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John Nahas on Why One-Size-Fits-All Blockchains are Failing Global Institutions
00:30:14
Avalanche CBO, John Nahas, reveals the roadmap to solve the $100 trillion institutional distribution problem by trading general purpose blockchains for custom L1s.
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- [00:00]
John Nahas
I think where we're going and where we've been is to a more distributed approach, kind of like what the Internet looks like now. And you could kind of think of us maybe as WordPress. Like, if you asked me 20 years ago if I wanted a website, I think you're crazy. Right. But now we take for granted that anybody, any business, small or large, can spin up a website and become a business. Well, why can't we do that with blockchains? Like, why are we focused on this one large, ever expanding pipe that's supposed to fit everything in it when the world doesn't work that way?
- [00:37]
Interviewer
All right. Things are wild in the crypto space these days, and I thought it'd be interesting to talk to someone who's been in the space for a good number of years, is helping to build and promote and do business with one of the largest blockchains out there that's doing some really interesting work. So we decided to have John Nahas, who's the chief business officer of Avalanche, with us today. John is very outspoken in his opinions on where things are right now, where they're going. I think that Avalanche has really taken a unique approach and the idea that what used to be subnets now is just tons and tons of layer ones that they are building as a custom tool for any business. And the layer one is really focused on that blockchain solving a business need. And I really appreciate that approach. We've spent a lot of time with Avalanche over the last couple of years, so we thought it'd be great to have John on and just get his perspective. We also talk about the recent New York Times article that talks about crypto is useless. So stay tuned for that conversation and, you know, and really just talk about the idea that, that the industry is craving rules and regulations, but also craving an opportunity just to build businesses. And Avalanche has a new tagline build for business that they are focused on. That I think really comes out in the conversation. So come back after the break. John Nahas from Avalanche.
- [02:01]
Narrator
History doesn't just happen. It's built by the bold, the brave and the bullish consensus. Miami is where crypto culture and trillions in capital converge and ideas that fuel institutional scale are sparked. A place for those who refuse to settle for the status quo. The builders reprogramming the future of finance. Through every deal and decision, breaking boundaries begins with being there. Experience that for sender.
- [02:30]
Interviewer
All right, welcome back. We are here with John Nahas, Chief Business Officer, Avalanche. John, we have spent a lot of time with Avalanche over the last bunch of years, seeing how much you guys have evolved, been very impressed with the evolution of not only the offering, but I think the evolution of the message. And here in 2026. Really want us to have a conversation with you on what you and the team are building, why this moment may feel transformative, but also really giving a little bit of a look back at all the successes you've had and all the things you guys have learned. So welcome to the show. Really excited to talk to you.
- [03:07]
John Nahas
Thanks for having me. It's good to be, to be with you.
- [03:09]
Interviewer
Thank you. All right, John. So I know you guys have this sort of new positioning, really focused on embedded finance. Avalanche is built for business. Give us a little bit of, like the DNA of that. What's going on in that messaging that you're trying to say so effectively?
- [03:23]
John Nahas
I mean, I think for the longest time the industry has been providing a lot of technology and a lot of infrastructure without many solutions. And for the most part, it's tried to fit kind of business needs and solutions onto existing technology. Where we're different and we can dive into it is, you know, we allow for tailored technology to meet your business needs, your geographic needs, your compliance needs, and everything in between. There's never been an instance where a product or a company has to fit onto the technology. The technology has to fit the business solution. And I think that's where we are. Edmund put out a great kind of North Star vision mission tweet, I believe, last week, talking about how Avalanche is built for better business. And by focusing on embedded finance, what we've done, I think, really well for the longest time is we focused on things and we kind of planted a flag in different industries and we've led in those things. We've been since day one focused on institutional. We had a period in which we were very focused on gaming, and we still are. We have Nexon's Maplestory Universe and Off the Grid that are real games that are very successful right now. We've done enterprises and consumer and the early days, we came live with Defi, of course, but all these things kind of lived in their own narrative, in their own vacuum. What did they all have in common? Right. The industry loves to kind of give people tags like, oh, they're the gaming chain or the institutional chain or the payments chain. There is no such thing. Especially when you're dealing with general purpose chains that kind of don't know what they're trying to do. We've had business verticals or focus verticals, but what did they all roll into? Like, what was Avalanche's purpose and goal? And to me, better business makes sense. Better business to me means we can help existing businesses make new money, new revenue, by digitizing, by finding new ways to do it. We're seeing this with the Detroit Pistons, the Cleveland Cavs and LSU with their fan engagement platforms. They're raising fan engagement by 40 and monetizing that as well. Or you can help people save money right, through operational efficiencies coming onto blockchain and digital Rails, digitizing everything. So if your accounts are now wallets, your dollars are now stable, coins, your yield is now defi, your assets are now tokenized, right? Like, we've had a distribution problem for the most part in this industry. We keep building technology that nobody's asking for, that nobody needs. By being the backbone of a FinTech or a Neo bank, you multiply exponentially. Your users, your transactions, your assets, and everything else in between. So that's kind of the angle we've done for a while and we're really doubling down on now under that kind of embedded finance stack and by just being better business. And better business can be an institution, it could be an enterprise, but it could also be the startup and the innovator.
- [06:06]
Interviewer
You know, John, I was reading the Vaneck report that just came out about you guys, and I was struck by the, the stat that you guys are processing on your L1s, about 40 million transactions a day. And so my, my question that I asked myself, but I'm happy to be able to ask you, is what are all of those transactions? What are those people doing?
- [06:27]
John Nahas
So in regards to those L ones, I'll give you an example. Denari is one. Denari is kind of the DTCC of blockchain. They have an Avalanche L1, which they have a broker, dealer and an ATS license. They have no action from FINRA. These guys are as above board and regulated and compliant as it comes with public equities on blockchain. So their L1 is kind of a mint and burn mechanism. So think of it as the hub that issues equities that are then traded on public blockchains. So you can sell an IBM share on Kraken or Coinbase or whatever exchange that they're integrating with. You can be selling it there and I could be buying it on Avalanche's C chain or on Solana or on a different chain. It's kind of like the beacon for equities to go to other blockchains for to be traded or exchanges or even neobanks and fintechs in emerging economies. So that's one of them. Another is FIFA. So of course everyone knows FIFA up until now. It's been doing collections with their FIFA collect kind of, I mean, lack of a better term NFT platform. But also something huge that they did was the rtbs, the right to buys. So effectively these are options to be able to buy a World cup ticket. So you put a deposit, you get a right to buy when the tickets come out. You can secure that. They're working now with a lot of other opportunities for people to be doing this. I mean, look, I'm a Southern California native. If you tell me I could pay $20 to have the ability to buy a Dodgers World Series ticket next year at face value, I will take that every day whether they make it or not. You know, it's an option, it could expire, right? So that's another one. We've got things happening on private permission chains as well. Program at last this week just came out, they're bringing $2 billion of tokenized assets onto their Avalanc L1 that used to be previously on Corda. We have Balcony that is doing the deeds for Bergen County, New Jersey and expanding into other jurisdictions. There's so many lists. I mean, I think we have like 70 plus L1s live now. We're on track to be at about 200 by the end of this year. These are businesses that need their own environments, right? So whether it's jurisdictional or compliance based or rules based or gas specific or gas free, it really spans a lot of different industries, geographies, asset classes and use cases. And that's I think, where we're different, right? Like we're spreading it out and allowing people to build the technology that, that supports their business and their use case.
- [08:52]
Interviewer
And what I sort of love about it because you, you know, you mentioned the number of L1s, right? Most of the time when you're talking to Polygon, they're talking about Polygon, they're talking about their L1. You guys really have, have allowed the idea to your point that we will sort of create the chain that you need for your specific business. I was talking to one of the companies that was both, both incubated by Blizzard, is building on Avalanche. And I got, you know, before this conversation I said to them, tell me what you really like about working with the Avalanche team. And they said they really were impressed with the enterprise approach. They were like, for us it's like our custom chain is similar to spinning up an AWS instance or integrating HubSpot into our business that gets looked at in that same way that it's part of their business tech stack. And I'm just sort of intrigued by what feels like a much more plug and play system through for blockchains. That feels evolved compared to a lot of the ones that are out there now who are kind of just saying, hey, this is the chain we've been building for five years. You know, if you know solidity or rust, you can play with it. But like you guys are actually sort of creating customizable software for folks pretty much.
- [10:02]
John Nahas
I mean, and that was the vision for Avalanche from the days of the white paper. Like this isn't like a, we built this chain, we filled it with Defi back in 2021. We need to scale, what do we do? Like, you know, I, I, I used to talk about this kind of inverted pyramid situation but like if you look at the legacy chains, Ethereum specifically, it's an inverted pyramid and it wasn't, it didn't know what it was being built for at the time. And kudos to them and we love everything that Ethereum has done and brought to the market and we've taken that and built upon it. I kind of look at us as kind of being that extension. But L2s are general purpose and L3s are asset specific and they're just trying to figure it out. The current state is the ever expanding pipe. Right? One chain put everything through it. But we know that jurisdiction wise and compliance wise and asset wise and whoever it is doesn't want their, an enterprise or institution doesn't want their asset alongside a meme coin alongside a payment. There needs to be privacy, there needs to be a million different things. And that's just the early days of the space. I think up until now we've had kind of more recently a rude awakening where we just kept building technology for building technology's sake. There was no PMF and the token was the product. And we used the tokens to go get people to use it and to build upon it. Avalanche from day one was built from the ground up in order to take into account what we then called subnets. We've now changed the name to avalanche L1s because that's what they are. They're sovereign layer one blockchains and your validators, your rules, your sets. And that allows for kind of that change. You know, I always like to say that the problem with the industry is that there's too many blockchains and too much block Space. It kind of reminds me of like AOL in the early days of the Internet, right? You would log on, you have your chat, your finance, your sports, your email, your finance and everything on one page. That's kind of what general purpose chains have been up until now with very few successes. Overall, I think where we're going and where we've been is to a more distributed approach. Kind of like what the Internet looks like now. And you could kind of think of us maybe as WordPress. Like, if you asked me 20 years ago if I wanted a website, I think you're crazy, right? But now we take for granted that anybody, any business, small or large, can spin up a website and become a business. Well, why can't we do that with blockchains? Like, why are we focused on this one large, ever expanding pipe that's supposed to fit everything in it when the world doesn't work that way? So we're proliferating and scaling that way. We're adding more chains. So think of us as a highway. We have the C chain, which is our chain, which is kind of like a global liquidity hub. You have stable coins, you have all L1 tokens, you have all other assets. But then those assets can flow to those other chains and flow in between those chains. So think of us as a highway and we just keep adding more lanes and everyone is working in the same, in the same direction. Some might be like a diamond lane, some might be like a cargo only lane. You could specify what you need the chain to deliver on for your business. And that's kind of where we are. And that's like the WordPress thing. So paradoxically, yeah, we do need more blockchains and more block space, but that's, you know, purpose built, custom tailored to the business use case that's emerging. And we're seeing this now across privacy and supply chain and payments and equities and everything else. There might be chains that are needed for coordination and no value transfer. There's a lot of this. So effectively it's infrastructure. I do think that the network was envisioned correctly six years ago. The tokenomics do need to change to meet that mission. So I think you've seen the tweet on the vision from Emin, but you're also seeing the foundation on Avalanche's side working with stakeholders and community members and infrastructure providers to better align the system. Right, so that there is more accrual of that value and that Avalanche and Avax specifically are central to the growth of the network and all of that traction. But yeah, 40 million transactions on all the L1s combined. Like, if that was just on the C chain, which it could have been, you know, we'd be top leaderboards in all these metric sites. But that's not the way the industry works right now.
- [13:57]
Interviewer
And how much from a business perspective, when you're out there talking to prospective partners, how much of it is, let's hide blockchain behind and just say, this is just better technology for your business. Need versus blockchains are this revolutionary technology that can do X, Y and Z.
- [14:13]
John Nahas
It's the former. I mean, I think, honestly, you just mentioned to me earlier, you know, crypto's useless. Like that New York Times headline. Like, there is no other industry that has to. That, that focuses itself on being the solution for everything, right? Like, you don't log into Netflix and underneath it doesn't say powered by aws or you don't log in to like whatever website powered by Azure or gcp. But we do this because the, the incentives have been inverted in that sense. So when we go to businesses, it's not, it's, it's. Blockchain is great, it is revolutionary, it's fantastic. And this is how it makes your business better. This is how it helps you make money. This is how it helps you solve money. So we're not sitting like, you know, a lot of ecosystems get pitched all these great ideas, and it's just a headline grab. Like, we are walking into businesses and saying, here's your business. Here's your last quarterly report. This is how much you're spending on X, Y and Z. You can save this much by adopting these digital rails. You can make this much by changing other things. And then the light bulb goes off and they're like, yeah, why aren't we doing this?
- [15:21]
Interviewer
Come on. Yeah. No, you brought up the New York Times article, which was headlined Crypto is pointless. Really talking about also the Trump administration. I don't want to talk about that part, but I do want to talk about crypto as useless. They wrote in the article, I'm just going to quote here. Since its peak last fall, bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, has lost almost half of its value. 2 trillion of wealth has evaporated. We have one question. What took so long? Outside of crimes and scams, the technology is useless and its economics are even worse. Then I knew I'm talking to you and I'm like, Then I'm like, these guys are working with JP Morgan, Apollo, Citibank, blackrock, you guys are working with the biggest financial institutions in the world, specifically, I think through the, like the idea that Internet money needs its own native platform. And you know, if I'm Citigroup, I would rather partner with someone who just lives this and breathes this day in, day out than have to build it all from scratch. What do you think is like missing in that narrative, the counter, like crypto narrative where they say, what point? You know, this is clunky, it's old, it's, it's slow. I'm like, that's not real. Like there is so much else that is happening that, that they're not seeing.
- [16:52]
John Nahas
I mean, it's just peak bear market, right? Like the naysayers come out. I'm waiting for Peter Schiff and everybody else to come out and just dunk on the industry. I would say half of it is misguided and just ignorant. And at the same time, like people love to be the I told you so guys when they were wrong for the longest time. So they have a data point to highlight and say, this is great. But at the same time, I think the industry needs to wake up. You know, I was talking to somebody who will remain anonymous and they were like, you know, everybody's waiting for the institutions to come. The institutions are here and they just don't like what they see.
- [17:23]
Interviewer
Right?
- [17:23]
John Nahas
It's a lot of smoke and mirrors, It's a lot of headlines. We deal with a lot of partners that tell us we worked with a competitor, X, Y or Z. And the minute the headline came out, they stopped talking to us and they, they moved on to the next thing. That's not how business works, that's not how partnerships works. Like, you need to work with people in a proper and professional way. And this industry is very short term focused, three month narratives that come and go. I think what we've done well is the medium to long term and we stick by that. But with that there's ebb and flow. So in that narrative kind of valley, you need to have mindshare and I think where we failed to do that for the longest time in telling our story so that when we hit those peaks, you go from one to the other in a more consistent manner. But look, I do think a lot of it has been useless, right? Like more and more blockchains with high market caps and lots of things that just don't bring value. They don't make money, they don't. Businesses that need a token to sell, the token to fund the business is not a business. Right? Like, and and it's just been purely speculative and we needed to grow up. And I think, you know, this might be a good reckoning for the industry writ large. I think, I think it's needed. I think you and I had, were talking previous to starting this. Like everything we wanted in more is here now. And everybody is terrified because they don't know where to go from here. Well, where you go from here is providing that value. The technology provides that value. It helps create value or save money. Right? That's the exciting part. What that enables is for new innovative applications and use cases to emerge. We have yet as an industry, 12 plus years to deliver on any meaningful killer apps, right? Like for the most part, like, you know, you had email with web one, you had social media with web two. What have we delivered that's different? That is only possible because of blockchain. We have not done that much of it. Right. I like to kind of look at blockchains as cities, right. And economies like you have the ecosystem growth part. And that's all everyone ever did. They built roads and plumbing and sewers and bridges and electrical. And if we build it, they will come. Well, that's not always. How many cities do you need that are uninhabited, right? How many cities do you need with like four residents and maybe a business or like one major business. We are focusing on doing the business development aside too, so that we bring in the great companies, enterprises and use cases that will inspire, hopefully, right, the builders and the innovators to take inspiration from that and build something better and something new and something novel. For the most part, everything else has just been copy paste for the longest time, right. So it needs to be a one, two punch. It needs to be top down and bottom up. There hasn't been much bottom up. Right. Grants and all this money flying around to fund things that come and go with the narrative cycles that come and go. And for the most part, if we're talking about cities, I mean, how many Las Vegases do we need? There is a Las Vegas out there. You can attribute it to another ecosystem. How many more ecosystems need to be a Las Vegas, you need a New York, you need a Chicago, you need a Los Angeles, you need a Lo to Paris and everything else. I'd like to look at us as kind of, you know, a city with different neighborhoods. Come build the house that you want in the neighborhood that you want to be a part of.
- [20:33]
Interviewer
Well, you talk about that, you know, we have everything we want. We have a friendly administration, we have a global opportunity that seems to be being adopted more and more by jurisdictions around the world. You guys yourselves, I think, have done 1.4 billion real world asset value on chain through all of your different partners, the Franklin, Franklin Templeton and Jonas Henderson and that kind of the. Those folks. So to me there's, you know, 1.4 trillion is not the market cap of Nvidia, but it's pretty damn good for something that was, you know, something that occurred on message boards 13 years ago. And you know, people really took on their own to build something from. So, you know, I would also argue stablecoins are starting to be one of, one of those killer apps that just make a lot of sense to people. And I think we've seen obviously all the sort of up and down, but also the kind of consistent growth within the stablecoin industry. I know you guys are also involved in that too. But going back to my earlier point, if blockchain is doing itself favors, it doesn't want to be the subject of conversation. Right. It really wants to be just, you know, the power of a technology in the same way that the music industry ignored MP3s, you know, when they were on LimeWire, but they couldn't when it was on the itunes store. Right. And so I just wonder if we're just in that sort of awkward.
- [21:57]
John Nahas
Yeah, we're in that weird. Exactly. Teenager puberty moment where like, but we're that, but we're that. But do you really still want to be that? Like, you know, there is, in my opinion, there is one bitcoin. There is only one bitcoin. There'll never be another better bitcoin. But there are different platforms and different use cases and, and what they do is enable other things. Right. Like, like regardless of your L1 and regardless of the chain. It's not about the chain. It's about what the chain enables. It's what the chain allows. It's. And we have just, I think having been such a smaller industry or quiet industry or disregarded industry, we still have that chip on our shoulder where we have to make it about the tech all the time and talk about the tech all the time. And now the world is just saying, no, we can use this for a lot of good stuff. But we're still saying, but what about us? What about us? Like, you know, there is that kind of push and pull and I think it's a maturity thing and I think with time we'll grow into it in a proper way. It just, yeah, it's just going to take some time.
- [22:59]
Interviewer
We've been to the last two years of Avalanche summits. We've met many founders who are building businesses on top of Avalanche. And I do think there is a consistency that one, they get a tremendous amount of support from you guys and the idea that you're really invested in helping them achieve their business goals. I think there is an idea that the community is pretty strong. You know, you don't really play into the, the sort of meme and trolling sort of talk that a lot of our industry does. You're, you're a little bit more walk the walk, I think type people. So what do you think that someone who's building a business right now and you know, what's that thing that really pushes them over the edge to Avalanche?
- [23:41]
John Nahas
You know, we did delve into the meme stuff for a while, but that's mostly community driven, right? So there's like this, this weird push and pull with crypto and it's like, why aren't you supporting this and that and the other and everything under the sun? That stuff's community. Like people could do whatever they want. It's an open, public, permissionless network and they can build all that. What my team and what we focus on, what we focused on from the beginning and I tell people, and I think what separates us is, is that and you know, the best tech doesn't always win at the end of the day. People work with people. And for as much as AI is replacing so many normal tasks on a daily basis, as much as blockchain can automate and digitize a lot of things, people work with people. People work with people they want to work with and, and who they trust. And I think whereas a lot of people in this industry have been fantastic partners up until the moment of headline and, or launch and then they move on to the next headline because the perverse incentives have focused on that, we do it differently. Like my team is judged 50% on what they bring in and what they win and 50% on the success of that thereafter. So we continue to work with partners after they launch. We continue to connect them to other partners. My team is an extension of almost every other team that we work with on a daily basis. So if someone's launching something and they need to talk to an exchange, I'm talking to the exchange for them. If they need a stablecoin provider, we will connect them to whoever it is. If they need a wallet provider, we will connect them. Like, this isn't kind of a come build here and good luck, God bless and we'll see what happens? And that kind of stuff takes time, right? And those kind of projects and companies take time. I mean, you know, you just mentioned the 1 point something billion today in RWAs. You know, we just brought 2 billion on in Japan from program. We're working with Mirae Asset in Japan. In Korea, we're working with Nexon in Korea, right. For Maplestar Universe, we're working with Konami in Japan, like also that person. Because those personal relationships matter, right? People work with people. And what works in Japan doesn't work in Korea, doesn't work in Abu Dhabi, doesn't work in Turkey. Like, we have local teams in different jurisdictions that know the language, the culture, the protocols, the things that matter. More so than just the numbers, because if it all comes down to rough numbers, nobody really has that much of an edge. So I think that's where we've been different and we continue to lean in on those guys that we want to work with.
- [26:00]
Interviewer
All right, John, I have two more questions for you and then I'll let you go. Number one is you can't be in this business and not see all the people who have really parallel path now, crypto and AI. How does Avalanche look at the AI opportunity, the agentic opportunity, all the buzz going on around that and how blockchain should play a role?
- [26:23]
John Nahas
First and foremost, I want to highlight, I think one of our great partner companies in Kite AI. They're launching their own Avalanche L1. I think they go to Mainnet in March, their tokens out already. I think it's a couple hundred million or it's like number 80 or something in the 80s for market cap backed by PayPal and General Catalyst. These are real builders in AI who are tackling the micropayments and the agentic payments space. And they realize that they need their own chain for it, right? So in a world where we know that AI is going to utilize blockchain rails for payments, you're going to need space for that, right? You need that to be segregated. So the liquidity on the C chain needs to be robust enough to facilitate all the payments that are happening on Kite AI's chain or on other chains that they may launch. I mean, they might need more than one chain, right? So we're working with a lot of different people across a bunch of different AI use cases, supply chain, automated payments, everything in between. That trigger that again, right? I think the architecture matters and the rails matter and we give those people what they need.
- [27:25]
Interviewer
All right, and my final question is, we're sitting here when we're recording this Bitcoin 67, 68,000. Obviously it was in the 120s. Anyone who's been in long enough, you've been at Avalanche over five years, just knows there's ups and downs. But how do you personally manage the volatility of this business? Because I know, you know, people deal with therapy. No, you are from la, I get that.
- [27:51]
John Nahas
It's a good one. Look, on a personal level, I have three little kids, so I spend as much time as I can with them. I think a lesson that I've taken, and I think everybody in this industry needs to, is to just unplug a little bit sometimes. Like you're not going to change anything in the moment. You know, have that family life, that social life with that meaning outside of a screen and a number that comes and goes. We've been here before to your point, like I've been here for over five years. I've been in this space for like eight. This is not the first time, it's not the last time. I think there's a lot of changes going on, but I think we've always seen collectively whenever we have these bear markets or you know, peak FUD situations where we're like, it's over from that the real stuff emerges. You know, we saw defi emerge, we saw a lot of other things emerge last time. I think we're at the cusp of stable coins taking off. We're at the cusp of regulatory clarity that will allow everybody to be at least on some level playing field going forward. There's tons of capital waiting on the sidelines, waiting to just get in to investments and use cases once they know where the line is drawn. Right? When I talk to institutions and enterprises and everyone in between, the one thing they always say is we want to do this, we want to do this yesterday. But we can't start something, even if it's super conservative, knowing that one day there's no line and that line can be drawn and we can be on the wrong side of it. So once we at least know where the line is. I think John Woo said this a few years ago and got skewered for. And I said the same thing. This industry used to always be anti regulation and then anti bad regulation. I think at some point, and we're almost there now, where any regulation is better than none, because at least you know where that line is and what you can and can't do. And then we can incrementally build upon that and get better. Look, the crypto native people get mad at me probably for saying that. But that doesn't affect the one thing that I think is critical here, which is bitcoin. Bitcoin is what it is, and it'll never change. But for everybody else that's building companies, businesses use cases, innovating. They need clarity and they need the space to run. And I think we're almost there.
- [29:59]
Interviewer
All right, John, thank you for the time today. It was great seeing you. Congrats on all the sort of updates. You guys have made. An avalanche. We look forward to keeping track.
- [30:07]
John Nahas
Appreciate it. Good being with you.