people about it,
that sounds great.
And then you say, well, are you willing to pay for it?
And maybe you get a different answer.
And so when I talk about product and revenue here,
part of the idea that I should explain
is that these entities that support the ecosystem and that have done so in developing the chain and developing the infrastructure are now looking at building products.
And it's not the first time. We built some products like Canvas, for example, around sports NFTs and others. But this is focused on building products that bring revenue.
And one of the advantages of revenue, aside from the fact that it shows that the problem is real,
is that it also gives us room to reinvest from a healthier base.
So this is an expansion of how we create value.
So what we keep that we had was technical support, of course,
for anyone using the chain, high quality infrastructure,
and a backing for good builders.
What we're adding on top of this is now direct product building
that can work as revenue engines and distribution services
for people to also tack on to.
So a lot of these products that we want to be building
and talk about, they're not just product on their own.
They intend to also be platforms.
What does this bring?
It brings more users and repeat activity on Tezos.
It means more room to reinvest in the ecosystem.
And instead of preserving capacity, it helps us fund growth.
So what changes for builders?
So technical quality, again, remains stable stake. I think that's a part that we can't really compromise on. No, we want to. But
it means that we want to lean in hardest where we see real genuine pool, especially in the
form of revenue. So support is shifting from, I would say from speculative activity to scaling proven demand.
So if you find pool, if you're here, if you have something and it's working and you're getting users,
and you're getting revenue from those users, then once you find that pool, we can help you scale.
We can be here and we can support you technically, we can support you with investments,
we can support you in different ways to help you scale.
But the pool has to be there.
And I think there's been, and it's not just in a system, broadly speaking, around the world in crypto.
There's been this model for a while where, hey, there's a return on activity.
It's good to have activity, so we'll find anything that might have some activity.
Activity is no longer enough.
I think we have to look at revenue.
So some of the product engines we're building.
One is uranium.io.
It says stay tuned for big news,
but the big news was already announced, wasn't it?
Officially later.
Officially later, okay, okay,
because I've seen some stuff on social media.
So stay tuned.
Stokenized commodities on your internet, IO.
We're also building Bento, a wallet, but also a distribution platform for applications.
And then some applications in the space of gamified finance, which is a new area of interest.
So tokenized commodities, real assets, real value.
I think it's solving a problem that no one else was solving.
These are physical assets with global markets.
So big players with real stakes are interested in this.
We're still working on an aspect of it,
which we can call the DeFi mullet,
which is Trifi in the front, DeFi in the back.
I find the front, DeFi in the back.
To be candid, one of the challenges we've had with uranium is,
To be candid, one of the challenges we've had with uranium is, you know,
it's a lot of the people using crypto are retail and, you know,
retail interested in crypto and you tell them you want to buy uranium.
And they say, well, you know, it's not going to make me a millionaire by Sunday.
So, you know, why would I care about uranium?
And then you go talk to hedge funds and banks and they're like, oh my God,
we're desperate for a better way to get exported to uranium.
But does it really have to be a token?
So we're working on how we can combine this so that we can have a crypto-back offering
that's legible to TradFi.
And one point here is that this is a problem that existed before a blockchain solution.
It's not a problem that's created for the blockchain.
It is real that there's a lot of long tail commodity markets which are underdeveloped,
which need to be better developed, and being able to quickly spin up markets for commodities that are globally available
is not something you could easily do before and that you can do on TezosX.
Bento, so it's about value, but also beyond Tezos.
So it's a multi-chain wallet.
Why a multi-chain wallet?
Well, because we want to expand distribution.
Most users who are using a wallet are users of multiple chains.
They don't want to install a separate wallet for each chain
that they're using.
So Bento is natively multi-chain.
And in fact, a lot of work went into the back end of Bento
to ensure that it could support
many chains. So Unlaunch is going to support only a few I think Ethereum, Ethelink and Tezos
but it is basically it has a plug-in system that makes it easy to add many user chains and many
user chains will be coming. It's about creating value so this is a wallet that is focused on
yield generating features for users.
So if you are a user and you hold some crypto and you figure like, well, you know,
some people are earning like 5, 10 percent in their crypto, more than that,
but they have to be constantly switching DeFi protocol or be aware of everything that's going on.
We're trying to package this into a wallet that can give you access to the best deal you have.
So you hold your assets, you keep your directional exposure
on your assets, but on top of that, you get yield.
It's a very simple and legible value proposition for users.
Why should I use this wallet?
Is this because it gives me access to Tezos?
Is it because it has a nicer UI?
No, it's because on this wallet, your assets
will generate more revenue for you than on another wallet.
And it can generate fees.
One thing that came as a surprise a couple of years ago
was how wallets became fee engines.
And I think that wallets are pretty key
because at the end of the day,
a lot of users don't use blockchains.
They use applications.
And in fact, they don't really use applications.
They use wallets.
So if you look at an you know, an interesting use case is,
or study case, would be Pumped on Fun on Solana.
You could say that, well, people don't really use Solana,
they use Pumped on Fun, and it turns out it isn't Solana,
but really, they would use it on another platform,
that's just where it is.
And then you could also turn that and say,
well, they don't really use Pumped on Fun, they use Phantom.
And in some sense, not 100%, but Pum.net Fund has had some pricing power over Solana.
If Solana is trying to get more feed out of this, it would be hard because it could switch chains.
And likewise, Phantom has some pricing power over Pum.net Fund. of a permanent fund. Another example is that, take a user on some of the,
let's say, on some Ethereum L2 like Bayes.
So they're using Metamask to do a swap.
And what's going to happen when they do their swap?
They're going to pay a few cents
for the transaction to be included on the chain.
They're going to pay a few basis points.
That's already way more money for the Uniswap fee, for example.
And then they're going to pay 75 basis points,
which is an insane amount of money to pay for a swap to MetaMask
because, ah, that's just what they use.
So wallets are distribution engines.
They are much closer to the user than the back end.
They are fee engines, so we think they are quite strategic.
And especially having a multi-chain wallet can be strategic
in bringing users from different blockchains
and showing them opportunities that they are on Tezos.
So in short, market research leads the way.
So why tokenize RWAs?
Because there's a real institutional pool.
We still need to iterate a bit on how we get institutions
comfortable with a token.
But Tezos fits naturally here as a settlement layer.
Why multi-chain wallet?
Because go wide and bring people to Tezos.
And gamified finance, it's not ready for announcement yet,
but it's definitely high engagement.
It's transaction dense.
It's something that's revenue positive on day one
when it works.
So it's not some speculative thing
that you have to build.
And then maybe after millions and millions of investment
for years, you get somewhere.
This is something that can give you revenue right away.
So it's a proven model.
So that's some of the product that these entities are building.
But like I said, the support model
is also helping people scale.
And one thing that has been a strength of the Tezos ecosystem
for years is that it's been a fantastic change
for indie developers and builders.
And the recent very impressive improvements in Coding Agent
makes this an indie builder market.
It's actually getting harder for people in software to raise venture capital.
Venture capital is getting a bit more worried about software.
Why?
Because software is becoming less capital intensive.
And VCs want to invest in capital intensive businesses.
They want to invest in businesses that are going to raise money and need to keep raising money, need to IPO, need to do all that.
That's not really the case if as a solo dev now in a week you can launch
an app that would have taken a team six months or a year to build before that.
So it's fantastic for indie builders.
So let's look at what happens before or after AI.
Proof of concept, you go from days to just hours or hour.
And MVP, which would take you weeks or months,
can be done in days.
And products that would take months or years to develop
can be done in weeks.
So the benefit is that it's not that you can build a product
with no traction faster.
The benefit is that you can really iterate very quickly
and learn if you're solving a real problem.
And so, you know, I think this is a great fit for Tezos because it's going to be an indie builder era.
We're going to see a lot of software projects being built by one or two days only.
Coding agents make it radically cheaper to try ideas and Tezos has historically been a chain where people try new ideas.
So a small team, or even a team of one, can outship what used to require a fully funded startup.
And Tezos is so easy to integrate into side projects, experiments.
It's part of the culture. It's part of the ethos. It's part of my identity.
So I would recommend try more things and keep the one that gets pulled. It's very hard to know ahead of time what is going to get
pulled and what is not going to get pulled.
So try all of experiments.
Try this side project that you've had in your mind for years
and never really had time to do it.
Launch it, and it's very easy to integrate Tithos into that.
And then when something works, the ecosystem is here
to help you scale it, to help you make it
from something that's a green shoot that's having a lot of interest and buzz
into something really big. So we're here for that. So to help good product grow,
find your people, find people who love it, who are willing to pay for it and
then come to us. And what we offer? Technical support, scaling assistance, distribution, marketing, co-investment.
What we're less likely to offer now is grants to build something merely in the hope of generating activity.
We're not the only one who have done this. It's been a popular model in crypto.
It's a model that's fading or faded.
And the bar is, you bar is prove it first.
Prove it with revenue.
It doesn't have to be a lot of revenue,
but it has to be a little bit.
It has to be that someone's paying for this.
And then we can scale it together.
So strong execution layer.
We have that.
We're finishing that.
And a strong business layer.
Tezos X is amazing infrastructure. It's useful, it's scalable, it's built without
compromise and so we can leverage it for profitable products, bringing more on-chain
activity, bringing a stronger ecosystem and ultimately broader adoption. So this
is a harder path than just a pure infrastructure play, saying like, hey, we have the best
infrastructure, everyone come build here and then everyone builds here.
When that works, that's great.
I don't think it's going to work for anyone anymore.
We're, you know, the technology has matured.
We're much later in the space of crypto
that people can play that.
But it is more reliable as a pass to get there.
Another thing, separate from this is I was...
The graphic design team has done some great work
around making the brand evolve a little bit,
trying to do a refresh on this.
And so here's a sneak peek on things to come,
and I think a video should play. Music All right, thank you.
Okay, thank you. I don't know, probably we have some questions.
Yes.
Well, do we have questions from the audience?
If not, I will probably ask you something.
So what do you think?
You know, we spoke about Tezos X.
Where do you think the first breakthrough will come from on Tezos X?
I mean, Tezos X is less about breakthrough and more about continuity
and more about really, like, giving everyone a great platform.
But I think some of the applications I'm more excited about, you know,
seeing using Tezos X is some of the NFT market
platforms like objects, seeing them run on ETHLINK
will be interesting because it's, oh, sorry,
next to ETHLINK on Tezos X will be quite interesting
because it gives another level of speed to the application
that has been missing.
Any questions from the audience?
OK, we have one there.
Danny, do you?
I think we have a microphone at the back of the room.
Oh, yeah, just wondering about funding for public goods
and stuff like that that doesn't have a revenue path,
basically.
A lot of developers and AI agents, too,
expect to have access to tools for free, basically.
Yeah.
There's been a lot of public food.
Historically, we've done a lot of public good fundings.
I think we have a lot of public goods already,
and the costs of public goods are generally falling.
And so it's been a tough transition
because there were many people in our ecosystem which were developing public goods.
But then at some point, you know, you end up with a library that doesn't really need maintenance.
That's kind of done.
And software can get done at some point.
So the cost of developing software is going down enormously.
The public good that we have in our system is now largely mature and adequate.
So I would say it can still happen,
but it's a lot of focus as it was during the part
where we're really growing and we need to build everything.
Any more questions?
We have one.
Sorry, over there.
Hello, I just like to know the secret word for the silly quest.
Oh, I will do it later.
Come on, don't worry, I will give you one.
Okay, any more questions for arthur
okay well thank you very much arthur it has been a pleasure very inspiring thank you
all right all right a lot to take in. Thank you again, Arthur.
We're going to have a break now,
but obviously I understand that some of you might be waiting for something.
So I have here a secret word for you.
I'm going to try to say it in my radio voice.
I'm going to say it only twice, so listen up. The secret word is Tezos X.
I repeat, Tezos X.
Good luck.
We're going to take a 15 minutes break now
and go grab a drink, step outside,
talk to the teams in the X-Fit zone,
and we're going to come back with a presentation
of something that I never thought I would talk about here in blockchain, which is
tokenized uranium.
See you in 15.
Welcome back to Tezos Explained.
We are joined today by Ben Elvich.
He is the product lead for Uranium.io.
Thank you very much for having me.
Looking forward to the conversation.
Well, let's dive right into it.
So can you tell me more about Uranium?
There's been a recent surge of interest.
Can you tell me more about what's driving it?
Everyone sees the need for greater energy security, but also more power needs.
A lot of things that are driving society are power intensive.
And certainly now we see with AI as well, increased demand for power.
And I think if you want that combined with clean energy, nuclear is the only proven solution.
Therefore, if you want to have more nuclear capacity, you actually need a large stock of uranium to do that,
because uranium is the base material from which nuclear fuel is created, which then powers nuclear reactors. And so naturally, with increased demand and appetite for nuclear power,
you see increased demand for uranium, which makes the market super interesting.
Why has retail access to uranium been so difficult?
It's a market that historically, until we launched in December of 2024,
that's only been traded in terms of the physical material over the counter or OTC.
And because of that, the lot sizes in terms of minimum amounts that can be traded have
been very high.
Typically, that's about £100,000 in weight, which a current spot price is between $7.5
and $8 million, which for most people is pretty inaccessible, not just in retail investors,
but also smaller hedge funds and professional investors as well.
The other option would be to invest in one of the listed vehicles.
These are closed-ended investment trusts, and they typically trade at a discount to the actual underlying asset value of the uranium held.
We think that through tokenisation, not only do you reduce the operational burdens and the capital barriers,
but you also get more effective exposure over the long term to the underlying asset if you're looking to invest in uranium.
Maybe for those who just joined us or are just learning about this topic,
you can explain a little bit what uranium is and what uranium IO is, what XU308 is.
XU308 represents beneficial ownership of the physical uranium. So if you own,
let's say, £500 in weight equivalent in XU308 tokens, you could actually take physical delivery
of that, which is very different to a lot of typical approaches to tokenization, at least
historically, where different vehicles and entities would be created and different assets, essentially,
that would reference the price.
What we've done is use blockchain technology and infrastructure to improve the market and how the market operates rather than creating a new asset.
If participants in the market have surplus inventory of uranium,
they haven't got enough to trade in those minimum lot sizes,
they can actually use our capability to tokenize it and free up that capital and they
can hold on to that uranium they can sell some of it or all of it and they can also use it to borrow
against and use that as collateral which can create more capital efficiency now that you
mentioned it tell me more about borrowing against xxu 308 so there was a recently announcement
coming from uranium io mentioningio mentioning Morpho,
mentioning Oku. I think it's super important because we're moving a market that has gone
from being only traded over the counter. The first phase is creating a more transparent and
efficient spot market. And then how do you make capital allocation and people investing in
Uranium have even greater efficiencies by using all the benefits of being on blockchain rails to enable people to use the uranium they hold that as collateral and borrow USDC against it, meaning they can take advantage of short term investment opportunities whilst also retaining the longer term exposure to uranium.
You don't have to miss out on other short term opportunities that you may want to invest in.
You can actually do both now with this capability through Morpho and Oku.
And can you tell me more about the reasoning behind Morpho?
Why was Morpho chosen for this?
Yeah, I think Morpho was chosen because they've sort of proven themselves as a leader really
in that peer-to-peer lending
protocol so it was really two reasons one they're established and open source and audited and that's
great from a security and reliability perspective and two it was just seamless and very easy to do
so that also meant that it was not a huge resource left on our side as well essentially took care of
all the hard work and all the thinking,
and we were able to really configure that to meet our needs
in the specific use case of Uranium.
And can you tell me more about how Oku fits into all of this?
So Oku is the front end, so when you go to uranium.io,
you go to the borrow section,
and then you actually click the button to start the borrowing process.
That front end is Oku, and Oku has built what we consider to
be a really good UI for people to access the underlying capability and contract that Morpho
have. Everything we're doing on Uranium.io is to make investing in Uranium and interacting with
the Uranium market as seamless as possible. Tell me more about Tezos Layer 2. What makes it a good
choice for tokenization? Thezos layer two so etherlink
was really important and it has been a great platform for us to build this on because to
reach the scale we want to reach we need something that is low cost will scale with us seamlessly and
is very reliable and etherlink so far has ticked all of those boxes from speed, low fees, reliability and scalability that you want from an institutional grade platform.
And we're excited about the future upgrades and that making it even more effective for us to scale XU308.
OK, Ben, can you tell me a bit in more detail? How does this actually work?
Sure. So I mentioned before, you know, you go to uranium.io, you go to the borrow section, and then you have to be holding XU308 to post it as collateral. But then you can choose how much
you want to either want to borrow in USDC or how much you want to post as collateral,
and then it will calculate the amount of USDC that you can borrow. Right now, the maximum
loan to value ratio is 77%. If there are price changes from a Uranium perspective
or for whatever reason, from a market dynamics perspective,
you end up with a higher loan to value ratio,
you will end up being liquidated.
And that's super important for people to keep an eye on.
Other risks are around pricing risk
we've seen across the market.
But again, that's where in anticipation of this capability,
we have built the price feed as well.
So you're getting minute-by-minute pricing.
That's a big evolution from the market where it was sort of at most every 20 minutes the price was printed.
Tell me though, I know a lot of viewers are probably participating in Apple Farm.
Can you tell me more about this option and Apple Farm?
Apple Farm is really the sort of cherry on the cape and being launched on Etherlink, right?
We tick all the boxes for the core platform.
I think because Uranium and XU308 has been launched on Etherlink,
we get to benefit from incentivising and enabling users to participate in Apple Farm.
Actually, you know, you still get your Apple Farm rewards
even when you pledge as collateral your XU308.
Again, it goes to that same perspective of you still maintain your exposure
and the benefits of long-term exposure to uranium, including your Apple Farm rewards,
while also being able to free up capital through borrowing USDC to invest in other short-term opportunities,
which again may also enable you to earn Apple Farm rewards on Etherlink.
So it creates this virtuous circle where users and
holders can benefit from the wider Etherlink ecosystem and the wider Tezos ecosystem through
what we're building, which is something we're really proud to be a part of.
What is the bigger vision behind uranium?
There's two aspects, I would say, in terms of the bigger vision. One is getting uranium to
reach its full potential. We are looking at other products and vehicles
that are both DeFi and TradFi oriented
as to what might be interesting to investors in the uranium space.
But more interestingly, I think, is the wider vision
beyond the blueprint that we've built with uranium
and applying that to other commodities, specifically metals.
We're very excited about bringing all of
the effectiveness and efficiency of an improved market infrastructure we've done for uranium
to other hard to access metal markets as well. Well, you heard it here first, something big is
coming and try to take a guess in the comments what's coming next in the metal sphere for uranium.
Thank you so much for joining us and I'll see you next time.
Thank you very much.
Welcome back to Tezos Explained. Today we are talking with Artur who will help us to figure out
LWA. On-chain RWA grown to 35 billion dollars recently. How we ended up here? Why we saw such
a huge growth over the last years? I mean there's a couple factors and it depends also what is
counted in RWA's. I think a big part of the story has been Stablecoin. It's by far the most
successful RWA and also the most boring RWA. It's essentially a tokenized doorbell bank account, but it's
been very important for a lot of markets.
So it has worked
in crypto markets
and DeFi markets. I think the use case
usually is people want to borrow
in dollars against their position.
People want to trade in
and out of position and go flat.
And so they've been using Sablecoins for that, or
more recently tokenized treasuries
or tokenized money market fund.
So these are crypto native people
who have crypto wallets
and they just find it convenient to just stay on chain
as opposed to going through an off rep
and back to their bank account to buy anything.
But it's also been a big story for remittances
and in emerging markets,
particularly with weak currencies.
So you've seen essentially
a lot of Latin American countries,
some Asian countries.
So from that perspective, I think, yes,
it's been a big success for stable coins.
And recently, you know, legislation in the United States,
like the Genius Act, have given clear guidelines
for how to launch stable coins.
But the main chain has been the recognition by the U.S. government
that, you know, we're not going to come and say
this whole thing is illegal because there's actually like codification for it.
There are publicly traded companies who are stablecoin issuers.
So that recognition, I think, has made a big difference.
But aren't stablecoins very profitable for some countries
because basically stablecoin issuers invest into the depositions,
for example, US.
So they buy bonds and things.
Is it profitable or helpful for the countries?
So a couple of things here.
First of all, stablecoin issuers making money hands over fist
is a new phenomenon.
We've had decades of near-zero interest rate policy
and all of a sudden we jumped in 2022 to 5% rates
in the most unprecedented unprecedented fastest rate hike and I
think based on like technology innovation is moving for now I think like rates are going to
stay high for a while but we'll see some margin compression I think like at some point civil
coin insurers are going to have to like pass some of that yield in some form and they already are
in many cases. I would say for governments it it's been, for the longest time, a choice between saying,
well, you know, there's two things we really love.
We really love inflation, and we really love financial surveillance.
Which one do we love the most?
And stablecoins, in the way that they worked, they have KYC when you onboard and when you
offboard, but they don't KYC every single home.
Instead, when they went to the regulators and said, well, we have chain analysis tools,
and then based on those, we can do good enough AML protection.
I think it was an open question whether or not regulators would be okay with this,
because if you were PayPal, for example, and you were saying like,
oh, I'm going to onboard people without doing KYC, they were like, no, absolutely not.
Every single person is going to have an account.
You need to have a KYC.
But somehow in stablecoins, it didn't have to be in that regime.
And stablecoins would be far less useful if you needed to do this KYC onboarding for every single account who's going to hold them.
It was not obvious that the government would be ready to accept that.
would be ready to accept that.
At the same time, yes, they've been a huge consumer of bonds.
And the more people are using the dollar
and the more there are dollars holders out there in the world,
the more you can inflate.
So which do you love more?
Being able to inflate the money supply
without having too much of an impact on prices
because it will be absorbed by the rest of the world.
Or do you love financial surveillance more?
And they picked inflation.
I'm glad that they did.
I think it's a lesser evil than global surveillance.
Absolutely.
I do agree with you.
What about other asset classes in RWA?
Those have been smaller.
People have been pushing precious metals, like gold, for example, have been pushed for a bit.
And it has some adoption, not nearly as much as stable coins, even though there's some overlap between people who like cryptocurrencies and people who like gold.
A lot of people are skeptical of their government, concerned about inflation eroding,
they're buying power, they were buying gold before, they've been buying Bitcoin after,
so there's a bit of a product market fit here.
With that said, there's also a lot of options if you want to hold gold.
Tokenized stocks
have also been a thing so again i think like gold the idea of like why would you tokenize a stock
when you anyone could open a brokerage account and have access to it i think it's targeting those
crypto native users who have a wallet maybe they don't even have a brokerage account they just want
to stay on chain and they want to have access to the stocks that they're interested in buying it's
on chain it's easy and I think still there are some countries
where you cannot easily access some type of stocks
and you can possibly access them on-chain.
Yeah, yeah. I think the global aspect is quite important.
There are some brokerages which are very open in terms of countries.
I have not checked that.
But, you know, you take something like Interactive Brokers.
I think if you live in Brazil,
you should be able to open Interactive Brokers account.
I'm not exactly sure, but they are like almost semi-professional.
And yeah, in practice accessing those things is harder.
And having it on chain, you can use this global reach.
There's also been, I mean, this is taking us back a little bit, security tokens.
You know, with the word for it, in 2019, a lot of that took place on Tezos.
But they weren't actively traded. They were mostly
a primary issuance type of story where it was more of like, we have existing shareholders,
we're going to tokenize our shareholder registry on a blockchain. So the blockchain would give you
some sort of traceability as to what was happening. But the asset was much more weakly on the chain
than it is in this new RWS. Yeah, okay, I see. What about Azerlink? Are there any RWA present on Azerlink?
Yes, there are. So there's a few categories. A lot of them have been provided by a company called Midas,
which has tokenized different things, including treasury bills, including some yield funds.
So we've seen those with Midas on a Tezos blockchain and of course one big initiative is
uranium so uranium has been tokenized on Eselink and it's something where there was some involvement
from Tezos foundation and Trilitex so it's not just something that just happened to the chain
but it's a first if you want to buy spots uranium right now and you don't want to buy a hundred thousand pound, that's pound weight of uranium for millions of dollars, it is pretty much the only given town.
What are the plans about other exotic assets?
I think commodities are super interesting because the regulatory status of spot commodities in most countries is much more amenable, I would say, to work on a blockchain than it is for securities.
And also, there are fewer markets for spot commodities.
So in terms of the opportunity, there's an opportunity to create something that doesn't exist as opposed to trying to replace other systems.
And there's a better fit in terms of the technology and the regulatory.
So base metals, I think, are really interesting.
So things like cobalt, cadmium, some precious metals as well.
I think there's still some interest here.
Copper, lithium, all of that.
There's an interesting play here. What are the recent developments that push RBA forward?
I think it gets really interesting when they start interacting with DeFi primitives.
So there's been, again, lots of innovation in DeFi primitives.
But if the only thing you can do with DeFi is do more DeFi, it's not really helpful.
You want to be able to finance something.
There has to be some connection with real productive things in the world.
I think there's a bit of cynicism sometimes where people say, like, oh, the stock market, you're just gambling.
It's all zero sum.
It's not zero-sum. Like, you know, when you put money in the stock market, even in the secondary market,
you are giving liquidity to someone who gave liquidity to someone who gave liquidity
to someone who financed a business.
And that business has grown and has innovated and has done things
and has hopefully done things that have helped, you know, the world.
In the same way, I think if we want those DeFi primitives to be meaningful,
they've got to be put towards some purpose.
And when AWA can interact with lending, for example,
or with DEXs, that gets really interesting.
So if you take something like Uranium, for example, on Tezos-EsoLink,
you can trade it in an order book DEX called Angie,
and then you can borrow against it with Morpho.
So you have these primitives.
And then on
top of that perhaps when there's more liquidity you can imagine perps which is a nice innovation
from the defy world and all this inter-connectivity and permissionless innovation hello hello welcome
back so now we're moving into real assets, specifically how physical commodities are moving on-chain.
Our next speaker is working directly on this, bringing new asset classes into our ecosystem, starting with uranium.
So please welcome Ben Alvidge, Head of Commercial Applications at Trillitech.
Bear with me a sec, guys. So thank you, Michele, and thank you, everyone.
I'm here to talk about something and link to what Arthur was saying earlier, frankly, that is long overdue. A fundamental rethink of how metals are traded, owned and
settled. The metals market, as many of you I'm sure will know, is one of the oldest and largest
in the world and yet the infrastructure for that market has barely evolved. We're changing that.
Let me show you how. We started with uranium in December 2024. It feels both longer and also shorter than that.
So what XU308 is and what it represents is beneficial ownership of physical uranium that
is stored that, different to most other tokenization projects, can actually be physically delivered if
you have a storage account. So this wasn't a proof of concept. This was a live product with real physical backing, real custody, and real investors.
We chose uranium deliberately. It's a commodity with enormous structural demand tailwinds. Anyone
who's heard anything about nuclear, nuclear can only be powered by uranium. And so the two go
hand in hand. But it's got almost zero accessible
investment products for most of the market, including some of the smaller hedge funds.
Realistically, it's limited to bilateral agreements between suppliers, utilities,
and some of the large asset allocators. If we could crack uranium, it's one of the most complex
regulated commodities on earth. We can do that for anything.
So what did we actually do for the uranium market?
So we took it from kind of getting just physical exposure to, you know,
with high minimum investments, millions of dollars.
For most metals, that's sort of six to seven figures.
And you're getting, and the other option is either you get indirect exposure through equities
or futures that don't actually track the commodity cleanly. Settlement is another big factor.
Sometimes that takes days, sometimes it takes weeks. Certainly in the case of uranium,
standard settlement cycles for the physical is about 15 days. And access, as I mentioned before,
is typically restricted to a
small club of institutional players and specialist dealers that charge fees commensurate with that.
So we stripped all of that away. And what we delivered with uranium.io and XU308 is a market
that's available 24-7 globally with no exchange hours, no time zones, and no minimums. You can buy a fraction of
an ounce of uranium. Wouldn't advise taking physical delivery for a fraction of an ounce,
but you can absolutely do that with higher amounts. And settlement is instant on chain.
So none of these long settlement timelines. And you get direct exposure to the physical commodity.
It's not a derivative or an equity proxy. You are straight into beneficial
ownership of the physical asset that if you want to trade it onwards, you can. If you want to take
physical delivery, you can. And that makes a big difference in terms of evolving the market
infrastructure, not just creating another asset that references the underlying. So with that,
we thought we've built this infrastructure out for uranium the custody
framework the tokenization layer the compliance stack the price feeds I must add and we asked
ourselves the obvious question why stop here the same barriers exist across the metals complex
the same solution applies so we decided to go broader.
The opportunity why we want to go broader is massive.
It's a $25 trillion market in terms of you look at both physical and derivatives.
And so we think that actually what we've built for uranium,
and we've been live for over a year, which is really exciting,
is as applicable to every other metals market where trading is opaque, manual and slow.
And here's kind of the really striking thing.
Metals, unlike virtually every other major asset class, can't be easily collateralized or composed into structured products on modern rails. So this is a huge asset class that requires a lot of capital,
and yet we've made the market infrastructure currently stop participants from being able to use that capital efficiency.
Again, with uranium, what I failed to mention earlier is,
of course, you can now use uranium as collateral for borrowing USDC.
We see this as something that's applicable for other metals markets as well.
And so I'm delighted to say that given market infrastructure for metals trading
hasn't really changed since 1877, when the London Metals Exchange was founded,
the fundamental mechanics remain the same.
We're excited to take on that opportunity,
and I'm really pleased to announce that we are launching metalsals.io, which is an extension from Uranium.io.
And so we believe that this is the next generation of metals market infrastructure.
We're not building a trading venue on top of all rails.
We're replacing the rails entirely and modernizing that infrastructure.
If you look at every other asset class, they're all talking about tokenization. To Arthur's point around problems,
this is an asset class that hasn't had any modern infrastructure. There hasn't been the same
adoption of technology and market participation that you see in equities or fixed income.
Let's just skip to the end state and get to the good stuff with tokenization.
And that's absolutely what we will be building and have built with metals.io so we've got one platform
with multiple metals with the same robust structure we provided for uranium we're delighted that we've
been able to invite other partners to participate in this and so at launch we've got a few different
things i'm going to talk to in a second but let me give kudos to our great brand and creative team with a bit of a video that gives you the summary that's a little bit more eloquent than perhaps I have been. I'm going to go. So, what are we launching with?
You can see here, sorry, I'm not used to click-throughs in this way.
I would have expected it all to be there. So, what are we launching with? Uranium of course,
building on that successful framework. We want to make sure that it's even more accessible and
easier to add to people's portfolios alongside, excitingly as you'd expect, other metals. So,
we're launching with gold which enables people to
preserve value and get all those benefits of investing in gold but on chain through our
partner vnx gold and really excitingly and third what we're going to have is and it's there and
available a basket of rare earth rare earth metals and critical metals i'm not going to try and
pronounce all of them they're all on the name there. And so these are the materials that power everything from EVs to semiconductors to defense systems.
Again, similar narrative to uranium, super inaccessible but super critical for the way society is heading,
solving that real problem within the Tezos ecosystem.
And actually now what we're bringing is an opportunity where this periodic table here and beyond isn't just decorative and there because it's nice to relate to.
It's actually going to be our product roadmap.
And so one final thing from me.
Because we're so excited about this and the folks that we work with are very generous, we want you to celebrate this launch with us.
So you can try it for yourselves.
If you scan the QR code,
and this should also work for those watching the live stream,
and use the code METALS LAUNCH, all one word,
you can claim a free metal token.
You can choose which one.
This is exclusive, however, to the first 2,000 participants.
So if you're really interested in rare earth metals,
it may be sold out.
If you're really interested in gold, similarly.
So I would advise you all to sign up quickly.
And you can own a piece of uranium, gold, or rare earth.
It takes about 60 seconds.
You just need your email address.
We'll provide a wallet for you.
And then, yes, we would encourage you all, and please do absolutely boast about it on socials
or wherever else you may be tonight in Cannes or at home.
I don't know who you'd be talking to about it, but maybe you could. And the final thing from me is just to say thank you. So
that's metals.io. So we started with the hardest commodity we believe in terms of uranium. We've
proved that it works. And now we're scaling that across the metals complex. If you're interested
in the institutional side, what we're doing on that front as Arthur alluded to happy to have some conversations with you there this we believe is the foundational aspect of how we're
going to transform metals markets but we do recognize there are other exciting things in
the pipeline around traditional finance products happy to talk about that or anything further
after our next conversation which I'm very pleased to invite Giorgio from the RareTech team and Alexander from VNX Gold,
where we'll have a little bit of a chat about commodities tokenization more generally and where we go from here.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Brilliant. So, as I mentioned, I briefly alluded to Alexander and Giorgio's role.
But why don't we start, Alexander, with you introducing yourself and then, Giorgio, you can do the same.
Hopefully, everybody knows me by now.
And then we can get into some of the questions and then we'll take some time for Q&A afterwards.
Thank you very much, Ben.
My name is Alexander.
I am CEO of VNX.
VNX is a token generator located in Liechtenstein
and we have VNX Gold,
which is a token backed by physical gold
stored in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
So we have two partners, two vaults.
One is located in Liechtenstein and another stores gold in Zurich.
One token is one gram of physical gold.
We only deal with LBMA, one kilogram gold.
And the tokens are generated on request of the customer so when the customer
comes and would like to generate tokens which are representing ownership of the physical gold
this is when the token is created and we're very happy to partner with metals.io thanks very much
georgio do you want to go next yes so
thank you so much for having me here
my name is Giorgio Donat
and I'm a lawyer
qualified in Italy and Spain
and RWA is my passion
so since the term RWA
was not invented
so in 2021
I started with the tokenization
of a totally different commodity which it was carbon credits at the time, with a project that it was quite successful at Klima DAO, and I'm one of the founders.
And I've always tried to see, I always see the upside of having RWA tokenized, so basically removing the gates.
We're going to talk about that later.
So it has always been very very interesting for me
This kind of venue and I always continue with this and now I'm working with Neumann Tech and as a
CLO and also I do a little bit of
product when necessary and
I'm mainly focused on this and I'm very, very happy to be here today
because there is the launch of the Rare Earth Tech token
and with the most successful protocol for RWA in metals
because there's nothing else to say.
You're the best.
And also remember when I was still working at Klima,
every time that they had to mention RWA is successful,
it was always
Euranium.io. So I'm very, very, very happy to be here. I really appreciate that. So let's dig into
some of the themes. Let's start by looking at building tokenized commodities.
So you're building separate things and Giorgio, you've previously worked in a different asset
class altogether. What surprised you guys the most about the gap between the theoretical promise of tokenization
and then the operational reality of getting a product to market?
We're all at different stages with products going live, but what's been the real challenge
there and what surprised you as part of that journey?
For me, for sure, I underestimated the adoption time. I did feel that the new
technology will be much quicker to penetrate the traditional financial players, but it's
just a sheer size, I guess, and the different burdens, legacy, regulatory constraints, all of this put together
lead to a very, very different timeline that I initially estimated.
But what is flip side is that currently, I think we do see the turn of this huge supertanker
towards the tokenized commodities,
or more specifically metals, recently.
And we see the development of the lending and borrowing markets.
We see the development of the perpetual markets.
And since these are all based on the blockchain technology,
we feel that sooner or later there will also
be a shift of traditional players coming here. So the infrastructure has now been built,
now the first money is coming in, and of course you are a big part of building that infrastructure,
and then it just needs the first big players to come to the market for it to take off.
Brilliant. Giorgio, any thoughts there?
Yeah, I'm going to say something that not everyone will like,
but that's why I'm here, right?
So in this kind of asset class, in RWA,
it's easy to build in 2026.
It was very complicated before when, for instance, you launched.
It was very, very complicated.
The moment that you have the right partners,
it's easy, let's say,
okay? The most complicated thing is getting the adoption and getting, like, the market to pick up.
Let me explain to you what I mean with that. So, these kind of markets, as they are,
their nature is to be institutional, okay? So, institutional, there's many, many parties,
is to be institutional.
So institutional, there's many, many parties, traders.
There's not really retails.
It's very, very small parts.
So all these markets, they used to be only over the phone.
So they would even not maybe take the call
if you wanted to buy something from this kind of brokers
or this kind of asset class.
So with blockchain, we're removing those those barriers which is the most important thing but even if we're
doing it, even if we are successful, even if we have the best legal
infrastructure, even if we have the best technological infrastructure, it's very
complicated to have institutions to come to you. So the challenge and the gap now
is to prove to the institutions
that everything works properly, works
in the same way, and it gives you an
advantage. Let me give you
like a, I'm going to be very, very quick,
but this is really something for me which is very
it's very hard for
me. If you want to buy some kind
of asset class and some commodities,
you need to first know what you have to buy. Second, know where to buy it. Second, you need to buy some kind of asset class and some commodities, you need to first know what you have to buy.
Second, know where to buy it.
Second, you need to call.
You need to wait until they take the call.
You need to be accepted.
You need to do the KYC.
You need to do the KYB.
You need to pay.
So the wire takes two, three days.
You need to get a quote.
Maybe the quote changes.
Everything is very, very, very complicated. With the use of blockchain, we can literally kill those barriers
and we can have everything much, much, much faster
and we are removing all the gates.
So this is very, very, very important.
And at the same time, traders and commodity traders
that are doing this since, I don't know, 20 years, 30 years, whatever,
with us disrupting the market,
us, meaning innovators, okay, disrupting the market,
they have the feeling that, as somebody said, there are barbarians at the gate.
So it's a little bit complicated for them to adopt the technology.
But the moment they will understand the technology can give them a huge edge,
at that point there will be no gap.
That's my take.
That's great let's move on from sort of the the building and challenges to sort of thinking more practically around market structure pricing and what comes next so alexander tokenized gold is a
pretty crowded space whereas things like tokenized uranium are quite novel. But more broadly, what for you and the VNX team
determines if a commodity or a metal
is actually suited to tokenization
versus to sort of crib from Arthur's presentation earlier
being a solution looking for a problem?
I think the key point is demand from the market.
And I think we are discussing several other metals.
For us, the key is the presence of the platform such as metals.io and a determined partner who can help this kind of distribution
so to say happen or adoption happen. That's the key per se, it's a product which was built in the search of the market fit.
No, it should come the other way around.
Market, a partner who can help distribute and market it,
then I think it's worth considering.
Any thoughts, Sergio, on that piece?
I think that you said everything absolutely perfectly.
But, of course, it requires a lot of knowledge
to understand exactly what is the right model to follow.
And, of course, in the end, there's only one judge, the market.
So there's not much that we can do.
We can do all the theories that we want,
but it's always yes or no.
So there's nothing in between. So I think you said enough. It's a really nice segue. It's almost like that we can do. We can do all the duties that we want, but it's always yes or no. So there's nothing in between.
So I think he said enough.
It's a really nice segue.
It's almost like we prepared for this.
So thanks, Giorgio.
In terms of that piece around the market and the market being sort of king in all cases,
how do you think what we're building and what's being built in terms of the tokenization of commodities
can really move the move the needle in terms of pricing dynamics so gold has deep transparent
spot and derivative markets that's not the case in a lot of these other metals and that's the
opportunity as i mentioned before that we see how maybe starting with you georgio how how does
tokenization support and interact with that price discovery?
And can on-chain markets genuinely improve the transparency and liquidity for traditional opaque commodities?
Okay, this I think is the best question that could ever be asked because I really, really, really want to stress this point when somebody asks me and when there is this occasion.
So the best use for blockchains and RWA
is transparency and price discovery.
As I said before, I really want to do that example again.
The moment that you want to buy something
and you have to call one broker,
you will have one price,
and you don't know if the price is correct,
and it's the same price they're giving to someone else.
If you will call another broker,
he will give you another price, because, I don't know, maybe price is correct. And it's the same price they're giving to someone else. If you will call another broker, he will give you another price.
Because, I don't know, maybe he wakes up two hours before and he doesn't want to deal with you.
So there is no price discovery in a lot of markets.
While, on the other hand, if we have these markets totally on the blockchain,
we finally have price discovery.
Because, well, you own the website, you know exactly how much is trading and how much is the price.
That's the most important thing.
And that's also why in some kind of like commodities markets, we innovators, I say we, everyone,
we're hated because there is a lot of people, a lot of traders, a lot of institutions that they make a lot of money
on this gray area, on these gray prices on this gray
area so not everybody likes what we're doing this maybe also that's one of the reasons i didn't say
that because the you know the institutions they do want to adopt us as i said before but on the other
hand from a technical standpoint the blockchain is amazing for the price discovery for instance
a market that is very illiquid, let's not talk about like metals,
but in general, a market of commodities
that is very liquid and is very gray.
First, you solve the problem of the gates
because you just need a wallet
in order to access to that commodity.
Second, we just said that we solved the price issue,
which it's going to be transparent with the blockchain
because blockchain is numbers.
Third, price discovery.
A moment where you have a market that, again, is illiquid, or it's liquid but it's very deep,
but you still do not have a price, you have the amazing system of liquidity pools.
Liquidity pools are governed by the smart contract.
Therefore, the moment that you buy, the price is going to change,
and you can, with a single
click and with a single smart contract,
price something that it
wasn't priced before, that just
moved in the price right before. So,
in my opinion, blockchain is absolutely
necessary in these kind of markets, and
is the true game changer for this kind
of commodities market.
I mean, here, an important point, from
my point of view, is what you're creating, you're creating a waterhole. I mean, here, an important point from my point of view is what you're creating,
you're creating a waterhole.
I mean, we're talking generator.
We can, you know, if you come to us,
generate whatever, doesn't matter.
We can do it. However,
a single point, be it gold,
be it silver, be it platinum, etc.,
is just one metal.
What you're creating is a place
where traders,
where professional players would be coming
to participate in this, that or that market.
And therefore, this waterhole concept is very, very important.
That, I think, what you are doing,
and I think that's what will move this market
and will create acceptance.
Can I say just something else?
Because everything is in my mind
and I want to make everyone clear.
So for gold, for instance,
we do not have this issue that I just said.
But we can basically,
because of course it's a totally different market,
it's much more deep and liquid,
but we can have a same liquidity pool system on gold.
And it will create numerous new opportunities for trading,
for price discovery.
Again, maybe there's going to be like two different markets,
like the physical or like the bank, let's say the bank or the blockchain.
So it's so interesting.
And this should be really applied for everyone.
The blockchain is the problem solver.
Sorry.
No, no, that's great.
So that's an opportunity, right?
I think we're all here because we believe in the invisible hand of the market. And actually, I would summarise that as
even if there is parallel liquidity pools to start, they're still of benefit. And actually,
if you are an institutional player watching this live stream, there may be arbitrage opportunities
that you should look at and participate in and so i think i'm conscious i
want to give time for questions let's just do a rapid one sentence maybe two specifically giorgio
um kind of in the next 12 months what really needs to happen for this to sort of move into
the stratosphere and be as successful as we think it can all be in terms of not metals.io because we've got a lot of belief there but tokenized commodities more generally in my view metals.io would be the platform waterhole
in order to drive liquidity in order to drive interest from the traditional players you have
to have arbitrage opportunities meaning it needs to be pools on different DeFi platforms.
You need to have lending and borrowing markets.
You have to have perpetual markets.
And then you have to have some other financial products which are built on this.
All of this will drive the volume and demand on the sport market at the metals.io.
That's if it's done for at least one or two market at the metals.io that's if it's done for at least
one or two products on the metals.io
will show a
blueprint for the others
and in essence will confirm that
these 12 months have
been like
MVP which works
which functions
and it just needs to scale
I just want to scale.
I just want to make sure we have time for questions, Georgi.
Yeah, yeah. The only thing, I promised to a colleague that I wouldn't do any bad jokes,
but the only thing that I can say is that I hope that in the next 12 months the market settles
and the market's going to be flourishing because now, of course, there is a lot of uncertainty.
So the only thing that I hope for myself and for everyone is that there's going to be certainties and not uncertainties.
So that's what needs to happen.
No, no, no. Uncertainty is good. Volatility.
So it's almost like you want diversifying assets in uncertain markets, which maybe we've got the answer for.
It says I've got four minutes left here.
Are there any questions from the audience?
Who likes volatility in the markets?
Okay, I'll kick off. I have a question for you.
Would you say we're still early in tokenized commodities
or have we already started seeing real traction?
I would like to answer that.
Because I started an RWA project in 2021.
So, are we early?
Why?
Because now everybody is doing that.
But as the market is saturated, not of course in our space,
but as the market is saturated with RWAs everywhere.
Like only the good project will survive, meaning like the market will cut out itself like the other players that they won't be as good in operations and in what happens in the,
you know, let's call it back end, but like what happens that you don't see,
only those players will go will move up while the
others they're just gonna die outself so i don't think that we are early but i think that there
is a lot of players coming up now i'm gonna hedge my bets on this one so i think we're at the end of
the beginning and i think what i mean by that is that we're transitioning into a different phase as we think about tokenization.
I think what we've proven with Uranium.io is that model of taking an SPV, going and buying some assets and then tokenizing the shares of the SPV and creating the situation where you aren't holding the underlying, but you're holding something where you're exposed to the benevolence of the SPV sponsor I think we'll be on that now I think what we've shown with common law frameworks
like we've done on uranium and we'll be doing with other metals coming up and the teams have
done here is that actually we're in the phase now where we're moving towards using blockchain and
tokenization for what it's really meant to be for, which is evolving and improving the market infrastructure
to break down all of those barriers,
to deliver on the promise that blockchain,
when I was at Morgan Stanley,
was sort of the fear that we all had
is that it's going to revolutionize the market infrastructure
and what are our trading desk going to do,
what are our portfolio managers going to do.
Actually, what we've been doing until recently
is building things in silos that are new assets
that are interesting, that deliver phenomenal returns
for people that have made lots of and lost lots of money.
But actually, I think we're now in this phase
where people are looking to echo the theme of today,
seemingly, to actually solve real problems
with the technology.
And I think that's what we're
fortunate enough that we're within the Tesla's ecosystem we can do because we've got great
technology and we're really excited and seeing a lot of interest not just from a participation
perspective which is great but also from a business perspective in people starting to
recognize the opportunity in in in this sort of, as I would call metals.io,
sort of trying to transform those markets.
Any other questions from the audience?
Please ask us questions.
Okay, then.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. okay then well thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you
okay Okay, okay, thank you, thank you very much.
It was a really interesting topic and a fantastic announcement.
Thank you, Ben.
Now, test questions.
I believe there is another secret word that you might be waiting for.
So I will say it again in my radio voice.
The secret word is physical.
I repeat, physical.
Good luck.
Now, we're zooming out to the bigger picture.
Now, we're zooming out to the bigger picture.
For a long time, crypto yield has been mostly limited to crypto native users.
But that's starting to change.
Institutions are coming in.
Adoption is broadening.
And on-chain earnings are starting to come to people, to users that have never even heard of a smart contract.
So we have now a panel that brings together a great mix of perspectives.
So moderating the panel will be Ryan Rodenbaugh, CEO and co-founder of Volts.fyi.
Joining him will have Arthur Braidman, co-founder of Tezos,
Owen Simonin, aka Asher, a founder and CEO of Myria, and Dimitri Kovaleski, founder of Angie. Give it up for the panel. All right.
How's everybody doing?
Good. Can we get a little bit of energy going into this panel?
All right, all right. Thank you, thank you. I know it's us, maybe one more before you guys can start drinking, but please, I think we'll have a lot of interesting stuff to talk about today.
My name's Ryan, co-founder and CEO of a company called Vaults.FYI. I have a single API to integrate
DeFi into your products.
And I'll kick it over to our panelists just to introduce themselves real quickly,
and then we'll get into it.
Owen Simonin, CEO of Meria, stacking provider.
Hi, I'm Arthur Breitman, CO-FOUNDER OF TEZOS.
I'm Dmitry Kowalewski, founder of Hanji, on-chain, clubdex.
Awesome.
Well, if I had to say what one or two of the big themes of this week feel like, DeFi
Earn is definitely one of the topics that it feels like everybody is very interested
in. And so I'm curious to speak with some of our panelists today about, you know, as you,
because I think there's a version of this panel where we could come out here and we could say,
hey, everything's going great. Everybody's starting to integrate these earned products
into their suites. Like it feels like things are kind of going in the right direction.
I guess from what you guys are seeing or starting to integrate, what are the things
that are still being solved to get companies comfortable
with integrating DeFi or kind of challenges
that still exist out there?
I'll leave it as an open-ended question, feel free.
I just can imagine from my talks
with people from brokerages,
so we're not, a lot of them were launched like from people from brokerages. So why are not...
A lot of them were launched like a TreadFi yield.
For example, companies who offer services for SMEs in Europe,
a lot of them are launching yield products,
but they are mostly based on T-bills.
And I think when it comes to discussing crypto,
first, it's hard for them to measure the risks
and especially career risks for them because if they put client money into
BlackRock and even if something goes wrong it's okay but crypto is very hard
to measure like there isn't the resolve incident it's hard to reason about and
it's a wrong situation to be in to address it to your boss
And secondly, I guess regulation and the need to be able to convert to stables
But this is getting solved. I think right now
Yeah, I think the thing that I find interesting on yielding crypto is that
It's there's a there's an arbitrage has still not been closed in the sense that you've
had structurally higher yields in crypto than you had in other lending markets in dollars
terms and you can't explain it only by the risk.
Some people say like, oh, it's crypto is risky.
It's like, hmm.
I mean, not necessarily.
So I guess one part of the risk is like if you are unable to tell the difference between, you know, like an Aave and a Luna, for example, then yes, that is a risk because you need to understand it.
I don't think it's, you know, that profound to know the difference.
The second thing is a smart contract risk.
But I think even accounting for all these risks, like the yields have been much, much higher. The second category of explanation is that
there's a capital shortage that's willing to lend in crypto
because institutional lenders don't want to touch DeFi pools
or others for regulatory reasons.
Those have been historically the two.
And of course, the yield varies.
There's a strong correlation between being in a bull market
and having higher yields in crypto
because at the end of the day, the yield comes from people wanting to have leverage
primarily in crypto, and that's a source that is
much more prevalent in bull markets. There's also other sources
of yields that you see, you know,
you see sources of yield in staking,
and even if you want yield in dollar term term like staking hedge by perps like
you know the the on tezos in particular but on a bunch of other coins uh the market between like
probably sticking your coin and like and ensuring a perp which scientifically give you dollar yield
is also not closed and it's it's a bit surprising why that's uh why that's not the case
why that's not the case.
From the retail market
and from my YouTube community
and this kind of thing,
I feel that people are looking
to invest in two kinds of things.
One kind of investor
are looking for high yield,
always looking for
the last liquidity providing,
sometimes the last staking solution,
and one kind of investor
are looking for
the reliable yield
and from that point it's
always funny to see that
from the point of view of the user, DeFi
user, they have to look to find
and to understand all chain, all protocol
and all solution to get the yield
and from the side of institution
they just want to integrate the partner
allowing people to access to a regulated path to get this yield.
So I think we will need a few years more to have the answer of what is the best way to get the yield and also what kind of yield we have to distribute to people.
Yeah, great points all around. And Dimitri, I'm glad you brought up risk because, you know, I think it's a very challenging thing
because if you think back to the last time
crypto really went heavy on pushing yield onto users,
it wound up being the Celsius, FTX,
you know, Gemini earn exploding.
And so I think there's a lot of people
that have some PTSD from that.
Obviously this time around, it's very different
in that
everything now is kind of on-chain. But on-chain introduces kind of a new set of risk vectors,
I think, as we saw probably this past weekend with Resolve and all of that, which, again,
I think was something people wouldn't expect. So how are you guys thinking about kind of this new
wave of risks and how we can better communicate some of the things that exist now with smart contracts and all of that. Yeah, it is a communication challenge, again,
because people tell you, well, the risk is high because the yield is high because there's lots
of risk. And you say, actually, not that much. And you say, well, look at this and look at that.
And it's so silly because when you look at something like Celsius,
they had a fantastic business,
you know, they potentially had a fantastic business model,
which is collect the yield on DeFi on the one hand,
you know, do like, you know,
like well-collateralized lending,
and the other hand, offer a money market,
you know, like that institutions can plug in
or people can plug in and get a high yield. And they could
have done this and they could have earned
a ton of money and slept very
well. And instead of that,
they had to do the dumb thing and
do a bunch of insecure loans and get
into like liquidity provision as a sort of
yield, you know, even though it wasn't hedged.
And they did all this, you know, dumb shit.
So it's,
you know, people sometimes throw the word greed around when they just mean like wanting to make money.
But this is, I think the definition of greed is wanting to make money in a stupid way where you get in your own way.
And that's what you saw here.
So it's hard to convince people that no, no, no, there's nothing, like the yield is strictly higher because of capital shortage and not because of all of these problems.
But that is true.
You have protocols where there's a lot of controls and you can see exactly what's going on
and which have survived very, very well through a lot of industrial conditions
and which still have structurally much higher yields than many markets.
Yeah, I think the big problem for broad retail, offering these products to broad retail
is the complexity of the crypto products.
So basically the platforms like Celsius, they kind of obstructed all that complexity and
just offered flat yield, but that ended in like custodial credit risks of these lenders.
And if we offer like the DeFi platforms directly
to the users, then we need to somehow explain it to them.
And this is kind of complex, because you
need to make retail user understand
that he's putting this not to your brokerage,
but to like Aave, for example, through your brokerage.
And I think this is a challenge in itself.
Yeah, I think great points.
I think abstraction is kind of a double-edged sword, right?
Sometimes it's good to understand
what's happening underneath the hood.
And I guess thinking a little bit more broadly too
about where the future of sort of earn goes in crypto,
right now the majority of what people are doing
are or is
variable rate lending. Obviously, there are things like Pendle, which are immensely popular
and kind of bring more fixed-term components in. I'm curious if you guys have kind of seen
anything interesting or have any kind of hypotheses around when fixed-term lending or other types of lending could become more popular?
I think, I mean, one way is just to kind of do it under the hood and just offer a fixed-term lending for retail.
I mean, or SMEs, for example, in Europe,
which is like a probably better market.
One way to think about it, I think, is just like a user acquisition channel
because you can just like a user acquisition channel, because you
can just offer a bit higher yield for like fixed term, for like a reasonable size of
deposit, just to attract users, and I think it works extremely well.
Basically, it's a lot of institutional actors looking for fixed terms yield.
The problem is you have to add additional layers, basically.
And if you add additional layers, you are also adding an additional risk in your investment.
So from the retail, I never hear about people looking for fixed yield only.
So predictable finance is always interested,
but I think that at the moment,
it's not the priority of many users.
Fair enough, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you have to look at the demand.
So essentially, like, people are, you know,
it's not just people are lending, you know,
in variable instant rates.
They're also borrowing in instant rates.
And you would think that from a
borrower perspective, if you want to go like, if you want to leverage your assets, you might want
to lock in a funding rate so that you don't get pushed out of your position with the funding rates.
But I think all of this short-term trading, so people are not that concerned with like,
you know, they don't want to say like, I don't want to hold this position for six months.
So probably it's the demand side of the
equation. And you can still offer
long-term
rates and locked rates,
but then it means someone has to
basically the risk, and someone has to say,
hey, I'm willing to take that swap
and to make the market here
and carry this rate
straight on my books. And there's just
not that many, first of all, there's not that many people who know how to price this well. And second, there. And there's just not that many, like, first of all,
there's not that many people who know how to price this well.
And second, there's not that much capital who's like indefined,
sophisticated enough to want to like go and make a market in this.
Well, speaking of not knowing how to price collateral types well sometimes,
if there's another big theme I'm kind of coming across this week,
it is everyone trying to get RWAs into their products in some way, shape, or form.
Most of the attempts of this historically have been things kind of like private credit or real estate,
which I think for a number of reasons are not particularly suited to be brought on chain.
But Arthur, obviously you guys are doing a ton now with metals.io.
I'd love to kind of hear from you too how you imagine these commodity-like products
kind of fitting into the earn stack and kind of user activity here.
I mean, either as collateral or wherever that may sit.
Yeah, so I think part of the issue is that a lot of the early issuers of RWAs
were essentially people who were looking at blockchain as distribution channels.
So they were saying like, hey, this is like 2017, 2018.
There's a lot of people who made a lot of money in this space.
And you know what?
I bet they're very upset that they hold this very volatile thing.
And they want nothing more than to get into my real estate projects.
And I haven't been able to raise money from my real estate project.
I know I'll put it on the list.
And of course, there's just no product market fit here because the type of investors who
are interested into real estate is very different from the type of investors who hold a token.
I think there's far more overlap with commodities.
A lot of the people I know that got really early into Bitcoin, for example, and, you know,
I mean, like 2012, they were people who were commodity traders.
And commodity traders got it.
The equity traders, they were like, where's the discounted cash flow?
Commodity traders were like, no, it's supply and demand.
I get that.
So I think there's more of an impedance match with commodities.
But even with uranium, we found it quite hard.
So loss of interest from institutions.
But they're like, oh, they're cautious because it's a token.
Whereas the crypto public, it's there, but they're like, yeah,
is this going to make me a millionaire by someday?
So we're still in this kind of like a little bit of a man's land in between
that needs to be tweaked to really get this adoption.
But I do think that commodities stand a better chance than real estate.
And one of the advantages as well is that the regulation around commodities
is closer to the regulation around cryptocurrencies.
And so that makes it much easier, much more,
to put them into exchanges, indexes, and all of that.
Now to your question, getting onto the earning stack,
it depends if you want to get leverage against them.
It's also possible that a lot of people
will end up getting their leverage via perps.
So sometimes people point to perps and say,
see, we don't need a spot market.
We don't need a lending market.
That's quite true, because if you want your perp to be in line,
someone needs to take the other side.
And then that might be someone repugning the exposure
synthetically by taking a spot position
and borrowing against it.
So maybe we see some of that, but it's a bit early for that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'd say that like retail is mostly attention driven.
And so I wish we added oil as well in the past few weeks.
So before that, I don't imagine a lot of people trading oil retail,
but in the rest of the weeks, I think
we'd have quite a lot of
attention and volume and activity.
So, yeah, you just
should just really add
those assets and hope that
or hope that you will not
need them, but if something happens
then you will have volume. I think
also, like, probably we're in a new environment now, which where macro makes need them, but if something happens, then you will have volume. I think also like probably
we're in a new environment now, which where macro makes more sense. There's unfortunately
more events. And so there might be more activities in commodities and also currencies. So yeah,
that might be more interesting for a table now.
There's a saying, I'm not claiming it's, there's some truth to it, it's not 100% true,
but there's a saying that says that stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down,
and commodities take the elevators up and the stairs down.
And that's the thing with commodities, it's like, you know, like you said,
it's like sometimes they just spike to ridiculous amounts very, very quickly.
And then, yes, you get a lot of interest.
If this happens to uranium, I would predict that, yes, people would get a lot interested.
You know, it's like, it's the old beam. It's like uranium at this price.
Like, no one's interested. Uranium at 10 times the price.
times the price. Like, ah, now I want to buy it. Yeah, I think when I think about RWAs, what I'm
Like, ah, now I want to buy it.
really excited about is just having better additional forms of collateral in lending
markets and crypto, really. One of my favorite examples here is if you go to Base, which is a
big network for DeFi activity, and there are more phone markets there, it's almost entirely one
collateral. It's all borrowing activity almost exclusively against CBBTC.
So like for some of these networks, for some of these protocols as well,
it really is just finding one great asset people want to borrow against and sort of going from there.
Yeah, but people don't buy an asset because it's collateral in some sense.
You know, it's not like these people say like, geez, I want to borrow.
I know. First I'll buy some Bitcoin and then I'll borrow against it.
They want to hold Bitcoin in the first place and then they happen I want to borrow I know I'll first I'll buy some some Bitcoin and then I'll borrow again so they want to hold Bitcoin in the
first place and then they happen to want to loan so you know it has to start
because like people wanting the assets to begin with or or you know like maybe
already like being holders of the asset and saying like sure I own this thing
anyway now this is tokenized I get to like borrow against it which is more
convenient I think for retail it usually starts with a bad trade.
So you buy a lot of some commodity
and then it goes down
and you just start to borrow against it
to not close the position.
Yeah, well, kind of segue in a bit.
You know, we've talked maybe a little bit more here
about kind of some of the institutional side
and what all that looks like and may feel like.
And something I've been kind of thinking about when it comes to earn and kind of DeFi generally is what does like the, you know, what Robinhood kind of did for stocks,
maybe Revolut did for something like Forex. What does that look like today for DeFi? And Owen,
I know you're kind of building something here as well. I'd love to maybe hear about that and kind
of how you're thinking about that coming together.
It's always too complex to answer to this question
because this market is going so fast.
And I think the Robinhood of tomorrow
is very complex to think today,
but that can be Robinhood or Revolut.
The problem, but is it a problem?
That is the question.
But finally, at the end of the day,
blockchain is just a technological basis.
So it's a way to distribute, to hold, and to interact with different kinds of assets from crypto, from stablecoin, or also RWA and all assets behind this family.
But at the end of the day, users are looking for a very simple interface.
Institutions are looking for a very simple interface. Institutions are looking for regulatory
path and compliance and basically you have to hide this regulatory path, this KYC, all this
different friction when you have to onboard a customer to being able to distribute your product
and if it's possible earn module and yield with that.
So I would not be surprised if Revolut or Robinhood become one of the big companies of tomorrow,
but I think behind the scene will be some tech provider,
basically DeFi protocol or also staking provider
and this kind of thing,
able to answer with financial and compliance flows
to this distributor. Yeah, I guess riffing on the compliance flows a bit, one, what does that kind
of look like for you? And sort of connected to that as well, I imagine you've spent a lot of
time talking with regulators. Arthur, you've probably spent a lot of time more than maybe
A lot of time, more than maybe even you wish, talking with regulars, meet you maybe a little bit earlier on that front.
even you wish talking with regulators, meet you maybe a little bit earlier on that front.
How has their understanding been, as you're sort of explaining to them the flows of,
hey, yes, we're going to allow our users to deposit into this DeFi protocol,
where they're then going to take out leverage and move their position on this other chain?
And, like, how savvy are you finding the people in these conversations?
We have two different kinds of discussions.
The first one is about the custody, because you have the segregation of the funds inside of your company and the different things you will follow to use and to place theize the risk. For example, the first native
staking, correct me if I'm wrong,
but it's Tezos in 2017,
2016? 2018.
So, when we discovered
the staking, that was the first yield product
based on proof of stake, and we really
appreciate that for what?
Because for the first time in
2017 for Just Mining,
now Meria,
we was able to provide a yield from banks' deposits without taking the risk of custody.
That's exactly the kind of discussion that we have with the regulator.
That's why we have to categorize and to explain the different kind of risk
from staking to DeFi product because you have different layers of risk and finally
RWA because it's different to have endogene
yield from like staking and exogene risk and yield from RWA. So it's different kind of
discussion, but yes from the staking and the yield it's more a technical approach and the ways that we will use some IPI
audits risk because you always have some
some risk in your protocol and the ways that you will distribute a yield on an asset without taking
any risk in the path. So I mean I don't have that many conversations. I think the last time we've had some questions, they've been around uranium and like it's
not even directly with the regulators, it's like with people who deal with the regulators
and I think one difficulty is them understanding that just because something is on a blockchain
and it's a token doesn't mean it's crypto.
Sure.
And for a lot of people, they still think this way, they see like tokenized uranium, you know, it's like, you know, it's a title, like it's a commodity.
Clearly, it's not a crypto product. It's not a crypto token. It's like, oh, but wait,
but you know, there's a private key and there's, it's on a blockchain, that's crypto.
But fundamentally, it's so, you know, it's funny because I remember years ago,
regulars saying like, oh, you oh, regulation needs to be technology neutral.
You think that you're different just because you're on a blockchain.
But actually, it's kind of the opposite.
It's like things have been treated differently and in general more poorly
because they're on a blockchain.
Not always than when they're on a blockchain.
The counter example to this is stable coins,
which if anyone tried to do stable coins not on a blockchain
they would have been stopped immediately but like if you did it on a blockchain it was all right
that that was the uh the exception and did that just come from a moment in time or you know like
talk about that i think it's i think it's a matter of focus i don't i don't quite
understanding but you know if paypal had tried tried to run the way that USDC was being
run or anything like that by not KYCing any customer and letting all the transfers and
saying, oh, well, if we get a report, we'll free some accounts, they would have had lots
of trouble.
But you could do it if you were doing it on a blockchain.
And the regulators were not focused on that.
They were extremely focused on other aspects, like what they perceived to be issuers of
crypto tokens, all of that, that took the front and center.
So it's interesting.
Yeah, it's a bit of a moment in time
because it depends what they're focused on
and how they think about the problem
and where they think the risks are.
Yeah, very interesting.
I think, you know, kind of on some of this as well,
one of the more forward-looking things, you know,
I've been thinking about with my business,
and I'll kind of pose this question to you guys,
is I've been thinking a lot about kind of like who
our users are today.
And like if these are the people that in two years from now
will still kind of be our largest segment of users.
Like really kind of forward thinking of, OK,
are the people here today still going to be the ones
in some time from now?
I'm curious how you guys are thinking about that,
and maybe even your roadmaps as well.
The customers, the profiles, the ICPs that you have today,
do you still think that they will be the majority of your,
however you measure it, volume, economic activity, et cetera,
in one, two years from now?
Or what kind of new categories are you
finding yourself excited about?
I think we can create the next wave of adoption.
Everybody here in this room wants to live again 2021.
Yeah.
The problem is we can't control that.
And I think we reached the point where the next wave of adoption is not about convince crypto skeptics.
The wave of adoption is not about convince crypto skeptics.
It's to work on interface, UX, integrate institution and distributor,
and providing the chain, the stack of technology,
to being able to answer all the regulatory necessities
from the different regulators, especially in France.
And of course, to address directly the final user but through an institution it's a bit funny because it's one
intermediaries and basically when we think about bitcoin and this whole ecosystem so we are working
to reduce intermediaries but we have to work with people already holding the trust of final user.
So step by step and month after month,
we are reducing the number of B2C
and retail customers that we have with Meria,
and we are distributing more and more exchanges,
institutions, platforms, banks,
distributing after us with our stacking stacks the yield to the final customer.
So more B2B2C.
Sure.
Yeah, a difficulty if you're in the L1 business in some sense.
You don't necessarily know who your users are.
Sometimes you do.
For example, there's a big art community on Tezos.
And it's easy to know because they're active on social media.
So, you know, they let themselves be known.
An amazing art community, yes.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
But other times you don't know.
It can be in DeFi, it can be in projects.
It can be hard to know.
People want to be anonymous.
And so compared to almost any other tech business today, you have a lot less knowledge of your users than you would if they've onboarded for you, if you have an email.
And so compared to almost any other tech business today,
In essence, the business which has distribution, like exchanges and wallets, know a lot more about user behavior.
Because you have a wallet, you see the transaction, you see the pattern,
you can send notification, you can see what people react to,
you can see what they're interested in,
you get a lot more information.
Same thing with exchanges.
Exchangers have demographics, have loads and loads
and loads of information.
They can see those strains.
They know what get people to take.
It's a lot harder if you don't have access to this data
in terms of who are the next users that are going to be crypto
native it depends on the
product I think there's still going to be some very crypto
native product five years
from now that really cater to
a crypto audience and it's going to be
it's it's own niche and then
hopefully what we're going to see is we're going to
expand in two different areas and some some of them where, you know, the crypto bits and rails will be more visible. Some of them
where they will be less visible. But ultimately, it's not like a replacement. It's more of an
addition of different type of community and different type of users.
Dimitri, I'll come back to you on this, but I just wanted to follow up on something real quick.
I'm curious if between, Arthur, between Etherlink and Tezos,
kind of if you've seen like new user populations pop up to the best as you can tell,
or what you're seeing there too?
Yeah, yeah, so we had some incentive campaigns around DeFi on Etherlink.
And I did bring new people who were more into the EVM world
and who had not really been active on Tezos or on DeFi,
and who came in and participated in the campaign.
And some of them stayed and are still
active in this environment.
So we did see some new users, but it's still very much
in the crypto-native ranks.
MARK BLYTHIERSON- Absolutely.
I will mention we just added support for Etherlink on vaults.fyi as well,
so you can access all your DeFi there.
Yeah, and Dimitri, same question to you.
I know you're much kind of early in the journey here.
Yeah, so currently it's mostly crypto-natives,
but I think in the future it will be just regular users who would come
because our platform is better than the ThreadFi equivalents.
I mean, we have some technological advantages, like settlement is instant, for instance.
We have some regulatory arbitrage. It's easier to onboard.
We see that stablecoins are getting more and more adopted,
and currently, I think, the most difficult part In onboarding on crypto natives is to have them get stable coins from their bank accounts for example
And that is getting easier and easier. And so in a few years, I think the stablecoins would be the kind of
the standard that they hold so
Then I mean if in the near future we would have users with stable coins already,
then getting them to trade on a DEX would be even easier than getting them to trade on a Forex brokerage or Robinhood.
So, yeah, I think we'll get tokenized stocks.
We're starting to get tokenized stocks, getting commodities.
So basically we would have a lot of assets in the same context of a chain.
And that would be much better than what they have right now for the instruments.
Because I think in the U.S. you cannot even cross margin stocks and a futures position, for example,
in the brokerage, because it's like different exchanges, so we have different accounts.
And it would be possible to offer this on-chain
because it's like the same context.
Yeah, I noticed actually in our conversation on RWAs,
we actually didn't talk much about tokenized stocks.
And it feels like one of these categories
that everyone's kind of perpetually very excited about.
No perpetual pun intended, but continuously very excited about. And at the same, you know, we've
seen some acquisitions there, right? Kraken just bought X stocks, but still it feels like on-chain
volumes are relatively muted for on-chain stocks. Like, I'm curious in that category as well,
where you see, you know, your example makes a lot of sense, but where else maybe that makes sense for users?
I think it's interesting the popularity at least, you know, if not in usage, at least in narrative of tokenized stock.
And we do give it a different approach.
So if you look at tokenized stocks, and a lot of them are saying, like, oh, wow, we tokenized NVIDIA stocks.
From my perspective, it's like, if you want to buy NVIDIA, you have so many options.
You have so many ways to buy it.
So many brokers will sell it to you.
And I think what they were after is, like, people who do not have a brokerage account,
you know, they got, you know, their first expert to finance was using crypto.
They have a wallet.
They have money in their wallet.
And they've heard of NVIDIA.
It's a cool stock.
They just want to buy it.
And so they buy that. And they've heard of NVIDIA. It's a cool stock. They just want to buy it. And so they buy that.
And they have access to it.
So you're really marketing to crypto users,
like heavy crypto users who also want
to diversify their portfolio.
It's a bit more than that.
Like Dimitri was saying, it's like, hey, you can actually,
even if you have a brokerage, maybe you
want to hone your stock in a way that gives you
instant settlement should you wish to sell, or access to different borrowing markets.
So yeah, there are some benefits beyond this, but from my perspective, in terms of tokenization, I've been more interested in trying to get long tail products which are super interesting, that people might want to invest in, but which are not widely available.
And so in a sense, when you tell them,
when we say like, oh, RWS, what is it going to be like?
Well, the big things are tokenized Nvidia stocks
and tokenized US treasuries.
It's quite accessible.
So Uranium, it's a very, very different play in a sense.
Like, hey, this thing is interesting.
And on top of that, we are the only game in town
if you want to own it.
That is, yeah, it's different.
But the crypto world is always creating incentive
to bring liquidity.
So when you check Xtox, by holding your NVIDIA stocks
directly on side of your wallet,
you will generate points from Xtox.
So the company working between Kraken, the new acquisitor,
or the new owner of Xtox, and also Nasdaq,
to bring traditional finance inside of blockchain.
And you are generating points, and of course, one day probably,
on something like Hyperliquid BIS
I don't know but this kind of promise
is also something from crypto
and for crypto native people
and I think at the moment
the tokenized stocks are more
looking for native and crypto users
and traditional finance
is about to come and to use this kind of
path
I would also add like Arthur mentioned is about to come and to use this kind of path.
I would also add, like Arthur mentioned, that
a lot of users actually
can't access US stock markets still,
especially in emerging markets, and so
having tokenized stocks
can really make a difference
for them. So if you're
outside of US and Europe, then
sometimes having access to the
US stock market is really difficult. So in such edge cases, I think tokenized stocks can make a
lot of sense. But I also understand that stocks is really difficult because you have like corporate
actions, you have dividends, and so it might be painful to set up, but hopefully it is done correctly.
Now, single name perps are, when we do it,
we have single name perp tools on stocks that are interesting.
Actually funny, but in brokerage, some retail clients,
they have strong preference for spot stocks over CFDs
I don't know whether it translates
Everybody okay back there?
Just camera
No, no Oh.
Someone fell in the back. I hope they're all right.
OK. All right. Okay, alright. Alright.
See thumbs up.
Let's go.
Don't want to be callous if someone's hurt.
Yeah, I was saying that anecdotally, some retail clients had preference on like stocks
over CFDs for like single name trading.
I don't know if it translates for perps or like if perps are fine.
Please.
No, I also like some people have reference for dividend paying stocks.
Yeah.
It's more of an annoyance.
Impossible to explain.
Interesting.
Cool.
All right.
Well, I guess coming back around just again sort of on this go forward, I think one of the other themes we've seen out of the kind of mega like that. I'm kind of curious, especially on the Meria side, like you have both the consumer business,
you have the custody business, of course.
Like how do you think about trying to, you know, because you also mentioned this B2B2C
strategy.
How do you compare that to evolving yourself into this single platform where you can kind
of do everything for your users in a single place?
In terms of regulation, it's too complex to have everything in a single app.
First of all, because when you are looking about Twitter,
you think that people just don't want only finance.
They also want communication, social network, AI,
an investment tool at the same place.
So creating the X, again, that that will be complicated and the second thing is
you need different kind of license to distribute cryptocurrency that will probably be different in
the future than distributing stablecoin like in francis you need to be mica to distribute some
cryptocurrencies and you will need an another license to be able to distribute some yield on stablecoin.
And finally, you also have for any RWA, considerate and categorize as equity today.
That will be security, and you need to be mefied.
So I truly think that will be two different jobs to provide the platform and the one-stop shop of investment tools and product
has creating the network
like blockchain or centralized
distribution network
or finally the technical stack
like staking, building
block, MEV, etc.
So I think
you can target to be the
biggest one and to create this tool but it's
different kind of work and today it's not the job that we do at Meria and finally we target to be the biggest one and to create this tool, but it's different kind of work.
And today it's not the job that we do at Meria.
And finally, we have to be specialized in one segment and one path
if we want to be able to provide and to create value and to distribute it through biggest platform.
Well, as we're coming up on time, I want to thank everyone for listening today, of course.
I'm curious, what is something in crypto right now that you guys are most excited about?
Besides, of course, what you're working on, whether it's something you're playing around with,
something that you're sort of eagerly following, either on the research side, on the new launches.
you know, new launches.
Curious what you'd suggest the audience give some attention to.
give some attention to.
There's one thing I like,
and it's not an endorsement.
It's an endorsement of the idea.
I don't know about the execution.
I haven't looked into it.
But I think it's a thing called Ventral,
which are doing like single name perps
on pre-IPO stocks.
And it speaks to me because
one of my first projects in crypto was in 2012.
I, you know, I tried to pitch that, it did not pan out.
But it was built on Bitcoin, a purest exchange for pre-IPO stock at the time where people
really wanted to trade like Twitter and Facebook and all that before the IPO.
I think one of the reasons for the success of crypto is that people have been cut off
from early stage investing
for a long time. And at the same time, it's like tech has grown immensely. We're seeing today a
lot of tech giants, which are still private, you know, like the major AI labs. And, you know,
there may be some IPOs coming, but I think there's far too, far too little, you know,
far too little businesses go public, which is very unfortunate.
And so trying to bring some form of liquidity to private markets or to some form of access
is a great mission.
And I hope it pans out because it's extremely exciting.
I love that use case.
I'm mostly excited about like spot and preparing developments. I think we would
have more and more place on composability and things that it can
unlock. An aggregator of aggregator. We are creating the first tool where we
aggregate our solution but also all of our competitors.
And it's for final
user, and we are working on it for more
than two years. And so, for the
moment, we are still building it.
But yeah, I'm a bit
enthusiastic from that.
Very nice. Alright, guys. Well, thank you so much for
listening, and yeah.
Thank you, thank yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Hello.
Great conversation.
Great conversation.
Now, before we move to the next panel,
I think I have a third and final secret word to disclose.
Who's interested in that?
No one? So I will not say it?
Okay, I will still say it.
The secret word is yield.
I repeat, yield.
Good luck.
Now, as a final panel of the day,
to close out this incredible day,
we're turning to something that is and has always been at the heart of the TESOS ecosystem,
digital art.
From generative systems to immersive exhibitions,
this space keeps moving forward.
And this panel will explore how artists and creators
are using these new tools and formats
to push their craft forward.
Moderating the panel is Vinciane Jones,
our partner manager at Trillitech.
Then we have Alexandra Art, head of art at Trillitech.
Brian Becafico, art advisor and curator.
We have Patrice Trecet, artist.
And last person is Georg Eckmeyer, artist and researcher.
researcher. Give it up for the panel.
Give it up for the panel.
Thank you everyone and all the speakers for joining us today to speak about the future of digital creativity.
So we have
amazing speakers with us on stage. To kick us off, we have Alexandra Art who's going to give us a bit of an intro to
what Art on Tezos is, what we're doing as Art on Tezos, and some of the amazing programming that has taken place
over the past couple of years. Can everyone hear me okay? Okay, wonderful. And there's someone to
click through the slides, right? Actually, do we have a clicker? Because I think this will be,
yeah, this will be quite hard without the clicking.
Okay, wonderful. So you should be able to see all of us soon on the screen. Can I just,
as a warm-up, can you lift your hand if you've ever collected any art? Just like any art.
Okay, that's a good crowd. And can you lift your hands if you collected an NFT on Tezos?
Oh, wow, the hands are only getting higher.
Okay, this is great.
I know we have thousands of viewers online as well,
so thank you, everyone, for joining.
We'll be brief because we have to make it for the art show after this.
So long story short,
Arts on Tezos marked five-year anniversary this year, which is a big hallmark in the grand scheme of things. And in our team is Venti and Jones. We also have Josh from our team here.
And we work across several pillars. And today we're joined by artists and curators who are active in the ecosystem.
And later in the panel, everyone will introduce themselves and have slides to show you. I'm going to contextualize a few things that we do and
pass on the words to Venti-Anne to continue from here. So first and foremost at the heart of the
ecosystem we have artists, collectors, community, this involves writers. We've had over half a
million artworks bought over the last year and millions available if anyone wants to check it out.
We have many different marketplaces from long-form generative art to HTML, 3D,
Object, as many of you know, are very popular. Also, Taya is a DAO.
So you also have platforms that offer different infrastructure solutions.
As you've heard earlier today, there's the roadmap to CESOS X,
and that is a big part of our work also to make sure all the different builders
on the ecosystem are aware of the changes that are taking place.
And then mainly we also have programming.
Programming that is part of what we're doing today.
So we're just going to jump in. Some of the programming is online. part of what we're doing today um so we're just gonna jump in
some of the programming is online some of it is physical it spans across the world so some of the
online initiatives are targeted to creators who can't always travel to destinations like here
and they can participate online so last year we launched the photography prize we have monthly
art commissions on tezos where emerging creators are invited to create new work and they get a stipend towards it we have micro grants we
have exhibitions the list goes on and on we also have in real life events so last year we launched
art on tezos as a umbrella brand and it kicked off in berlin and took place later on in buenos
aires these are often either events led
by our team or also by local communities. For example, TES Art Montreal took place last year
for its like third consecutive year, which is a really big event in Canada. And we've also
participated at Perry Photo together with Artverse Gallery and Object One, which is one of the major photography fairs in Paris.
Moving from that...
I'll speak a little bit about our institutional partnerships.
Art in Tezos has a long history of working with museums around the world
and being chosen by museums as well as their technology of blockchain of choice.
MoMA, for example, has used Tezos in their past
when they displayed Rufek Anadol.
Currently, we have a number of institutional partnerships on the go.
If you find yourself in Lyon, in France,
you can explore an exhibition by Wenyu Atelier
that opened recently at the beginning of March.
We are also working closely with HEC,
the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland,
and we have plans to showcase works both online and in person during the Art Basel week coming
up in June. And also if you find yourself in New York, please do stop by the Museum of Moving Image
to see an amazing commission by Sarah Friend and Ye-Won Song,
who are exploring blockchain as a medium.
So these are just a few examples of the institutions that we've worked with.
The idea behind these institutional partnerships is to provide a way to educate a greater public
who might not come across digital art in their day-to-day online,
who may step into museums without having known
that art on the blockchain exists
and to educate them within those contexts.
It's also really interesting and important for artists
to work within institutional context.
So it provides a platform for a lot of artists
who are looking for that next stage in their artistic career.
And it also provides a lot of really important context
when it comes to the history
of digital art and art on the blockchain. And going back a little bit to community programming
and what we do online, one of our very long-running initiatives is the Tazos Tuesday Collecting, which has started, I think, back in April, May of 2024.
So it's been going for two years almost.
And here are just a few of the guests that we've had.
And we have a guest, a past Tezos Tuesday guest as well, Brian here.
So how it works is every two weeks, a collector is given 500 Tez to explore and collect with on Tezos.
So they're announced from the Tezos handle,
they collect from the artists who share their works and replies,
and from their own exploring through the Tezos marketplaces.
And we're very glad to have Brian here today,
who is an art advisor and curator,
who will talk a little bit about his background.
He was previously head of digital art at Sotheby's Paris,
and he'll speak as well about his Tezos Tuesday curation.
Sure, thank you.
That was nice to do.
I mean, the challenge is to keep it up to the 500 test budget
because I guess on Tezos, it's a place where people like me
that are a bit of art chronic accumulator,
that sort of anytime I see something, I just want to own it, is a bit of a challenge to keep it.
But one of the things that I really enjoy in Tezos that I don't think you get quite as much on the other chain is the cultural diversity that you can find on Tezos.
One of the reasons to that was that when the big NFT moment happened, you know, minting
fees were quite high.
And let's face it, if you're someone living in Indonesia, where the average monthly income
is about $300, you're not going to spend 50 bucks minting an NFT.
And so on Tezos, especially on objects in various marketplaces that exist, you get to
meet a lot of artists coming from places that usually
do not have access to the broader art market.
Artists from Africa, artists from South East Asia, South
America.
And in the creation that I did for the Tuesday,
it's really, really shown because there
might be a couple of American artists,
but much more diverse than, I would say,
the reality of the trade art market,
where pretty much 70% of global value auctioned off by auction houses in the world is auctioned by New York.
So there's an American dominance, hegemony almost, that make it so that if you're an artist,
you're not living in Paris, London or New York, there's no way you can really make a huge career
for yourself unless you get to be
internationally recognized and stuff like that. But I think that is one thing that object and
Tezos in general has provided to the art world is access for artists from those regions to be able
to get to know their art, get collectors from across the world and make a sustainable living.
You know, prices on Tezos are often much lower than what you can find
on ETH.
But this, I would say, social economical reality of living
in an emerging country make it so that even if you're setting
artwork for 100 bucks a piece, if you're living in a country
where the average income is 300 bucks a month,
that's something that is sustainable for an artist.
And here we have an artwork from Mirai Kotulis.
It's an animation, so it doesn't really give as much justice like that.
But both of those artists are from Turkey, for example.
And the first exhibition I did was how artists, especially from Kurdistan,
have used crypto to flee terrorism, to flee ISIS during the war in Syria.
flee terrorism to flee isis during the war in syria and crypto is a way i believe in the
ideals of decentralized idea of of of zero knowledge proof of cypher punk ideals this idea
of being able to free yourself from state-owned currency state-owned control and censorship is
still very much a reality in today's art world.
And I believe that, you know, without Tezos, without NFTs in general,
artists like Mirai, artists like Kubilay,
wouldn't have been able to make a career for themselves
and exist in the broader art world.
The same thing here, like Lorraine, I believe,
is that those are two artists from South America.
This is an amazing scene in South America, and I still as well believe it's a you know
South America even in the last century there's been a lot of political
instability and stuff so they are ready to meet the future of both crypto and
the future of the art world is being a ball to on board those people from
emerging country from Africa from South America from South Asia which
demographically in any way
is going to represent the majority of the world
and already is in some aspect.
So yeah, in that regard, I invite anyone that likes art
and that likes to discover artwork that you never see
in the gallery in Cannes, in Paris, in New York.
That's where you can get those artists
and that's where you can, I believe,
discover the most interesting artists of their generation that, you know,
if you were not from this country you would never have a chance to discover, to be fair.
Thank you so much. And next up we have Patrick Tresset who has been working for
the past 20 years exploring the representation of humans through
computational systems, AI and robotics.
Patrick, it would be great to know a little bit more about your work and how do you explore
human presence and human representation through those art techniques.
Yes, now it's working. Hello everybody.
Yeah, I'm best known for this type of installations where you have a robot.
I use the robot as actors and they all have a specificity that they make marks.
So they react reality by making drawings.
But I'm not going to talk too much about that because we are here.
The physicality, well, that's another debate.
Anyway, but to bounce off what you said about the community on Tezos,
that was what was the big surprise because in 2021
was to meet all those artists from everywhere in the world
and created this kind of commune of artists with different tastes.
And the collectors are also in the community,
which is something that is very specific, I think, with NFTs.
And perhaps NFTs on Tezos are not familiar with how it is.
You have this direct link with people, which is surprising because it's digital.
And that was...
Yes, would you have a question?
I just had a quick question because Patrick,
I remember your art when I first joined Tesos five years ago.
I remember you were already there.
And as an artist that exhibited in museums, has decades
of career working
with these robotic arms. You were
at Basel last year at Digital Art Mile
with us. There were lines of people
to get your portrait. But you also
discovered blockchain and
NFTs. So you're
that bridge between the both worlds.
Could you just speak a tiny bit
to that as well?
So it came because of the pandemic so my my practice was based on exhibition so
because our installations they are not easy to serve i mean not many people by installation so
you get paid by fees when you exhibit so during the pandemic pandemic, no exhibition, no fees, no money. And then the NFTs appeared. So I was looking at it. And the NFTs appeared on Tezos. And then we joined all of them. And forNUK that I developed this new side to my practice.
And that was nice because that really, the beauty of the digital stuff is that it's very fast and
painless to make. There's no friction with digital stuff because with installations and robots you
will see when you come to the exhibition, it's different. It's heavier, takes time. It's the same thing with painting, you have to send them.
I sold some paintings last month to someone, some drawings,
and that's a month and a half that they are stuck at the custom in the States.
It's impossible.
No, so NFTs are great for that.
There's no friction of digital artwork.
And lastly, we have Georg,
who will introduce himself as well.
So Georg is an artist and a researcher working at the sort of
forefront and kind of intersection
of human and machine perception.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your practice?
You've also participated in the object residency, and you'll be shown as well later on today
during the art show, which starts at 6.30.
Okay, thank you for having me.
And yeah, I'd like to talk a little bit.
This is one of the works.
It's called Songs of Algorithm and it's a network
sculpture and these are various devices playing together. You can instant it with
your QR code and then you are part of a network sculpture and I like to use the
human phones, the phones you own. I like my art being on your phones
because it's quite an intimate object. We have our phones, we know where it is and
it's personal communication and I like my art not... so I like it also on the big
screen, I have to admit that, but I also like it that people have it on their phones, in their personal space.
And that's the main thing about this work.
Yeah, and there are some other works.
It's the Songs of Algorithm.
It's called, yeah, because I think there's a combination between humans, humans have songs,
and I wanted to know what kind of songs machines would have.
If they would sing to us, how would it feel?
Because I'm quite interested in how our feeling, how our effects change through the machines.
And so I try to imagine if the machine would do human
stuff like tapping back tapping or yeah making a song and that's yeah well I
relate to me our bodies and the data and how we do together what is the second
skin of data yeah we are surrounded thank you I
think we have maybe time for one question for the group and then we'll
soon be heading off to the art show I'm just bouncing back I think on your point
Georg about the you like the fact that collectors have the work on their phones
that it's something that they have.
Thinking about the future of digital creativity and what that means for collectors and artists,
obviously, how do you think that NFTs and collecting digital art has maybe changed people's
approach to art in general, now that it's something not necessarily, you know, that
stays in a museum, it's something they can take home with them, it's something they can have, display on a screen like a phone, display on a screen
like a TV. I think it's often a question people have is, okay, I own a
digital art, if they don't know anything about NFTs, what do I do with it?
I like the idea that they have it on your
phone, because you can also have it on a screen, and
many collectors have it on the screen and many collectors have it on the
screen also but to have it on your phone it's kind of it's everywhere where you are and it's you take
your art somewhere and then you think you're sitting somewhere and think about your collection
and you can access it and i like this there's a very close relation to from the collector to the artwork
and i think the relation between artists and the collector is also quite new in the nft space
because it's a public thing normally i buy artwork physical artworks then i give or i
sell them i give it to somebody they it somewhere, and there's no connection.
We maybe sometimes talk, but with NFT, it's public.
It's a part of discourse, and many collectors talk about it, and then it's a social, not
this artwork, and that's what I really like about NFTs.
Brian, do you have any thoughts on that?
Sure. Yeah, there is a book
I've been rereading recently
called Relational Aesthetic
from Nicolas Bouriot, and this idea
that heart is meant to be
a connection factor, right?
Screens has been
criticized as disconnecting
us from the world, but I do believe
that screens and digital is a way to connect to the broader world in a way that we were not
about to do so before. And I do think that the internet is this third place
as there's been a lot of physical, philosophical stuff that we will not get into here.
But yeah, pretty much this idea that connecting with arts through an
exhibition, the audience or to the
artist I think is the new parting of creativity nowadays you can be creative
not just to your artwork but to the way you communicate with people to the way
you present yourself through the way you sell artwork you know marketing
communication sales all of those fields that were tend to be mediatized uh intermediate sorry um is no longer the case
with nfts and this is both a new responsibility to artists but also a new opportunity i believe
to express creativity in a way that was not seen before and even nicola is very critical about nft
in general but i believe that in fact this movement is very much
uh in line with this notion of relational aesthetic network out some people call it in
space um but uh yeah let's not go into semiology but uh it is something that i truly believe is is
the future of creativity to the title of that yeah i Yeah, I just quickly, I know we have three minutes left,
to build on that point, because we're talking about the future,
and you mentioned,
interestingly, networked art, right?
That is sort of the state, and the same
way as maybe a hundred years ago, people
were like, wait, photography's art? What?
No, let's just take a portrait.
But then you have the photography fairs,
and all of a sudden, you need photography reporters,
and then all of a sudden, you have collectors, you have all these people who are interested in photography circulating
around a certain place but that place doesn't have to be physical and I think that's where
we're moving in right now is you know we have Instagram launch and all of a sudden there are
Instagram artists artists that don't need gallery representation they said you know they have their
channels and same thing that happened with blockchain as well,
and different blockchains, different marketplaces working together
to create these networks that congregate people who are passionate about it,
and then it manifests itself at events like this.
And the beauty of digital art, it doesn't have to be a confined gallery space,
it can be anything, because the beauty of digital art, it's not confined to a canvas.
Like a lot of artists work with art that can be a vertical screen, horizontal screen, HTML.
They can do site-specific work.
And I think those works are much more fluid.
They can be accessed globally at any point of time, similar experiences for different people.
And I think that is, the conflict is not like physical chat arts versus digital.
I think it's just, it's that confluence,
that fluidity that it allows to create spaces
of shared connection and conversation.
A lot of artists that we have
are some of the world's best developers, you know,
people from Microsoft and Google
in their spare time, they create art, you know,
or we have artists that have traditional training,
but then thanks to COVID, you know,
they're easily able to sort of like morph that
into something new it gives life and I think that conversions of different journeys it's
what really makes us really excited about it. So Alex has shared what she's very excited about for
the future of digital art and out on the blockchain I think I'd love to hear from
the rest of our speakers what are you most? Patrick, maybe you kick us off.
It's a good question.
In art in general?
Or in creativity?
No, I think that, yes, this possibility with communities producing art like that networked,
it's very new and very interesting. I don't have much more ideas on that, I'm not that excited.
Networked art, okay. Brian, we have about less than one minute left.
So you have 30 seconds and then Gail gets 30 seconds.
I know I tend to go on the monologue, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I did some notes.
I guess the merging of physical and digital this day has been very important.
If I may promote the show that we have with Patrick.
You know, we are hosting an exhibition on Wednesday
with One H, where we showcase the work of Patrick,
but also the work of another artist called
Osvetier, Paul Mugino.
And both of those artists have a physical practice that
dwell into computer art or AI or various variety of digital
art system.
And we've seen with Arbezel, Hong Kong and Miami that those artists
have been producing more and more
physical art as we call it, new media art
installation and I truly believe
in this idea of connecting further
from digital and going back to that
tangibility in this real life connection
that is really the
convergence that we're seeing
and I think a lot of those artists
never thought about doing digital art before, I think a lot of those artists never has I think never
thought about doing digital art before I think a lot of digital artists never thought about
making physical art and this is a shift that is very exciting and it's been going on for a couple
of years now I think. Georg to wrap us up. Okay I was always waiting for something like NFTs because
I wanted to get rid of USB sticks of having to print something.
I just wanted to have a digital process. Just can it be digital?
I don't want to have it on the screen. Everybody said, oh, the screen and the video is to work.
And so I'm quite excited that this is there.
I want to experiment more with these infrastructures because I think that's the new way. The 60s introduced performance and changed art and now we have infrastructures
and this will change the whole art world too, I think.
That's a wonderful note to end on.
Thank you so much everyone for joining us on stage today and thank you.
Thank you, thank you thank you thank you
