Paolo Tasca: CBDC, DLT Science Foundation, Hedera Governing Council, and more

In this week’s episode of the Hedera Corner, King Solomon from Genfinity is joined by Brooke Lacey, and Darren Moore to interview Paolo Tasca. With experience as a central banker, former centralized exchange operator, advisor of CBDC initiatives in multiple countries, founder of Quant, Hedera Governing Council member, and extensive experience from leading UCL’s BCT research institute and the DLT Science Foundation, the panel asked probing questions about the state of web3 and crypto and what the future might hold for the entire industry.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
What's up, everybody? Give us a couple of seconds here. We're going to get started here in a minute. Wow, what a crazy day today! So yeah, very, very excited today to say that we are going to be interviewing Paolo Tasca. He's going to be hopping in right about three, but we wanted to make sure that we kind of started this a little bit early to kind of go over all the aspects that Paolo has been involved in in the DLT crypto space. I mean, he comes from a traditional banking purview. He's been the Central Bank digital currency advisor to five or six central banks, including Canada, Colombia, Chile he is the co-founder of Quant. We'll go through his resume a little bit here in a second, but yeah, excited to also say, as we're kind of, getting everybody up here, that we're starting to try to expand out even these interviews in these spaces, you know, across different ecosystem contributors. Darren, we had on last Monday, from the XRP community, but obviously he's in other communities as well. He's an advocate for privacy and doing that work through xx and everything else. And then Brooke Lacy as well, who's, pretty well known as far as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, some of those communities also. So, we're gonna get started here in a second, but again, Paulo's gonna be coming in at three. We're going to be going over maybe some newer stuff that happened today, as well as an overview of Paulo and the ecosystem. So, and I see we do have Brooke up on the stage as well. How's it going today, Brooke?‍

Brooke Lacey
It's good. I'm so excited to be here. This is going to be great, just love getting all nerdy, and see what's gonna happen. We got some good questions. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
It's always interesting, I mean, anytime you, like, especially, I guess I'll give a little bit of a precursor, like, you know, when you end up being able to potentially interview people like this, you do need to flush some of the questions out at the onset and make sure that they at least know some of the topics that are going to be discussed and there's a lot of work on the front end that goes into this. So, I do have to give a gigantic thank you to, Darren and Brooke for being a little bit patient with me as well. I know we just kind of were in a chat for like an hour before this, nailing down flow and everything. So, thank both of you guys.‍

Brooke Lacey
Just saying it's not as easy as it looks. I think a lot of people are, you know, wonder that like, do we just, you know, pop in sometimes? Sometimes I do, but it's always better to have a flow, you know?‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, it's a lot of prep work, and then on top of it, to make it entertaining, you know, it has to have a natural vibe to it. So, we nailed down some questions and hopefully you'll be able to give us some straightforward answers. I think, you know, he's got a real lot of experience in this space and can really shed some light on some of the things that we're talking about and, maybe help us, help us focus on certain things.

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
And I think there's some, some topical stuff too that we're going to be asking him, surrounding, SEC overreach versus, you know, the United States ability to potentially compete in the DLT space moving forward. And what better time to ask that question than today when the SEC literally sues CZ and, Binance, which just came out, I think two hours ago. So, we definitely want to get into that, definitely going to get into some CBDC stuff and kind of touch base and see what he thinks as far as, you know, some of these assets natively that exist on these ledgers like hbar or XRP or ETH or Bitcoin or whatever it may be, and are they going to interact with CBDCs when they go live? You know, or CBDCs going to kill portions of some of these assets? But it'll be interesting because we really have done a lot of work at the front end to try to get some, get some good questions and answers going for you guys. ‍

Darren Moore
I see they specifically stated, BUSD as well as BNB. And kind of the issue is, if Binance is cooking their books like FTX did, like what happens with BNB's token if they levered BNB's token to buy other assets? You know, you could have another FTX type of situation. We don't necessarily know. There's a lot of speculation going on, but I'm watching BNB's chart really closely and seeing how everything reacts if we break below some key levels. You know, we, there's a lot of air underneath BNB's chart.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Yeah, and I know one of the other things that we were going to ask him is, or at least Darren, that I know that you wanted to ask is, there going to be a potential for any of these Central Bank digital currencies to either be issued on or interact with public ledgers? And I know that I shared earlier, there was a, this might have been like over the weekend, but MUFG, which is the largest bank in Japan, just announced bank-backed stablecoin issuance, on Ethereum, on Cosmos, on Avalanche, and on Polygon. So, it's pretty interesting, like, when you try to shake out these types of questions and then you see, I mean, this is the same thing that's happened to us for years, Darren, but, you know, you see like research that, like, has, you know, synergy with like questions and it always, like, comes full circle almost in this space, which is, I always find really interesting.‍

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
I think it's also, and hello everyone, but I think it's also going to be very interesting because for those of you that are not very familiar with Paulo's work and his background, right, I mean, on top of the DLT Science Foundation, all the work that he's done, with CBDCs and central banks all around the world, he also founded the biggest research center for blockchain in the world, which is out of UCL. So, it's going to be very interesting to hear his thoughts because obviously, in terms of the CBDC conversation in the US, we've seen, you know, both sides of the aisle kind of bringing up concerns about CBDCs and how that might look like. And it's going to be very interesting to hear his input and also what he's hearing from other countries besides the US, because we know that obviously in Europe, there's been some, I guess movements with the introduction of Mica, and also, like, in the Middle East and Asia, it seems like they're, you know, they're getting ahead of the US. So, it's going to be very interesting to hear all his insights.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Yeah, I was, I was reading through, we'll start pinning stuff here before he even comes in. He'll be coming in like, you know, 20 minutes or so. But, I was reading through the DLT Science Foundation, which he's the, you know, co-founder and co-chair of, and that is like the third arm that has kind of come out through, we're backed by Hedera, and they put together a bunch of blogs. And one of the blogs they put together was, was literally like viral tweets and influencers and all that stuff. And I always just find that interesting, especially when it's coming from them, and they're very educational institution-oriented and research-oriented. And the blog was all about, you know, echo chambers of thought and siloing people's thoughts based on, the way that people put out viral tweets in this space. And it's like, there's not really anything there when you start digging deep into it, but it does create these silos, it does create these echo chambers. And I don't know if we'll be able to get, I don't know if we'll be able to have enough time to ask him that, probably not, but just really cool to see, you know, other, especially such an enterprise and educational-oriented, you know, organization talking about some of that stuff because I think that is some stuff that does definitely need talked about in this space.‍

Brooke Lacey
Yeah, I find it to be so repetitive, and it's always interesting to hear the big brains talk about that and, you know, refer to it because it really is you know, something, it's sort of like that meta where it's like inside like, looking at the tweets from Twitter, like, inside of it. It just keeps repeating itself. So yeah, I always love that other perspective from these big brains. ‍

Darren Moore
I think I saw that report. It came from the Biz. It had, it had like tweets in the report. I think CryptoWolfXRP was in that document. So, it's funny that they're studying us.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
And I know, Brooke, we were talking before when we were going through the questions, like, I love the, like, the real aspects of education, that you're trying to start providing now. But also the fact that you find humor and like a lot of the phraseology that we use on a consistent basis. And you're like interoperability, interoperability. Or what was the other one that you said? Like, I forget. ‍

Brooke Lacey
At the end of the day, at the end of the day. And now, now you're gonna say it and you're all gonna hear it. But yeah, if anybody has not, met me, because this is kind of a new grouping which I love because Solomon and I are definitely, like, on the same page with so much stuff. But, I do some parody stuff. There was a very viral, when we talk about virality, like, you know, Twitter is not a video app. And I did one kind of making fun of women in Web3 panels. Which actually stems from me being in tech for so long, and I'm always, I'm always asked to do, like, you know, conferences, just come in and talk about women in tech. And it's like, what? That, well, what's the topic? So, I definitely think we all take each other, take ourselves way too seriously. And yeah, there's all these, like, words that we overuse. Which, by the way, I have really dove into the difference between influencer and KOLs. Which, like, now I, you know, I come on as a, which means Key Opinion Leader. Which I think is really important to differentiate between people who are just writing threads because they're repeating what other people say, and actual, like, Key Opinion Leaders, whether, you know, you call it a thought leader or whatever. It's just really important to remember that experts are going to say certain things and then, you know, other people might just repeat it. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
And I know that we were made a contact, you know, we were made the contact maybe like three weeks or four weeks ago, but, like, I was, like, going and looking through your Twitter and stuff. And that same thing that you put together about the women of Web3 stuff, and look, this isn't saying anything bad about women in Web3 whatsoever. I mean, half of Genfinity is, or women, but that's not for the statistic or a number. That's because they're all badass builders and, like, they've just, they've helped to build everything that we've tried to accomplish. But your video was so funny because it was like, you're like taking it from both ends of the spectrum, and, like, you're like, 'Yeah, we're gonna do a space by women in Web3,' and then you, like, give the other snapshot and it's like, 'Yeah, but, you know, what's it gonna be about?' And then it snaps back to the other person and it's like, 'Well, I think there's going to be, like, women panelists, there's probably going to be some women in the audience.' It's like, it is really funny. I thought it was great. Hey, to give a little bit of an overview and background of Paulo before he hops in, I know he probably got like 15 minutes or so here. So like even in some of the research that I was doing a while ago, like, this is probably two years ago, I found his like long-standing resume. So, just to give you guys maybe an oversight here, he's an Advisory Board member at Nexo, DLT advisor to the Bank of Italy, Central Bank digital currency advisor to the Bank of Canada, Central Bank of Columbia, Central Bank of Chile, Central Bank of Brazil, CBDC advisor to the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies. He is a board member at the Cyprus Blockchain Innovation Center, steering committee member at Construction Blockchain Consortium in the UK, member of BSI for DLT in the Tech Committee, permanent member of ISO TC307. So, that's like that Quant initiative with interoperability and blockchain. I mean, this, his resume goes on and on. Advisory Board member at Napa,Swiss Innovation Valley, co-chair of the Coin Committee at Hedera. Let me see if I can get to the first page here. Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Quant. Leading peer-to-peer economist at the German Central Bank. Oh my, I mean, it literally goes on and on. I know he's a research fellow at UCL and runs a lot of aspects. Uh, I think he runs the aspects at UCL with the Blockchain Research Laboratory and then more recently, the DLT Science Foundation. So, this guy has been around the block, probably, you know, in more real conversations with what's actually going on behind the scenes than probably anybody, maybe anybody I've ever talked to. And I don't know, it's just going to be really interesting to be able to nail down some, some of these questions that we put together for him, and hopefully we do, we've done our due diligence and can make this, educational, informative, if you will. Darren, have you, I mean, I know you looked into this a little bit as well, but I mean, the guy's history is pretty, pretty ridiculous.‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, I mean, we certainly, well connected into everything that's going on from the top down outlook. I'm curious to wonder if, you know, the shenanigans in crypto, if that affects kind of like what they're trying to do with the payment systems and CBDCs. Like, if you know, all the bad actors in crypto actually, um, sway everybody, or if the technology speaks for itself.

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Yeah, and I think, so to give you guys an overview, and if you got, we're going to try to keep him on here as long as possible, so the more people that, you know, share this space as he comes in and help us, I mean, he, I know initially, Marc, you said we have 30 minutes with him, but we were also supposed to have two individuals from the DLT Science Foundation. And this is more so going to be the Paolo aspect here, so we might have a little bit longer. He's gonna, hopefully, we can get him to stay on if everybody wants to, you know, support this type of a space. Share it, retweet it, do X, Y, and Z. If you guys have questions, drop them down in the chat, we'll try to get them answered if we possibly can as well. To give you guys an overview, um, we're obviously going to ask him for a background, we're going to ask him about, you know, why did he kind of come into the Hedera ecosystem. We're going to ask him about envisioning how he envisions crypto assets interoperating with Central Bank digital currencies. I know, Darren, you've got questions around government coins and CBDCs potentially operating on public ledgers. Brooke and I are going to be asking about privacy aspects. I know that's a focus that you're certainly interested in at this point in time, that I think we all should be, especially when Central Bank digital currencies start to roll out. So, we've got a bunch of topics in here.‍

Brooke Lacey
Yeah, and who knows, maybe he, you know, thinks that this is going to be boring and, you know, he's only given a half hour, so there's no dead space. But we can assure you that we have enough, info to keep him for a couple of hours, which we're not going to do, but you never know. So, yeah, drop questions into the chat. I threw some links in there, and of course, you know, I'm kind of cybersecurity obsessed, so I just want to say, you can click that link. I promise it's not going to drain your wallet. Yeah, in that case, and then we're just gonna, yeah, we're gonna flow with this. I think it's gonna be really interesting, the DLT Science Foundation, really, like, I don't know, this is a robust organization with grants and programs and tools and different events. So, I'm looking forward to just diving into that, even, even offline, well, I guess online, but like, off the Twitter space.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
I should say. Somebody's saying that if you click a link and it's not going to drain your wallet, is exactly what somebody would say if you click a link and somebody drains your wallet. Darren, or did any of you guys see, I know, this is over the past couple of days, I think the Republican leaders of the House Financial Services and Agricultural Committee, this was Friday, I think they released like a 162-page document on how the US government polices digital currencies currently and how they're potentially trying to, maybe, shift the narrative. Darren, I don't know if you had a chance to look into that at all. Do you think this is kind of more of the same with documentation that comes out that, you know, leads us to believe that we might start to make traction in the United States? Or what are your thoughts, like, around how far we actually are versus, like, you know, is anything going to come to fruition that actually cultivates innovation? Or are we just going to keep kicking the can down the road until it's too late?‍

Darren Moore
Well, to be honest, I only got to read the headlines. I've been helping people at the whole Atomic wallet situation. So, if you're unaware, a lot of people, their wallets got drained just interacting with some smart contract. I believe it happened with an upgrade for Atomic. But still, people are really nervous. And what's weird is, like, Atomic had, like, those 12-key situation, while other chains, you know, like Cardano, for instance, they wanted 15 words, so you couldn't just import your key into a different wallet. We had to, like, track down an old Atomic wallet to move past that. So, I've been busy with that. I only got to read headlines of the proposed bill, but just it being in the psyche of Congress as well as the Senate, all right, it just always being on their tip of their tongue, something's going to come out of it. We don't know if it's going to be good regulation, bad regulation. I hope it's good because there's so many good advocates for it now. I mean, really, if you look at the people that are trying to get rid of it, you got one Warren, you got a Sherman, Brad Sherman. They don't really have, like, the big backing, right? And then I'm seeing, Kennedy, right? He's talking about freedom of money, he's really pushing the narrative, and it's really getting to the people. Right? You also have DeSantis talking about anti-CBDC bill. It's forcing people to get educated on the topic, and that's what we need, right? Because we need to talk about the nuances to be able to get regulations. So I'm happy to see it. It's being pushed, but hopefully, it doesn't get pushed in the wrong direction. This Binance lawsuit kind of concerns me. However, you know, the overall goal is to clean everything up. If Binance really is a bad actor and they're doing exactly what FTX is doing, I prefer the markets to take action, and the markets will ultimately have the last say. So, hopefully, he's not doing anything wrong, and it all works out. But they listed quite a bit of coins. I'm seeing BNB, BUSD, Solana, Cardano, Matic, Filecoin, Atom, Sandman, Algo, Access, Cody, Amp, WUST, Trax. It's a lot of different coins that they kind of threw at, broadened that again. So that's concerning. And, you know, once it's under the SEC's jurisdiction, you really limit the capabilities of what you can do with the technology, right? If everybody needs to be a certified investor, you need to get your Series 65 or, you know, only broker-dealers can sell the coin. You put up all these roadblocks in the way, and innovation can't take its course. You know, I'm kind of concerned about that, although, you know, some coins are securities, right? That's fine. But, like, we need to iron out the rules, right? It's still the security laws. Just to be a certified investor kind of stringent. They should, I personally think, there should be a little bit more relaxed with it. If people are, you know, financially literate, they should be able to participate.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Yeah, I find it interesting that, like, there's been a narrative over the past week that has come from, like, Elizabeth Warren and some of the normal players that, you know, try to push these narratives that, like, crypto basically invented drug trafficking and money laundering. Meanwhile, like, if you look at fiat and how much money gets laundered and how much money is used for nefarious purposes globally in the US dollar because it's the main currency in the world, and you're going to pin it on crypto? Meanwhile, it's totally ironic because crypto, I mean, most cryptos that aren't super privacy-centric, I mean, it's an open book, and these are public ledgers. I mean, you can literally, if you're complaining about money laundering using crypto, then do your job and regulate it in the right way because you can track everything that happens on these ledgers, for the most part. ‍

Darren Moore
Right? Do the police work to actually catch them. Don't do this broad net type of surveillance or broad-net cancellation of crypto just because you don't like it. The other thing is like the dollar itself, right? We're shooting ourselves in the foot by all these sanctions, just sanctioning everyone and pushing people away from using dollars. The reason why we have value and the privilege of a reserve currency is because people want dollars. If you push them away from dollars and they're forced to use other options, they're going to eventually use the other options, and that's what's backing our currency. So our standard of life is because there's demand for dollars. And I saw today, you know, I don't want to comment on the actual political part of this. It's just the action of sanctioning, right? I believe the country in Africa was sanctioned today because of whatever they're doing with politics. Just that action, I think, is really eroding the dollar and gonna cause problems. And if you apply that same type of surveillance dragnet to crypto, I mean, you're just destroying currency. And it doesn't matter. People will find a way to use money. It doesn't matter. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
If you guys are just joining right now, we've got Paulo Tasca coming in at 3 PM Eastern time. I should mention up at the top here, we've already pre-scheduled our space for next Monday, the 12th. We are actually interviewing Leemon Baird, who is the initial HBarbarian, so literally the author of how everything that you pretty much see within Hashgraph. That will be next Monday on the 12th at 11:30 AM Eastern. We'll start that space. We have a privacy-focused space this Wednesday. I believe we have, let me double-check real quick. I know we've got Aleph Zero coming in, which should be pretty interesting because they're obviously a layer one, and they've gotten a lot of traction over the past six months or so. XX Network, I think Darren's going to be here potentially. We've got the XRPL represented through Xspectar. We've got cold storage on Hedera also represented through Yamgo. We've got Self Crypto, so dealing in digital identities surrounding NFTs, and Serenity Shields, so the digital sovereignty and the privacy aspects as well. So excited to do that space. That's Wednesday. And then the last announcement we have on here, and I'll mention them again as we get into this interview with Paulo or maybe towards the tail end, Gen3 open beta. If you guys are interested in participating, our whitelisted users, we just put out this week, so major announcement. Gen3 has transitioned to open beta. Shout out to our whitelisted users for their invaluable contributions during the initial testing phase, and you can sign up in the pin tweet as well. We've put together an aggregator of content that also has Hadera connectivity, so you can view anything that's actually happening within Hadera in real time, any NFTs being minted, as well as charting, as well as research, and kind of a social ecosystem. It's free to use, so if you guys want to go and test that out, feel free to do so as well. Got like five minutes left, guys, so appreciate you guys being patient. Again, this is the first time that we've done a space where we started at like 30 minutes prior to. We wanted to see the feel of it, to kind of give an intro and get through some of the boilerplate stuff that always happens at the very beginning of spaces or interviews anyways. So by the time the interview actually occurred, um, we were able to kind of flow through it seamlessly. And again, I have to give a gigantic shout-out. We're trying to expand these spaces out with more ecosystem contributors. So we have Brooke Lacy helping us out today with the interview. She is, you know, has a huge Tik Tok following and is starting to do educational content and trying to grow her Twitter and her YouTube and all those other things out. So what better place to do it? She has a lot of ecosystem followers and connections within Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, things like that. And then Darren as well, a lot of you guys probably know him OG XRP Community researcher, but he's also delved out into a lot of macroeconomic aspects but just real research and quality down the line. So thank you guys for being with us, and we're gonna get started here shortly.‍

Brooke Lacey
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that. I think that we all kind of come together with different backgrounds and different perspectives, and that's kind of what makes all of this content really poignant. Because, you know, like we were talking about earlier with the silos and the echo chambers, it's difficult to weed through all of the noise. So, you know, I've always said, like, we talk about DYOR, you know, do your own research and all that, but when you have an audience, you are the research, and people are looking to you for the information. So it's a responsibility and an obligation that I take really seriously. And, you know, that doesn't mean that I'm always going to get it right or I'm going to, you know, have the best education, but it's the way that you can approach things. It's the way that you get people's attention. And I know, like with my TikTok, I have a very large, it's a majority of women following. And I think that's just because I've been able to establish trust with them and be able to talk about life and be vulnerable and authentic and then kind of throw in there, like, hey, this is what I'm passionate about. This is about crypto. This is how you can, you know, manage your own life. You know, there was a time there while I was talking to women who may have been in like a difficult relationship situation where they didn't have access to their own funds, and I kind of walked them through how to utilize non-custodial wallets and, you know, putting away the grocery money for three years. You know, after three years, it's not worth what it was, you know, prior. And so getting started with crypto and understanding decentralized finance was really important to a lot of them. It's been an interesting ride. You know, three years ago in 2020, I didn't necessarily wake up one day and say, you know, I think I want to be a TikTok influencer. As a Gen X single mom during quarantine, I was just really looking for a way of you know, making us happy. Like, we all just, we were in a really tough place. As single moms, and we just all kind of came together and made this video content and sat on live streams and talked about mental health. And now it's become this global audience that I just take it very seriously and also have a lot of fun with it. There's like 15 million video views on the hashtag Brooke's laugh, and that was, you know, something that I probably could have ended up just being the laugh react girl. But, you know, I find it really, again, very, like, a big responsibility to be able to teach people and bring information they wouldn't necessarily see anywhere else. You're definitely not going to see that on Facebook. And that's the way we looked at it a little bit in early 2020 during the quarantine. Everybody was in those echo chambers on Facebook, and it was really kind of local to where he lived. And then TikTok came around, and it was a global audience, and I was able to talk to people around the world pretty immediately, you know, at the speed of light. And, uh, I thought that was just really, really cool, and it opens up a whole new way of thinking. So, yeah, so the whole social media thing has always been kind of strange to me, but I definitely lean into it a lot more now because I recognize this attention economy. We hear that a lot, but I like to call it knowledge brokering. We come together, and if we can take it seriously and understand that obligation to have the right information and at least, you know, respect the information, then we have the obligation to broker that knowledge between us. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Thank you so much, Brooke. I mean, we're extremely happy for you to come on and to help us out with this space and this interview. And, yeah, looking forward to it. And, guys, Paolo should be coming in, so if we see Paolo coming to the audience, and you know, I know I asked Marc already through HashPack. I'm hoping that he comes on through his cell phone because obviously, if you go on a laptop, it's a nightmare and you can't speak. So if Paolo comes in, let's look for him. Let's make sure that he raises his hand up, and we can get him up here to speak to give a quick recap again we're gonna be interviewing Paulo Tasca. It should start any second now. Paulo is a CBDC advisor to the Bank of Canada, Central Bank of Columbia, Central Bank of Chile, Central Bank of Brazil, DLT advisor to the Bank of Italy, has worked with Nexo, a permanent member of ISO TC307, co-founder of Quant, sits on the coin committee at Hedera, and is the co-chair and co-founder of the DLT Science Foundation. He's also worked with an economic leading peer-to-peer economist at the German Central Bank. So obviously with the UCL and the blockchain aspects, it's like the leading global research organization for blockchain, DLT, and crypto as well, and he runs that. Just really excited to be doing this, and yeah, bear with us, and he should be coming in any second, guys, and we'll go from there. Anything else, Marc, that we may have missed prior to Paulo hopping in?‍

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
No, and I think he's on the audience, so if Paulo, if you can click on the bottom left corner and request to speak, Solomon and Genfinity will get you up here.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. If you guys are just joining down here right now, we are about to be interviewing quite the legend in the DLT space. The background and track record speaks for itself, and that is Mr. Paulo Tasca, currently co-chair and co-founder at the DLT Science Foundation. And Paulo, we started this space like 25 minutes, 30 minutes earlier just to kind of talk about you and your background a little bit so we could get over some of the boilerplate stuff that normally happens, knowing how busy you are. But, you know, first and foremost, I wanted to say thank you so much from Genfinity and HashPack for helping us to put this together. I'd like to kind of start off and ask you if you could provide for the audience down here a brief background of yourself in traditional finance, what led you into crypto, web 3, and what led you into the Hedera ecosystem as well, now working with the DLT Science Foundation.‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, now my pleasure. My pleasure to be here, really. And I think, you deserve it. This is basically the first Twitter space I do, so it certainly is a good moment right to celebrate. Happy to share my thoughts with you guys. So, I entered the crypto space many years ago. I'm not, you know, sometimes happy to tell about these stories, but, I mean, what can I say? The fact that, you know, some people think, 'Oh, you entered in 2011, so you must be a millionaire, you must be a billionaire,' right? All these things that generally are not true because the markets since then happened is up and down, right? So, let's remove this type of speculative mentality. And, my work done over the last years in this space was always basically focused on the fundamentals, you know, on the speculation, right? So that's what I've done since 2011. I did set up, I mean, I was at ETH Zurich, I was a postdoc at ETH Zurich is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which is one of the strongest universities for natural sciences in the world. And they are a very vibrant community. Already, we're talking about the pre-era of the Crypto Valley, right? The Crypto Valley didn't exist yet, but people started talking about Bitcoin and this kind of stuff. I was a bit skeptical at the moment, but then people said, 'No, you are a researcher, you know, and you can have data for free.' And always, you know, if you are a researcher, you're working data analytics, office data is a very expensive commodity. So having an ecosystem where data is free for us was good. But at that time, it was also the time of the first cryptocurrency exchanges, right? And I don't know how many of you remember Mt. Gox. It was this Japanese cryptocurrency exchange that did drive basically 75%, 80%, 85% of all the transactions in the market. It was really a monopoly back in time. If you wanted to trade, you had to go through them. And then to my colleagues at ETH, I told them, 'Listen, let's do some research, but let's try to build something. Let's try to build something in the space.' And we started to build something in this space, like a blockchain exchange, back in time. I think it was about 2012, 2013. And it was an exciting period because there was much uncertainty, you know, talking with the regulators back in time. So we're talking about 10, 11 years ago. In Switzerland, you didn't have an interlocutor, right? So no one at the FCA, at the NCF, in London, which is basically the equivalent of FCA of the SEC in the US. So no one there where basically they didn’t have enough knowledge about crypto and couldn't help you when you submitted our proposal to apply for a crypto-to-crypto and crypto-FIAT exchange platform. And the way I remembered, they were, there was one single person at FINMA at the time that had some initial knowledge. And it was an educational process for him. We worked together for one year, and after, you know, ping-pong, ping-pong a few times, we had been approved. So we were the first crypto-to-crypto and crypto-FIAT exchange platform that was approved by FINMA. So we had a kind of an approval to start, you know, offering the service to the market. But, as you may know, life is always very strange, and at that time it was a period of the European financial crisis. So my background is in systemic risk. My PhD was in systemic risk in complex networks. I applied graph theory, natural theory, to econophysics, basically to understand the contagious dynamics and especially specifically of financial authors. And I was called by the Central Bank of Germany to work with them, to help them, you know, understanding these things, and I was lured by, you know, the fact for working for a central bank, as a young researcher. So I say, "Okay, I joined you." So I had to park this crypto exchange project for a while, and I worked with a bank. And the bank, I told them, "Listen, yes, you recruited me to work for systemic risk because we have the European Sovereign crypto research. I would like to set up a team to work on crypto because this decentralized finance is the future, and you, as a central bank, you need to jump in." And that's what I did for two years and a half. In the meantime, the crypto exchange in Switzerland was kind of going, keep going, the development was going. And then, at a certain point, I decided, you know, because it was a very interesting period of my life, because I was a disruptor in Switzerland with this crypto exchange, a central banker in Germany with a central banker. I was very wearing two hats. And, you know, twist of the fate, the first report on crypto assets written by this central banker was written by me, in collaboration with my team, with my research team in Switzerland from this previous company I did set up. So, really, this was really a nice event, a mix of, you know, of, people working in the decentralized finance together with the central bank. I didn't expect this type of open mind from the central bank. Indeed, I did organize in 2015 the first workshop at the central banks. I called my friend Andreas Antonopoulos and the others from the crypto space, banking time, and the central bank was so open that we didn't even accept payments in Bitcoin back in time. But then things started to change, you know, the central banks became more aware of scandals and scams, and you know, people started to jump into these markets, started to play with these asymmetry information, started to create these first Ponzi schemes, and, you know, the bank central banks are generally, you know, prudent in these cases, so are more conservative. And, therefore, that position became a bit more rigid, and I decided to then to leave the bank and to propose the University College London to set up the standard for watching technologies, which did not exist back in time in 2015. I moved to London. That's how I started my career in blockchain. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
That's fantastic, and I know, Paulo, your background and experience speaks for itself. I know we probably have some questions surrounding, the background here a little bit. You know, one of the things I did want to ask is, you know, yeah, you've worked closely more recently with, the Hedera ecosystem as well. If you could just maybe briefly touch based on, you know, the unique features or characteristics of Hedera that you find most compelling or valuable, obviously, you know, that ties into the DLT Science Foundation, the tokenomics committee. I think I watched a Max Walker-Williams video as well. You said on the kind of the board of the governing board members kind of interpreting maybe new ecosystem participants that want to come in. Maybe just, like, briefly, if you could talk about your experience of what you find interesting within Hedera and what you're doing right now within that ecosystem.‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, let's say that Hedera is unique, and what strikes me about that is the fact that they really are all full speed on the ecosystem development, on the adoption, on product development. And they don't, they're not basically the first time, you know, younger students are trying to, you know, create a you know, a money machine. They don't care about this. They care about decentralization. They care about creating fairness, democratization. And even they apply this rule. So if you think about the way the decision-making process is taken, you know, that is very decentralized. It's not a DAO, but it looks like a DAO to me because, there are a lot that basically, the nodes that are basically running the network that are all the council members. And I do represent the University College London in this respect with all my colleagues. Basically, we do take part actively to all the decisions. There is no, basically, one single person or a couple of person or Leemon himself that is the inventor of Hashgraph that take decision. No, no. There are these people that means around, like, we meet twice, three times, even more a week when we have to discuss, take decision. And we create, you know, a transparent process when we do collect also comments and feedback and, you know, hey, there are improvement proposals from the community. And we discuss whether to adopt, not to adopt, etc., etc. So, this is the things that I didn't see so far in many other blockchain infrastructure providers. To be frank, this is something that is, really important because the council members that are governing, this decision-making process in a sort of out-train, I would say, they are all reputable organizations that are not basically there to make money or to speculate on price, but they're there because they believe in the technology, the believers in the potentials of this technology. So, that's the first thing. The second thing I would say that, the way it has been designed, the consensus mechanism, Hashgraph, is kind of a very light, indeed. And, by design of the consensus mechanism, by design of the network, how the operators work together, as of now, uh, it is really, really fast in terms of transactions per second. And the energy consumption of the machines, validators used in the system is relatively low. So, if you combine high transition per second with a relatively low energy consumption of the validators, then you have a kind of one of the most green blockchains that is actually operating in the market nowadays. So, these two elements are something that is a combination, you know, that you don't find very easily in other blockchains. So, that's why I think I'm happy to work with that. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
That's awesome. And, to give you, maybe, I know you hopped in right at the top of the hour, Paulo, and I know your time's limited, so we're hoping to keep you here as long as humanly possible, because we've got a little bit of a wide breadth of questions that we want to be asking you as well. We also have Brooke Lacey up here, which we didn't allow for, like, the introductions of the panelists, but Brooke is working on, you know, educating communities across Twitter, across YouTube, aspects like that, coming from, like, the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystem, also in other ecosystems, obviously. We've got Darren who is up here from kind of the XRP ecosystem, multiple ecosystems. So we do have some interesting questions for you. I wanted to ask you just quickly as well, and this is probably where we get into some of the more poignant and interesting questions for you. So how do you envision crypto assets? So whether it be something like unit of account-based assets, whether it's HBAR or XRP or Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever it may be, once Central Bank digital currencies roll out and become mainstream, do you believe that crypto assets are going to interoperate with Central Bank digital currencies? I know a lot of the concern from the community is, you know, you might have CBDCs potentially kill some of these assets or at least some use cases. I mean, just briefly, if you could give your thoughts around CBDCs and the way that your unit of account-based crypto assets may work with them.‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, that's the interesting that you mentioned this. So, I know that people in the community, I mean, I'm talking every day with the community, the industry, all of them, there is this unknown route about what this means that central banks are entering this space, what is implied. Let me do a quick preamble. Okay, so, there was an article a few years ago by The Economist, probably three, four years ago, it was,  The Economist, it was probably in the cover, and it was saying, "Okay, the tax guru are the new bankers, the new bankers, right?" They're all, the financial markets was where was controlled in the past by the quants. Those of you that are old like me remember that in the '90s, you know, with the Mark Miller, Black-Scholes models of derivatives, everybody was into quants, and they were trying to be trading derivatives that were, you know, the frontiers of the state, quant finance back in time. But then, with the internet, with the internet gains, and, you know, the invention of blockchain, you know, the new technologies that master this type of tools are becoming the new bankers. That was the article of The Economist. And, this was kind of a warning island for central banks because the events of technology in this, the events, the invasion, so to say, of field from the quants by technologies into the finance territory, was a threatened for the commercial banks, but became also attractive for the central banks, right? Because they had to reconsider their role within this space, right? So when it comes to talk about central bank digital currency, it's much more than this. It's about redesigning the role of a central bank in a heavily tech financial markets. What is the role of a central bank in this type of market? The central bank has been invented, generally, recently, 200 years ago. Before, we didn't have central banks. We did still use money. We did trading with, and commerce was flourishing. Central bank is a human invention, okay? And therefore, as any invention that we have adopted in the markets, the invention is subject to innovation, and the innovation is forced by social trends or new technologies. And therefore, also the role of central banks probably will change dramatically in years to come. Probably the CBDC is just the surface of a nice bird. That's what I'm trying to say. So going back to your question I think that, you know, central banks digital currency, most of the central banks think that the blockchain is a useful technology to use for central bank digital currency. Some of them think, okay, maybe it's not, maybe we can create this with the CBDC blockchain. Okay, there is still a bit of debate. Personally speaking, I think that most of the central banks will use blockchain because this is a technology of the future and is basically far superior than any other technology. What this will imply for crypto assets, well, this will probably facilitate the interoperability with the existing crypto assets, right? Having a CBDC infrastructure will certainly help many of those listing crypto assets to exchange with the CBDC, and this will basically be positive for end users. Of course, you mentioned that some people assets could be, you know, this means in the sense that the risk is this, that because when the central banks will enter this space, which is basically a tax base, they will set a standard and they will set basically a kind of regulatory standard. And this regulatory standard potentially will create a scenario where only approved or compliant crypto assets could potentially interoperate with the CBDC, thus pushing out from the industry some of the crypto assets that will not be able to catch up with this. That's also a scenario that can happen, right? But, I mean, I believe that, generally speaking, you know, having, the, you know, the best of the two shoes, so having the central advantages, the currencies that create more clarity in the markets could facilitate many things that crypto assets now are trying to achieve, like cross-border transitions. So, imagine, having, you know, the large, the most of the traditional international trade and meta services on blockchain, on crypto assets, which is basically then enabled by the presence of CBDC. This would be something that would be a multi-trillion dollar market every day. So, DeFi could also benefit because, these, you know, the integration, imagine the integration of the DeFi services that at the moment are detached from the traditional finance. Imagine how more powerful this type of products and services will be if they will be integrated as and will be similarly easy to transfer and to and jump from finance to DeFi. No, that would be something that also, I think, actually as a positive aspect. So, the disintermediation, I would say that, you know, this will enable a kind of flexibility for end users to manage their assets, right? Choosing CBDC maybe for more stability and, but at the same time, swapping to more interesting assets for other financial activities that could be for borrowing or lending and having other types of incomes that the DeFi world can offer. So, at the end, I think it would be a positive transformative and challenging for some of the players at the moment, but could be a positive outcome. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Oh, thank you so much. No, I'm gonna turn this over to Darren and Brooke now for the next couple of questions here. And, uh, Darren, I know we have limited time with Paulo, so let's ask some concise questions and we'll try to get some concise answers and get as many of these questions answered as we possibly can. But, Darren, the floor is yours, man. ‍

Darren Moore
Well, that leads me into my next question. Is I'm not sure if you've seen this, Palau, recently announced that they're minting their gov coin directly on the ledger or CBDC, whatever you want to call it. But their national currency is being minted directly on the ledger. What's the likelihood that central banks will mint their currency directly on ledgers versus creating their own siloed networks? ‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Well, this is a good question, right? I mean, you need to understand that central banks are not tech companies, right? So they try to catch up. But, I mean, I left the central bank in 2014 and 2015. And, you know, talking with the president back in time of this important central bank in Europe he told me, "Listen, Paulo, you always need to remember that we are not tech companies. So, we will never become, you know, we will never have a development team that will develop, you know, tech solutions. But, you know, 8 years, from, you know, in this space, means decades. So, things can change." So, to answer your question, it probably depends on how tech-savvy the different central banks are. I can see that, talking with different central banks, they have a different sometimes understanding, a different, you know, for knowledge and capability of, you know, managing this type of tools and technologies. And probably, therefore, they have more options, then. Right? They, by doing so, they have more options to choose. Other banks are also, you know, taking decisions based on their political vision and general, you know, economic situations of the real economy. Right? Inflation rate and, you know, unemployment rate and all these things. So, it's a mix. How fast, I think the problem, I don't know exactly what would be the ultimate choice. We may have a mix of solutions depending on these factors that I mentioned.‍

Brooke Lacey
Yeah, that was succinct, you guys. I'm really proud of you. Excellent job, Paolo. It is a pleasure to meet you. I want to throw this at you in terms of the CBDC rollouts. Are you concerned at all with any sort of,  like, totalitarian situation? How do you feel about, like privacy and whether it should be protected in the digital age?‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, this is a good question, right? So, the problem, you know, Web 3.0, right? Web 3.0's ultimate goal is to regain access to our data, right? And they use these new technologies to keep control of our data, our information. And that's the basically the main driver around these thousands of developers that every day are working on building this Web 3.0 world. I think that if we follow the same rules of the Web 3.0 community, then we should not have any problem about the surveillance and about who owns our data. The problem here is that central banks, it's a legal entity that is controlled by law, by a public institution, which is linked to the government in most of the cases, which is called central bank. So, the central bank here is supposed to be the benevolent dictator, sometimes it's not even the benevolent dictator, but they have this particular role in the economy. How this benevolent dictator can play a fair game in the Web 3.0 economy depends very much on the democratic political discussion that happens at the country level. So, it is something that goes beyond the CBDC design, but touches how the government perceives and sees the relationship between the government and the citizens. Right? So, if you use tools that entrust this relationship by shifting control to the citizen and giving them more authority, more possibility to control their data, their information, then probably we end up in a CBDC solution that will use a kind of knowledge proofs technology to hide the information of the user, will not violate our privacy. Because at the end of the day, what they need to know is simply how much to charge in terms of taxation, not to know where, what, what do we buy, from whom we buy, what. But this is an interpretation. We may have other types of understanding of this relationship between state and citizen that is not so trustful. And in that case, I fear that there could be some metadata or some information that will track our activities, and this will not be good. ‍

Darren Moore
I was wondering if, if the private sector could fulfill the role of a CBDC with stablecoins. And is it better for a CBDC since it gets regulated and these issues are discussed? Because the private sector is going to follow KYC/AML laws. They have no choice. But if we had a CBDC, they have to rework all the laws. So, in your opinion, does private coins fulfill the role or is it better to have a CBDC?‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, so, I hate to give a gray answer, but, you know, I'm much in favor of the private sector entering, you know, fulfilling the role of the public sector and providing solutions. This is not something new. It happens every day in many countries. You know, the streets are built by the private sector and the mountain by the private sector, and they fulfill the public goods. The electric grid is deployed by the private sector, and the literacy tree, you know because of our private sector that deployed these, and this is a public good, it's a public service, and this means that the state basically trusts these private sectors to provide a public service under some level of licenses. Okay. This is somehow already kind of happened in the banking space. If you think, when we move from central bank money to commercial bank money, so the commercial banks are basically providing a public good service when they redistribute their money to us, the citizens. Right? We don't have accounts at the central bank, we have accounts at commercial banks, and they are working for the central bank. They are fulfilling a public service. So, and this is working, but you know, I've been an expert on financial crises for many years, so sometimes these commercial banks go bankrupt, sometimes, you know, the banks collapse. You remember Lehman Brothers and, you know, the Silvergate recently. I mean, what does it mean? Does it mean that the commercial banks are not fulfilling their service? No, that means that if we want to go into that direction, which the person is speaking, I would prefer that in this case, the private sector step in and provide this solution on behalf of the central banks, because they have more experience, they have more technology, they know how to do this in a more fast, more efficient way. That's my aim, my goal, my hope. But by doing so, by bringing this service, we need to kind of entrust the consumers, because, you know, even with the best intent, sometimes there could be some storms that can generate some problems. But that doesn't mean that the technology and the solution will not be worth it to push and to go into that direction. I think that will be the best design model, from my own personal opinion.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
I know, Paolo, we always hear and I think we have, like, three or four questions left. Hopefully, you can hang around so we can get some of these answered. I know that you're super busy all the time. You know, we always hear the word interoperability. Um, I'm curious, you're a permanent board member at ISO/TC307. When we think about defragmentation and kind of that path work of interoperability across different networks, we'd just love to hear what your thoughts are. You know, are these networks, these different DLTs, going to interoperate? And in which ways do you feel like they are going to interoperate at some point in time?‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, so there are different, you know, there are different, it's come, this concept of interoperability is very complex, right? Because you can have interoperability at different levels. Are you talking interoperability at layer two, layer one, layer zero? What are you talking about? So that's a question, right? We may ask ourselves. So if we talk about interoperability at layer two, for example, the question is how I can port my NFT from one blockchain to another, right? And there are, there are people working on this because the gaming community is asking this, right? And the other industries that are jumping into this, like the art industry, the fashion industry, they're asking this. So there are solutions that, you know, some blockchains like Kusama that are trying to offer this solution. Some remark NFT is working in this direction, saying on the Kusama blockchain, trying to create a kind of portable NFT. If you talk instead on layer one, well, there are, there are some, there are some blockchains that try to solve this problem. Like, talk about Cosmos, the problem with this blockchain, Polkadot, is probably the most advanced. Probably the problem with this is the following, that when you have an inter, let's say, parachain communication, the translation needs to go through the shared consensus mechanism, which is in the Polkadot relay chain. So it's not really interoperability, right? Because you need to go through, you need to always use this, this consensus service. There are other solutions like bridges, for example, Overledger, which is basically the technology that I developed when I was at Quant Network. They try to use a different angle to solve this problem of interoperability by providing kind of an operating system that enables, basically, from, as an extra layer, to read and conciliate the different states of the different blockchains in real time, which is something not easy because you need to do, you need to do, for each pair of the other blockchains. So you need to do both Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, and so on and so forth. There is no way, a homogeneous type of a standard in that case. So there are studies. I think that if the CBDCs will become really, you know, if big banks will really decide to offer these CBDC solutions, they will push for this interoperability. Probably, this will become one of the most important requirements, and the new blockchains and the new solutions will basically, I say, I was trying to say, new blockchains will come to the market that will basically, we have this interoperability in mind since at a design level, because most of the solutions I've seen now are on layer two rather than layer one, so there's a lot of way to go in this direction. Interoperability is extremely important. I mentioned before about cross-border payments, cross-chain transactions, and these require interoperability. I mentioned before the integration of DeFi with the traditional finance through CBDCs, and these require interoperability. You know, I think that this is certainly an area that the blockchain infrastructure providers should look at more than what they are doing now. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Paulo, for that. I know Brooke, you have a question, maybe a broader question for Paulo as well.‍

Brooke Lacey
Yeah, Paulo, thank you for sticking around. This is really insightful. We appreciate it. So, speaking of what we were just talking about, it's kind of a broader question. Just in general, what are some of the use cases for digital assets that you feel are currently flying under the radar but could represent mass adoption, like that kind of stuff?‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Okay. So, if you look at the life cycle of the Gartner Hype Cycle, we are in a kind of the valley of disillusionment, right? Because after all the hype in the previous years, now we are kind of in a down situation and even the price market reflects this situation. But that's exactly a nice moment for the industry because it's exactly in this moment that generally every innovation will produce new services and products. It's now that many industries do not make a lot of noise and fuss, but they do create and build on blockchain. So, I think that we need to be very, very careful about what is going to happen in a couple of years from now because there is really serious industry. There are really serious multi-billion dollar industries working on blockchain and trying to find solutions. So, what are the underrepresented use cases now? I don't know. Probably, in other industries, it is not underrepresented, but certainly important is the digital identity. Now, we talked before about having control of our own data and using this technology, like NFT, for example, beyond art and collectibles, but really to have access to our rights in various shapes and forms. So, this kind of link to digital identity and all these new solutions in the digital twin, the crunchy space, imagine how important it will be in the years to come, when we think about even the Internet of Things, right? We're talking about 30 billion devices connected by 2030. It means that trillions of transactions every day between these devices. This needs to be done and managed in an efficient way, and I think this is another area where blockchain can really make a difference. And another area I think that has been recently overlooked a bit is the emergence of DAOs. It's an extremely powerful concept for redesigning business models, for redesigning governance models in businesses. And I think younger entrepreneurs, the next generation of companies that have a more open, share, democratic model of representation will probably adopt these solutions for their governance and also that we learn to embed a more open and frequent dialogue with not only the charity, but what should be their user and customers. So, in a different, really redesigned model of business as we know now. So, these are areas I think very interesting to look at. Of course, there is this space of digital goods and the NFTs I mentioned beyond art and collectibles should go into that space. And this is not a technical problem, it is more a legal problem because in the manager's edition, for example, for physical goods, we have the so-called first sale doctrine that applies, which means that if you buy a physical item, the original copy, you own that and cannot control the subsequent sales of the item in the market. But this applies only to physical goods and does not apply to digital goods. For example, if you buy a book in the store, you can resell that to your friends or give it to your mom, etc. But if you buy a digital book, you have other licenses and generally you cannot. So NFTs here can play an important role, helping to solve this type of problem. And if you imagine a book transformed into an NFT, probably under, you know, it becomes a digital representation of a physical item. Therefore, you can probably solve this problem. But there is a lot of uncertainty and probably here the different lawyers need to come together and find solutions. But this is fascinating because this is a very important market get that need to be disrupted. And also, I think, apart from the Internet to property rights, I think the most important market at the moment that will be affected, and there are many companies working on that area, is a trillion-dollar market, which is the market of real estates. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
We have to think we might only have like two or three more questions for you, Paulo, and again, my sentiments are the same. We really appreciate you hanging around, Darren. I know you have a question, and then Brooke, I think you've got, you know, one or two additional questions, and then we'll kind of close this out. Darren, go ahead.‍

Darren Moore
As institutional participation in DeFi will increase, will you be able to still keep the DeFi element you spoke about, the identity component? But when institutions, if they decide to come into the DeFi world, will DeFi cease to exist and be more like a CeFi-DeFi hybrid?‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Well, I mean, I don't think that they will enter the DeFi space. I see, rather than that, there will be some interoperability between the DeFi world and the CeFi world, if you want. So, I don't think the central banks will have any intent or any knowledge or any type of idea to enter the DeFi space. This would be too far away from their mandates as a central bank. Central banks care about financial stability, price stability, employment rates, and so on and so forth. So, I think that probably, rather than having a central bank that will understand more about these new currencies, and they will force them to kind of integrate their services, which will remain centralized, with DeFi, and this probably would benefit the DeFi world because the user can more easily jump from one world to another without cost or pain in an effortless way.

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
I know I saw a tweet about a week or two ago, and you basically compared Gary Gensler to a Twitter influencer. I think Brooke, has some questions, maybe around that, just real briefly, and then I want to close this out with you as well. We appreciate your time.‍

Brooke Lacey
Yeah, Gary Gensler, I mean, the SEC, just CZ and Binance. So I guess the question is, how is the US going to remain competitive in this environment of SEC overreach?‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Oh, no. The US is not competitive at all. The US is losing competition every day. There is not a vision at the moment. I don't see a vision in the US. US markets have a lot of problems. So, let's start from this point. So, I'm not even talking about crypto. I'm talking about minimum rights, social security rights for people in need in that country. So, there is nothing. So, the US has much more problems than taking care about crypto. But they are not doing a good job. So, they are really, really bad. And I'm very concerned, to be frank, because I don't think the SEC leadership is taking these things seriously. This could have been a really great opportunity for us to keep showing that they are progressive and embrace new technologies, but they are really not doing a good job. And as you can, I don't need to tell you guys, but as you can read every day, companies are moving to other ecosystems that are embracing these from different angles. Not only because the regulation is more clear, not only because operating from the ecosystem is faster and even more tax efficient, but also because they create all the support that the industry needs in terms of, you know, if you look, for example, in Dubai, the new VARA is called Vara, the new Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority. It's certainly something important. So, they started to create a new regulatory body that is being designed to understand the needs of the new industry and speak the same language as the new industry. That's what, you know, I don't see in other countries, and that's what I think we should have done. You know, regulation also the regulatory bodies are something new. The SEC was invented in 1929. Now, it's not something that existed here forever. So, we did invent the SEC, and we need to be brave as the industry leaders to promote changes in the SEC or to promote a new regulatory body if it is the case when a new so powerful technology enters the markets. You know, everybody now is talking about AI and so on and so forth, and there are already, you know, with our foundations, we already, you know, supporting the creation of the so-called decentralized AI centers. Imagine putting AI in a blockchain network, which is unstoppable, censorship resistant. So, what we're talking about is we're talking about a transformational event in our society, and I'm really sorry, and, you know, the price when I see our leaders that should, supposed to steal our direction, that they wasted time treating that all crypto are securities. This is a shame.‍

Brooke Lacey
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, lastly, do you think that when regulation does occur, the regulations put in place will potentially regulate normal citizens out of the crypto markets?‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
No, I don't think this will ever happen. I don't think so. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Very succinct as well. I mean, I think, one of the things that, you know, as we kind of close this out, and I know how busy you are, and we certainly want to get the DLT Science Foundation members up here for an additional space in the future, but just really honored to be able to have you on and be able to pick your brain for being in this space for quite some time. I saw, you know, in closing, I saw a really interesting tweet and a blog post that the DLT Science Foundation put out recently, and when you talk about being brave, when you talk about education and educating even the lawmakers or regulators, you guys put out a thread, around social media pollution, for the most part, echo chambers, conspiracy theories, viral tweets. Yeah, and I would love to hear your thoughts around that because it's one of the things we've tried to focus on is breaking down community barriers and bringing people like yourself on to actually do these types of spaces to educate the community. So, from the DLT Science Foundation standpoint, and the media aspect, like, if you guys ever have situations where you'd like to highlight some of the educational initiatives, whatever it may be, I know I've talked to Marc from HashPack multiple times. We would love to help you guys in that regard, but I would love to hear your thoughts around those echo chambers first and foremost, and then after that, you guys have a launch event coming up on the 29th with $5 million grants from Science Foundation. Maybe close us out with what you're doing with the Science Foundation.‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, thank you. I think I have even my head of science here in the Twitter space, Jawa. Probably she can spend a few words about our programs in terms of educational research. But, you know, when it comes to, you know, you mentioned the echo chambers and the information pollution. You know, these are basically, because everybody talks about environmental pollution, but I don't see many people talking about information pollution. And this has been a big problem in the crypto space over the last years because many bad actors did exploit this asymmetry of information in the crypto space, luring retail investors with ridiculous gains with a phantomatic new crypto without providing enough information or providing wrong information on purpose. This is called disinformation, misinformation. And we lack, you know, in the information abundance era, we will have tools that enable us to identify where is the real knowledge, where is the real knowledge that is useful for me? And as there is a paradox here because in the information abundance era, where do we live now, it's not true that more information is better to take decisions. More information can damage the decision-maker when it comes to take decisions. So, we as the DLT Science Foundation have a mission to protect, especially the people that are less equipped with knowledge and instruments, and provide them the instruments to fight this information pollution. That's what we're trying to do with some tools that are going to be put in the market, probably in Q2 this year, that will provide intelligent agents when it comes to all these amounts of information that online communities share about some crypto projects. And when it comes to identifying scams, when it comes to identifying spams, when it comes to notifying the quality discussion of a crypto community, either in Telegram, Twitter, or whatever, Reddit, and so on. So, we're going to help the community with the instruments that we are developing in-house for the betterment of the crypto economy. I want to break the equation: crypto is bad, blockchain is good. I'm so tired. So, we need to reestablish the fact that crypto is used and crypto is here to stay, and the bad actors have been out in the market for so much long time. It's time to work together in order to get rid of them. If we get rid of them, the sooner the better for all of us. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
I could not agree more, and I know when you guys start rolling those initiatives out, feel free to contact Marc and HashPack or us, and we will certainly try to support those in any way possible. I know you have your head of science down there as well, and we want to do a unique one just with the DLT Science Foundation, but I know you being the co-chair and co-founder as well, I kind of wanted to get you to just mention, in closing, you guys have a big launch event coming up on the 29th of June. The DLT Science Foundation has $5 million in grants for the academic and startup community as well. Maybe just talk about this launch event, how important it is for you guys, and what you guys are doing with the Science Foundation.‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
Yeah, yeah. Let me, briefly talk about these lunch events. And, then, you know, and then we talk about let me talk about what we are doing. So, basically, the lunch event we started basically, the foundation March this year. So we are really new, but we are old to say. But this organization is new. The official lunch was in March at the party blockchain week. We're going to have this official lunch in London on the 29th of June. There will be streaming, so people can join online if they cannot be in London. And, we're going to, you know, have a one, I mean, the co-founder of uh Hedera who is a Mance Harmon, in will be interviewed by Max Walker Williams. And then, we did invite the former Governor, uh, or the Bank of Canada Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, Timothy Lane, to share his view. He was working with the Mark Connie back in time, so to share his view on CBDC and all these topics that we discussed today. And then, we are going to showcase some of the, you know, all the first projects that we already funded with the grants that are in the realm of copyrights in the media industry. How to use blockchain to show some big problem that those industries have. And we will have a, finally, a panel, will be moderated by the Global Chief editor of a Coin Telegraph. And there will be a mix of panelists that we'll talk about, not just finance, but we talk about how blockchain can help community needs. How blockchain can solve a problem like CO2 tracking emissions and this kind of thing. So, you know, blockchain is here to serve the different businesses across different sectors. And this panel will cover, uh, you know, as many status as we can. And then, that's the event, basically. So everybody that is in London, please reach out to us and happy to host you on the 29th. I don't know if Jawa you want to share some words about our resurrection of education. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Yeah, if she wants to request to come up, and while she requests to come up, briefly, I'm just going to mention real quick, we have some pinned tweets to the top. We are interviewing Leemon Baird next Monday. Leemon is obviously pretty much the founder and the first HBarbarian within the entire ecosystem. Monday the 12th at 11:30 a.m eastern time. We've got a privacy-focused space this Wednesday with aleph zero. We've got XX Network. I see Aaron down there in the chat. We have self crypto, and multiple other participants. And then gen 3's open Beta whitelist is closing. I also pinned up to the top, the DLT Science Foundation's latest tweet. Discover the latest advancements in digital identity with self-sovereign identity. And I really recommend, I mean, if we, we kind of went over before Paolo hopped on the background of Paulo and just how much experience this gentleman has, and certainly super honored to have him up here. I would recommend you guys go follow the DLT Science Foundation. I mean, there's close ties with UCL. UCL is running pretty much the largest blockchain research aspects in the entire world. DLT Science Foundation is doing a lot of great work as well, and that's just getting kicked off starting at the end of June here. But yeah, and I don't know if I don't see a request to come up, Paulo, and that's fine. Yeah, we can do another one of the future, but I did want to, she hasn't got she has a little she has a little baby probably she's between us, but, but that's fine.‍

DLT Science Foundation – Paolo Tasca - Founder
That's fine no thank you very much for having me, uh, to your space. I really enjoy very much, and, um, I hope, to, you know, to have the chance to deep dive for the next time. So you know other topics around blockchain. Thank you guys for listening to me. Thank you so much. ‍

Darren Moore
It was an honor speaking to you in the future. I'd love to talk about, the systemic risk and instant settlement. Like what this technology means systemic risk if you ever have the time, but it was an honor to talk to you. Thank you. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
She's coming up right now. How do I pronounce, her name, Paulo? And you know what, I think we were gonna have you on, and I'm so glad that you did come up here. So please, like, the floor is yours. Anything you want to talk about within the foundation would be fantastic.‍

DLT Science Foundation – Jiahua Xu – Head of Science
Sure. I think Paolo covered most of the things, but I guess I just highlight, a few aspects on the science slash research front as head of science at the DLT Science Foundation. So, you mentioned blogs on the DLT Science Foundation Website, I would also encourage you to have a look at our science notes, which targets kind of more geeky, tech-savvy, more academic audience. Those are, more of high quality, also short articles, but high quality with proper, kind of references and the triple fact-checked, scientific notes, that highlight the most recent research advancements in the DLT space, industry insights, and also innovation and ideation. So yeah, we do, we do change specific research in terms of topics. We do change specific research. Of course, we look into the economics mechanisms of Hedera, but as well as fundamental research, chain-agnostic research, just to push the frontier of the scientific research in well-distributed ledger technology. Also, our research covers a range, a broad range of disciplines which is also reflected by the background, the diverse background of our research fellows. We come from computer science, financial economics, risk management, security, privacy, as well as law. So yeah, so we really foster kind of interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as cross-border collaboration. We cover, as Paolo has mentioned, you know, machine learning, AI, with DLT. We look at DeFi on different blockchain ecosystems. We also look at Layer 1, the consensus layer of different chains, as well as, as you guys have mentioned, the interoperable kind of protocols, cross-chain protocols. So we really do, a wide range of research activities here at the DLT Science Foundation. Yeah, I guess that covers that. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon - CEO
Well, thank you so much, Java, as well. I mean, it's one of the things we've focused on doing with these spaces is when we do our kind of cross-chain Wednesday spaces with multiple ecosystems, and it's certainly good to hear that you guys are focusing on that through the DLT Science Foundation as well. We've got a lot of people in here right now, and I would recommend, before we close this out, please go and follow the DLT Science Foundation. They're putting out great work and blogs, and they're just getting started. With all the research aspects, June 29th, I believe, is the, uh, the kickoff event as well. Five million dollars. I have to give a gigantic, thank you and heartfelt, we are super honored to say that Paolo Tasca came into the space today, and a thank you to Marc for helping to put this together through HashPack. Super excited for you, the head of science, to come up and talk about the DLT Science Foundation. Thank you to everybody from Genfinity. Thank you to Brooke Lacy. Brooke coming from, you know, the Bitcoin, Ethereum ecosystems, but multiple ecosystems, but really focusing on educating the wider community with fun and entertaining ways, but also in very serious ways. And this is the first time that she's come up and helped us out with a space like this, so it's just great to get people up here that are willing to kind of educate the community. And same thing with Darren, Fame21 More certainly macroeconomics and the XRP research for years and years, but, look guys, we're doing these consistently. We've got Lehman Baird next Monday. Paolo, it was such a pleasure to be able to talk to you. We really appreciate your time. I know it was longer than expected and anticipated, but, hope to do this again with you guys. And if you guys have any initiatives through the DLT Science Foundation that either HashPack or Genfinity can support, we are certainly interested in doing so. So with that being said, thank everybody so much for joining. Thank you, Paolo thank you, Java, as well. And, we will see you guys next time.