SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Hey, hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode of Blockheads Blockcast. I'm your host, Takatoshi Shibayama. I'm also the head of APAC for Ledger. I aim to uncover the creative, intelligent, and radical minds who are shaping the crypto industry today. I'm as crypto curious as anybody that's tuning into this show. We're doing this together, guys. Let's go. Welcome to License to Chill. the offshoot of the BlockCast Normal series, where we discuss the weekly recaps of what is happening in the juicy world of crypto, the markets, anything that comes to our minds. Before we start, everything we say here is not investment advice, business advice, relationship advice, nor friendship advice. I'm Takatoshi Shibayama, the intergalactic host of crypto, and I have here with me Lisa Tan, CEO of Economics Design, and Nikhil Joshi, COO of Mergo, a co-founding entity of Cardano. What's up, guys? Nice to be here. So there's been a massive market capitulation. We are recording on the 11th of April. Obviously, from Monday, we had this massive drop in prices. And that's all everybody's talking about these days. If I look at the markets, you know, the top, I would say 10 tokens that dropped from 55 to 65 percent. I see here Sui, Solana, Aave, BNP. Polygon, Near, Uniswap, Ethereum, a bunch of these tokens are down. Obviously, the talk is all about the Trump tariffs, liquidity pulled out of the market. I think from 2022, there was$9 trillion of assets that Fed bought and$2 trillion has been pulled out from the market. So we're really seeing the effects of that coming right now. Well, what do you want to talk about? Let's talk about these tokens. Since it's crypto, the biggest driver I think that we see and a lot of people are talking about is Ethereum. In May 7th, there's going to be the Pectra update. We'll see a big change in the Ethereum's performance. The great big change will be the smart contracts on the wallets, the increase in tokens that can be staked from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. I think it's a huge change. But still, Ethereum, not a lot of people are talking about it, right? So Lisa, what do you think about what's going on here?

SPEAKER_00: 2:19

Yeah, I think Ethereum is very interesting because it's the price that we can buy Ethereum in 2017. So So Ethereum is back at the 2017 prices and it's wild to see Ethereum going through these big changes. From 2017, we have multiple Layer 2s, we have GameFi, DeFi with a bunch of applications built on top of it. It's a proper full stack that has proper integration with different B2C and B2B avenues and distribution that proves value can be created in Ethereum. At the same time, the value has dropped significantly to where the 2017 value, which is wild compared to Bitcoin, right, which is the first on the rank, it has increased since 2017 by insane amount of folds. So that's a very interesting perspective. And I want to give some perspective to the three, I'd say, main chains and how I look at them. The first one is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an asset class on its own. People are looking at Bitcoin as an alternative asset, an alternative safety haven, and Bitcoin has dropped in price, but it's still stabilizing around the 80K range, despite the S&P shifting significantly. So it's another asset class that people are putting their funds into. So it's its own category in its own right. The second one is Solana. Solana, it's moving towards the institutional play. We talk about institution a little bit later, given that Ethereum is going to increase to 2,000 tokens to be staked. So there is an institutional play going on. Solana is trying to crack that, but primarily Solana is very Web3 driven. It's very community driven. All the meme coins Everything is built on Solana. Yes, meme coins have dropped in activity in the last couple of weeks, but Solana still has its own strong community that will support its price. Ethereum in its own right is a very interesting mechanism. I'm looking at things from an economics perspective. From Ethereum, Ethereum is like the best decentralized network. It completely disintermediate different economic agents, whether you're a data aggregator, whether you are bringing off-chain data on-chain, whether you are a DeFi or GameFi or Oracle. Ethereum as a network can help solve all of these things. It really removes intermediary to provide transparency for people to trade and interact. So from a fundamental value, from a first principles value, it solves the main coordination problem that gives us real transparency and real decentralization, which is what crypto wants. However, this is not priced in into Ethereum, considering that the price is now back at 2017. Ethereum prices, people don't care about that. That's the thing. Everyone talks about how important decentralization and transparency is, but nobody prices that in. People take that as a given. And nobody really cares about that. And that's something I'm quite worried about because at the end of the day, Ethereum, I think it's going to be the gateway to crypto for Web2 people to come into Web3. And I think this new update will bring in a bunch of institutional or track five people. That being said, people are not pricing things accurately. Or people are taking a lot of things for granted, which is transparency and the ability to coordinate as Ethereum is a network. I guess that's a bit worrying, but at the same time, that's real life, right? People just care about how cheap, how fast, and that's it. People will pay for it. People don't pay attention to transparency or decentralization until things go south.

SPEAKER_02: 5:26

Yeah, and it's also just a beauty contest overall, right? So obviously, Ethereum has seen improvements over the past. I mean, before when there was like NFTs, you had to spend, I don't know, 100 bucks just to send$10 worth of ETH. But now, I mean, the fees are cheaper and transaction speeds are faster. So... Why is it stagnating?

SPEAKER_01: 5:45

There's been a bit of talk about the cannibalization, right? Between the layer two and the layer one part. You're probably better placed than me to talk about this, but I'm trying to get my head around that. Is that a real thing?

SPEAKER_00: 5:53

Yeah, that's a very interesting perspective because one of the things I was reflecting about a couple of months ago is this whole layer one and layer two competition. With layer twos coming in, they're getting all the fees and layer ones just don't get any more fees. But what is the fundamental reason or potential reason that's driving it? I think layer one is really what I call the economics of security. And that is basically how much you will pay for a security camera in your house to make sure that nobody comes in. So security is something that people don't place a lot of value on until things go south. So it's a bit like insurance, right? People pay, I don't know, a hundred dollars for one year's worth of travel insurance, but People don't really value it until they fall sick and they really need insurance money. So people don't value security that much, which is what layer ones do. They just provide, that's the main value that they have. Layer twos, on the other hand, is data integrity. It presents data, provides data, aggregates data, and makes data transact a lot faster before it gets a road to layer one, which is where it's secure over there. So it's all about data integrity. It's about data coordination, data availability. And data is key. In the digital world today, Everything is about data. Data is this new oil, which is the thing that's been talked about for the last 20 years. So people value data. People care about data. And so when you are in layer two, which is the economics of data, data integrity, data availability, people value that more and people price that more. And to me, from an economics fundamentals perspective, I think that's why layer twos are getting all the money and layer ones are just not making that much money anymore.

SPEAKER_02: 7:21

Yeah, I mean, even just on the pure economics of everything. I mean, if you have layer twos, they're pushing their tokens. on Ethereum, then it's very extractive towards the value of ETH in general. right? Because everything's transacted on ETH ultimately, but everybody's trying to push the community to buy their own tokens. So people are going to, you know, sell out of ETH and they're going to buy the other tokens. So that whole economics model is kind of flawed for Ethereum to

SPEAKER_01: 7:49

begin with. But I think that there's also a divorce between utility, the economics that should be driven off that utility and just plain old narrative, right? So I think this comes to a question of horizon and this space, rightly or wrongly, right, has a lot of people who have short time spans that they're looking at. And so Ethereum had the first mover advantage with its smart contract. So very different to Bitcoin. We understand that and has built a lot of activity, a lot of community around that. And that's buoyed its price. But is that moat really a moat? And so the Solanas, the SUIs that are coming up as a newer narrative, right? And I'm not trying to suggest there's nothing more to it than narrative, right? But it's about capturing attention and mind space. perhaps more so at the moment than it is about utility. So for me, and this is not a comment specific to Ethereum, but I think right now there's a lot of promise of delivery of utility at some point in the future, right? And so the pricing of this is, in my mind, a bit more like a call option and not a tech index. You know the direction of travel is going to be pretty decent, but you don't know exactly where it will land.

SPEAKER_00: 8:57

Completely agree with that. I think narrative is the most important thing right now in this attention economy, whether it's Web2 or Web3, it's all about grabbing attention and just looking at how short time span people have and time horizon yesterday trump decided to pause the tariffs so all the tweets were like yay amazing everything is good life is good and then like 12 hours later oh shit why is everything red again like it's a pause in tariffs it's not like eradicating tariffs so people don't have a longer time horizon and that's really worrying because it means that everything is focused on narrative on one hand it's good because it means that we can shift things very easily going back to your idea of core option If this narrative doesn't work, the company is, or the founder is adaptable enough, flexible enough to just shift to the next narrative that could potentially work because the market's changing so fast, so that's good. But if your narrative keeps changing, your business model actually changes. If this business, this protocol, this application doesn't make money, it's just all about narrative, it's all about pumping money, it's all about pumping the marketing, then we are just building upon nothing. It's just the world's biggest Ponzi scam. And that is worrying.

SPEAKER_02: 10:03

Absolutely. I mean, I think from ICO days till now on, everything is narrative, right? It has been narrative. And the more loud your community is, the more people talk about it, the more hype you get. And then that's kind of how this crypto industry is built, right? But I think going forward, you know, we already maxed out the Web3 community that wants to play in this game. They lost tons of money. How can we get more people to come into this space that are not from the Web3 community, Web2 community is the one that we want to go for. But if everything's about hype, narrative, how do we get these Web2 people? I mean, I thought this cycle will be trying to abstract chains, abstract tokens, and try to build something that Web2 people can come in without having to think about all these complicated stuff that nobody's really interested about. And are we seeing that kind of thing happening? Or is that something that the Ethereum community, Solana community, all the other communities, are they thinking about these kind Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 11:02

look, we run the risk of undermining the whole thing. Of course, we three here are believers, right? But I think there is value that will be delivered. The question is, when you're talking about crypto, blockchain, Web3, Bitcoin, this all gets talked about interchangeably. Like it's one thing. Actually, if you look at its roots, if you look at how it's manifesting itself with things like real world asset tokenization, and obviously being like mode du jour, right? There's a very big spread on what people think or how they think about crypto and blockchain. So you can take Bitcoin as an asset class and then you can take everything that's come after that with smart contract functionality and just think of that as a tech stack and a bit like a piece of wood. Right. What do you want to do with that piece of wood? The same question applies to what you want to do with this tech stack. So I think part of it is, yes, there's a lot of. functionality that could be delivered, a lot of value that can be delivered. But it's also understanding what's your audience that you're talking to? Where are they on that curve of understanding? And ultimately, what do they want?

SPEAKER_02: 11:58

Well, it seems like the institutional space is where Ethereum wanted to go for as well, right? Because now you have the spot ETFs. Now they're talking about ETFs that can be staked. So there's going to be a lot of versions of these kind of ETFs coming out. And it seems like if even when I talk to exchanges or any type of like protocol, they always have now a institutional strategy and a I just want to dive back into what Nikhil said. At the

SPEAKER_00: 12:29

end of the day, we need to abstract this complexity away from the protocol, just as you mentioned, Taka. What does that mean? What does that look like? It means that we need to start looking at how much value or what value can be created for the end users. Maybe Web3 users are maxed out and we need to start looking for new users and bridging Web2 to Web3. And there are two angles to look at this. The first one is, I think that's where dpin comes in. So dpin is kind of like RWA, depending on physical dpin or digital dpin. But I think dpin is quite interesting if we talk about, so I'm going to give you a very simple example. We talk about storage before all the compute and whatever kind of stuff. Let's take storage, for example. Right now, you have three key players in Web2. You have Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Right now, everyone is kind of like slave to them. They just provide all these services and people have to use them. However, there is potential geopolitical risks and it has never been stronger than today. I mean, you can use the Chinese clouds as well. They are competitors to them as well. But what does a decentralized cloud cloud system look like? And I think that this could be quite interesting because if let's say you're in the middle of Turkmenistan or somewhere in Saudi Arabia, Amazon isn't going to have its own server over there. If you have Deepin infrastructure over there, it could help and it could reduce the latency, which is this ideal goal that we have. So there's a lot of Deepin coming up. And I think that's very interesting. One project is Impossible Cloud Network. They already have five mil ARR on the Web2 side of things, which is going to be interesting because all these Deepin projects A lot of them that, at least I've seen, all their clients are in the Web2 side of things. What they're looking to do is, okay, on my user side, it's going to be Web2, but in the backend infrastructure, is there a competitive advantage to look at a decentralized infrastructure where I can compete or potentially hedge my risk against geopolitical climate? And that could be interesting. So that's one. The second one is, Also coming back to geopolitics, it's fintech on crypto. So Christine Lagarde said that EU needs to build its own fintech infrastructure and not rely on Visa and MasterCard just in case as a hedge. Right now, actually, a lot of Germany is using PayPal. They're PayPal driven. It's crazy because PayPal is not even a German company. And then in Netherlands, you have Deal, which is their own thing, but it doesn't spread across EU. So we need to stop building a new fintech infrastructure, building on a new tech stack that is cross-border that it's not restricted to specific jurisdiction. And I think that's where Ethereum or crypto could shine again.

SPEAKER_01: 14:57

Yeah, so coming back to that point about, what was it, 32 ETH to how much? 2048. Yeah, that's huge, right? So that basically points to really only institutional players being involved there. And so... What you'll have is, I imagine, institutions controlling. So to your point about Ethereum being the most decentralized, right? Well, how does that look once you've just got a bunch of institutions controlling it? Question mark, is that a good thing or a bad thing, right? And then all that activity that you just talked about sits above it. But I do think that it raises some big questions around Ethereum and it's not a retail chain already in a way. And so you just have this fat institutional layer that's helped running it. And how decentralizes it at that

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

point? Going back to our first point, nobody cares about decentralization. It's not priced in. People just care about more tokens being staked, so there's less circulating supply, so prices go up. Faster, cheaper, that's it. When we talk about institution coming in, is it a bad thing, question mark? Bad thing for whom and in what aspects?

SPEAKER_01: 15:58

Correct, which goes back to the point of the spread, right? Of what does blockchain or even Ethereum specifically mean for you, right? And there'll be people who clearly don't agree on that point.

SPEAKER_02: 16:09

Well, it's all about going back into the institutions, right? So, you know, most people, when they host any data, they don't care if it's AWS or Google or Microsoft. I mean, to them, as long as it's there, brand name is good, then you're not going to get fired for using them. So I think that if you want to go after the Web2 space, that's the way it's going to be. They don't really care about decentralization. As you said, Lisa, it's about like, is it fast? Is it cheap? And is it reliable? And that's all they really care about. So are we going back kind of into that Web2 space for Web3? Because the promise of all this decentralization, programmable, modern, all that kind of stuff doesn't really resonate for the rest of the world. So are we just like speaking out loud with this tiny space of Web3 that we're living in? Or are we preparing ourselves to become more of a Web2 slash 3 kind of world?

SPEAKER_00: 16:59

It's interesting because in my vision, it's not about Web2 and Web3 in the future. It's just whatever protocol that gets the job done. I don't care what is being used as long as I can rely on the data, I can rely on its execution, and I can rely on the output. That's all I care about. So whether you're using, in Africa you're using M-Pesa, whether you're using WeChat in China, it doesn't matter. Or you're using some blockchain solution to send money in Europe in the future, it doesn't matter. As long as I can send money, and I know that the money will be received, and I know that this is real, and not some weird version of money that is not legal tender, that's enough. I don't think people care that much.

SPEAKER_01: 17:34

Yeah, agreed. I think it all points to chain abstraction. Apart from the.001 whatever percent of the world who love to argue about iOS or Android, like there's four phones on the table here, right? What are they, all iPhones? When did you ever talk about iOS versus Android? I haven't. I'm sure there are people who love to, right? But for most of the world, no one cares, right? They just want the products to do whatever they need to do in a safe, clean, efficient, whatever way, right? And so that's where it will end up, I reckon. And so the notion of community, right, will, I think, dilute itself because they will just have to blame right and community is whatever you want it to be right be it guitars or layer ones or film or whatever your thing is so it will dissipate over time and where I agree with you we won't be talking in terms of web 2 versus web 3 we are now in the way that when the internet opened up people had their online business and then their physical business but now it's just the same thing right it will just become the way things are done

SPEAKER_00: 18:38

yeah and on that note I'm actually really really bullish of blockchain as a technology because Thank you. going back to everything that we've discussed so far, it's all about the ability to trust, to transact, to do the thing, to execute. Right now, there is a potential risk that your data is being scrutinized and whatever you send could be changed. Who knows? But with blockchain, there is no incentive to do that because no one owns the chain specifically. Yes, you've got institutions coming in, but if anything, they're running validator nodes. They are not there to change. If anything, it's about ordering the transactions, but they're not going to change the content of your transaction. And in a world that is is increasingly looking inwards and less about collaboration, less about transparency. Blockchain as a technology helps to provide that transparency, provides that trust, because when it comes to transparency, there is trust. So if we stop trusting the current tech stack that we use, we need to pivot to something else. We're not going to stop using tech. And I think blockchain is here to stay. And I'm very bullish on that. But how it looks like, how it reflects token prices, who are we targeting, how Web2 users are coming in, how institutions are coming in, how fintech could reinvent itself or be integrated into blockchain tech, that is something to see.

SPEAKER_02: 19:51

And I think that blockchain infrastructure is going to chug along, become more institutionalized like what Ethereum is doing right now. But on the flip side, the businesses that are being built on it is starting to become consolidated, right? So this week we heard about Ripple acquiring Hidden Road. What does this mean for Ripple? What does it mean for the crypto industry in terms of like trading infrastructures? And my take is that Ripple is trying to become a bank. First, I thought they were really going to go into the payment space. They also bought a custodial service or I would say custodial infrastructure Medico. They kind of disperse all the people inside of it. And I don't know what Medico is doing right now, but then they're going to buy Hidden Road. So it's an unusual tech stack, right? Or business stack. So you have payments, you have your stable coins, and then you have a custodial element to it. And then now you have, you know, a prime broker. So are they trying to become an investment bank? What do you think?

SPEAKER_01: 20:42

Yeah, well, look, I think before we get to what are they trying to be, the headline here is the 1.25 billion, which is a crypto company with clear really buckets of capital going and buying a pretty decent name, right? I guess traditional finance roots, but Hidden Road already playing in digital assets and acquiring a prime broker. That's a good message in my mind. And of course, in the backdrop of what's going on with tariffs and whatnot, right? There's been a lot of chit-chat about are these IPOs going to happen this year or not? Having something like that go out, I think is quite symbolic. So kind of going back to the early part of the conversation on messaging, right? And how do you bring people into this space? I think That as a headline is attention grabbing. And a lot of this is going to be about the sales pitch. to the 99 odd percent of the world who are still unfamiliar with blockchain and the promise of Web3. So I think that lends itself, first of all, to interest and curiosity. Like, so if, you know, the questions would be, well, if Ripple wasn't going to buy Hidden Road, who else would have been in the mix? So I think someone else who's floating around, I don't know who the name is, and flip it the other way. If Ripple were not to have acquired Hidden Road, who else would they have gone after, right? But clearly this is now crypto coming back the other way, in a way, reverse acquisition, right? So I think it's a real positive message in terms of showing credibility, gravitas, serious and long-term sustainability of the proposition together.

SPEAKER_00: 22:03

Completely agree. And I think this goes back to one of the research that Fabric Ventures just released a couple of weeks ago, talking about in the future, it's all about vertical integration. And crypto in its own right, as in a company just issuing tokens, it's not going to be sustainable. Because if we talk about narrative, it's just one of the narrative. To really scale, to grow, to dominate or to build something sustainable something long-term, there needs to be vertical integration that includes a lot of other middleware. it's not a hidden road, it's a middleware, but it's part of the business stack for Ripple to really conquer its specific vertical. It's a good strategy to do that. And I'm quite excited. This also helps to bridge a lot of trapfire coming into crypto. And that's always good.

SPEAKER_02: 22:45

I always thought that they wouldn't be bought by Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley's or the world that wants to get into crypto. But I'm actually quite happy that it was bought by a crypto company, right? Because then you can start challenging the incumbents, right? Obviously, Ripple is much smaller in one of these investment banks. For now. For now, right? You never know. I mean, these token prices can go up. Their treasury can be bigger. They have a balance sheet. These guys can potentially start being a kind of boutique investment bank that is crypto. And I think that's a positive sign. You know, I don't want to see all the crypto trading infrastructure businesses being sold off to investment banks, right? I mean, that's not really the world that, you know, we wanted to get into. But I'm sure, you know, the other companies out there who are doing similar type of businesses are starting to kind of think that way. I mean, I was at Copper before. Initial founders were thinking, okay, we're never going to sell to banks. Screw them. We're going to go IPO. maybe in this market right now, maybe it's potentially possible. But, you know, I think they kind of pivoted a little bit and they want to be like bought by some other bank. Right. So I think there's going to be like, you know, two worlds where, you know, people think, OK, I'm going to sell the TradFi or I'm going to be crypto native forever. You know, we're going to go against the incumbents. You know, I think that's kind of like the market I'm going to start to see, I feel like from this next cycle. The other way we can go is a lot of fintechs are kind of looking at crypto. So adding in crypto in there. Right. So I I think one of the things that I've started to see from a lot of fintechs is looking at stable coins. They want to use those blockchain rails to do payments. But what other kind of areas do you guys are starting to see? This

SPEAKER_01: 24:22

comes back to the idea of selling the message. So stable coins have initially acting as a bridge, inverted commas, not a blockchain bridge, to get from fiat to crypto, to stay there, to hedge yourself. But I also think a mental bridge, the concept of a digital asset where people go, well, hang on, where's the intrinsic value here? Right. I think once you put fiat into a tokenized form, people can understand it more intuitively. Then it's just, should we say, fiat, but on different rails. And so that helps with the selling message. And of course, we've moved on from there. People are now talking about yield bearing stable coins. Real world asset tokenization is the biggest narrative, right? As far as we see, it is narrative, right? So it will land at some point. I do believe that the crypto rails will be the way that things are done, but it's not quite there yet. And I think that Within that, there is a bit of risk of what I call tokenitis. It's like when you get a wah-wah pedal with a guitar and you just want to use wah-wah and everything. You can tokenize whatever you want. That's not hard. But why would anyone care? What's the incremental value? And that's not going to happen by tokenizing real estate today, as an example, because people aren't ready for it. But you can stop at a different part of the liquid stack. And so I think fintechs 10 years ago, this was the promise of breaking banking. And I don't think it ever arrived. And speaking as someone who comes from banking, I'm glad for the time that I had there, but extremely reactive to the way that it is, in my mind, quite a risk-averse industry and slow relative to what it purports to be. That, for me, the fintech piece, the fintech play from 10 years or so back is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Nothing happened at all, with a couple of exceptions. Now crypto rails are here, and you can see those companies are starting to pick up on those ideas. because that is the thing that's going to move the needle on actually bringing efficiency. So some of these aspects of banking that have just not been improved for 50, 60 plus years.

SPEAKER_00: 26:22

I agree with that. I'm also thinking about everything we're talking about right now is very a developed world focus thing, right? Where if banking infrastructure existed for the last 50 years and it's taking a long time to evolve because of legacy tech stack. What does this look like for new economies, new countries for, I don't know enough about these countries, but like Myanmar needs to rebuild, right? And what does that look like Could they just leap forward and go into this idea of fintech on blockchain tech stack? Because there's no legacy tech. They can just implement it. And we've seen that with China and mobile payment. So nobody has cards in China. It went from cash to mobile immediately because you can skip steps ahead. What could that look like for economies coming up? Because there's a rearrangement of world order coming up and there's going to be a lot of opportunities coming up. And I'm quite excited about that. I just don't know what it looks like for the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_01: 27:18

Yeah, that's the most exciting bit for me, to be honest. Historically, should we say, the US was, you know, the leader of the pack. Then it was Europe and then it was everyone else. I think here what we're definitely seeing is the opportunity for smaller nations. We see this a lot in Southeast Asia. I mean, Union Bank of Philippines, I think, is phenomenal. As a bit of a poster child of how you can leapfrog, exactly to use the expression you used a second ago, leapfrog, you don't have to follow that well-trodden path. Even Viet with the level of sophistication and interaction of an app, like banking is just a utility. And that's how it should be treated. It should happen in the background without you having to stress out about it.

SPEAKER_00: 27:53

Yeah, so an interesting perspective would be a lot of consumer applications are now integrating banking services in there as opposed to starting as a bank. So take Grab, for example, we're in Singapore, right? It started off as a taxi booking application. Now you could order food in there. Now you could pay with crypto. And I believe you have their own like stable coins-ish, which is just their own like Grab credits that you can put into Grab itself and you can use that to pay for other things. So People are becoming banks, but the other way around. So they capture community and users first, just going back to Web3, right? It's all about your community, it's all about your narrative. If you can capture this community, you can show value to them, and they're sticky, then you can start going down the vertical integration of integrating and providing other services to create a huge vertical segment that you can monopolize.

SPEAKER_01: 28:40

Yeah, exactly. It's like the idea of embedded finance. So as an individual, as a consumer, or as an organization, you just want to do the thing that you want to do. Money is just the oil. that allows machinery to work. And so then that comes back to what you said a minute ago about blockchain as opposed to crypto. Now they have to go hand in hand, but I think looking at the utility and how can that then become part of this embedded utility where it just happens in the background. As an industry overall, I think we need to get better at not leading with the tech, but leading with what the utility is or the opportunity statement for the end user. That will snowball as it lands.

SPEAKER_00: 29:24

Yeah. And I do see a trend in the last about nine months where companies focus on, I guess, the traditionally Web2 companies in the sense that they have community, they have some level of product market fit. Then they figure out how to embed crypto in there and then embed tokens to help facilitate transaction and ease of flow so things are changing it's no longer going to be tech first I hope and at least the things that I'm seeing it's going to be value first and then you can integrate everything later down the line

SPEAKER_02: 29:55

yeah that's usually for any company you have to solve a problem and then you know that business provides that solution. And I think in crypto, we've done it pretty much the other way around. We went from tech first and build a solution and find a problem. And I think that as the industry matures and then also the incumbents looking into crypto, they can find different types of business models or technologies that can work for them. So all in all, I do kind of feel like crypto, what we built in the past, say seven, eight years is more of a POC into a world where these need to be embedded into various parts of the financial system. So we do remain positive. Markets are shit, but there's a lot of promising things that we can look forward to. And that was your week of License to the Shield. So thank you very much, guys.