B (3:35)

Yeah.

C (3:37)

And in many ways I, I kind of thought there is something to be done. I was always very infrastructure driven. And then in 2018, you know, I'm the founding partner and was the chief commercial officer of Copper. I don't know if you know that shop, but was one of the largest custodians and prime infrastructure providers globally. And we solved for a lot of problems in and around, you know, off exchange settlements. We were the first ones to do the walled garden. We were the first ones to do Clear Loop. The way that we implemented Custody and then, you know, kind of became one of the biggest custodians. And then Clear Loop specifically was a flagship product, if you want to call it like this, with like hundreds of billions of trading volume that went through there per month. Very institutional driven. But during that time of course there were a lot of foundations, you know, from all the biggest ones that, you know, that use custody with us at the time. And one of them was Concordium. And Concordium is a very. Going to go much deeper on this I think later, but was a very unique blockchain. You know, at the time we had like 250 blockchain engineers and they all revered the code. They Were like, this is very, very nicely written. As it turns out, you know, Concordium was built by some of the best cryptographers in the world, like Ivan Damga, Tobin Pritz Petters and like those guys. And it was founded by a guy who really knows his craft, which is Larsia Christensen, he's the co founder and for 20 years he was the CEO of Saxo Bank. And it always sparked my interest. And then Copper became quite big, you know, kind of to understand this why I left, right, because like Copper became quite big. I like to more build things, I like it more raw. I don't like to operate stuff. We hired like you know, hundreds of people and a load of bankers and they really enjoy that type of stuff. And I was like, okay, it's time to maybe move on. And then in September I took over here. But yeah, to your other point, like what's going on right now? A lot, a lot is going on and a lot of it doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you kind of unpack it and scratch away the surface of just going on to crypto, Twitter, etc. You basically it's, for me at least it's relatively obvious what's happening right now. But we will be able to unpack this, I guess.

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Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Man, it has been, like you said, just a wild year. There's so much going on. There's so much still going on. And the beauty of crypto is, guess what? It's not going to stop. There's going to be all sorts of new catalysts as we move our way into 2026, as we move our way through the end of this decade, even some are going to be good. In fact, I'd say most are going to be good, but there's going to be some bad ones in there. And I think that's just part of, of growth. Right? And so when we talk today, we're again, we're going to go a lot deeper. We're about to get into it. But when you talk about layer ones and infrastructure as a whole, you got to go through a few, through a few speed bumps to really figure things out. And one of the cool things about having kind of your unique perspective on this with, I mean, 20 years of finance and infrastructure experience, is that you've kind of got to see it all since 2008. Right? You go through that entire crisis, you go through everything that we saw there, the fall, the recovery, the historic rise that happened afterwards. Then you went through what we saw in like 2021, 2022, what we went through, you know, Covid and all the crazy dips and valleys and runs that we've had since then. And then we're at the current day. So it's like this kind of stuff, it doesn't phase you, it doesn't phase me. And just for the listeners out there, again, I think that this is all very normal and natural for any space that is new.

C (10:31)

I agree. I mean, look, there is. There is. I remember in 2018, everybody was like, okay, this is it, party's over. Let's go back to our day jobs, you know, the bitcoin's funeral, if you want to call it like that. Yeah, of course it wasn't infrastructurally. A lot of things have happened. 2021 was different. You know, it was like the defi summer. Yeah, you kind of were able to grow a user base, which was quite interesting to see some loads of funky stuff that was going on and still is going on, quite Frankly. And then 2022 was a different one because I think at that point, you know, people were kind of leveraging themselves a little bit too much. And I mean, more from the infrastructure side, you know, you suddenly had, of course, ftx, you had Celsius, you had like all those things. They were kind of systemic at the time. And that of course, kind of had A had a cascading effect and you know, wherever we are in the cycle right now, I have my views, they're quite strong and convinced I'm convincing myself of these. But there are a couple of things that are just like weird for me. Right in and around you happened on October 10. Interestingly, there is no body that surfaced yet. I would have thought that at least a couple of guys would have blown up in and around that event, but didn't really happen. The next thing is, you know, stupid things that kind of occurred, you know, specifically October 10th I think is quite interesting because for some reason we have decided that stablecoins should trade at par to each other, which is absolutely stupid for a long period of time. Granted they actually wanted to fix it, but it was exploited before beforehand. That credit trades at par to each other is just nuts. Right?

B (12:16)

Yeah.

C (12:18)

But I mean I'm more interested in the adoption. Yeah, right. And quite frankly as an industry we have done extremely poorly. It's very poor our performance and I mean in the entire blockchain and if you want to go crypto specific, the idea of it being adopted and you see the grassroots now and. But it's the same stuff that we heard in 2021 quite frankly. But like what do you actually do in order to get users on? Because the matter of the fact is the amount of DAP users, the average monthly DAPP users are roughly the same for the last three and a half to four years that didn't grow and that has a reason.

B (12:53)

What do you think the market's missing right now?

C (12:57)

Right now? To do what for bitcoin to do a new all time high or I.

B (13:04)

Would say for the growth. You know, we were just talking about how crypto has done maybe not the best job of getting that kind of next level adoption and working towards it. What's missing to get us to that point? Because I think a lot of people feel the same way, especially when they look at maybe like activity or if they look at like you know, even I don't want to get into prices but you know, you kind of look at the general altcoin market, you said hey, well bitcoin's done well. But there's been kind of a disconnect between maybe the adoption of bitcoin and the adoption as you know, a general technology.

C (13:36)

Yeah, I mean bitcoin, we need to kind of leave bitcoin aside. Right. Because like bitcoin there was an idea and then, and then it went down a completely different route with regards to store of value and it has a rightful place there because like you know, thousands of years ago you were able to buy a chicken with like a shell with a hole in it. As long as you and me agree that it has value, it has value.

B (13:54)

Right, yeah.

C (13:55)

Which is where the whole idea of money comes from. So. And smart money specifically, which what we are very interested in. I think the biggest part quite frankly is tooling. Tooling is one of the core things we have been hailing off the rooftops for so long now about real world adoption. But there is nothing that has been really built for real world adoption. But there are certain things that need to be addressed in order to get new users into an ecosystem that does not work. If you try to explain to them what a mnemonic seed phrase is, that does not work. If you try to explain to them that if you lose that alphanumeric numerical string, all your money is gone. Right. It does not work if you go down the route of trying to explain people the complexities. To my initial point, they have no scooby of how of what MT500 messages are and why it takes two days in order to settle a transaction when you buy Apple shares, nor what it takes in terms of the payment flow when you buy coffee at the corner shop. Right. If you are continuously just going down that route and don't address the systemic problems which in my opinion is very much smart contract driven like that's one of the core ones for me from issuance to actually usage and ultimately smart contracts fulfilling a custodial function. And you're not able to abstract away the complexities of what this technology can do. And what I always say is, I mean if a couple of people from my community etc dialing in, they're going to be bored of hearing this. But blockchain is here to be used, not understood. Everybody tries to understand it. Yeah, don't understand it, just use it. Right. But that is down to the industry in order to build things for that to happen. And if you rock up and try to get users into an ecosystem and try to explain to them what money Lego is or what yield farming in a defi pool is, forget it. You might. It's a non starter, it's for very young people and that's. And that's cool. But if you want adoption sooner, there is a group of people, if I think of my auntie or my parents, it took them a month in order for them to feel comfortable to click two buttons at the side of the phone and just put it there to hear beep Right. For Apple pay like it took a month.

B (16:08)

Yeah.

C (16:09)

So why would you think that in any shape or form suddenly if you try to kind of give them, like I say, open a wallet, Write down those 24 words and don't lose them because that's your backup. It's people go like no, I'm not doing that. So that's, I think one of the main reasons of why we haven't seen it take off properly which is also one of the reasons why the big chains out there have a big problem in order to, in my opinion in order to kind of steer towards it. But that kind of goes back to more smart contract problems which we can maybe dive into later.

B (16:40)

Yeah, I mean let's just, let's dive into Concordium now, you know, give everyone a proper introduction. We've talked about some of the issues that that crypto is seeing. You know, what is Concordium doing if someone hasn't heard about it and how is it addressing some of those issues?

C (16:55)

Yeah, a lot of people haven't heard about it yet unfortunately, but they very soon will. Look, if you think of Concordium there are two core pillars. On the one side identity. So the reason for that is I've spent a lot of time in the, in the rooms with regulators. The regulator's job is there in order to safeguard retail. Preliminary like that's their main job and they do a okay job because in many ways they're over regulating. What's happening in the US right now is pretty cool to be honest. But what it ultimately comes down to is, you know, do you remember in 2021 when everybody was talking about permission defi and stuff like this, what the stance that we are taking is or the, the uniqueness of Concordium is that you have the ability to identify yourself once you enter the ecosystem, but you do it once and from that point onwards you are interacting in the ecosystem in a complete privacy preserving way using zero knowledge proofs. Like this stuff was built in like 2016, 17, the TGE was in 2021 and it was a little bit too early for it quite frankly. Which was why if anybody is going now and looks at the thing, it looks not great but we had a pretty good year in comparison to the rest of the crypto markets but like significantly up. But what it ultimately comes down to is the fact that if I'm interacting right now in this digital world, right. I don't what you have to go through right now and I'm sure every listener will agree to this whatever service or whatever Goods you would like to access, you basically have to go through an onboarding process. So if I need to prove that I'm over 18 or over 21, it's not just enough that I can give them security that I'm over 18, over 21. Right. I basically have to send them a copy of my passport or my driver's license so they know exactly what my birth date is, they know exactly where I live, they know exactly what height I am, whatever it is, right? I don't want that. I don't want this. So this is the cypherpunk in me, right? I don't want that. But the matter of the fact is that the regulator is there in order to enforce those things for sometimes good reason, in some cases, complete nutter over regulation. So that's pillar number one. So zero knowledge proof based identity for just verification. Zero knowledge proof based verification in an interaction which might be just access or it might be payment, Right?

B (19:18)

Yeah.

C (19:19)

The second part where the uniqueness comes in is what we have done is we built something called plts last year, Protocol level tokens. Let me kind of take a larger swig at this. What it ultimately comes down to is that every single hack, every single, you know, misappropriation of funds that you kind of, you know, just look at what happened to Balancer like three, four weeks ago or whatever. And before that it was like, what was the big one? Yeah, our good friends at Bybit, right, It's smart contract vulnerabilities for different reasons with regards to the ability to just swap addresses or whatever else it is. But the big P, the big problem is that due to the speed of innovation in this industry, in and around Ethereum and Solana and whatever else, those smart contracts have been pushed down the road of fulfilling a custodial function. Because when it comes to an exchange of money, there are two ways, right? Either you trust me every single month in order to click a button and send you 100 bucks, or we'll put it in a smart contract and one second after midnight on the first of every single month, it gets released. Right? And that is true for like defi trading and everything else. Money literally sits in smart contracts. Now that is, and I know a thing or two about custody having been part of building the biggest, one of the biggest custodians in the world. So what, what I mean there is that when it comes to the whole promise of why this industry has existed in the first place, you know, programmable money, how often have we heard that, right? Concordium allows you to do this on the protocol level. Right. So what happens now is that you can program into it whatever you want right into the issuance. So issuance is not happening in a smart contract, it's happening on the protocol level on the other side. Then if you bind this together with the identity, you can for example, solve for things out of the gate, travel rule done, age verifying payments done, geofencing done. Right, yeah. And that ultimately allows you in order to. So we have, over the course of the year, even though nobody knows us. Right. For now we have, we have, we've got 10 stablecoin issues on. Right. Like Stabler etc. Which are quite, you know, tether's love child in and around the compliance side of things. And I think we can then dive deeper with regards to use cases. But if you think of Concordium, it's zero knowledge, proof based, privacy preserving, identity and protocol level issuance, fulfilling on the core promise of programmable money and all the perks that come with it and security, you know, cutting the risks down to a bare minimum.

B (21:59)

Yeah. And that's been a huge push it feels like since, I mean what, since 2022 is how can we cut risk, how can we make this more reliable? And then also when there's a lot of infrastructure that is being built, I think it makes sense that, you know, there's some things that just shouldn't be publicly available. Right. There's people out there who advocate that everything should be on chain and transparent and this and that. But I think when you look at it from a business perspective or a banking perspective or transaction perspective, like I don't want anyone seeing what my bank records look like. I don't want people seeing everything that I buy with my credit card or my debit card or every wire transfer that I make or every, like I don't know if I'm on a brokerage or all, you know, there's a million different kinds of transactions that you can make whether you're an individual or a business or a government or whatever. And it makes sense. I think there's a time and a place for full transparency and there's a time and a place where it's like, hey, not everything should be just an open book for anyone and everyone. And that's where kind of I would say that this fits in there is that it helps clarify that line, but it also is saying, hey, we want to be intentional about onboarding business on the blockchain. Because for years in the past, for the past several years, it has been onboarding and I would say doing a good job of onboarding retail traders, retail users and investors to some degree. And I think now the next stage is saying, okay, now that there's at least some sort of a retail base, how can we actually build up the business side? And that seems to be where Concordium.

C (23:37)

Really comes in to a certain extent. I'm actually, we're actually flipping this on its head.

B (23:41)

Okay, let's flip it on its head.

C (23:43)

Yeah, so, so, because look, there is a, I mean it depends of how, of how wide I want to go now because otherwise I'm gonna blabble on for like the next 10 minutes. But there is a, there, are, there, are there other maxis for specific ecosystems? Right? You've got the eth maxis, you've got the soul maxis, like and, and they don't, they don't necessarily like swapping between each other, which is one of the reasons of why you see what has happened to the altcoin market specifically over the course of the last couple of years. Money is not really moving from one to the other. Nobody. Because basically you need to call a spade a spade. They all do the same shit, just in a different color. Yeah, right. The users are the core thing here. If you come again to with a proposition of like, hey, trade here because you, Solana is cool and fast and you know, neon and meme coins. You like meme coins come to Solana. Yeah, right. That's easy. Go pump funning and whatever you want to do, right? Go, go for your life. The problem here is that those users truly are also the users in Web2, don't get me wrong. But the Web2 users, which this pie here is much bigger, much bigger, you need to figure out of how to tap into this one. Not the 21 year old that has, you know, the 18 year old that is now got his bar mitzvah money or whatever and now starting to do some cool stuff in the ecosystem of Solana or Ethereum. That's not the way that we think about it. The way that we think about it is how do you get people into an ecosystem without mentioning crypto, without mentioning blockchain? And this is where you kind of have user adoption on the premise of. And I give you an example, for example, right? If you go in the latest announcements that we've had, one of them is like, we're so spoiled. It's in the adult industry. Yeah. Adult content is huge. People don't like to talk about it, but it's a massive one. Right. Every Human. They don't want to admit it, but they use it. But ultimately what it comes down to is that the regulator has now rocked up. And this is the important point here, right? If you want to have adoption.

A (25:51)

And.

C (25:51)

You don't want, you would like to get the, you know, the cryptoground involved. You cannot do it if you don't, you know, implement privacy in some shape or form. But there's a difference between privacy and anonymity. Because on the other side of the coin is the regulator. And you need to kind of struck that balance. And if you want to see adoption, the adoption doesn't happen if I continuously have to onboard just like the way that I'm onboarding right now. You see what I mean? Because that's a massive cost center. It's a huge cost center. The reason why Wall street is as big as it is is not because there are like cool people that are just doing trading and like, you know, spray champagne and stuff in Patagonia vests. It ultimately comes down to is that the vast majority is very, very sad individuals that go in, sit in a dark room and don't do anything else but back office and compliance work. That's the reason why, that's why you have those centers, right? So that's what you need to change. And that's where we kind of come in. Not on the premise of like revolutionizing Wall street right now. We take it from a different level. We take it from a level of like getting a user base into an ecosystem and allowing them to, in a privacy preserving way without them knowing that they're on a Web3 ecosystem now. Which means if you think of adult, if you think of gaming, if you think of gambling, for example, right? Online casinos, huge. Right. The regulator has decided, or look at what's happening on social media right now. Look at what happens in Australia right now. They basically switched it off for under 18, for under 16, like by law. So. And to a certain extent. Right, right. Because there is content that you should just shouldn't be watching if you are of a certain age. Now if you would like to do it though, I would like to access adult content or gambling or whatever. But I do not necessarily want them to know where I live. I do not want them to know what my name is. I do not want them to know what my exact birth date is. They need to know that I'm over 18. The regulator goes like, okay, pushing a button and saying, yes, I'm over 18 is not enough anymore. Okay, what's the solution? So we brought this to the regulators here, to Ofcom. They went like, please go ahead, it's one of the best things that we've seen and that's the reason why you see slowly adoption. So there's a lot of merchants and on the other side you just go to the app store, download the Concordium ID app, go through the motion of verification. There is no crypto mentioned, there is no seed phrases, there is no nothing, right? At this point you just create an identity that is yours and should only be yours and allows you to interact in an ecosystem in a fully privacy preserving way using zero knowledge proofs.

B (28:29)

So when it comes to like I guess proving your identity in the first place. Yeah, is that something, I guess explain that process. Is that where someone is going through a third party source, verifying it there, then they give you the green light and say hey, this person's good. And then you turn it on on the back end. Is that how that works?

C (28:49)

So yeah, let me explain, it's a very, very good question. So what happens is that you have like the Nota Bayness sums ups on feeders like whatever is there, right? Those are identity providers. They verify that your document is correct, that it's yours, it's verified. But the magic is what happens afterwards, right? You have your device, right? And on your device what happens once you go through that process? In the Concordium ecosystem they cryptographically hash what we call an identity object to your wallet, only to yours. There is no copy of your passport floating around on the blockchain, nothing. Right. And then I start interacting. So what the blockchain basically does, it takes a specific line item depending on what the request is and says like is this person over 18 transaction goes through like zero knowledge proof, says yes or no. Is this person, you know, is this a UK government issued document? Yes or no, but not what it is. So nobody has a, you know, like I say, you don't run around and have hundreds of copies of your identity on different merchants, different ledges sitting. You basically do it once and you should only do it once and from that point onwards is yours and only yours.

B (29:58)

And I mean immediately my brain's going towards this can be used for so many different avenues. I mean we're talking about identity and the stuff that's associated with that. But you can continue to take it a step further to, I mean, I mean endless different areas. Does this person have the security clearance he needs? And it can be yes or no, but again without letting people know all the credentials and all the stuff that they don't need to know. And the stuff that you don't want to be out there in the case of like a data leak, you know. So I guess in the absolute worst case scenario, it's like, does this person have that? Yes. But not actually revealing all the information like saying, I guess a great example of that would be like, does this person have a verified agent email? Yes. But if it gets leaked, you're not losing your age and your, your address and your email address isn't all out there. It's just acknowledging the fact that those are verified, which is fascinating. So it's like, I mean, even in like an airport situation, it's like, you know, there's a million different lines, right? You have your normal, you have your TSA pre check, you have clear, you have all these, you could just kind of scan, it can say, oh, this person is instantly approved for that. This person is approved for security clearance, this person is approved for like just you fill in the blank. There's all these different areas. And I mean, it does seem like that's kind of the next logical step in the world. I mean, we're becoming increasingly more integrated with tech. We're, you know, making it part of our daily lives and it just seems like it makes sense if we have something like this that is instantly verifiable without putting people's identity and data actually at risk.

C (31:34)

You absolutely nailed it. Like, that's like that's really what it is. That's what our gene is. This message comes from Alteryx. Business breakthroughs aren't about more data. They're about getting your data ready to harness advanced analytics, custom models, AI, agentic futures and more. Alteryx One makes that happen. Built for analysts, powered for the intelligent enterprise. Connect data from anywhere, automate analytics and turn insight into action with speed. User focused, secure, scalable. That's Alteryx One, trusted by nearly half of Global 2000 companies. Visit alteryx.com to learn more.

D (32:09)

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C (33:37)

There is, there is no, there are, there are no face scans or whatever. Like this is literally just you, you prove. That's the whole point of zero knowledge proof.

B (33:44)

Yes.

C (33:44)

Like, like, like the title says. Like that was the original idea, you know, shot like think of it, right? So it's really like what Concordium. If you think of Concordium, even though people don't know it yet.

B (33:55)

Yeah.

C (33:55)

And we're doing our hardest in order to kind of, you know, fight the big one. But that's also needs to be understood, right? If you kind of stand there and you go like, oh yeah, you know, a lot of people just think about token price, right? At the end of the day, what it comes down to, if I'm rocking up and I'm trying to, where we are right now, to pick a fight with Ethereum or Solana, I need, I'm smoking crack. Like why would I do that? What I ultimately need to do is bring users into an ecosystem and from that point onwards you can slowly guide them into this. Cross, sell, cross sell them into it. Right? Or you already have users in the web3world, which for example we have with our partnerships. If you just, you know, you just need to look it up with like ledger or bitcoin.com, like those are tens of millions of users and they, do they really want to go down that route of actually having the wallet verify whatever they would like to access? Right. They've chosen Concordium to do this with. So all this stuff is now about to go live in like January, February and beyond. Right. But ultimately what it, what it, what it comes down to is like you said, the privacy preservation, my identity not being bare ass out there in whatever interaction is exactly what I want. I want to interact with certain things. I do not want them to know everything about me. That's, that's. And I understand that there are regulatory constraints and I need to adhere to them. And if you think, and this is where I'm kind of stamping on the hopes and dreams of those hardcore cypherpunks that go like, screw the central banks and blah blah, blah, this will not happen, peeps as much. I think eventually we might get there in 100 years or whatever. But like, if you think that now zcash is going to rule the world and the regulator is just going to give in and go like, ah, you know what, kyc, aml, forget it, let's YOLO a little bit. It's, it's, it's absolutely not happening. Yeah, like that's, that's the key thing.

B (35:53)

So it, you're right. I mean in a perfect world that would be awesome. Unfortunately.

C (35:58)

Absolutely.

B (35:59)

We don't live in a perfect world. There's people who are bad actors, there are people who are malicious. So listen, I mean both you and myself, we're some of the biggest crypto advocates and fans out there. We want as much adoption, we want as much integration as possible. However, I think part of that is just understanding that those entities, they have a time and a place in today's society and that's not going anywhere anytime soon. So I think that there is this healthy balance where there is an integration of blockchain technology, there's an integration of crypto, but there's also a time and place for a traditional financial infrastructure. Like there is a need for that and especially its relations to governments and I think even like everyday people. But again, just because that isn't going away doesn't mean that crypto can't grow and be integrated and become an increasingly bigger part of everyone's life.

C (36:55)

Let me, let me, let me give you an example and let me give you listeners an example because like I've told you what the core USPS are and, and I completely agree with everything what you said right now. But think of it this way. We have really cool innovations in this space. And what I mean with really cool innovations is if I just concentrate on the stablecoin market right now, I'm not going to talk about Paolo and Tether and even Jeremy having a hard time to try to compete with him because the use case is so geared towards the crypto native world. Right? But there are things that are yield bearing, like tokenized money market funds, synthetic stablecoins. Right now those stablecoins don't even get close to the, to the TVL that for example, Tether has. Do people ask themselves why I did for A long time. And ultimately what it comes down to is that you don't solve for a use case that is based on what I like to call and what a lot of people like to call the time value of money. Now, if I have the ability. And there are other things, right? Because like if I think of Biddle, if I think of hash note, if I think of ondo, right, they are securities, so they have to adhere to the US regulatory framework in order to be handled like securities. So there's onboarding, accredited investors, over a hundred thousand, blah, blah, blah, right. There is a secondary market for those things. There is no Biddle BTC pair on binance, right. Doesn't exist. Why? Because that would be a use case. But that use case doesn't compute with the regulatory framework, right. So you still have to go through those hoops. Now, if you think of it that way in terms of like what we have done, we actually have onboarded, well partnered with, I mean it's just another stablecoin in the ecosystem spy company. You guys in America maybe don't know that one, but it's the biggest tokenized money market fund outside of the US that's like number three or number four now globally. But ultimately what it comes down to is that the idea of programmable money, right on the core promise, like I said earlier, peer to peer, you and me decide what has value and you and me decide what we're willing in order to exchange value for, right? So think of in this case the ability to have the programmability on the base layer like we have on the protocol level, with all the wonderful perks that we partially have built and are building out right now, like locking mechanisms, right. Multi locks, whatever, single locks. And then smart contracts govern and smart contracts doing what in my opinion smart contracts should be doing and what smart contracts are absolutely amazing for which is enforced conditionality. They shouldn't act in a custodial fashion. My and our core belief. Now think of rental agreements for a second, right? So if you and me agree that. So maybe first that what happens once you sign on the dotted line on a, on a rental agreement? What's the first thing you have to do?

B (39:55)

I guess you got to show up, you got to get the paperwork together and you got to sign.

C (39:59)

You ultimately have to put down a deposit. Yeah, like that's a security deposit. That's that, that's what it is. Like at least like here in Europe, you have to send to a specified bank account, which is an escrow facility X amount like three, four Months of, of, of, of rent. Yeah. Right. Now what happens there is that money goes into a drain because the only one that makes money on this is the bank, right? So now it sits there for like two, three years. You did not smash up the kitchen in Aussie Osborne style. And subsequently you are supposed to get like your 10000 back or whatever, you know. Yeah, whatever. You have it in the savings account. You don't get the full, you know, the, the yield is not yours. Now that also that facility costs. The bank doesn't do all this stuff for free, right. So if I rock up and I basically on the time value of money idea, meaning I can agree with you peer to peer to use something that is signed transaction that goes your direction based on whatever conditions are sitting in, the smart contract of like kitchen is not, you know, smashed up and you just go beep beep at the end of the thing and the transaction basically is just canceled. If you want to look at it that way, right. You find yourself in the position right now where you can give a yield bearing stablecoin a reason to exist. Because right now it's very, very, you know, minuscule. And what I mean with that is people don't know that a lot of, I mean Guy actually written a nice piece about it. Like about 60% of Biddle's AOM is guy from Athena, right. Was actually also the biggest client of Copper or one of the biggest clients of Copper. So what it ultimately comes down to is there is. And if I'm a fund, like we had 400 institutional clients at Copper, right. If I'm risk off because the market is choppy or whatever is happening, right. I'm risk off. I might as well call my bank and just buy the money market fund. Why would I buy the token? I can't do anything with it, right?

D (41:54)

Yeah.

C (41:54)

Because there is no market for it. There is nothing that I can do with it as such. I'm simplifying it down a lot. And you can take that logic down to its absolute bare bones. And what I mean there is that you can use securities in order to do things. For example, I don't know what you have in, you know, I don't know what you have in America. Think of like we have Deliveroo here. I think you've got doordash or something.

B (42:15)

Yeah, we have, right.

C (42:17)

If you go to a restaurant, you open the menu and tell the waiter, I would like to have this as a starter. That as a main, the very first thing that the guy doesn't do Is whip out the machine and you have to pay there and then. Yeah, right. You get it first. You see if it arrives. Did the chef spit on it? Are the hairs on it? I don't know, is it the wrong thing? And once you're done, then you pay. Right. So that transaction has a time component to it. If you use something in this wonderful idea of like what we can tokenize. Right. Suddenly tokenization would make sense. You basically come to the conclusion that I can use something like this. But that requires you in order to not issue in a smart contract, in my opinion, because that's one of the biggest risks that requires you to X, Y, Z. Right. And in the meantime it yields you. Now for the time being, it's a tokenized money market fund. But why not take an hft, you know, long short equity fund. As long as you and me agree that we take that as a base, I might need to top up because it didn't work out. But if it does work out, I might make 15% on that annualized Right. Over the course of a certain time span. So. So this is where we want to go or this is not only where we want to go, this is exactly where we're going. Right. I'm not trying to compete on TVL with Solana or ETH right now because of their tether or USDC holdings. What's the point? Right. What I do want to be there is to explain on an institutional level and then combining that with the identity, meaning you can solve for onboarding, geofencing and the regulatory framework, not just age like you said, if you need to onboard on an institutional level and prove that you don't have, you know, whatever it is, you know, proof of funds, proof source of wealth, whatever, like that's all possible.

B (44:02)

Yeah, I mean let's continue to dive into that a little bit more because there, there are a lot of sectors and we've touched on a few. But like what are some of those other sectors that you expect to adopt the blockchain technology and kind of use it in this way?

C (44:17)

I mean quite like from our perspective it's the high risk verticals that kind of started all off. Always they always the ones that kind of move first. Gambling, gaming, adult social media. That's really it to kind of start.

B (44:30)

Off and people don't realize how much activity and money are in those. When you look at it's in number one gambling, a ton of money, a just a unfathomable amount of money. When you look at gaming, I mean it's Nearly. It's almost like half the world's population plays video games in some way. I mean, you're talking about just so many people across the entire planet. And it's the nice thing about that is again, it's not like you're like, oh, well, this is only something that's popular in the U.S. or oh, this is only something that's popular in Asia. It's like, no, it's like there are global use cases for a lot of these. And there's also so, so much money that's involved with it as well. And the growth rates are all there. I mean, especially for the gaming industry. That's one that I've kind of, you know, specialized in over here and looked at the metrics and looked at its compound annual growth rate and activity and stuff. And it's one that I'm excited about. I know in recent years there hasn't been the infrastructure to get gaming where it needs to be, but I think we're starting to get back to that point and I think with what you all are doing at Concordium is helping us get to the point where we can have like anything that's like crypto integrated or blockchain integrated for the gaming side to get where it needs to.

C (45:47)

Be correct like we have. I just had a meeting today with a gaming company. So in game purchases, they want to do this on Concordium simply because of the capabilities that we have. Right. Building that in. And also like the age gating is quite big there. Right. So for you to buy your pink battle ostrich in whatever game, you maybe shouldn't be 13 with Daddy's credit card. Yeah, right. So this is, this is where all those things come, come kind of together all the way down to. And if you kind of flip that on the side. So the use case of actually using money within certain ecosystems, that's number one. But if I just look at the, if I just look at the social media world right now, which is getting clamped down left, right and center like under 30, like under 13s on the 16s, whatever. They're huge fines that are being given out. Right. In Australia, you have a violation around this, you pay 24 million Aussie dollars, one violation. Wow. So they're really people. It's, it's so new that people haven't actually read up on this. But for example, adult content in the US is being, is being restricted now in 18 states. But it's not only the users that are coming in. The next leg here is also where it's Becoming important with regards to the adult, with regards to content creators, you want to make sure from a regulatory perspective that they are over 18 too. So the entire payments flow can go back to back if you do it on Concordium.

B (47:16)

And you know, going back to your.

C (47:17)

Point, baked, baked in. And this is important, there's not some layer two solution. And it's all like we can do now five times as much tps, you know, five times as much TPS than Solana man, if we get to the point of like having to cross more than 2,000 TPS, right? That's great that use case and not bot driven stuff in some defi pools, right? I just want to make that clear. But it's like the, and then, and then you have the next problem, right? Think of Ethereum, right? Look at what happened on October 10, right? Gas fees went through the roof. Now Concordium has it fiat pegged, it's fixed right now it costs €1.00 a transaction costs $0.01 always. So fork free consensus can't fall over. Like if you actually dive deeper. Specifically for like the hardcore crypto fans, I highly recommend that you should start reading our white paper because this is majorly different than anything else that you know out there. Far more robust, scalable.

B (48:15)

I mean and going back to your point about these fines and stuff, you have to ask the question from the company's perspective, how much is it worth it to avoid having those constant fees? Because we see it happen a lot where something happens. They have to pay a fine, they get in trouble, how much is it worth to remove 99 plus of that risk? And they're going to say well if this happens on an average of, you know, let's just say it's, I don't know what the number is. Say it has happens once a day, right? Okay, that's $24 million a day. How much is it worth to you to reduce that by whatever, 99 or whatever. And they're going to say well it's probably worth us at least 23, $24 million because that's how much we're paying right now. Right.

C (49:01)

And this is, and this is exactly where we come in. Okay, right. Because, because the way that we do it, it's not trying to, you know, pump money into a growing ecosystem on the premise of, you know, if you think of like yield farming, etc, where do you think those 40 come from? Like people are, people are so weird that they think like it's just like magic money that just appears. Ultimately what it comes down to is that we are turning into a. If you bring the users, it's worth something to the company. The integration of the. Because this is open source, right? Go to GitHub, use it. So they go like, how much is it? And we go for free.

B (49:36)

Yeah.

C (49:37)

And they go like, great. What do we need to do is like you have a subscription model, maybe get yourself a couple of CCDs if you want to do sponsored transactions. Otherwise the users, you cannot just guide them towards holding some CCD in order to do all the wonderful stuff that you want to do. Right? But the beauty about this is, is also there are revenue shares, affiliate revenue shares, those guys are fighting for users. So if you figure out of how to bring this web to world that currently. So they look at you as a crypto firm, right? But if you bring them users that currently in a compliant way can interact with their content, whatever it is, gaming, gambling, adults, social, like whatever, right? You suddenly find yourself in the position where you, where you make money outside of transaction volume. And that's like, I'm, I'm at the end of the day, I'm a business guy, but I'm also a cypherpunk. Deep down, I want to see both work together. Right now if you look at every single foundation out there, it's all just based on the premise of loads of transactions, use the gas and ultimately, you know, sell some coin. We don't position ourselves that way. This is a revenue generating foundation, which is nuts if you, if you think about it.

B (50:44)

So yeah, yeah, no, you're right, it is nuts, man. And that's what fascinates me so much about this stuff is that we get to see it grow. And I mean I love doing the podcast because we get to see crypto grow and every single year we're getting closer and closer and closer and we get to speak to people like yourself who are actually building this from the ground up, talking to businesses, talking with companies and regulators and like the actual countries themselves about making this stuff happen. And we get this like just this close up zoomed in view of what's going on. And I mean you all have shipped a lot this year. What would you consider your biggest milestone so far?

C (51:26)

I think, look, you have to kind of go to the point of like, like I very much restructured the entire business. You know, there's a completely new management team that came on and then we just went to work on the premise of like PLTs like those protocol level issuance situation that didn't exist. So we built that and Then we just basically went out in order to start create an ecosystem around it. So we're very much focused in and around PSPs, like Payment Service providers that got like thousands of merchants behind them and they see revenue drops right now because of the age gating mainly and people like, you know, if you think of the adult content world, it's like there are three options, right? And you have to kind of ask yourself the question. So it kind of comes to product specifications as well. And what I mean there is, you know, number one is send your passport. No thank you, why do I want them to have my passport? Number two is like a, you know, selfie with AI age estimation a bit weird while you, you know, hold your thing and then. And then second of all. Or the third option is a button that says Anonymous verification. Which one are you inclined to press? I know which one I'm pressing.

B (52:35)

Yeah, probably the anonymous.

C (52:36)

There you have a user. There you have a user. At this point there is no. Now hook your, hook your ID app or the wallet up to this pool and start swapping, whatever that's. That stuff's not mentioned. Right, so. So we've done that. We have. So PSPs are very high up and most of it was really just announced in Q3, sorry, Q4, because the first three quarters were really just building, building, building. We were quite quiet around there. And then of course the wallets, that was a big one as well, like Bitcoin.com, ledger, SFL, Coin98, just to mention a few. Because that's also hundreds of millions of like about 110 million users right there. Then you have, you know, we're thinking about things like more broader kyc, but in a privacy preserving way. Meaning that you just do it once and then, you know, think of a world where you just rock up to chase on the homepage. You scan a QR code and the accounts open in a second. Right. Because of reliance of KYC, etc. Then you have what else? Yeah, I mean ecosystem, you know, exchanges and stuff like this kind of came to it. But it was all kind of only in Q4. The stuff that I'm really excited about is going to happen in like January, February, March, like Q1 and Q2 should be very big the way that I see it right now in terms of just pure adoption on our side. So yeah, that's just to mention a few things. There is a plethora more. Just follow us on the socials, you'll see it all.

B (54:13)

I guess if we flip the question on its head and say, hey, let's fast forward a year and a half advance 12 months down the road. What do you hope that Concordium is known for?

C (54:24)

Concordium is what my hope is. Yeah, yeah. Because you never know. Right. I want to be known as the privacy preserving verification layer for the, for the traditional world as well as the crypto world because we can also, you know, have verification capabilities for other chains. So you just build it into the transaction. As long as you have a Concordium ID that address is verified. Do you see what I mean?

B (54:48)

Yep.

C (54:49)

So we, I have no interest in order. Coming back to the point. Right. I'm no interest in order to piss into the pond of, of Ethereum or Solana. They should do what they want to do. But if the regulator says hey, how about the verification on that front for whatever use case there is, you can do that. The other side I think also which is something that we just announced a couple of weeks ago and I think we're going to be doing more and more of it. Well, I don't think I know is what we've done with the X402 foundation like Coinbase's, Coinbase's setup in and around agentic payments. So in an agentic economy where you've got like agents running around doing all sorts of things, you need to verify that they actually have been, you know, green lighted by ultimately a human. And we've built that already out. So that's out there. So you just need to look it out. But it's like ultimately Concordium should be there as the verification and smart money layer for real world applications.

B (55:45)

Yeah. And the cool thing is that I mean privacy is on the rise. You look at it, it is on the rise right now. I know in recent years there's been regulation and there's been fears. You know, is this stuff even going to be allowed? Let me tell you, things are looking bright for it. I mean if you haven't seen, if you're, you may be newer to crypto, you're not super into it. Just look at the privacy sector lately and some of like, like if nothing else, if you're not going to look at adoption, if you're not going to look at regulation, if you're not going to read through any of that. I mean just look at the price of some of these privacy related charts. It is nuts. Like Zcash for example, they did like 2000% in a couple months time. Like there's a lot of attention coming towards the space.

C (56:24)

No, I mean we, we, we We've also done several hundred. And now with everything happened, you know, it all came back rightly so, but it's like also the important thing is, and I think there is something that needs to be mentioned on this as much as also like zcash to a certain extent. But there is a difference between anonymity and privacy. Yes, there is a massive difference. There is a massive difference. And the difference is completely shielded transactions. Nobody knows anything. The regulator will never. Which is also why you see like zcash from certain times, like even Binance shut it down. Right? Yep. The deposits there is. There is the fact however, if you want to go down the list, if you want to look for somebody that is compliance ready, if you think about it. And I never thought of myself of talking a lot about compliance, trust me. But it's like if you want to have real world adoption, you need to strike that balance and anybody out there right now, even though you know, we're not that known yet, there is if you dive, dive deeper and you actually really unpack. If you look at, you know, coingecko in the privacy sector, we're like in the top five, right? Zcash number one. And then you kind of go down the list. SECE, zinc, etc. Etc. But if it comes to the fact of the capabilities, if you boil it down and it's also quite. I'm a fan of simplicity identity on the base layer, protocol level issuance abstracting away all the risks of smart contracts. The stuff that you can do with this, just like you said earlier, is endless. Endless. You can build new defi. Which I would love to call newfi. Right. Where you. Where you basically say it's not built on the fact of you having to send funds into a smart contract anymore, you keep them. It's a locking mechanism, right. There are so many things that you could do. But yeah, I completely agree with you the privacy. And it's interesting how all the core things are coming back, right? This zero knowledge proofs was the core idea about everything that this industry basically stands for. It just evolved so quickly that we need to try, you know, trade apes and punks and stuff and then eventually kind of reverts back to the mean. Just like any market, you're either imbalance or out of balance. I think that the privacy thing in terms of real world adoption, but not disregarding the compliance angle is the only way that we can win. And then subsequently we hopefully find ourselves in a ccash way. But you still have to deal with bad actors and that's you know, if you think of like what we can do and geofencing side of things. Yeah, transaction goes through. But tether or circle that is issuing on Concordium says it's not allowed to touch anything from North Korea. North Korean wallet transaction would just not go through. Right. So that's ultimately what it comes down to. It's just logical, simplistic ways of thinking about it. And yeah, tooling is the other side.

B (58:59)

Right, Absolutely. Well, Boris, really appreciate you coming on here. For all the listeners out there who want to get plugged in, they want to follow yourself and what Concordium's doing, where can they find you at everywhere.

C (59:14)

You know, there are the telegram groups, we're on X, of course, just at Concordium, you find us there, you have discord. Anything that you can possibly do, go to concordium.com you find us there. And it gives you very detailed also like the entire tech road map, like the Full Monty and yeah, follow us on the socials because that's where we are. You know, we're banging out stuff daily now. So it would be great for you to follow us.

B (59:43)

Absolutely. Well, once again, Boris, AKA Triple B, thank you for, thank you for coming on with us. We know the audience enjoyed the this one and that's going to wrap us up, everyone. So thank you all for tuning in to another awesome episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. And we'll see all of you on the next one at the same time, same place next week.

D (60:13)

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