Institutions Want Tokens - How is Ethereum Keeping Up?
Transcript
We suggest that you start at the Bob introduction.
Small talk. Waiting for attendees
[0:02] Redwan: What are you using? I use Restream. We try to do something, and it's streamed on Twitter. I think YouTube and LinkedIn at the same time.
[0:10] Victor: So we're using Streamyard too. We're using Streamyard, and I'm just stuck with JavaScript.
[0:16] Bob: We have been screwing around with different tools trying to find anything that seems a bit.
[0:26] Redwan: I'll share the one. I don't know if you've tried this one, but this one looks pretty cool, pretty great.
[0:30] Bob: Because you're thinking, there must be good software for this, right? It's such a common need. Isn't there just an answer that just works?
[0:39] Redwan: But the thing is, those platforms, they're not built with interoperability in mind.
[0:43] Bob: They don't like it. They want to trap you in.
[0:44] Redwan: Yeah, exactly. X, especially. So that's against our vision.
[0:50] Kieren: On X, there isn't even a means to download the bloody audio. Yeah. Why would you want to download it?
[0:57] Redwan: You know, that's something, I guess, the next step in maybe like five years.
[1:00] Bob: You want to use it somewhere else? Are you seeing somebody else?
[1:04] Redwan: Be able to own your data, you know, on those platforms. Even on a query or just access.
Something I love about Google is, like, I can go, I can activate, you know, like the tracking, you know? But at least I can go and say, what did I do that week? I went in front of that restaurant or that store.
It was pretty nice. And I can go and see and check. I have access to that.
It can be helpful. But most of the things, they have like thousands of data, but they don't even share it with you.
[1:31] Victor: Yeah, exactly.
[1:33] Redwan: I find it quite well.
Bob introduction
[1:38] Victor: 5:01, oh, yeah. We are live, so we are live. No, no, no, I'm ready.
No, but that was a good cold intro, right? So we have a very special guest today, but a special format because all of us together for a change in real life. In the same room.
[1:58] Bob: In the same room.
[1:59] Victor: And you are a special guest. Do you want to intro? Yeah, sure.
[2:02] Bob: So, yeah, we have here today with us Redwan Meslem, Meslem, who is the Executive Director of the EEA, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which all of us at this table have had a hand and a part in over the years.
[2:21] Kieren: Healthy run.
[2:22] Victor: Yes, exactly.
[2:23] Kieren: So, yeah, it's like it's eight years now.
[2:26] Bob: It was in 2017. Yeah, February 2017 was the launch date on the 28th.
[2:30] Kieren: There was pre-work solidly before, at least three months, maybe more.
[2:34] Bob: There were meetings I was part of in December and January. There were, I mean, those were the first big meetings, right, you know, with whatever, 30, 40 people, crazy amounts.
But yeah, like it really started probably at DEVCON 2, really. Those were the discussions. So that was Shanghai, October.
[2:56] Kieren: There was the kickoff meeting at the JP Morgan office, which was pretty big. And even before, they were the closed door meetings at Microsoft.
[3:07] Bob: Right, so that public launch was February.
But December, there was an internal like one. And then JP Morgan was in January of 2017.
But yeah, like a lot of those initial contacts had happened at DEVCON 2 in October the previous year.
[3:26] Victor: Well, in the DEVCON 2. Yeah, so like basically there was a lot of conversations there about figuring out how to bring on enterprises too. And there were a lot of interested parties. And yeah, like the group of people, which was I think about six people that were interested, met at like a Starbucks just off site.
And that was sort of the idea formation thing about the…
[3:58] Bob: And then Matt Spoke of Nuco held a little bar side event as well, which we have some technical issues. Oh, okay.
[4:16] Victor: Hold on a second. I'm just going to push you. Insist to tell everybody.
We have a technical issue, everybody. I can, I will fix that. Oh, did I?
I messed up the Twitter. You did a bad one. Yeah, I did a bad one.
So everyone, please join us on YouTube. Spaces at 5 a.m. Right.
[4:36] Bob: But yeah, Matt Spoke, held a little event at one of the bars upstairs, which I went to and there were various others there. If you went to that as well.
[4:45] Victor: I didn't go to that one.
So I think it's, I think the main thing was that, yeah, so I think the main thing, I'm going to try and fix this right now on Twitter. Live technical support, see if I can resolve it right now. If not, I did choose a…
[5:09] Bob: But also parallel in that, because I was still working for the Ethereum Foundation at the time was that there was like an enterprise Slack set up there, which was actually started by Vitalik, who afterwards said people kept badgering him about enterprise stuff. So at some point he just dumped them all in a stack, in a Slack and ran away.
Yeah. That was the technique. So that was not quite the same group.
It was a larger group that's slightly different.
[5:41] Victor: Nuco was part of that.
Also… By the way, we should introduce ourselves. We should.
[5:49] Bob: Yeah, hi, I'm Bob Summerwill. I'm Head of Ecosystem at STRATO Mercata.
[5:56] Kieren: Kieren James-Lubin, CEO of BlockApps.
[5:56] Victor: Victor Wong.
[5:59] Kieren: Creators of STRATO Mercata.
[6:00] Victor: Yeah, and Victor Wong, Chief Product Officer of BlockApps.
So, sorry, back…
[6:06] Bob: But yeah, AMIS as well. Do you remember that?
[6:10] Kieren: Yeah. Oh yeah. We should check in on, I haven't thought of AMIS until…
No. In like several years until the moment.
[6:16] Bob: So the interesting thing about what they were doing, so that was like some Taiwan bank consortium thing.
But then they did like work on like Chinese cryptography and stuff. Like they've got differing requirements, right? And Masterchain, which was in Russia, that was like a Sberbank thing.
[6:44] Redwan: I have a question for you, it's interesting. Because you have, you know, I was not at the EEA at that time. And so it's very interesting for me to, you know, what were the hopes and really excitement that you see, you know, you were part of those early conversations, this was created, 13, I think, companies.
It's like a pretty, it was a pretty big event, you know. As you mentioned, you know, like JP Morgan and everything, all those big names coming into the ecosystem. And what were the hopes and really like the overall like atmosphere, you know, when the year was created, I think?
[7:13] Bob: Yeah, well, I mean, so, I mean, consensus were very critical as well. Because, you know, they were doing a load of the enterprise like engagement stuff, right? You've got many, many companies like starting to get interested in, hey, you know, we want to do a pilot, we want to get involved.
So consensus, we're doing a lot of those. So they ended up having a lot of those connections and bringing those in together. But yeah, you know, over those months, you really have like, they've got a hell of a lot of momentum really, really quick.
So the observation during DevCon too, when the idea was hatched was basically that, at least at the innovation lab level, a lot of the enterprises were just using and forking their own flavor of Ethereum. They had like hacked their own consensus algorithms and security and- Many guests. Many guests, indeed.
We learned later that like a lot of JP Morgan's forum was initially built by Jeff Wilkie. He had like some kind of- And that was not announced at the time of DevCon too. That was still behind the scenes for a few months.
That happened just before the EA started. But yeah, you got all of this stuff brewing up, I mean, for years earlier. Like if you think of like RSDB that became Monax, that became Hyperledger Burrow.
So that was a permissioned Ethereum client off POC5 pre-mainnet. Yeah. Mid-2014 of sticking in Tendermint onto an EVM.
So yeah, like, you know, it was all a bit smished apart, but it was like the time is right for us to work together because we've all got the same needs. Us too. We had our own client and it got used in a bunch of the consensus consulting engagements at that time.
And we started even then kind of tuning it for enterprise. And so I guess the idea was like, well, maybe enterprises won't adopt if there isn't a standard for all of this new stuff that they need that's above and beyond the base. Well, I think it was even beyond that.
Like there was just tons of technical work going on in individual companies siloed to get like Ethereum to do what they wanted to do in a private way. So everyone was like holding on these things. And what came out of that, those early conversations at DevCon was, wait, like we're all doing similar things.
Maybe if we all kind of work together, we could do it faster and get this up fast. And that was all around private Ethereum. And I guess also like a marriage between like kind of customers of these things and builders of saying, you've got all these kind of startup-y kind of companies that are making Ethereum and things.
And you've obviously got big demand from really major enterprises to have this, but yeah, on that standardization side, it was like nothing. And it's like, you're all gonna get vendor locked like instantly, and it'll all just be arbitrarily different and painful and horrible. So let's try and work out.
Because, well, at some point as well with Quorum, it was kind of like, are we gonna like collaboratively do code bases as well? Like, Hyperledger was another piece into this is that a few months earlier, I've spent a bunch of time working on C++ relicensing, C++ client to get back to Apache 2. So it could have been contributed into Hyperledger and we could have like gathered around that.
That fucked up. So the EEA was kind of a backup, I guess. And like, right, we can't have this grand fusion, but there's enough happening on the Ethereum side that we can at least get all the Ethereum pieces together and then, yeah, I guess it went quite quickly from, okay, we don't want to straight compete with Hyperledger.
Having a shared code base also kind of like screws up the companies. So I think, let me, you know, in the spirit of spiciness, I think the enterprise users would have preferred a shared code base and they wanted to commoditize any difference among the startups out of existence so that they could never be vendor locked again. They've had these horrific, you know, IBM nightmares, Oracle nightmares over the years.
And they're just like, not this time. We're not going to live through this. I mean, also, you know, you have got that market pressure, right, of Corda coming out, of IBM launching Fabric.
They were worried it would end up that kind of nominally open source, but quite proprietary. So those were both shooting for release in February, 2017. So it's that kind of timeline is like, right, we've got to get our shit together to be able to do like an Ethereum product thing that can have some hope against IBM and R3.
Also, DA at that time, I remember one of our prominent enterprise user, EA members said, you know, yeah, they've got a call with, you know, 300 people on it every week, trying to sell into the big banks, let's say. And it's funny that all of the, like Ethereum just survived all of this, more or less not paying any attention. And like, you know, this competition kind of came in.
Well, I think there was another parallel thing that was happening. At that DevCon, really were like the first, like the kind of enterprise use cases we talk about today. Like, for example, Santander talked about, you know, US dollar on chain, which we all recognize as a stable coin now.
And we actually had a design for, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[13:31] Redwan: But you see, Victor, I think that's a very cool parallel. Like you've set the stage pretty well for like, you know, where it's coming from.
[13:38] Bob: Yeah.
[13:39] Redwan: And then where it started, you mentioned, you know, innovation labs, like starting to contribute to some codes. We've known like the use cases that blockchain and Ethereum can solve for a long time. But it's only actually now, and it's been for probably like for the last year that things have been really changing drastically.
And to take, you know, like your words for, when you say innovation lab, it's not innovation lab anymore looking at, you know, how they implement blockchain in their ecosystem. It's really like executive team that say, hey, we want to plan what is the production, like how we get it to market.
[14:16] Bob: Thankfully, like they're scared now. So like they better move or else.
[14:21] Redwan: I mean, I don't know if it's like, no, there is, but there were some interesting, some interesting talk, you know, like when we were at Cybose, like the SWIFT conference.
[14:28] Bob: Yeah, we should mention that because like, you were just at Cybose and you're dealing with like, what we think of as tried by institutional players. And that's, you know, where you have a lot of communication. So like, what were your impressions about where they're at with that?
Because that's the other side that we talk about.
[14:47] Redwan: The digital asset tokenization is definitely a hot topic. Everyone is looking because they know it's happening. They want to be involved and it's more.
And now, especially like there's less, there's less like regulatory, you know.
[15:06] Bob: The listeners may not know what Cybose is.
[15:08] Redwan: Oh yeah. So Cybose is the big SWIFT conference. SWIFT, if you're not familiar is, it's a messaging system that a lot of, 11,000 financial institution around the world.
It's actually a co-op. It's a DAO for tried by. Kudos to Danielle from ConsenSys who said that to me once.
It is a DAO.
[15:27] Bob: Although it's like, can we buy in now?
[15:29] Redwan: I feel like, you know, it's not, I guess it's restricted.
[15:32] Bob: Yeah, you know, like token gated.
[15:34] Redwan: But the token is having probably a bank license.
[15:37] Bob: The London Metal Exchange is like this too. It's like, you want to sign up, you got to like buy a bunch of shares and like, you know, then there's an annual fee and whatnot. And you have to like put someone there all the time.
You have to join the trade guild. Yes. I think that you've got to do your.
Yes.
[15:54] Redwan: Exactly. And so that big conference is the, it's a big make of payment, I would say every year. So you have all the big financial institution, also like, you know, global financial institution, like, you know, like clearing house, settlements, like your work here, the TCC, et cetera, but also like all the banks.
And they gather here and there is a lot of conversation. What is very interesting is actually Salvos and Swift is a very like kind of standard organization. Because what they do is like how we make sure like we send messaging across all of us that everyone is sure is going to understand.
And so they used to have a different like kind of messaging format. And recently now they're migrating to something new, which is how ISO 222.
[16:37] Bob: Okay.
[16:37] Redwan: Which is if you want to go and dive deeper into this, this is really like the, how every financial institution want to discuss. They've been working on that spec for a long time. And that's how anything that can touch finance from securities to payment, like they have to be qualified.
[16:54] Bob: Yeah, I think it's good to explain. So like most of finance gets cleared through messaging. And it's like, so crypto people are used to like putting a transaction in and then it goes everywhere.
Yes. It's not really like this.
[17:08] Redwan: Oh, yes. Thank you. Indeed, that's a very key point.
Is that the process of what we call delivery versus payment in traditional finance, it's a pretty complex thing because how you make sure like when you deliver the money, the money has been received, that you receive the asset, that everything has been, and it's a kind of a lot of dance because you receive message, you send another one. And it's not like how we used to do where in crypto, we submit and it's actually an atomic transaction, which is like just one thing. And when the transaction is complete, you know it's been executed, it's been delivered.
And all the parties that is actually, I give you the can, well, I know you've been giving me like the money exactly. Where actually there is like a little bit dance, well, I put the can here, like you see the can, then it's been moving here, like you send the money. And so the blockchain here offers such efficiencies because things that were like, you know, like the T plus one or T plus two for some of those different exchange.
Now you do it like, well, depending on what chain you're gonna deploy between a second to even like less than that.
[18:19] Kieren: Yeah.
[18:19] Bob: And also SWIFT isn't a payments mechanism, right?
[18:23] Kieren: No, it's a messaging mechanism. That's another comment.
[18:26] Bob: So let me, I think, interject with this specific example. I think they're biggest in FX, right? Yes.
So let's say I've got some USD, I want some Euro. And we kind of like agree to a USD Euro trades. And so we like, I guess we look up whatever the pair is trading at.
And I think it's like, I send my side of the trade with some unique ID to SWIFT and you do too. And then SWIFT like checks if it matches. It charges like seven bucks either way.
If it does match, then it'll like tell us that it matched.
[19:04] Redwan: Well, I don't think it's actually exactly this way. It's more SWIFT offer a type of envelope and a format of envelope and paper and ink that we know how to use and how we're supposed to fill up some forms. Then how we trade those forms between different market participants, it's not much, you know, like the people, like they're going to be some, you know, corresponding banking that's going to be like locally, they can do cash and they're going to, everyone is going to take their share.
[19:31] Bob: It's not moving the asset. It's just, it's like, like I have the USD on my bank list.
[19:38] Redwan: You've got the Euro on your bank list. Talking to each other in a secure and compliant way for, cause it's also, oh, you send that, you have to send like some specific messaging for like compliance that, then I send another one saying, hey, I checked there's information and you know, you.
[19:54] Bob: A bunch of like local jurisdiction specific. Yeah, it's like a lot of different handshakes, you know, like all these things. Yeah, I think the way someone described it's like a.
Funny TCP handshake. Yeah, it's sort of like what they're doing is tracking the transfers, but no money is actually moving. And then they have a list of IOUs.
So like when I send a SWIFT transaction to from like, let's say I send a hundred dollars to you in France and I go to my bank, I put in a hundred dollars, the money doesn't go anywhere. It just.
[20:28] Redwan: Well, yeah, so the bank has to write USD off my ledger. The net at the end of the day.
[20:33] Bob: Yeah, so they write the Euro off.
[20:35] Redwan: RTGS that's going to do like the transfer actually. So it's like a different messaging. Like if you research and I'm not a SWIFT expert, but I have to learn over the last couple of months, you know, I've done like a little bit more like deep dive and it's fascinating because there's such a huge dense, you know, between, you know, like two transfer of money because you have the money in your bank account, but then you actually central bank money.
Then you have like the deposit money. So like those, like what you call like M0, M1, M2. And so all of that is pretty, pretty complex.
And then we're just talking about payments here, you know, talking about, you know, securities or like those other like financial instrument that you can exchange also using blockchain in a very efficient way. But that's, you know, using Stablecoin, you can make everything super simple. And also one misconception, maybe I would love to mention is like, you know, like we talked about Stablecoin and CBDCs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They actually exactly the same thing, but it's just in a different context. A CBDC is a stable coin for central bank.
[21:36] Bob: And- It's just the issuer.
[21:37] Redwan: It's just the issuer is not the same as, you know, we never gonna really touch that CBDCs because this is like the money of banks, if you say. But almost, I think from a technical level, it's very like, almost like a copy paste of the same contract mechanism. It's not, but we create like a whole different language and terminology for that.
But they're actually very similar. And funny fact, those CBDCs, they've been doing, you know, like the, I think the baby needed to grow. You know, you said DEF CON 2.
So it was a two years old kid, Ethereum. And we were like, hey, come in here. You can manage like the most critical infrastructure of the planet, which is our money and how we do trade.
And you can do all of this. And I think like the Ethereum Foundation, I have to give them credit. Like they, yes, for a long time, they were saying, hey guys, you're not considering the enterprise, everything.
But I think they did the right thing because they protected, you know, like that baby. So it could grow and become like, you know, now we had an age of, you know, it's more mature. It's more than 10 years.
It's still like not even a teenager. Like the analogy was like, was human is going to take some limits. But we are at a point now where we have a technology and Ethereum is really a capacity to answer all the challenges that are like facing, you know, that we're blocking re-institution to adopt, which is, you know, while scalability, privacy, you know, like composability and interoperability, you know.
Like the four points that you had in the ARC paper for from Circle. And now we have this, you know, like just last week, you know, ZK Sync announced like up to 15,000 TPS. And there is some new thing that almost every week going on.
So really like now, like the technology, when they come up and say, well, I need to make sure like this is private. I need to make sure like this is going to, you know, be like be executed in a seamless way. Also like the decentralization, it's more about the way they look at it.
It's more like the vendor locking. I would say the best analogy is that you want to make sure the infrastructure you rely on is going to be able to absorb your activity, but also be resilient enough. This we still have some work because it's definitely, and I understand the perspective of institution to deploy on a like public infrastructure.
You know, at first when Wikipedia showed up, like, you know, 20, 25 years ago, something like that, I think. I mean, I remember I was at my engineering college. I was at the board and we were talking about having wiki, you know, for doing some articles.
And they were like this very academic guy said, this is unacceptable. It's not, hold on, French accent.
[24:27] Victor: This is unacceptable. We never are going to do this. This is, anyone can put any information.
This is not trust.
[24:34] Bob: To be clear, you are French. Yeah.
[24:37] Redwan: You're allowed to, you're allowed to. And so, but they were in French. Like they were very like, you know, and protecting this.
And at that time I said, well, we can trust, you know, something that's being built collectively like this. But now we know you have to take a grain of salt, but it's actually much more accepted, you know, like that those are like reliable source of information and that you can have things that are being built publicly that are actually very resilient.
[25:02] Bob: I mean, so. Sorry, I was just going to ask like, but like there's always this like gap between what traditional institutions understand about, like we all understand what's been capable for a really, really long time, but are there still gaps or do you think that's been closed now? Like it's maybe grown up fully or, but like, but even if, even like when the capability is there, there's still like a knowledge gap, I think sometimes.
[25:30] Redwan: Well, let me put it this way. There is about, if you combine all the different type of money, $123 trillion of cash around the world. Right, right.
300 billions are on chain. Right. So the numbers talk for itself.
We're very early. So there is people like they can, I think we still have like a lot of work to do in terms of education, but by education, I mean, really talking from product perspective, what business problem I can solve for you, how it's going to be done, what is going to be the maintenance after, how like, how are you going to deal with a very specific use cases? And so you can have like some teams that already like have an understanding, you know, like what you can achieve.
[26:15] Bob: Yeah.
[26:15] Redwan: But we still like need to provide, I think as an ecosystem more structuring, you know, like who you can work with, what are the different vendors, what services they can do, where they can help, what's the type of contract you're going to have after. And really giving like that overall perspective of like a new entrant, you know, in the market. And so some of them, they understand very well and they have already like some pretty detailed question, you know, even like asking me, our red one, we need to increase like the contract size from a 24 to a 40, 48 kilobytes.
And we have some, you know, like those, those stack overflow issue, like well known. So yeah.
[26:55] Bob: The stack depth one that was always a problem.
[26:57] Redwan: And so there is some of them, it's this, but then some other ones in this small product, they're going to ask me, okay, why should I go on an L2? What is the L1? What does it mean?
And what about those chains? What are like the primitives, you know, explaining like, well, if you'd be on any L2s, you actually going to choose maybe one vendor in some way, but you can completely move your assets free among all the ecosystem. The wallets are going to be the same.
A lot of things are going to be equivalent that you don't have to rebuild. And so those are things, you know, like you need to explain. Some of them, maybe people, they're going to say, well, what is this?
This is just like some scammy or something like that. I think you can find all the layers, but now people, they also, they see like the potential of like what you can do with like digital assets, you know, tokenization. And for like people who are a little bit like looking around, I'm very excited to see what's going to happen in the next six to 12 months, because, you know, like Genius Act was signed July 15 or something like this.
Charity Act, I think it's still a little bit ongoing. So now we like, and we can also hear that, like there's already companies from every direction say, okay, how are we going to implement this? The FinTech is also moving.
So they're like the fact that they're building their L, even if they're building their L1, I wish they would do some L2s and my door will always be open when you want to consider that. There is a pretty great tool that can help, but that's going to push the market and from like financial institution to really like adopting this. There is an organization like DTCC, you know, like the biggest clearing house in the world, like all the securities in the world basically are being cleared over there.
They released like an incredible product like four months ago in April, like the great collateral, where they have like a collection of like hundreds of spot contract that allows you to clear and to make some margin call and collateral management from different jurisdiction, which is a fantastic use case when you see, I'm not a collateral management expert, but I understand the value, like how this unlock, you know, like you actually have some something that you can take from your bank in Japan that you're going to post for something in the US because you have a market event. And this is something you would not even imagine before.
And now you can do it and it's like compliant. It's actually like, it's legal. And then that's going to unlock so much efficiencies.
And so that's in the next like 12 months, that's going to be like a huge game changer.
[29:39] Bob: So it sounds like, you know, the lid has been lifted off and there's a ton of demand, but it's like walking down the path to supply that demand. That's the part that people are figuring out, right? Like, is that right?
[29:52] Redwan: Like, is that how you put it? I think it's such a very transformative technology for how those business operate. There is also how I'm going to make money.
[30:02] Bob: Okay. So there's a fear element to it, right? Like, at least that's…
[30:07] Redwan: It's like, well, now I can have like chat, like I'm a PSP provider.
[30:13] Bob: Let me ask you this. So in the early days, it felt like there was a focus on more like back office use cases. Like, yeah, how do I move the collateral from like my Japan regional branch to my, you know, whatever.
Business process improvements. Business process improvements. And I've felt that there's eventually became a, I think this started like 2020, 2021, a shift for big corporations wanting top line use cases.
Like Nike was the first to like sell a ton of NFTs. And then you're seeing like, I think like the digital asset treasuries are a kind of genius way for a token to like, like the company doesn't have to IPO, but like there could be a token and there can be something that's, and provides the traditional protections of equity that's publicly traded. And then you didn't, you could just leave this part sort of where it was.
And somehow there's kind of like a merger going on. And, you know, this is a, creating good top line revenue for investment banks and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So like, is your, is your sense that people want the efficiency to compete or like, are they starting to think about it as like a new revenue line or, you know, like a transformed revenue line or something?
[31:45] Redwan: Well, that's a billion trillion dollar question right there. I don't have like the answer. What I could say is I see, I see how, like, I think if you look at, you know, operational optimization, it's more than that.
If your capital flow more seamlessly, you make more money in a financial system. So the more you have a flow of your money easy, the more you're going to be able to make some, because you're going to unlock, you know, some capital improvement. Yet, I think from like conversation I've seen and where like the, still don't have like the golden goose say, hey, that's going to remix a little bit of like all the different people and intermediaries and people working.
Because if you suddenly have something that is being done in a much more efficient way, well, some different intermediates, then they might have like to rethink of where, like the way of doing their business. This is not going to happen from one day to another. What I can say is that, because we're going to have those new form of working with digital assets, that's going to be more like a golden era for like opportunities to be like, to be a pretty fantastic product.
And the people that understand pretty well the ethos of the like Ethereum ecosystem and also like blockchain in general. And like some operation in traditional finance and be able to bridge those two, you're going to be able to bring like some amazing product. And that's what we see a little bit more with convergence, you know, of Aave, that is that doing like a collateral product with Horizon and knocking, you know, like you have like figure, like you have a spike or you have some of like, how as we're going to have like now, some assets that are on chain that maybe you can loan and you can collateralize and you can borrow money and you can have some liquidity in front of those assets while being the actual, like, and also like, I want to stress, like we do, we say RWAs, RWAs, RWAs. There is a lot of, we need probably to find some new language because there is- You know how I feel about that.
[33:57] Bob: I think the RWA term is so broad.
[33:59] Redwan: Yeah, we need, this can be a RWA.
[34:02] Bob: Yeah.
[34:03] Redwan: Okay. And I can also take a picture of my, I guess, my bank account and say, hey, this is a tokenization of my bank account. Like, you know, and so there is all of the U.S., but most of them, they actually kind of elaborate IOUs. And not like, and now we're moving towards more and more having some of the standards and like things like the, it's the legal, like- Yeah, you want the native issuers.
[34:28] Bob: Yeah, exactly.
[34:29] Redwan: The token is the legal claim to the asset. And that's, when this happens and when like focusing on that, that's going to unlock some pretty incredible things. Because it's like the, and you connect this with DeFi, maybe with some, you're going to always need some form of AML, KYC, and everything, like the DeFi, like the like, you know, there's none for the last year.
They're probably going to have like two of those, but once you connect this, I think that's going to be pretty incredible.
[35:03] Bob: But how did the institutions feel about like, obviously as the head of the EA, and you feel strongly about Ethereum too, right? Like the Ethereum ecosystem broadly of L1 tokens. Like, how do they feel about that?
Do they see any other, you know, like we know that Ripple has tried to attract that interest for a really long time. Like, are they kind of sold on Ethereum at this point, or are they looking, are they still kind of needing to be convinced?
[35:30] Redwan: Wow. I've heard like several executive at presentation at CYBOS saying here, you know, like, Ethereum is the standard, you know, EVM is the standard. This is the ecosystem.
Having said that, and as, you know, decision makers, they also want to make sure like they keep the door open and not being locked. So they move progressively. You know, 60% of the stable coin issuance is on Ethereum.
I think probably 85 to 90% of all WAs, it's the same. Some similar statistics about DeFi activities. That's, you know, like electric capital, like you can see a graph like three times more like that.
And then the other ecosystem in terms of like builders and everything. So that's the most radiant and advanced, you know, ecosystem in terms of research on every, every facet. And so that's, they know, they recognize.
But it doesn't mean that we need to keep educating, to keep like, you know, working with the EF for instance, like they've been incredible work for the last few months of really like packaging the message in a better way that can be more digestible. But there's more like some work for instance, like, you know, like the protocol team, they're already addressing so many of the fear, like can have some different like, you know, digital asset manager in financial institution. But how we bring that message to the right people, package it in a way that it's easy to understand.
That's some of the work that is being done as we speak. And that's gonna really help, you know, continuing solidifying, you know, like that dominance position. But to also answer your question, like some of those institutions, they say, hey, we wanna be multi-chain.
We wanna look at everything, which I think it's absolutely fair. And I would do the same if I were in their shoe. So, okay, well, they have some different assessment, you know, criteria and they say, well, we're gonna take this chain, this chain, this chain, this chain.
And then we'll see.
[37:22] Bob: I mean, beyond EVM, I mean, you've obviously got competition between Ethereum and other EVM flavors. What is the competition outside of that? Because I know there's, you know, you've obviously got competition within that, but are institutions doing non-EVM things as well?
There's like cantons around. I don't know what they're using. Like do institutions use Solana at all?
Well, I know, but does DA still have its own, like big proprietary-ish stack? It's not proprietary anymore, but it's, yeah. Well, Hedera.
Okay, I'm using Hedera. What do you hear? Competitive.
[38:11] Redwan: Kenton is probably the one that most advanced in terms of like, you know, connection with the rest of the ecosystem. And I would say that not the rest, but the traditional finance. They have like a way, it's structured though.
It's something I still don't completely understand. You can be validators, have some tokens that they're gonna exchange on some private market. And so some form of revenue.
And then they have already like that. It's a consortium, you know, like Socorro P2, I would say. And they've been able to bring into their governance like a lot of the different financial institutions.
So, but then once again, and if you ask me, I'm biased, of course, but this is an ecosystem. Like here's a Kenton code is open source and everything, but well, you still building on a technology that is not super like very, like there's not a lot of people, you know? Like when are you gonna be like the CIO of a company and you need to have some maintenance or something, it's gonna be what, like 20 guys in a country that can do some work on this?
And so that's the way I look at this. But like the, I think like Solana, I'm not sure it was the institution.
[39:31] Bob: I don't hear anything institutional from Solana, but it seems popular nonetheless. Oddly enough, like Ripple has been trying to do this for a long time, but I don't hear them brought up in the conversation that much anymore. Nobody ever used Ripple.
[39:47] Redwan: I've been in blockchain, not as long as you guys, but really since 2019. And I spent like almost four years at Chainsafe, very authentic, like, you know, builders, like crypto native protocol development. And I've been to conferences, you know, with the engineers and I asked them in a very candid way, I'd say, have you ever built on Ripple or on some other?
And I had conversation with the engineers at Chainsafe and we had some polls and we had some conversation in the Slack, I remember, and no one really came up with some very mocked, just got an infinite war chest for marketing and lobbying.
[40:29] Bob: I mean, at one point, one of the cybers I went to years and years ago, right? Ripple was supposed to have a huge brew and you know, like, I guess we have decided, oh, they're too much of a competitor. So they kicked them out.
And this was- They were calling themselves the Swift killer. They decided, like Ripple decided, you know what? We're just going to run our own conference in parallel with Cypos.
They put a parallel conference and Vitalik was speaking at their conference. And I remember- At the Ripple one? At the Ripple one.
And I remember- They had buses in front of the Cypos conference, like taking you to where their new conference was. And I remember like seeing Vitalik, like run across, like looking for this conference because like it was in this new place and like we're all trying to- I remember like waving him like, over here Vitalik, over there. So it's- Corda?
Ripple's still using Corda? Archery?
[41:32] Redwan: Like it's being bought out by Selena. Corda and Selena- I don't think they would- Really?
[41:36] Bob: I don't think they would actually in those terms. I think it's a partnership and a collaboration. So we're not absolutely, absolutely they weren't bought by.
Not bought out, but yes, but. I mean, I will say- Anyone using Fabric still?
[41:55] Redwan: Well, yes, behind the scene, like the Fabric is still like very present, you know, I think central banks and those type of more very close environment, you know, even like, I'm not sure, BIS, we know Bank of International Settlement, which is, you know, for those who don't know, it's like 40 different international banks that work together to optimize, I would say like the collaboration and exchange. But they had like a project Agora that they started a couple of like months ago. Those are like institution where it takes like much longer time, I think.
That's starting a new project? No, it's not the same, the same Agora. But I would imagine like, maybe they were having some POCs before.
I know some few central banks, they're running, you know, like using Fabric, you know, like the Hyperledger, the Fabric, you know.
[42:49] Bob: It's probably like the asbestos, isn't it? It's just going to take years to sort of check out. You need people in suits to like- Houses, yeah.
I will say, I think we're almost at 45 minutes. Revlon has been very generous with this time. I think they asked, do you have any final thoughts you want to share?
[43:19] Bob: So you can see that- Right, well, one of their big sell at New York Blockchain Week in 2018 was their EVM integration. Right, that they did the- Yeah, they did a channel or something. About 3.js or whatever, that they did do this bunching together. And that was using Burrow, right? Because you've got the Burrow, Burrow went into Hyperledger before Bellu, and that was the continuation of that, RSDB, Bonax, OnUend, that was never made net compatible though. But there was that Go EVM within Hyperledger under the same licensing, so they could wham those together.
And I mean, that's seven years ago. So yeah, I'm sure that they need to have an even better EVM story these days.
[44:21] Redwan: To answer your question, and EVM and Ethereum is really the standard as everyone, that's what they're saying. You go through some different stages, you have the chief innovation officer of Swift and some different institutions. They understand that.
They're like, they understand that, and that's what they're saying. I was really, everywhere I went on all those different panels, we had a panel at 8.30 on permissionless, very private network. It was hosted by Applied Blockchain, a member of the EA.
There was like Citibank, a Linux Foundation, decentralized trust, UBIX, and me. And it was, we were full, there were people setting up, and there was the Swift innovation officer, some other banks that came to talk to us. So people, they understand.
Ethereum is definitely seen as like the standard and the place where you want to build because that's where you have access to the most equity, the most users, the most vibrant DeFi ecosystem, which is something that is getting closer, I think, and say, well, maybe there is some way to make some money here. I don't know exactly how, but there is some potential. So I think the future is very bright for us.
[45:38] Bob: And I think that ties very nicely back to the start of the conversation and about the thoughts of the EA and so on was something that Jeremy Miller said in the opening speech on the opening day was think of this as being like a router, an internet intranet. There's no reason why suitably modular codebases shouldn't serve all of these use cases, public and private. And what we did not want to happen, and I remember being driven very much by this, was saying, let's not have arbitrarily different codebases for these different things because we can't be having that conversation and making the effort to try and bridge those worlds.
And that was really coming from that fabric and quarter competition of these big enterprises basically sort of being told, you Ethereum guys have got to get your stuff together or we're going to get mandated to use this other stuff. And it doesn't matter what you want. It's like the spending all have been spent and it's never coming back.
So I think it's, to my mind, it's like really superb to see where we are. It's like, that's what we were thinking. That was kind of the goal, right?
Is that this can be a standard for everything. And yeah, things were like immature and maybe you needed to be doing consortium chains and you needed to take these baby steps on the way and wait for the tech to catch up. But really it's like, this can be the answer for everything.
So I think that's where we are.
[47:19] Redwan: And we're talking more and more, like Ethereum Foundation has done an incredible job. They have like an enterprise team also like that in conversation with everyone and they have access to all the different leaders and this has been pretty fantastic. And so the more we discuss about this and say, hey, there is no CEO of Ethereum.
It's not a private company. There's no CEO of internet. Yeah, it's Linux, right?
So that's something that is like catching up more and more and the more we're going, that's also like the mission of what we do at EA, going to have this conversation, doing events, like bringing some people together from like a few events that we do when we try to really mix like DeFi, traditional finance institution, like pure Ethereum players and have all those people talking together. That's how we make that moving forward.
[48:09] Bob: Well, on that note, I think we'll wrap up, but where can people find more about you and EA in general?
[48:16] Redwan: Well, the website of, we are present on all the social media. Like the website is like entalliance.org. We have the same handle like on Twitter, on LinkedIn.
I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter and try to post, you know, like often some few articles and some insights and there's some more work that I'm going to put together in a couple of weeks around other ways and everything. And also always looking for some like large institution that would like to collaborate on some writing pieces. So we can really put some like self leadership and helping, you know, explaining what's being done.
Like, and I think bridging, you know, like the Ethereum world with a traditional finance also like something that we're pretty excited to do in a couple of weeks. Yeah, that's awesome. We'll be also in Singapore FinTech Week next month, in DEF CON in Argentina, and we'll be also in Abu Dhabi for Finance Week.
[49:09] Bob: Cool. And Bob, where can people find you? So yeah, I'm on Twitter.
Says my name, Bob Summerville with a W-I-L-L, not Ville, not Summerville. Not the German spelling of it. Yeah.
Karen? K. James Lubin on X, YouTube, et cetera.
And you can find me on X at Vic, V-I-C, the number four W-O-N-G. Thank you for joining us for our first in-person roundtable.
[49:43] Victor: Thanks again.
[49:44] Bob: It's awesome. Thanks for coming. Take care.