Takatoshi Shibayama: 0:01

Hey hey hey, welcome to this week's episode of Blockheads Bloodcast. I'm your host, Takatoshi Shibayama. I'm also the head of APAC over 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 back to another episode of Blockcast. Today we have Mr. Jeff Feng, a co-founder of Sei Labs. Welcome to the show.

Jeff Feng: 0:36

Well, thank you guys for having me. It's pretty rare to do one of these conversations in person. You know, I think I've I've been used to uh uh doing all these through uh through video calls, so this is uh this is a treat.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 0:47

No, absolutely it's a treat for me too, because I do a lot of these on video calls as well. And then I have to you know work around people's schedules. You know, if you're in the US, then I have to do it like early morning or late night. You know, it's really good to do it in a in a normal time zone. Um we're recording this on the week of Token 2049. I mean, you're here this week. I mean, what is your aim? What are you looking for? Um, how do you how do you look to spend your time in Singapore?

Jeff Feng: 1:12

Yeah, I'd say Singapore differs from uh a couple other sort of major regions uh for crypto and APAC, uh, particularly because the the local market is relatively smaller, uh, but the the density of talent in this country is unbelievable. Uh so I'd say a lot, similar to a lot of other large organizations, uh like Solana, we we have a contingency of uh excellent team members, um, particularly from the foundation side based out of Singapore. Um so I'd say it's uh continue to hire excellent people. Um, and Singapore will serve as a sort of hub as uh the foundation continues to grow the ecosystem uh across other countries like China and Korea and Southeast Asia as well.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 1:53

Well, definitely Singapore as being a small nation and very clear on its regulation and also that people speak English. So it's a really good place for to attract a lot of MNCs. So I guess uh a lot of Singaporeans get the exposure to a lot of industries. You know, we're talking about crypto today, but you know, a lot of companies in crypto come here, so they get so much more exposure around crypto than going to other countries in in Asia. So it's definitely a place that I like to be in as well, uh especially if I'm looking to build a business in APAC. Yeah. And um yeah, let's let's talk about yourselves. I mean, like could you tell me about your crypto journey, how you got interested in crypto, you know, why you wanted to start say labs. Uh I'd love to hear your personal journey.

Jeff Feng: 2:36

Yeah, of course. Uh yeah, my uh my story is pretty uh pretty simple, unfortunately. I spent my uh my whole life growing up in the Bay Area. Um born and out of San Francisco, grew up uh in the East Bay. Um and when I went off to college, I stuck around as well. Um so graduated from UC Berkeley. Uh I'd say those sort of first two decades of my life spent in the Bay um mostly impacted this uh my life in a uh in a very tech-centric way. Um I think from a very early age, uh a lot of the teachings from YC, Paul Graham is something that uh uh impacted myself and uh the people I worked on uh companies with a lot. Um when you know, I'd say initially we were working on our first company. One of the sort of major takeaways as I was just starting my first job out of college, spent uh almost two years at Goldman. Um, then worked on a company with my last co-founder and then joined a uh a large sort of hedge fund and investment firm called Coatue.

Jeff Feng: 3:39

And so we did some of the fintech and the crypto investments and and a bit of healthcare, sort of the three areas I spent a lot of time. I'd say it became pretty clear that the sort of core value prop of crypto, even at the time, and that still stands true to today, is financial transactions, just trading digital assets. Um, those can be stable coins and those could be sort of much more speculative assets like tokens or NFTs. Um and that's it. You can just put a period after that sentence. So there is no sort of proven real use case or product market fit beyond that. So if you firmly believe that the core value of proper crypto is trading, I'd say that's what led us at least down that that sort of initial path, you know, that idea that eventually became upset.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 4:17

So basically you had trading in mind when you actually developed, say, is that how it came about?

Jeff Feng: 4:23

Yeah, my co-founder Jay, he uh spent several years at Robinhood, let out a big part of the crypto engineering team. He had a uh much more virtual experience uh coming out of the GameStop situation. That was one of the most prolific examples of the impact of corporate transparency or the lack thereof and how that impacts you know team trust, how that impacts user trust in uh not just Robinhood, but the general financial system. So one of the clearest reasons why trustlessness and permissionlessness is is important and why uh a lot of Israelists do eventually need uh to move on move on chain.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 4:55

Because most of the trading nowadays, I mean, still is, I guess, are done on centralized exchanges. So basically it's all kind of off-chain. So in order to benefit from a fast-scaling blockchain like yourselves, I mean, what areas do you think that uh trading can evolve into outside of the centralized exchanges?

Jeff Feng: 5:12

Yeah, you know, I think if if you believe the simple thesis that the one and only use case of blockchain is trading digital assets, therein is the single most important problem to address. Like there is no problem in distributed systems more important than addressing that trading problem. No. How that sort of evolved in terms of how the say in the blockchain has been designed ends up boiling down to a pretty straightforward architecture. It's combining the greatest strength of Ethereum, which is the development framework, Solidity. The easy way to think of how strong that advantage is is when you think of the most powerful network effects in the world. Typically people think of Facebook or Amazon, a large marketplace is Google. There are arguably two things that have a deeper mark network effect. Uh the first is currencies, um like the US dollar or uh you know the Korean one.

Jeff Feng: 6:01

Yeah, the more sort of people and companies adopt that, the harder it is to replace that currency. Uh and there is one thing that has even more of a network effect and is languages, uh. So namely English. And that's uh a pretty uh fundamental reason why a lot of the development frameworks still haven't changed since um you know the the beginning of like JavaScript, you know, continues to be widely used, uh, even though there are plenty of languages that are better. It's just much better, perhaps safer, uh easier to work with. Uh just doesn't matter because too many people already know this language. So that's uh how deep-seated at least Solidity in the EVM is. So I'd say that's Ethereum's greatest strength. And combine that with Solana's, which uh is simply just using updated hardware. Um it's like using your you know, the latest MacBook compared to uh the MacBook from early 1990s. Um it's just updated chips and uh and and that does lead to uh meaningful performance. So if you can combine those two, that's the the approach that we think is best equipped to solve this problem.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 7:00

And is Sei's focus uh more on the DeFi side where people like you know come and trade and do DEXs and all that kind of stuff, or i do you have a different angle?

Jeff Feng: 7:11

Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah. When people typically think of uh exchanging digital assets, uh DeFi is uh primarily the first thing that always comes to mind. And you know, that is very much a core part of uh the currency ecosystem. So I think some of the latest numbers off the top of my head is you know well over um 10 billion volumes on a monthly basis, 600 mil of TBL. With that being said, the I'd say that the actual highlights of things that really stand out about the ecosystem uh are not, you know, notably what people view as DeFi. That's the sort of beauty of how universal just being able to transact and do financial transactions is. So if you solve for that, you basically collapse everything down into uh simple financial transactions. So uh a couple of things to touch on. Gaming is by and large, say is leagues above any other chain period uh when it comes to a gaming audience and a gaming user base. Um turns out that financial transactions is critical to basically every web through game that exists.

Jeff Feng: 8:06

Second, social, another one that people really don't think about. People typically think of a project called Farcaster when they think of social that at least got like quite a bit of funding. Say actually has by far the largest social app period in crypto. And most of those, the users of the social app overheard are college students, not even crypto related or haven't gone down that rabbit hole, uh, which is why it's um much less uh sort of known across um uh you know the current industry. And then the you know, the last thing I'll touch on is uh a lot more sort of frontier um sort of products. You know, when you think of what was the instigator for you know these big crypto bull runs in the past, like past cycles, um a lot of the times it's like a new asset type that really sets things on fire. And I think there's a couple opportunities for that, perhaps in uh robotics, perhaps in uh in in science as well.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 8:59

And you mentioned about uh social apps. So how does blockchain fit into social apps? Because, you know, obviously a lot of it, a lot of the blockchain use cases are generally financial, right? So you do payments, et cetera. And that's how a lot of the uh other blockchains I've seen, if they want to scale, they put USDT on it or USDC on it and try to make uh more transactions on it um to make sure that it's not just like DeFi, but there's other elements to it where you know people will transact more and then get more network effect. Um when it comes to social, I find it to be a little bit slower, I guess. Like if you're on Instagram or whatever it is, and there's not a whole lot of like payments that happen on on it, right? Obviously there's people who are selling stuff, but I don't think that's the core reason why people are on Instagram. So when you say like blockchain with social apps, what do what does that actually look like?

Jeff Feng: 9:48

I'd say there's uh there's sort of two components. The first is you know, what social demands is scale and speed. You know, when you're scrolling on Instagram, when you're scrolling on TikTok, you just need each of the photos and the videos to load very quickly. Uh that's it. So it it's it's uh really that comes down to throughput. Um turns out that sort of throughput requirement and dependence is one for one exactly the same as if you wanted to build an incredibly performant sort of uh token or derivatives exchange. It requires that same sort of uh uh heavy demand of throughput and uh and performance. So it really is being able to kill two birds with one stone.

Jeff Feng: 10:28

Maybe if you're solving for that most important problem, you'll actually ironically address most sort of uh uh large scale web two requirements. So I'd say that that's one piece. Um it just ends up having much more overlap than people expect. Um and then the second, e-commerce is uh almost goes hand in hand with social. Like a a big chunk of Instagram and a big chunk of TikTok actually takes place in in uh sort of mini purchases um and uh and a lot of e-commerce. Tips and stickers um is an enormous part of you know most of the major streaming platforms. So I'd say it's uh it's a lot more embedded than people likely expect.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 11:04

And what about like uh advertising and social platforms? You know, I think a lot of the Instagram and TikToks do make money off of people's data and sell them advertising. I mean, does that component come into these like decentralized social platforms or is it completely separate?

Jeff Feng: 11:19

Yeah. Uh you know, I I think it's this is like a pretty common sort of ethos in past cycles of the this idea of, hey, we can get rid of ads, users can own their data. Um I think you fundamentally have to really just look at user behavior. Uh and user behavior across the board tells you that nobody actually cares about owning their data. Like that that is not a priority for like 99.9% of human beings on earth. Like they just want a good, simple, fast experience. And so I don't think I particularly have any opinions on whether or not the data should be owned by the user. I I think it just comes down to, hey, make sure they have a great user experience. And fundamentally, the company or the organization that creates that product, they can make that decision on whether or not they want to monetize through ads or they want to monetize elsewhere. I still think ads, despite all of the trade-offs, uh, is a very important part of making a product free. But yeah, I I would say that most of that sort of own your own data stuff is uh uh is quite a distraction.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 12:12

A nd also when you actually do payments through these social apps, obviously, you know, there's like financial data that gets captured as well. Like what do you think about that?

Jeff Feng: 12:22

Yeah, I mean uh that's uh you know, right right down the the alleyway for uh for YSA was built uh the way it was. You know, it exactly goes back to what we had talked about earlier, that overlap of uh of requirements. It's like people think large-scale social, large-scale gaming, and large-scale DeFi, they require sort of different, different pieces of infrastructure. And you'll you'll hear this pretty quick pretty frequently in crypto. Like there will be some new infrastructure product that uh purports that they focus on you know, social gaming or DeFi or stable coins. It all ends up really requiring the exact same high throughput, speed, cheap. That's it. Uh all of it ends up looking the same. So I'd say it's much more of a sort of marketing tactic than it is sort of reality, at least when it comes to distributed systems.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 13:06

I before before we had this uh conversation, I mean, I had the CEO of Cardano come onto the show as well. And obviously they've been around for a very long time, and then they were talking about, oh, we want to get more like enterprises using blockchain uh in a way that people thought about using blockchain maybe back in like 2017. Um do you do you find like enterprise solutions on on blockchain like interesting uh for say? Or do you think it should be more for like retail, like where it's, as you mentioned, like games, socials, trading, you know, that kind of thing?

Jeff Feng: 13:37

Yeah. Um yeah, it's a good question. I'd say that's uh typically a bit more controversial. You know, there are some projects and teams that that chase after enterprises a lot more than others. There are plenty of large organizations and enterprises that have decided to trust, say that's one of the sort of benefits of of that EVM approach. You've seen this with Stripe recently with sort of Tempo, you've seen this with Circle and Auric. Uh yeah, there's a reason why both of them are EVM first infrastructure. It is exactly that testament I talked about earlier, where um, you know, it doesn't even matter the specific, hey, this framework or this language is better. Everyone already knows it. You can't actually rip it out at this point. I'd say despite the more recent mainstream enterprise adoption for blockchains and how much it has been an area of strength for the state ecosystem, what always comes first has to be the the core user um in general, I say retail.

Jeff Feng: 14:28

They end up being the early adopters. They test out the blockchain and they test out performance and applications before they start getting more enterprise adoption. Enterprises by definition have to be much more hesitant, much more uh concerned about uh all of the downside. And particularly when it comes to institutions, I mean the you know, the definition of institution at its very core is some wealthy folks managing other wealthy folks' capital. Like the drive is to grow that capital and uh they must uh grow that capital alongside um just general users uh and typical consumers. So uh any blockchain must be uh sort of uh user first.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 15:06

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Um and uh you you know, I wanted to ask you about the 23ME acquisition. I mean, uh this happened back in March, so it's a little bit old news at this point, but the use case of it I thought was quite interesting because it's not trading, it's not like kind of your normal uh things that you hear in blockchain, but it's like genetic data on blockchain and people can own their genetic data. And these are the things that I really think is very important because these are like very private sensitive information that people should hold rather than you know kind of big corporations that will monetize off of that. So could you tell me why you decided to acquire the business and then what what do you want to do with it?

Jeff Feng: 15:47

Yeah, uh I mean I can speak on um on behalf of the foundation. I'd say that was like a mandate that was really came to consensus across the leadership team there. Um and uh, you know, I uh it was certainly something that was very exciting when when it was uh even initially pitched to uh to myself. Um, I'd say you know, if you if you take a big step back, yes, a lot of the sort of ethos and the initial excitement behind 23&Me was, hey, this is one of the most unique assets, period, in in uh in the market, where you have such a a uniquely uniquely sensitive uh sort of data set, really scaled. Uh the core business is not good, um, uh to put it lightly. Uh and there's an opportunity uh to give that sort of user um power and decision making back to the very folks that contributed that data in the first place.

Jeff Feng: 16:40

Um, in the if you look at it in the context of crypto markets, um, a bit of what we talked about earlier, cycle after cycle, usually what really pushes a cycle makes it a strong sort of bull market, one that attracts a new type of user, usually is a new type of asset. You know, so you've seen this before, right? You you saw this with early Ethereum ICOs. This idea of like these sort of tokens that were being sold. Um, you know, that was like a novel asset at the time. Um you saw this again um with very early DeFi, right? These sort of DeFi assets. So we're it was a bit different from the ICO assets. These are like DeFi coins like Uniswap and things like that. That brought in, you know, a new type of user that was willing and able to go really deep in the details. NFTs is a very notable one, new type of asset, regardless of how sustainable that sort of asset was. Obviously, it's uh you know much less adopted now, but that sort of 2021 push with OpenSea and several others, uh, that brought in a brand new type of consumer that was in crypto for you know a very different set of reasons than the early DeFi crowd or the early ICO crowd. I don't think we've seen that new type of asset uh for quite some time. Basically not since 2021.

Jeff Feng: 17:52

I think I'd say a lot of the current sort of momentum is mostly being pushed by great tail ones from the change in administration in the US, great tail ones around stablecoin adoption, other institutions, but not necessarily a new type of asset that crypto is uniquely able to uh to create. That's one of the sort of most interesting opportunities behind 23&Me and science in general, is with all the the complexity in the current research process, in the current healthcare process, are there opportunities for new types of assets that to be created that can align some of the both of the financial interests of users as well as, you know, obviously the uh the end goal, which is increasing access, increasing uh awareness, and just general healthcare services?

Takatoshi Shibayama: 18:36

Yeah. I think the genetic data is uh this one of the most like difficult ones to actually source. And I've been I did speak to a few, you know, meg tech companies and they all want to get into that space where they can, you know, look at people's DNA and then figure out, okay, yeah, can we build or or can can create a medicine to cure this disease or various research uh purposes. But you know, there's not enough of these like 23&Me companies that can they can buy the data from. And unless, you know, and these are the kind of the only entry points and they struggle because then now they can feed it to AI and then they could start kind of gathering more and more uh research on it uh so that they can come up with like cures for diseases and all that stuff. So I think this part, although it's not as like wily exciting like NFTs or anything like that. I mean, this is like for pure um, you know, human improvement, I guess. Um so do you s do you see this type of like what you call DSI uh growing in this space so that people or researchers can do more, you know, scientific research um based on more and more uh data?

Jeff Feng: 19:39

Yeah. Um yeah, I I think it's like a very new part of the space. Uh and just like any new category within crypto, um, there is like it's primarily doubters and pessimists that surround this this category. Uh I'd say that is precisely what makes it interesting. There are some things in crypto that have become much more consensus. I think we you know we can sit here and talk about BTC, we can sit here and talk about RWBs and stable coins, uh, but it's pretty clear that the incentives are aligned there, the adoption is there. We by and large know precisely where they're headed. A lot more sort of interesting to uh to debate and and figure out where something brand new, like uh like the sort of intersection between sciences, drug development, and and crypto is. Um I think the the initial sort of use case that we're seeing is always funding related. We saw that with every category of crypto.

Jeff Feng: 20:26

Like you see with DeFi, everything kind of starts with, all right, what's the core financial use case? All right, we'll make it easier to raise capital for risky projects. We've seen this play out time and time again, and it always ends up with some sort of adverse selection. There's like some bad actors, some good. I think what's exciting is thinking about the potential past just the level one sort of fundraising use case. What are the sort of opportunities to create new types of assets? This can be examples like patented sort of uh tokens and j digital assets. Uh, it can be an example of being able to tokenize particular pieces of data that are valuable. It can be using tokens as incentive for people to contribute their data more actively. Right now, this is so much of medical data is very siloed, both due to regulation, both due to, I mean, it's just you know difficult to get people to to contribute their sort of healthcare information. But if you can imagine that sort of easy access, open source access to general anonymized human data, how much can that impact drug development? That's actually far more exciting than even the fundraising.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 21:25

Yeah, absolutely. And do you see other areas in science that could use like these kind of crowd funded tools, basically?

Jeff Feng: 21:33

Yeah, typically when people think of uh sort of healthcare design today, they almost always view it through the lens of drug development. Um, when you look at what are the other categories of of healthcare that uh that are interesting. You know, we we've uh with folks at the foundation, I've I've certainly spent time digging into uh even like clinical trials, for example. Um still core part of drug development, but uh usually the the area that uh participants struggle with there is being able to incentivize people to do the clinical trials. Um they either have to pay large sums of money or it's like a very large logistical process. You know, can you change the sort of i ncentive structure there? Second, if you look at general healthcare system, I can use the US as the prime example.

Jeff Feng: 22:24

The US healthcare system is has you know been the poster trial of uh misaligned incentives for a very long time between like the healthcare providers who's actually paying the you know the hospital bill, bringing in tokenization and some incentives just as a way of at least changing that incentive structure. I don't you know I can't sit here and say that it wouldn't be net better of a system. You know, healthcare has been tried and tried a time and time again to get innovation and to be rewritten, mostly basically to for startups to fail in in doing exactly that. But uh I'd say one thing we've seen happen time and time again in crypto is uh tokens can change the uh incentive system for human beings in a much faster time frame than we expect.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 23:05

But still, you know, when you you know develop these drugs, I mean it has to have some kind of profitability at the end, right? So generally, if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, they just generally want to develop drugs that cure diseases for the masses. They don't really look at like obscure diseases and those people are pretty much left behind because nobody wants to build a drug for just a small pool of people. I mean, do you think this can really help in that? Or do you think because they're it's crowdfunded through tokenization and everybody wants a return, they're still not going to look at it? Yeah, that's a weird question.

Jeff Feng: 23:37

Yeah, that that's uh the age old like uh you know, rare diseases, you know, if you apply development in a capitalist system, never really gets the attention that they deserve. Um I think crypto can potentially change that situation, although you'd effectively need to ask yourself whether or not adding tokenization in crypto to any industry in the past has helped it deviate from just pure capitalist um sort of outcomes. Like has that happened in any industry that crypto has broken into in the past? Yeah, you can argue that you know some of the interesting value props of crypto is there are tokens that are valuable for no reason outside of just general human excitement, you know, like a lot of these meme coins. No, it it it does put into question, you know, the typical way that people think about valuing assets, you know, which is more of that sort of buffet like, all right, how much profit and and cash flow does this company have and how much is it distributing over perpetuity to shareholders?

Jeff Feng: 24:30

And so a very sort of structured value-driven view of how something's valued, uh, and crypto has sort of flipped that on its head and said, you know what, uh the value of you know a token or asset is just whatever someone's willing to pay for it, whether or not you think it's valuable or not. So yeah, yeah, I think I think based off of that case study, you can argue that uh crypto has a propensity to change uh this sort of current capitalist outcome of of drug development. Um just this is interesting uh sort of meme potential. Yeah.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 24:58

Are there a other areas in uh do you think that um you know blockchain or crypto can help other than a DeSci or you know the the the the kind of areas that we talked about?

Jeff Feng: 25:08

I mean when it comes to new types of categories, yeah. Obviously, you know, people have talked about stable coins for a long time. I think that you know the underlying tailwinds there are actually even deeper than people expect. I know it's not just the sort of price appreciation and and sort of sort of circles well-performing IPO. It is the core, you know, one of the biggest mandates of the US government because large stable coins, treasury by and large sit in T-bills. You know, it's it is like the one of the clearest uh paths to maintaining T-bill demand, uh, which is just you know buying US debt uh for for a long time coming. So uh I'd say that's uh maybe more of an underrated um sort of tailwind uh for that category.

Jeff Feng: 25:50

Uh for new ones, uh you know, I think people have talked about this before, like agents. Um as more and more agents are going to be used for day daily activities, you'll have agents that really specialize in particular things, paying certain types of transactions, doing certain types of bookings, for example. A lot of these agents will have to eventually pay each other, um even tiny microtransactions. These transactions cannot involve a human in the loop. I mean, they're literally done between two um robots. So is there a sort of native type of um financial transaction that does not require having a human in the loop and can be can be done automatically incredibly cheap and fast and that uh does conveniently just so happen to already exist on, say typically I mean, you know, I think we talk a lot of people talk about this um AI agents doing micropayments.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 26:38

If I kind of double click on that uh and I just look at my life and how I do payments in general, I mean, there's always a standing instructions on my iBanking app where I need to pay rent and taxes and whatnot. And the other ones are usually just kind of like it's not structured, right? I I take a train, I pay for it. I go to a restaurant, I pay for it. Like what what kind of payments do I usually would make to using an AI agent to do micropayments? I'm I'm still trying to figure out how that would fit into my life.

Jeff Feng: 27:10

Yeah, yeah. It's a great point. Um the most compelling current use case for agent-to-agent payment by and large happens in the enterprise. It is uh mostly the uh company issue. Like the amount of transactions if you sit as an operations person or a payments person uh at like Salesforce.com or Microsoft, or you can use a crypto example, even like sort of Blockhead as a as an agency, the number of sort of transactions that need to happen, um, you know, sending money between bank accounts, being able to make payroll, being able to, you know, calculate and handle taxes on time, that's I'd say a big brunt of the uh sort of agent-to-agent communication that will likely happen. On a daily basis, I think it's it's much harder to uh to draw today just because for the average person like yourself and and and me, we don't really do that many transactions per day, right? Like you buy a couple items of food, you you pay like you maybe like a Netflix bill once a month, but there just isn't enough sort of complexity, at least in our lives.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 28:09

So right now, like put the emphasis on stable coins. Right now, I think a lot of it it's cross-water payments and also trading. If you want to get these like web two people to actually start using stable coins, like what do you think needs to happen?

Jeff Feng: 28:21

The sort of issue that we're seeing with stablecoin adoption is similar almost one for one to mobile payments adoption um and how that played out uh in the US versus APAC and like other continents. So, you know, this is like the classic case study of innovators dilemma. You know, the US had very widespread adoption of credit card infrastructure, much more so than basically every other country. They were just so much more ahead. And that is precisely the reason why they're so behind now on mobile payments and why, from a stable coin payment perspective, they're also significantly behind. You know, simply put, you know, credit cards just work good enough. There is such a less of a uh sort of burning desire and need to move off and use a new payment system.

Jeff Feng: 29:00

On the other hand, you know, you saw you're seeing this in China as a great example and several other countries. Mobile payments is the default. Like if you lose your phone, you can't actually function in society. So very different, but that's almost because they don't have that sort of uh infrastructure debt that the US had. I think that's gonna be like the biggest bellwether of how stable coin adoption is gonna play out. Like it will be primarily and heavily adopted in places that don't even have maybe the the sort of mobile infrastructure and mobile payments yet. So those large mobile payments companies, they don't have that incentive to push off stablecoin adoption since those don't exist. So, you know, you're seeing that adoption with a lot of emerging markets, countries like Turkey and Argentina, because they actually were so behind compared with other countries. Uh, and you'll likely see that actually last in the US.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 29:47

I also think it's uh consumer behavior as well, because in the US, the reason why people use credit cards is because they want to spend beyond their means. Whereas I think in Asia, they just want to spend be within their means. And that's how the credit and debt. Debit system kind of is different, right? I mean, all these fintech companies in China, Southeast Asia, whatever, they're all like debit payments. It just comes out of their bank account or their app or whatever. And then the US, I think, is just like, oh, I want to buy like a big TV and I don't have the money now, but I get paid next month, so I'd rather use a credit card instead. So I think that spending habit will change the dynamics of like how stable coins is going to be used because stable coins is more like a debit card, right? Basically. So you have to pay on the spot. You can only spend with h how much you have. It's not a credit card system. So I feel like in the, as you mentioned, like in in these kind of uh developing countries, the stable coin will be more adopted, even with their own local currencies, because the spending habit of stable coins is the same as how they spend today.

Jeff Feng: 30:49

Yeah, and no, I I think that's uh that's a fair way to look at it. Um I mean I I personally think that the stable coins or or just like a digital USD or um or any other currency, it it won't actually matter. Um, but what we're saying about just uh the proliferation of credit in uh very mature, strong economies like the US compared with uh with China, which is effectively begging its consumer base to start spending much more aggressively is uh is exactly on point.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 31:16

Well, thank you very much for your time. I'm sure you're super busy during this week. How can people follow you, follow say no?

Jeff Feng: 31:24

I mean, I I really appreciate you taking the time. Uh it's the easiest ways to stay in touch with things on on the SA side is uh to follow the the Twitter account at say network all in one word. And then I'd say uh you know a lot of the sort of uh big latest announcements um you can certainly hear from um either myself on LinkedIn um or uh there's uh you know I think a lot of those end up making it making its way up to the website, say.io.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 31:52

Thank you very much for your time, and I hope you enjoy your stay in Singapore. It's a pleasure. Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, give Blockcast a like and subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And for all your juicy web3 news, keep updated on blockhead.co. Catch you in the next episode.