Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Buidl Europe 2026: The State of Decentralization

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

In this episode, recorded live at Buidl Europe 2026, host Sebastian Couture leads a panel with Ben Lakoff (Bankless Ventures), Richard Muirhead (Fabric Ventures), Aurora Orellana (G20 Strategies), and Matthew Arrow (Dark Forest). Together, they tackle the existential question facing the industry: can Cypherpunk values like self-custody and permissionless survive as multi-billion dollar institutions become the primary drivers of adoption?The discussion delves into the tension between individual sovereignty and the regulatory reach of organizations like the FATF, which they describe as a "Goliath" accountable to no one. They explore the concept of the "DeFi Mullet" a centralized user interfaces powered by decentralized backends and how privacy tech is becoming essential not for institutions seeking defensible competitive moats. Finally, the conversation looks at how global competition between jurisdictions will define the next decade of financial freedom and what it truly means to be a Cypherpunk in 2026. Topics00:00 Intro & Context04:15 Cypherpunk Values in an Institutional World09:30 Permissionless Deployment & Self-Custody15:00 The Regulatory Spectrum: KYC vs. Freedom21:45 The FATF & Global Financial Surveillance27:10 Jurisdictional Competition & Portability35:20 Selling Privacy to Institutions vs. Individuals42:15 The DeFi Mullet & Atomic Settlement49:00 Barriers to Entry: Legacy Mainframes & Career Risk55:30 What it Means to be a Cypherpunk in 2026LinksBen Lakoff on X: https://x.com/benlakoffRichard Muirhead on X: https://x.com/RichardMuirheadMatthew Arrow on X: https://x.com/mattarrow Bankless Ventures: https://bankless.ventures/Fabric Ventures: https://www.fabric.vc/Gnosis: https://gnosis.io/Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io

In this world of evolving cypherpunks to institutions in KYC and AML, it's likely inevitable if we want more mainstream adoption of this space, but then to maintain that freedom to say, okay, well, it's not working for me. I'm going to go here. When we get privacy on blockchain, institutions and companies and sort of corporate world gets the benefit from that, but also individuals do because let's hope that individuals also get the benefit from it because we may also end up in a sort of two-tiered world where, you know, the powerful get their privacy, but at the end of the week do not.

And so that would not be a great outcome. This is a spectrum. All of us care about privacy in some way, shape or form, but I still use iMessage and I still use WhatsApp and I still like do Twitter DMs and stuff. I think if you're looking more sort of the institutional side regarding privacy, you know, they want the privacy on their clients, the privacy on the transactions,

while still being able to be auditable to a degree. People are slash should only be comfortable really sharing that information if they have privacy, Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people, driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. We're here today at Biddle Europe. Hi, guys. Thanks for joining me today. So we'll start with a brief round of introductions for this panel on defiance and institutions.

What happens to cypherpunk values when institutions start buying our bags? Basically, the idea here is, you know, is crypto added as sort of an existential point where institutional adoption of Crypto leads a lot of the ethos and values and principles that have driven all his innovation for the last 15 years. Does it throw a lot of those principles out the window? But we'll start with brief introductions to my share. Right. Hey guys. My name's Ben Lakoff. I'm actually based here in Lisbon and I run bankless ventures, which is our early stage venture fund in the crypto ecosystem. I'm Matthew Arrow. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Dark Forest. We advise on market microstructures and token liquidity to foundations and protocols within the crypto ecosystem. Hi, everyone. I'm Aurora Oriana. I work for managing director at G20 Strategies. We support a lot of blockchain protocols with market making. We do advisory and we support for a lot of OTC services and treasury management as well as asset management. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. I'm Richard Muirhead. I'm a managing partner of Fabric Ventures, and we have been kicking around in a space since about 2012 back a couple of hundred different projects and seen a few crypto ways and seen a few ways of the last set of decades. I also have one other kind of small hat, which is I'm on the board of a sovereign SBRN, which is spun out of the kind of near ecosystem. It's where I try to keep my my sword sharp from an operational perspective because I could have, from whence I came. This episode is brought to you by NOSIS, building the open internet one block at a time. NOSIS was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a

powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. NOSIS is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that are so many others, like Safe and CowSwap. At the center is NOSIS chain. It's a low-fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years, and it's secured by over 300,000, validators. It's the foundation for real-world financial applications like NOSISPAY and Circles. All this is governed by NOSISDAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home. So if you're building

in Web 3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at NOSIS.io. Before we start this conversation, I think one interesting question, to perhaps get into is like what are the values that we actually want to defend as an industry, as people have been building in the space for a long time, who came into the industry with aspirations of a world where interactions would be mediated by systems, where trust was minimized, where people had financial freedom, where perhaps even things like regulation, sanctions could be skirted. What are the values that we actually

want to defend and want to sort of carry on into the next 10 to 15 years of crypto adoption as institutions becoming increasingly involved in the space. I can kick on. I think self-custody is a key point being able to have the option to look after your own assets and certain sort of guardrails as well where you can also exit a platform without permission. and I think having proper privacy and also visibility as well with the transactions while also providing secure networks, I think is a really core thing. Yeah, very important for fungibility as well.

If you have assets on one platform that can only be traded or interacted with platforms that are approved or vetted and like fungibility sort of falls apart. Any other things that come to mind? I think the big one for me is like permissionlessness. And Eric Voorhees did a really good keynote at a permissionless conference a few years ago. But it was like not having to ask permission to send money or deploy a smart contract or invest in different things. But I think that like ethos for me is like the biggest most important aspect for me within the crypto world. Yeah, and I would just echo what both of you have said.

And I think we're talking about cypher punks, one of the earliest cypher punks was probably Benjamin Franklin. And he had this great saying that I love him. And he said, those who give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither. And I think there's something there that can be applied to our space as well and how we banish this merge and evolve into a more institutional-faced ecosystem and preserving the permissionless space and preserving the privacy and making sure we're not compromising too far on those values that we started.

So I think, you know, if we go back to it, the core principles of being of cypherpanka, you know, definitely openness. I don't know, I can maybe ask forgiveness, not. permission. I always think, I thought that maybe that would be a good title for a conference, actually, forgiveness. But, and, and that's in privacy is a core part of that, that sort of sovereignty over yourself and to be able to keep secrets and so forth. I think maybe tackling ahead on, you know, this desire that was at the root from the romantic stages of this, of our movement from Web 3, to have kind of sovereignty over your, your money,

you know, self-custy, for example. And from that, I think it was related to a desire not to be subject to the devaluation of fiat, for example. I think that, you know, some of that we just have to accept that as the kind of pendulum swings from, you know, purely supporting the desires of the individual to dealing with the realities of institutions, that we're going to have to compromise on that a bit. And that, therefore, you know, we're going to have to have to have on our amps and off ramps. We're going to have to deal with, you know, KYC and so forth.

I think we all know. I mean, this is a trope. There's going well throughout the industry already that we want to have selective, you know, revealing of information to make that possible. But I think that the question of having sort of sound money and being free from the grips of our kind of central banking overlords or whatever, I think that can only come if there's actually, we can get it with the movement we've got now. But it doesn't come by forcing it. It comes from competition between jurisdictions. But if a jurisdiction is bad, manages its kind of fiscal monetary policy badly,

if there's enough fluidity between different ecosystems and borderlessness, you know, spanning nations, then, you know, that will get punished in a way that it wasn't before. But we're already seen with some of the rules say around stable coins in the UK where they're restricting them out that you as an individual or as a lot, institutions you can hold, you're going to end up with caps. It's hard for governments to fight that instinct to control, you know, money flow. Right. I think like sovereignty is such a huge, such an important part of the idea of being a cypherpunk and many of the core values was rooted in the idea of personal sovereignty and personal freedom, personal liberties, privacy, etc.

As we all know, much of our financial transactions are intermediated by entities that are regulated. Those regulations in large part, at least in Europe and the developed world, come from guidances that were issued by a shadowy group of people that sit in this organization called the FATF, which, you know, if you don't know about the FATF, look it up. Study the FATF. And the FATF is accountable to no one, is elected by no one. is effectively not even an organization. It's just sort of like a group of people that got together and decided, hey, we're going to create these rules for the world and, like, people will abide by them because we're also going to rate people or rate countries by their degree to which they agree to these rules.

And so there's sort of a rackets happening here. Sorry, this is a really hot topic for me. But, yeah, in that reality, in the reality of the, you know, the FATF regulated world, there's a tension between that. the desire to control, to control financial flows, to control financial flows for reasons that, you know, may or may not even arrive to the goals of fighting terrorism and money laundering. I think in large part it doesn't. And the individual freedom, the individual liberties of people to transact freely without

caps, for instance. In France, you can't use cash for more than 3,000 years. You can't pay transactions for more than a few thousand euros. So there's a tension there that it feels unresolvable. you know, where do we land? Where, where's the, is there a middle ground? And how do we as an industry, as people who believe in freedom and personal liberties, continue to fight against this, this Goliath?

Well, I mean, I'll try and connect it to my previous thought. I think if you, if you can choose to be in within whichever platform, whichever nation you want, and you can kind of, you know, rage quit from it when you want, you can move your assets or some, you know, privacy preserved memory of, of what you've been doing and you can take it with you, it's portable, your value is portable, which is pretty easy these days, but preferably your kind of identity and your sort of data exhaust is also portable. If you can do that, then that encourages competition. And then I think, I think the balance comes through competition between these different jurisdictions. That's how

you square the circle. I mean, if you ask any, you know, everybody individually, where the balance should lie. Of course, you'll get a million different answers, and probably on a democratic basis, probably not a very good answer. But I think through competition, you've got a chance that both people are held in, jurisdictions are held in check because people can leave. But also, you should get segmentation and diversity. If you really don't like the way the balances have been struck in one space, you can go to another one, whether fewer caps or, you know, it's more libertative. Yeah, I was going to say I think that's essential is just maintaining that freedom of movement and choice. And, you know, it's like you can please all the people half the time and half the people all the time.

And you're never going to do a good job at that. And someone is never going to like the jurisdiction or the regulating body that they're living within or under. But to maintain that freedom to move and say, okay, this is, it doesn't suit me as a person. This not doesn't not line up in my ethos. I think that is, you know, in this world of evolving cypherpunks to institutions in KYC and AML, it's likely inevitable if we want more mainstream adoption of this space, but then to maintain that freedom to say, okay, well, it's not working for me. I'm going to go here.

I think that's extremely valuable. And we definitely observed a fabric over the years across Europe. Europe is an incredible sort of old city-states with academia and these pockets of innovation and embracing of a sort of libertarian middle way and quite a lot of revolt directed towards, you know, extreme forms of government, typically in Europe. That created an opportunity, I think, around our space, upon the Web 3 and movement for a long period of time. And then governments competed to attract with, you know, with benevolent sort of regulation,

everyone from Malta to Switzerland to France, to the UK, whatever. I think we then squandered that lead a little bit because, you know, we're going to be able to you know, it's always possible for people to poll vault. And through, you could argue, quite strong individual and statewide economic self-interest, the U.S. just pole vaulted into the lead by saying, we're just going to embrace this all super fast. But that's good. Now, as long as, you know, for Europe, I guess, as long as we wake up again and become increasingly competitive. And I like that idea of competition and kind of voting with your feet and being able,

this portability. but I think that the other thing to be cognizant of is like this is a spectrum as well, is like all of us care about privacy in some way, shape, or form, but like I still use i message and I still use WhatsApp and I still like do Twitter DMs and stuff. And I'm not just pushing everybody to signal in proton mail because of conveniences and stuff like that. So I think everybody kind of has their line and what they're willing to sacrifice on this like scale between, and cyberpunk and convenience as you kind of alluded to as well. I think as to your point, I think people value privacy differently as well,

where to some people it's everything and others, they're willing to give a little bit of that away. I think if you're looking more sort of the institutional side regarding privacy, you know, they want the privacy on their clients, the privacy on the transactions, while still being able to be auditable to a degree, right? So everything's monitored, but they will give on a need-to-know basis. And so it's a bit of a fine line between, I guess, the cypherpunk, you know, pure privacy ethos and how the institutions are adapting and within their guardrails

and what will eventuate with that. Yeah, I think privacy is one of those things that's been proactively ignored and retroactively appreciated. And we all have the benefit. Well, most of us have the benefit of living in a society that we're not political dissidents and we're not enemies of the state. And, you know, for all intents and purposes, we don't have anything to hide. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't value our privacy. and it makes sense but if you extend what you said it's the classic like you know it's only once the horse has bolted that you remember to can i close the barn door from individuals

in particular tend to be like that and i was mentioning in the green room whatever we if there was some kind of singular mantra within fabric for last two years and i think it extends quite broadly within venture capital it's that it's quite hard to sell privacy to anyone individual to get them to make that choice they tend to be complacent but but i have to I have, I mean, reflecting on it a bit, and we'll see, I guess, what happens shortly in our industry, but possibly for three reasons that might change. So one is the regulatory issue. We're talking about here, you've got to have the on off ramps.

And like, we're in a situation where the, what do they call it, like a defy mullet, you know, kind of like you got centralized at the front and sort of defy at the back. And I think there's a lot of, that makes sense because, you know, you, you can. can operate in a compatible way with today's markets. You can onboard the huge amount of assets that are not currently on the industry, et cetera. So that's clearly, you know, forging ahead. Another one, I think, is around something that's a core part plank of our thesis.

Again, sorry, I keep talking about Fabric, but, you know, at Fabric, which is the role for Web 3 in a sense is to organize the world's data from the bottom up to make it available to AI, the menagerie of AI, kind of agents and models and so forth, to make them better. And we see that there's, of this is insatiable appetite for data. People are slash should only be comfortable really sharing that information if they have privacy. If privacy is baked in, I was talking to a pretty illustrious, you know, venture investor this week about it.

You know, like if you're going to just default to letting your scales and your watch and everything give all of the data all the time and your genetics and the works, you want to trust that system and therefore know that there's some privacy. So I think that's the second reason privacy might kick in. And the third is this chat at the moment about how we all know that kind of block space is pretty commoditized in every sense,

but that you can get a moat if I think the phrase that Ali over at A6Z uses is that you know, you can export your value pretty quickly but it's very hard to get to export the secrets. So privacy, can make a difference to constructing a defensible competitive mode for all the blockchains that exist today.

So different stakeholders, I think, in the system now have a reason to start adopting privacy, which I think could mean that it really takes off. But I hope we still get the balance in terms of, you know, it doesn't swing too far in the wrong direction. Yeah. Do you want to say something? I mean, I think like privacy, like institutions and broadly, you know, the corporate world, values privacy differently than individuals do.

And I think the, I think in large part, you know, maybe in large, but not a large part, but in some part, blockchains have not been adopted by, you know, the majority of the world's businesses because there is no privacy. And privacy is an essential component to, I think, you know, capitalism.

It is like arbitrage is what makes capitalism kind of work. And you get that by having, opacity and information. And so when we get privacy, on on blockchains. Institutions and companies and sort of corporate world gets benefit from that, but also individuals do because, well, let's hope so. Let's hope that individuals also get the benefit from it because we may also end up in a sort of two-tiered world where, you know, the powerful get their privacy, but the end of the week do not.

And so that would not be a great outcome. But again, privacy means different things to different people in their institutions. And like blockchains by design are public, transparent, and permanent. So they're like the complete opposite of private by design. But like with an institution, I mean, it's like, like you were saying, there's like a few key things that they're worried about. And it can be, it can be not private to a few or a trusted party. And it doesn't have to be completely obfuscated all the way to like the cypherpunk values. I mean, picking your point about how institutions behave. I don't know how many people have spent time sort of selective institutions.

I mean, we've all dealt with bureaucracy. But I always like to reflect, it's like the individuals and socials and socials. themselves can be very happy or if I'd excited about adopting a new technology moving certain direction. But of course, you know, if you've got a compliance department or some several departments and basically your bonus or your job depends on not screwing this up, it never happens. And so we've been at that stage for a long period of time and we're starting to see that now play out in a positive way.

And I do think that's if we can, well, regulation does that partly. If we can have privacy so that institutions can have arbitrage and can protect some of their intellectual property for at least for a period of time so they can make money, that's going to drive things. But I do think it's an interesting point. If you think about it, we rely on kind of social consensus on privacy with large organizations currently, but whether it be Google, Meta, Bank of America, Barthes or whatever, we're comfortable. We give up all of this information. The institutions have the ability to enforce a level of privacy, although they don't always do a great job of it for themselves. or the customers, but actually we have no privacy within those institutions. And we do have an opportunity right now with the technologies that have been coaxed into the

mainstream by our industry, ZK, you know, HME, etc., you know, T's, and long made the debates rage on Twitter as to which is the right thing for the right job. But it's, you know, we have an opportunity to tap into those to also have privacy for the individual to strike that balance. So I think I hope we get those competitions to that that emerges. Well, I don't know if you saw this this news recently where French tax, someone within French tax authorities divulged information about some sort of like some crypto founder in France to criminal networks that end up either kidnapping him or something like that. I mean, you know, so like even within trusted institutions, we, we don't have, you know, there are incentives that

make it such that even if your privacy isn't protected sort of makes you want to not pay your taxes. But for example. Not financial advice or tax advice, but... Well, I always reminds me of Travis.

I mean, maybe it's apocry of this point. I seem to remember I read it probably, but when Travis Kalanek from my, you know, Uber was up there and accidentally switched into God mode on Uber, you remember that one? When he could see where... Oh, yeah, yeah. He could see where everybody was tracked.

traveling. This is a fear, right? Because I think you kind of nailed one of the points or the crux of the problem is that institutions are extremely risk-adverse. If there's something that's going to jeopardize somebody's end-a-year bonus, they're not going to do it, regardless of the benefit it could provide. And the status quo of all these institutions right now is antiprivacy. So just complete transparency as much as possible because this is how a lot of the Web 2, businesses have profited over the past couple decades is, you know, Google invented this model of surveillance capitalism and they just eat all the data they can and then sell this to others.

Facebook then perfected it. Yeah. And then the fear is that this just kind of continues and grows. And as you said, then Uber has this God mode and, you know, where does it go? I agree. The flip side of that risk aversion that folks and companies have is that if they smell a profit or a small piece of their contribution to a profit, which in itself may not look totally evil, they will do it. But then 10 or 100 of them do it. And in total, that can be quite evil as an

outcome as we, as we know. I think that's interesting. I'm trying. And I think, you know, having, it was, I had this epiphany at one point that kind of like, you won't try to see so that you have in a sense, and some people use this term your own backpack of information and money and so forth. And then you want that backpack to be portable so that you can, take it somewhere else. We were talking about that, you know, we want that fluidity. And I think that, and for me, the epiphany story I had was that portability is basically the flip side of the coin from composability. So it's not just important to the individual that you're able to flip around like that and create competition. But it's also essential for innovation. Because,

you know, in talking about, you know, what do we want to preserve as we find the correct blend between institutions and individuals? One key part of it is composability. We want to, you know, for the developers to not have to ask permission for how they compose, you know, their application from different existing components. So I think they all tie together like, you know, privacy, backpack, portability, composability. That's the thing that we want to get right. And I think this is where you might start seeing more sort of the defy infrastructure supporting institutions. They're going to be taking the efficiencies. But there'll be guard rails around the air.

edges where there's the guardrails to tick the regulatory boxes, but things are going to become more efficient. For instance, say atomic settlement, a lot of the other things that DeFi has created. And if it creates more efficiency and, you know, more money for the institutions, then they'll use those infrastructures to their advantage. Well, I'd like to maybe shift a little bit the conversation to DeFi. We've talked a lot about privacy and freedom, which I think are super interesting. But on the Defi side, you know, if we look at volume broadly, like across crypto,

most exchange volume is done on centralized exchanges and not on dexes, not on AMNs, and most of the blending as well. And so leverage happens on centralized exchanges. Is this an indicator that Defy has failed to deliver that promise of efficiency? And if I see you shaking your head, then what is the, what is the, what is the utility? utility of defy and like what what efficiencies will institutions traditional finance institutions and global finance take away from defy in order to provide more efficient better systems global systems permissionless etc like all these things that we're well i think sort of i alluded before these

atomic settlements so instant settlement rails and sort of the speed as well and how the infrastructure can really support a lot of the new transactions that are taking place across the board obviously the volumes are not comparable with the centralized exchanges. And a lot of that is for regulatory requirements and the K-Y-C component of it for the onboarding. So I think it's a lot of the tech stacks that will be implemented on the back end with the institutions. I think that infrastructure continues to get better. UI, U.S. continues to get better. And these used to be bigger bottlenecks.

But if it's on a blockchain, it's censorship-resistant and you can self-custody your assets. And centralized exchanges work great until they don't. I mean, there's Roger Vair that used to say, like, treat centralized exchanges like a public restroom. Get in, do your business, try not to touch anything and get out as quickly as possible. But I think, you know, now these like more trusted institutions that are publicly traded, et cetera, but they're still centralized. And I think that there's like a blending of the two. like Richard had mentioned the defy mullet. So there could be this like centralized front to end with decentralized back end.

For example, like Coinbase with the Morpho integration. This has been live since April 2025. So they launched this if you have Bitcoin on Coinbase, Bitcoin, sitting on Bitcoin network, presumably, but like you click a button and it's wrapped on Ethereum as CBBT. And then you borrow against it on Morpho completely under the hood. but like people don't know what's happening and try to do that on your own. Even with the UX and wallet advances that we have today, that would be a very arduous process.

And you'd probably lose it in the process. But you can borrow against your Bitcoin at 6%, which is super competitive with any centralized provider lending against your Bitcoin. So things like this that are kind of blending the both. But it's really this defy mullet with defy underneath. the centralized exchanges could pitch or the institutions capitulated onto the centralized exchanges because they have the order book that they know and love these clobes and it's just because centralized exchanges are not familiar with AMMs and going back to this risk adverseness of institutions or the the institutions

aren't familiar with the AMM models and since they're their risk adverse they're they're naturally going to keep the distance and I think as you're saying with these hybrid decks is that have the clob on the front end and on chain settlement on the back end, this is going to be the first introduction of institutions to Dex's. And then it's only a matter of time until the institutions start to understand the efficiencies of operating on a Dex versus a centralized exchange. And then evolution over time and more and more order flow. And we're living in the Halcyon days of centralized exchanges.

But I think within five years, this flips and we see Dux's taking the lying share of the volume and the liquidity of the crypto markets. But outside of crypto, would you, like, with this five-year timeline also apply to, say, like London Stock Exchange and other big market venues? Like everything, maybe six years. Maybe we'll push it to six years. I mean, like you hear Brian Armstrong talking about being the everything exchange at Coinbase and, you know, I think Coinbase and others coming from different directions are competing to provide that very important, intuitive onboarding for individuals and then others for institutions as well. I think that front of the mullet, it's got to be easy to use. It's got

to satisfy governments. And then I think it's not just about the efficiencies at the back end. I think it's clear that obviously, you know, stable ground settlements. It's just going to happen. It's going to be baked in everywhere as a stack. And it's clear that all look at the deposits and other assets are going to be tokenized. And then it's clear that those are going to be re-hypothicated into all sorts of different other instruments. And so it's efficiency, but it also capability. And in that context, I wanted to bring back too much to privacy again. But you've got to, I think, trust implicitly at a kind of protocol level.

if you're basically you're unleashing the machines to do great work with your finances. There's almost kind of no halfway house because once you let them go do it, they're going to go and do it. And so you better trust that the information you've shared, A, keeps government happy, but B, you know, does embarrass you. What do you think of the biggest blockers to institutional adoption of defy tech? And I'm not just talking about crypto institutions. I'm talking about trad-fi institutions, you know, like black rocks, fidelity, etc. I think a big component of that quite often is legacy systems. So a lot of the big institutions have a lot of legacy systems.

It's even hard to upgrade Windows, for instance, quite often. This is how internally there's the tech stacks are just not up to date with the current technologies. And I think there's going to be internal push, how to adopt these blockchain technologies or potentially have sort of add-ons on the side where they're not able to add on to their existing stacks and they'll have to do something on the side to accommodate and to keep up with competition. And it's kind of like, can you get that first move of advantage? You'd mention sort of the tokenized deposits. Well, you know, city sort of did the tokenized deposits as initial.

They're talking about stable coins, but it's sort of still under consideration. So the banks are, you know, are heavily looking into it. that there's a lot of incumbent problems to face. And it's a matter of time before they will when they see there's a financial opportunity and they're going to be losing business to competitors, but it takes time. Wells Fargo's logo is still a horse and buggy.

And a lot of the triad fire institutions still are working on decommissioning mainframes. So I think there's a long way to go. Maybe not six years, maybe more like seven. For some of the other institutions, I think you start to see it, though. Yeah. I'd also add, like, the reduction in career risk for, like, proposing these things and adopting these things has decreased dramatically.

Like, you don't get fired for buying IBM sort of situation. But, like, everybody was talking about stable coins and how much more efficient they are and they're going to eat the world, all of this. But it wasn't until, like, the G. Bill was passed, that all the big major players started launching Stablecoin. So there was this bit of like career risk as well as like the regulatory risk. And as these things like get a little bit more clear, then more people are open to adopting these things. But it will be slow.

And I think also another one is the reputational risk, right? These institutes have been around a long time and reputation is everything. And quite often they might make investments into these other projects or exchange. but not have their brand name on the actual products. I was just going to agree with you like 100%. The percent, you know, how you're perceived if you propose, you think is totally changed. It was like a whole bunch of decentralization in blockchain theater

until about 12 months ago. Larry, you were economists talking about tokenization of everything. But you were, I think, at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, which I think actually should have been called Abu Dhabi Crypto and AI. Yeah. I mean, really, I mean, finance is almost sort of a sideshowed. Maybe it should be such a bit. I mean, it's to your point, right?

Like crypto and AI are eating finances. Yeah, yeah. And so I think the world Spargoers of the world, they're held back by their logo and the pacing innovation. And, you know, if I ask the horses that tell me to get different riders or whatever the phrase was, you know what I mean. And if they're held up by kind of bad systems. And sadly, I've wrestled with some of those in my past. But I think right now you've got, because of how things have fallen into place and the catalysts that are that have fallen into place, you've got everyone from Arveh to Robin Hood to Coinbase to, you know, to Crack and to, you know, to Bank of America, probably JPMorgan. All, you know, there are a few segments to the address, but to be doing on-chain banking writ large for, you know, individuals, wealthy individuals, SMEs, enterprises, governments, whatever.

And I think it's just a tsunami of competition. Hopefully that's good for us. So final question here. Basically, like, we're here. It's beginning of 2026. Our industry has changed tremendously in the last year. And with acceleration and stable corn adoption and regulatory clarity also has really been propelled over the last 12 months, which we wanted. And now it's here.

What does it mean to be a cypherpunk in 2026? Like what are the, you know, as an industry, how should we be interacting with institutions? Should we be interacting with institutions? It's like perhaps a question. Some people are asking themselves, but like what does it mean to be a cyberpunk in 2026? I think it's agency, just having a high degree of agency. Maintaining that and presenting that and acting upon that and being flexible and malleable, but not compromising on certain points that are valuable to your personal philosophies in mind.

but exhibiting a high degree of agency, I would say. I'd second that. I think the agency is key. And, you know, for the ones that want to maintain their privacy. I think it depends who you talk to. If you're talking to like a true cypherpunk, they'd say it means exactly what it always has meant. But maybe more to your second question of like how should we interact with institutions?

I mean, I think we'll continue to have more traditional finance, institutional players enter into the space. I mean, Morgan Stanley just launched Bitcoin and ETFs yesterday. Like, more and more people that this career risk has gone down, they want to get involved bigly. So adhering to kind of what started this space and like kind of the ethos that was very important early on, but like also accepting that it's evolving. And we have new players that have entered the arena. Yeah, at the heart of the cyphapunk movement, actually, I think, is philosophically a romanticism. And I think, I don't want to kind of call it kind of the end of history, but I think, well,

maybe we hope it is. There's this sort of struggle between institutions and individual that's been taking place, or indeed between the left and right wing kind of politics. And the cyphor punk was wanting to kind of take a more central path of sort of a third way and preserve the rights of the individual. I'm hoping that what was rolling out now, and I think the genie is out of the bottle in terms of the tokenization of everything

and hyper-tokenization, what we want to call it, I'm hoping that, in a sense, that's been addressed. But given that the whole point was, you know, holding romantic ideals aloft, that the cyphepunk will find something else that needs to be addressed. It doesn't need to be yes-as-a's battles. Thank you so much.

Thanks to all of you for listening in. And, yeah, enjoy the rest of the... of the evening. Cheers.