Takatoshi Shibayama: 0:01

Hey, hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode of Blockhead's 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. Oh, welcome back to Blockcast. Today we have Frederik Gregaard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation. Thank you for joining the show.

Frederik Gregaard: 0:37

Yeah, and thank you for inviting me. It's a famous show.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 0:40

Yes, I believe so. And uh you know, you're in Singapore this week. Obviously, uh we're recording this on the week of Token 2049. You've been in the crypto space for a very long time. How do you see the evolution of this space and then where we are today?

Frederik Gregaard: 0:57

Yeah, so basically I think I have different perspectives on the evolution of the space, right? So what I'm on one hand seeing is seeing these sort of mega crypto trends you know moving along, right? So we have you know we have some NFTs and NFTs are watering out, and now we get the digital asset treasuries, and that's sort of the next sort of trend. But what's more important, what I'm seeing, is that the technology is maturing. So what we're really seeing is that all these private blockchains are really um not getting the adoption which they were hoping to do. And that means all of these large uh conglomerates of large you know industrial players they're looking for something different. And that's very interesting, right? So at that stage, what we're seeing now is that these, you know, like Cardano, very large public permissions blockchains are seeing a revival in interest from nation states, but also from Fortune 500 companies and frankly also from SMEs. So medium-sized companies who who need to carve out of space for them in the next 10 to 20 years, uh navigating uh the world of technology is now seeking uh you know blockchains like Cardano because they you know they they they're taking the test of time, they have very mature, uh they're decentralized like us. We have on-chain governance, which is very unique. We even have a constitution, which a lot of people really like, including you know the compliance departments and so on. This part about writing down the rules you live by and having an on-chain verification of those, is very strong narrative if you go on a public commissioner's blockchain. So there's really these two trends, right? And in a way, in a very strange way, you see that the first trend I was talking about, like these mega trends in crypto, are actually a distractor. So they're moving some value away from the enterprise and nation state adoption because you know you get a bit scared when you see some of these bubbles appearing or some of these sort of uh large-scale experiments playing out. And therefore, I always like to go back to the you know first principle. You know, why are we here? Well, we're here because of Bitcoin. We're here because we needed a new financial system, we needed a new way to basically ensure that everybody around the world have access to financial services. And there I think in Cadana we're doing extremely well.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 3:02

Um that'll be that's very interesting because you know nowadays nobody really talks about creating an alternative financial system. I think the narrative has really turned into trading, you know, the NFTs, as you mentioned, dads, all these kind of things, and and perps. It's generally finance, right? And but it's it's not really targeted towards the people who actually really need the financial services, but just more and more people who are already have access to finance, but finding ways to even make more money or take a punt and try to, you know, and and there's nothing wrong with that, in my view. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I think there's a lot of innovations in the financial uh space uh in crypto, like perps, as you mentioned, is non-existent in the traditional space. So I do welcome all these innovations.

Frederik Gregaard: 3:49

Um but as you mentioned- Actually, perps are existing in the existing space, right? So it's it's you know, if you look at the underlying narrative of that, it's very close to what we could think about as a CFD, which has been very famous in Singapore, right? A contract for difference. Yes. The difference is with the contract for difference, very frequently you held the underlying. So you kind of hedge your position by having the underlying or at least having a future of it. And on the perps, it's just much more advanced, right? You don't actually interact with the crypto or the blockchain which it represents, right? Um and it's just managed by overcollateralization, right? So um in in a in a in a way, you know, it's it's not that new, right? But what I think it represents is uh is again this innovation, right? And this sort of coming back in round circle, right? What has worked in the past, and can we do a new version of that which can attract people who's not or were not, you know, exposed to the traditional financial system.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 4:37

Yeah, absolutely. And on the enterprise side of things, I mean obviously back in like 2017 there were a lot of kind of experiments or ideas being baked around it, but we haven't really seen a whole lot of adoption. I do remember it was IBM and a few like shipping companies that were trying to create this thing called trade lens where they can you know trace the movements of cargo uh across different countries and then it could reroute and it's kind of the I don't know it was a really interesting one, but it never really materialized. And you know everybody.

Frederik Gregaard: 5:09

So this was actually IBM and Mersk. Mersk is the second largest shipping company in the world, it's very big anchored also here in Singapore, right? And the reason it didn't work is because a lot of these business models is a bit like the telephone, right? If I have a telephone that has zero value, if you have one, it has some value. But if everybody has a telephone, it has immense value, right? And the fact was that this was a private permission blockchain. It was probably some of the best technology we've seen actually for uh supply chain and supply chain tracking, but also for refinancing. There was a whole financing aspect about how you basically do the insurance, and they were not able to attract the competitors to go on the platform, right? Because you know, do you want to be on a platform where Mersk and IBM has more rights than what you do have, right? You're already competing on the consumer side, and then you're going to join them on the infrastructure side, but they have the high hand. Yeah. And I think this asymmetric governance, as we call it sometimes, right? It's been a really tough cookie to swallow. And I think this is what's really happening right now with for instance Cardano, is that we see a lot of these companies are coming to us because it's the community who governs it, it's not the company. Right. Right? And that basically closes down these failure gaps we saw. But TradeLens is an amazing example in that, and it also shows how long you've been around now.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 6:22

Absolutely. Uh so what do you see like a really good uh enterprise adoption of blockchain in this case then?

Frederik Gregaard: 6:29

Yeah, so I think one of the big problems has been is we didn't have enough or a good enough digital identity on the blockchains. So if we go back to Bitcoin, right, where of course we work with uh mnemonics, right? We have one type of identity, but it's not a very deep type of identity compared to what you would expect for for Tradfi or what you expect in other areas, right? And uh even though there's been hundreds of projects and ICOs and so on around identity, identity is hard. It's one of those places where you know it it only materializes at scale. And well, the way we've gone at the Cardano Foundation is we build actually an identity wallet. So, first and foremost, it's not one identity, but it's a wallet where you can manage identities in plural. And uh what we've done quite uniquely is we actually built that outside Cardano. That means that you do not need to use Cardano for this. You can run this on Arbitrum, you can run this on Binance, Smart Chain, right? But you can also run it on IBM or on Microsoft. So basically, what we're trying to say is that we need to get to a world where we need to be better at managing identities in plural, right? The second thing we've done is we uh basically partner with something called Glife, it's called the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation. And we basically implemented their standard, which is something called Kerry. CARY is the standard which is used for the legal entity identifiers, which moves 80% of all world trade around. 8 0. So after the Lehman crash, right, and the last big financial crisis, right, that we discovered that even traditional companies did not have a good enough digital identity. And in many paper contracts, it just said Lehman brothers. It didn't say what country or what subsidiary, right? And you didn't say uh, you know, there was not a you know, there might be a date on it, right? But there was not actually, you know, uh the time of day. And this is really important if something big collapses that you know where you are in the progression of getting your money back, right? And uh therefore this got implemented. So we are actually the only blockchain who enables uh a free open source software wallet with all blockchains and all centralized technologies can take, who can manage LEI identities with this first-level quantum secure for companies, but also for individuals. That means that you can basically use your hardware security module on your phone to have this identity wallet who can control DIDs and VCs or verify credentials, right? But also can control all the way up to a to a high-level banking infrastructure identity. And what's so unique about that is that you know, if you think about what uh chain link really is lacking, right? Because all the banks are going to chain link at the moment, they don't actually have a good identity solution, which is on par with what the banks expect, right? And this is basically what we see is the bridge. The bridge is going to be a really good way of managing offline and online quantum secure identities on the high level and on the low level that you can have machine identities for agentic AI, for instance. So, what we do in Germany with Masumi, I don't know if you heard about that, right? But we have 500 German companies right now live on a gentic AI, and I don't think maybe less than 10 of them know that it's on Cardano. Why? Because Cardano is not important. What's important for them is that if you have an AI agent that they can speak to an AI agent in another company who holds another data set, it can identify the two AI agents, it can verify the underlying data without exposing the data because then you have privacy conference, right? There's an uh a security model and an audit lock, which is good enough for the supervisory authorities, in this case Europe, right? The European Union. But also good enough from an IT security perspective, because if you have an AI who has a lot more compute power than another AI, it can just, you know, send billions of prompts and you can figure out a way to circumvent the security features, right? And suddenly you get the data you're not supposed to get. So by having micropayments running in a stable coin, a very cheap stable coin, Mika compliant, so the European standard compliant, you basically can do a security level there and a very good audit log. And then you basically uh you know you have identity, right? You have micropayments and security features, including audit log, and then you have a collaboration, right? So how do you find these AI agents in the like think about the app store, right? Or an app store, right? The app store of of Google or of uh of um of Apple, right? That we don't really have that uh, you know, across AI agents today, right? So they basically build up one uh for this, right? And I think that's really the future of blockchain, right? Blockchain is an infrastructure, right? We many of us think about it as our daily bread and butter, right? But in reality this it's an infrastructure who secures in this case identity, businesses, privacy, and enables collaboration. And I think this is really what we're going to see is the is is is one of the main reasons. The other part was control. I mean, when you are a large company and you rely on an infrastructure, you want to own it and control it. And a lot of people don't understand that when you run everything on Linux, because the comparison was always Linux, right? And and Linux is a really smart guy, right? So it's all praise to him, right? But when you when you do that, you actually download the software, you run that in your environment, whether on cloud or on premise, you control that instant of the software, and that means that you have the feeling of complete control, including rollbacks. When you use a blockchain, it might people call it open source, but it rarely is. It's what's called public source, which means that you can see the code, but you cannot control the code, you cannot influence the code, and you cannot you have no certainty that the features and functions you need in the future is also there in the future when you need it. So what's quite unique about Cardano is that we are not just public code, but we are real open source software code, which means that you can actually interact with our governance and you can uh expect that the features you need in the future can be there if you are part of maintaining those as a maintainer or contributor. And with that, including the asymmetric governance we spoke about earlier with the trade lens case, right? We're now mitigating two of the biggest unspoken myths about you know how we get to enterprises and how we get to nation states. Because this was what nobody was able to really formulate. Um, but now we've you know we've we solved that, right? And also, you know, some maturity. Let's be honest. Cardano five, six years ago was just not ready to do these use cases, right? We did not have the programmability, the smart contracts, you know, uh the scalability as we have now, but now we can run Visa um on a on a Cardano stack, right? I mean it's it's not a big issue. But there's trade-offs, right? I mean, the way you secure things and the the way you work, you know, it's it's uh everything is a trade-off this right, right?

Takatoshi Shibayama: 13:14

Now, can I put a pin on that um control part? So, you know, before a lot of companies wanted to do you know um private blockchains, and obviously it's a very closed environment where it's not very decentralized, it's super centralized amongst their own kind of you know partners, etc. But um in in if when they're using a public blockchain like Cardano, I mean you you mentioned about control, but like obviously there's no control. I obviously you said that it's open source, it's not really open source. You can actually see with the code, but you can't control it. So how does a enterprise get comfortable uh with a public blockchain?

Frederik Gregaard: 13:50

Yeah, so as I said, there is actually control here, right? So control is just defined differently, right? It does it means that you cannot control every single line of the source code. But what you really need is if you make a really big bet on an infrastructure, you need to ensure that the features and functions which is on your capex slash on your revenue, depending on how you run your company, will also be there in the next five to ten years, including supporting your product roadmap or service roadmap of your company. So I'm not talking about the blockchain right now, I'm talking about a large company, right? Who's looking at doing an investment, right? It has a successful product and they want to move it to blockchain. That product will evolve over time, right? How do I know that the functions and features, including the regulatory needs, is being supported in the next 10 years? Right? Now we're talking about something Bitcoin cannot deliver, right? Because the power, superpower of Bitcoin is that the source code is not changing. So now we're going to the superpower, is that the source code is constantly changing with the requirements of the market, right? And the difference here is that on Linux, you will write your own source code, you will deploy that in your own instance, but you're also then the last defender of your instance, right? On the blockchain, uh specifically Cardano, we have two, three thousand anonymous entities and individuals who's defending the blockchain every single day, right? We were under attack from nation states, we were under attack from hacker groups, we're constantly being poked and under attack, and then the chain holds up. We have never been down since 2017, right? So it's Bitcoin and us who's left. There's no centralized stack who's been up running as long as we have, right? And we changed every line of source code since 2007 and now. So what you have is you don't have the classical control like in Deep Enterprise, we call it SOC 1 and SOC 2, which is a risk mitigation framework. And maybe in your show notes, for those who are really nerdy, you can I can send you some links. We actually just worked with Oliver Wyman and Hedera Hashcraft and Everlapse and um JP Morgan around writing a new risk mitigation framework. A suggestion for how we can go from centralized control, which is what we're speaking about now, right? To decentralized control is also okay, or maybe even better because it can do things which we cannot do in the centralized world, right? Um so so in this case, what you have is you have a control function that is there's uh features and things written down, we call it Cardano improvement proposals together with our our governance and our constitution, which allows you to push code uh to the blockchain, which is then being accepted by the community by going through some rigorously uh you know technology standards and and fallback options, right? And that allows you that you have control that the features and functions you need in the future, as long as they don't go against the sort of the ethos of the blockchain, will be supported. Uh but obviously you don't actually uh own it, right? So what some people do, and that's what you see right now, just was announced with Swift out of Holland, right? The big Swift network. And and also Robin Hood is uh is coming out with an announcement and so on, right? Is that they're looking for places where they can do sort of they call it a a wide label solution and anchor it into a public blockchain, or might even just the next generation of private permission blockchains, right? So what they're saying is, oh, why don't we just do a fork of something who works? Swift is doing that with consensus, right? Um but what you're actually going down to there is you're back to basics. So you're now back to a private blockchain. There might now be 10, 15 banks or whatever, you know, c collaborators, right? But it's still a private blockchain, which means that we're now taking the trade-off of control and security away. So I my my predicament there is I don't think it will work. What will work is if you anchor it into, in this case, Ethereum. Right? And now that might work, right? So you might want to think about you know the application landscape, right? So if you want to run a uh centralized security deposit, so basically an exchange, right? There are certain things you might not want to have on a public permissions blockchain due to front running or or uh privacy or whatever that might be. Or T uh you know, transactions per second. Cool also be another question, right? But if you run the security into the consensus layer, for instance on Cardano or the Ouroboros, right? Um, but run a a a simplified like a channel setup on the side, this works really well. So I think as long as you think about these white labels and these sort of layer two solutions to anchor that into something which really is moving towards decentralized critical infrastructure. Because when you look at it, Cardano was starting as a Swiss army knife, you know, we can do everything. But the more as we sort of walk through and these make a trends we spoke about in the start, Cadano is actually turning into being the number one decentralized critical infrastructure layer. And what you want to have is you want to have bespoke business logic, maybe lying in some layer two or some associated layers, and then you have the uh disaster mechanisms, the you know, the quantum security, the consensus, you know, these key critical factors, right? You have that on mainnet. And then you use the mainnet for that kind of security, right? And if you then lean completely out of the window, you can potentially look at a future where 90% of all dabs are on layer two and not on layer one. But you're using the security of the layer one, and that becomes very, very different and very and very an exciting future, right? Because this actually matches with the compliance requirements from the large corporates.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 19:14

And speaking of corporate, they've changed things a little bit. Uh so you know, right now I think there's a lot of noise around. Obviously, you know, this year we've been talking a lot about stable coins, RWAs, that's great. You know, I think that we can use another episode for talking about these kind of things. But also when I go around different conferences, especially in Asia as well, that we hear a lot about these digital asset treasury companies. This is another way for people they say that retail investors can get access or institutional money can get access into crypto without actually buying the underlying assets. And obviously, there are ETFs, which I personally think is a safer way to invest. There's a lot of regulations around ETFs, so obviously it is probably, in my view, the number one choice. However, I see a lot of these digital asset treasury companies the dats. I think now there's like a more than 150 publicly listed companies holding various crypto assets and the tune of like 160 billion, which to me is quite crazy. I mean, you know, I come from the hedge fund industry. I speak with a lot of my you know ex-colleagues uh about these uh strategies, and obviously, you know, there's a lot of transitional cost, a lot of leakage of running a digital asset treasury company. I mean, it's much easier to just buy ETF, but you know, you're still running a company with a lot of employees, you're not getting management fee. So it's kind of like a long-only asset manager with a lot of cost, in my view. But what what do you think is uh more or do you think this is going to be a continued trend? Is this sustainable? What what um opinions do you have about this?

Frederik Gregaard: 20:44

I think we have to be very, very careful here that we are talking about the same thing, right? Okay. So I actually think that what Michael Saylor is doing is very, very interesting, right? So the way he's built and controls the balance sheet and the way he runs the balance sheet actually in Bitcoin and not runs it in fiat, is very, very different than these debts we're seeing emerging now on Nasdaq, which is running a dollar-based uh balance sheet, right? And they're also sort of taking a different type of risk, specifically also when they then do uh you know um multi-tokens and they have a residual business, right? Because when you take over uh an empty shell or you take over like a pre-populated shell from Nasdaq, right? It comes with an existing business model, right? It comes with you know Nasdaq supervision, right? So you cannot just make it into like a lean asset management company like which you just mentioned, right? So there's a lot of reasons why I think ETFs or ETPs is is is quite superior compared to if you want an equity exposure into a token, right? Again, I want to you know keep Michael Saylor out of it for a second, right? Because the way he actually what he's doing is very, very different than that. This is not about Bitcoin exposure, actually. This is actually about T pills and what is your option about how you actually trade the yields market, right? So the way he basically have you know uh priority shares and um common shares and the way he segmented the the the the debt part, right? So how he raised funds compared to the balance sheet, right? Is is in it's also an old model, right? We saw that back in the 80s and 90s with some other products, right? But this is very, very unique, and I think we should be very observant about that. Okay. But in general, these debts I'm seeing coming out, right? And there's quite a few also moving around ADA. The following three concerns is what I have, right? Is if you buy something and the idea is that you're exposed in an underlying token and it trades way above that, but it has a lot more cost, I'm worried, right? I mean, simply, you know, the fact that it has a lot more cost and it trades over what the assets you have, and there's no other business model in that company, it you know, it's not good for retail investors. And actually it's also not good for institutional investors. So the question would be, you know, why why would you why would you do this, right? And there's two reasons, right? The first reason is for some reason you cannot access directly the underlying. Could be regulatory, it could be your class of investor who cannot invest in that. And then the question is, well, hold on a second, I'm buying this because I want exposure into Bitcoin or ADA, because I'm not allowed to hold the underlying, but now I can hold the equity. Is this really a good idea? Right? I mean, this is really regulatory arbitrage, whether that's from a corporate governance perspective or whether that's from a supervisory perspective, you know, be my guest to judge, right? But is that really what you want to do? And the second question is if this is really leverage trading, right? Um, you know, who's going to bear the downfall of that, right? Because what we see in general is that the sophisticated investors get out before the retail investors. So I'm really worried that what we're going to see is a lot of people who's on uh Momo or Robin Hood that they're going to bear the tailwind of that risk because you know it's such a hype and they get into it and they might not be monitoring their positions every single day. And suddenly they sit and they have to pay, you know, the negative part of that, right? Some countries, however, there's a good reason to do it, right? So uh like Japan, uh right, in Japan, there's a really big difference between holding cryptocurrencies and holding equity from a tax perspective. And if there's a 20% delta there, there's an argument, right, that your MNAF could be trading at a 20% difference, uh, and it will still be advantaged, right, for you. It could, you know, it could also be simply due to you're running a you know a type of model where you can, you know, the equities is is you know has a different type of balance sheet, right? I mean, if you want to look hard about how you re-hypothesize ADA, for instance, right, and use that as collateral, it's really hard, right? To use a traditional model, right? Because there's no single company who controls the balance sheet, right? So, you know, yeah, of course there's a market cap, right? But what's the you know, how do you actually get to a risk rating? And I think what's really interesting now is that there is, you know, standard poor's and moody's and others that are actually starting to do risk ratings. And I think this is the fact that you are going to get some risk ratings off that is going to change the game, right? Because that basically is another checkbox why it might fit an institution in WestA compared to going directly into the asset class. But then that's point number one regulatory corporate governance arbitrage, right? Yeah, so I I do think this is something which is coming very hard right now. It's it's very hot, right? Uh you know, everybody fights about the what is it, eight or ten uh Nasdaq companies who's left with the shells, which you can buy, right? So you're basically people are bidding up uh those companies, right? And it was never the purpose of these companies to do that, right? So I think creating a good one, at least on Cardano, would be also to think through the governance implications, right? I would prefer to create one from scratch and be a little bit slower on it. So you don't have residual risk and residual cost, right? You have a clean business model, which is the company's purpose is to own the following uh tokens, including doing you know some kind of associated business, whether that is staking or restaking, whatever that might be around that. So it can raise funds on debt and then you can invest in that, like Michael Saylor does, for instance, right? Which could be very interesting if you see that the yield curve of T-Pills is really under pressure, right? I mean nobody wants to buy T-Pills, right? And uh I was just actually in the in the US and the Treasury and speaking to them about it, and they're very much aware that this is a huge issue for them, and they ask for some advice around this, right? Um so I think you know, a clean company, no residual you know, risk, no residual uh cost, and then you need to think through the governance because Kalana we have on-chain governance, right? So if this becomes a significant exposure, let's say a billion dollar ADA, is this going to vote in our governance or not? And I think there's two ways here either you basically disclaim it from the start and say you will never be able to vote, or you do a defensive move and say, you know, you should be able to vote, but we then have priority shares and common stock or something like that, and we write down the corporate governance and how they vote. Because otherwise what you might introduce is a centralized risk into the ecosystem that you suddenly have a very, very large player who is able to maybe swing some votes based on short-term yield generation and not based on what's best for the ecosystem on the long run.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 27:04

So there's a lot of other governance tokens out there just like Cardano, and I have not really seen any of these companies really disclose what they want to do with their votes either. And also on top of that, it's very unclear what they're actually doing with these tokens as well. They could be buying derivatives off of this, you know. There's a lot of things that they don't disclose, and then they just say, Oh, we're just buying this as Treasury. But even the word treasury doesn't really fit what they're doing, right? Because it's a completely, you know, a different uh ball game when you come when if you just have some cash or cash equivalents as treasury and you're replacing that with Bitcoin, but you're not actually going out there raising capital just to buy Bitcoin. It's a completely different business model. So I think even using the word treasury is completely wrong. But I do agree with you, like having a very clean uh company to for the purpose of buying this. But then I I always kind of think then wouldn't the regulators come in and say you're actually running an asset management company and you can't do that as a public company. You have to, you know, become a licensed asset manager if you want to hold assets like this and then you know get institutional retail money. Wouldn't that be the case?

Frederik Gregaard: 28:12

Well they are, right? This is happening right now as we speak, right? Uh so what we are seeing coming out of the US administration is of course a much more lenient, a much more open, sort of business friendly crypto direction, right? Which people are using very much in in their advantage right now, right? But I was just on the plane coming here yesterday and speaking to one of those uh dads, right, representing another blockchain, right? And they said, you know, I cannot even write on my LinkedIn profile what I do for a living because it's not Nasdaq approved yet, right? Um so they are very much, I mean, there is existing rules about this, right? And if if your core business model suddenly becomes asset management, right? Uh well, what are you then, right? Are you managing uh you know money on behalf of other people, right? Uh or are you more like uh you know managing a set position, right? You know, what does the equity really represent, right? What is the business model, right? And there are you know listed exchanges have very, very clear rules that you cannot just change business model on a WIMP, right? You have to follow corporate governance and that's also one of the reasons potentially why this could be interesting, right? Because when you have you know like uh a very protected and good supervisory authority, uh what you know in the exchanges and in the exchange listing rules, right? Um it's difficult to do a big pivot, right? And that actually protects investors sometimes, right? It could also be you're walking too far in the wrong direction and you lose all your money because what you do is not working, right? And you can't iterate fast enough, right? But that is one of the sort of gates you go through when you get an exchange listing, right? Which is actually quite different when you think about a crypto listing, right? Because the crypto listings are more actually about, you know, oh, is there volatility here? Yeah, is there depth uh in liquidity? Is there volume, right? Is there like a hype going on here, right? This is something I can go in on X and I can see there are thousands of pictures of a snake or whatever that is, right? And then they're like, oh, we are in, we list it, but you have to give me a million dollars or something like that, right? So I think what you know the difference between a securities exchange and a classical crypto exchange is very much also to be found in the delta between the listing requirements. And I think in certain cases we should probably be a bit more lenient on the listing requirements of a securities exchange. But probably we should start looking at uh some of those listing requirements of the crypto exchanges a little bit more sort of you know, and and think about you know, if if this is you know already on the outset, you know, about pumping a token. Is that really what we want to push out to our investors and the people we give exposure to? Or do we want to have somebody like you know the Cardano ecosystem who's looking at you know 10-20 year adoption and is looking at you know telco companies, AI, infrastructure, right? And and and and really thinking about how you use the blockchain. But then you turn it into sort of more like nearly like value investment, right? Yeah, and uh and then you maybe you take a little bit the fun out of it, right? Uh as you said, that's there's no reason to be angry at people who's gambling, right? Yeah. I mean, with herbs and other things, right? And leverage and I mean it's exciting, right? At the Korean blockchain week last week, I believe they they instead of having games, right? They had basically people sitting and trading, right? Yeah. With you know 10x or 8x leverage or whatever, right? Yeah. And it is, you know, there is something there, right? But I think we have to sort of separate, you know, you know, those two things slightly or at least make some big disclaimers. But at least from my point of view, where I'm coming from, democratizing access to capital markets is a must. We should all have the same rights and privileges to get access to liquidity and products. I really deeply feel about that. However, you know, when you start acting and having that arsenal of weapons as an institutional investor have, you lose your money quite fast. So if it's not regulation who's the answer, it's education. Yes. And therefore, we also have a very deep, we call it Cardano Academy, which is free, high-quality education. We actually give away to everybody for free, including other blockchain foundations. They can just replace it with their own logo and they can, you know, add their token in and then do the changes they need, right? And we give it away to universities, to professors who don't have time to follow the market and they get the slides and so on, right? Because I do truly feel that you know education is the counterbalance to free democracy democratized access is not necessarily regulation. Yeah.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 32:36

Yeah. I I've spoken about this education topic quite a lot on this episode. You know, I always think that uh in when you kids go to school, they should always have a curriculum for financial literacy. And I don't think mu or any country that I know has this in the curriculum. But you know, as we grow up as and become an adult, all of a sudden we have to be super smart with with our money, which is completely impossible without the you know, the the same uh education that we get from studying math or history and all these things. And I think that's kind of what we're always lacking. And that can solve quite a lot of socioeconomic problems in developing countries as well, because you know, that obviously they do go to school, but they had if they had a little bit of like understanding of what finance is, then I think they can lift themselves uh out of their situations as well. And then yeah, I do believe we should demo democratize uh finance completely. Um so now you're in you're in Singapore. Um what do you what are you looking to achieve? I mean, I'm sure you you have come here many times, but um you know with a lot of these conferences, I mean, if you don't have a particular aim, you know, you just hear for the vibe only. I mean, what what do you plan to do while you're uh while you're staying in Singapore?

Frederik Gregaard: 33:48

Well, obviously uh a ton of meetings, meeting great people like you, talking about Cardano and blockchain in general, right? You know, keeping a tap on the on the on the supervisory authorities here, right? The MAS has always been like front-running and really good and very close contact to the Swiss as well, right? Switzerland and Singapore looks very similar on certain things, right? And then uh meet a lot from the Cardano community and associated communities, right? Uh to really think, you know, talk about where we are right now. Because I think for some of these OG projects, right? Some of these, you know, from 17, 18, 19, right? You know, maybe some of the hype has gone a little bit away. And I think that's a shame, right? Because the reason they're still in top 10 and the reason they're still in top 20, and and there's something magical happening there, right? And we've we've we evolved a lot, right? So to be honest, uh this time it's going to be quite a bit of marketing, really, right? Talking about, you know, what's what's working, what doesn't work, what do we need to get done, uh, but also to uh risk mitigate a few of the sort of negative trends I see, right? And uh some of those negative trends is for instance, right, when you see you know a nation state leader does uh a meme coin or something like that, right? It is really fun and it really gives you an economic opportunity short term, right? But it also there's some people who get scared about it, right? So institutional investors, hedge funds as we spoke about before, right? Uh sophisticated asset managers, right? They don't necessarily think this is a great idea, right? Uh because they don't want to be associated with that. And then talking to somebody like me who comes from from TradFi and and and and deep tech, right, can sort of calm down the situation a bit and show them on-chain how this governance works, show them about operation resilience, talk to them about you know these risk mitigation frameworks, talk to them about the sort of the larger things who's happening in decentralized, you know, infrastructure, right? And also about the security mitigations you need to work in a world right now with you know quantum computing and AI and other things which is coming very fast. And and put that in the right spot, right? Uh and that includes also talking to some industry players. So it's quite a lot in five days.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 35:55

Yeah, that's all quite a lot. Um well, well, thank you very much for your time. And um, you know, where can we find uh what's next for Cardano?

Frederik Gregaard: 36:03

Yeah, so I mean I just actually published a small blog um uh which is sort of a short-term update to the Cardano Foundation's 10-year strategy. Uh, I think that's a good place to look. So uh what we saw is that the DeFi is doing really well on Cardano, but it could need a bit of love. We don't have one of the large um you know, stable coins, right? So increasing the user experience for the stable coins. Going to Berlin, uh where we have our next summit to meet some really large non-blockchain crypto industry players who's moving into this space, and then you know, so if you're a developer or crypto enthusiast, come to Berlin and meet some of these German companies who's right now going in to use um blockchain as a security or collaboration tool, right? Um I think this is a good place to kind of verify your your business ideas and you know get investors. So Berlin in November would be a good place, right? And then uh this blog is another good place, and then of course the Cardana Foundation's um sort of web page and our um you know associated Twitter profiles and so on is uh is a good place. And then yeah, we are all over the world, right? There's eight million inhabitants who has a full digital ID on Cardana who can vote and they control an eleven billion large um you know treasury, right, with reserves included. So I I think you know if you're not doing something around Cardano, um wherever you are, there's economic opportunities to participate in security, to get grants, to build a business model, to you know, stay where you are. You don't have to move to the big city. I know Singapore is great, right? But you can stay and add value to your community. So under Cardano Academy, you can learn about these economic opportunities and you can upskill yourself and get a job in the new economy.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 37:42

Thank you very much for your time. Like and subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and for all your juicy web3 news, keep updated on blockhead.co. Catch you all in the next episode.