The Breakdown - Privacy & Institutional Crypto's [Redacted] Future | The Breakdown

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

While The Breakdown is between seasons, we’re sharing a panel from Digital Asset Summit hosted by David. The discussion explores how institutions think about on-chain privacy, the tradeoffs involved, and what it takes to bring financial systems onto blockchain infrastructure. – Follow Blockworks Research: https://x.com/blockworksres Follow Patrick: https://x.com/_patrickogrady Follow Yannik: https://x.com/yrschrade Follow Catherine: https://x.com/catgu_ Follow Eric: https://x.com/wesarn_real Follow David: https://x.com/dcanellis — Nexo is the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your crypto, borrow against it without selling, and trade a range of assets. Now available in the U.S with 30 days of exclusive privileges. Get started at http://nexo.com/breakdown Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ — Timestamps:(00:00) Introduction (00:45) Meet the Privacy Builders (04:17) What Institutions Want (08:40) Nexo Ad (09:17) What Institutions Want (Con’t) (23:00) Nexo Ad (23:52) Composability and Compliance (35:39) Retail vs Institutions Wrap — Disclaimer: Nothing said on The Breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

This week, the Blockworks team is in New York for Digital Assets Summit. So for this episode, we've got a panel from the event, recorded live and hosted by yours truly. All about how institutions are pushing for more privacy features on blockchain networks. We hope you enjoy and we'll see you again soon. This episode is brought to you by Nexto. Step into a new era of digital wealth. Earn interest on your digital assets. Borrow against them without selling and trade all in one platform.

Get started at nexo.com slash breakdown. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Welcome everybody. We've got a stacked line up. We might just run down the line and quickly introduce ourselves and what we're working on within the privacy space, starting with you, Yanik. Yeah, thank you.

I'm Janik Shred, CEO and co-founder at Arkium. What we're doing with ARICUM is we're building encrypted execution, which enables us to take all possible kinds of information, encrypted, and run computations over that information without ever having to share that. And what this technology that we are building enables is confidentiality and privacy on top of public blockchain networks, and for the first time ever this concept of secrets, right, proprietary private information being able to interact with someone else's private information without

having to share anything and that really opens up a whole new design space for on-chain economies Eric hello everybody I'm Eric Sarnicki I'm one of the co-founders a digital asset where the company behind the Canton network in the Canton network we brought privacy on-chain in a fully compliant scalable way we're processing well in excess of trillions of dollars per month and things like repo, life insurance, cash on ledger in various different forms. And we're bringing the real world on chain in all sorts of safe and scalable ways. Catherine? Hi, everyone.

My name is Catherine Gou. I'm the head of product for digital assets at Salano Foundation. I think many of you know what Salana is. It is an L1 blockchain. It is extremely fast, scalable, reliable as a blockchain. And we're putting a lot of effort into building. privacy features that could be used by different type of financial institutions. And I think going to 2026, we have a very large and growing crowd of FIs being on the network, people like Visa,

Mazdaq, Western Union, Pfizer, as well as JP Morgan, State Street Fidelity of the world. They're all participating on chain. So that need for privacy is ever more important. Finally, Patrick. Yeah, thanks for having me. Patrick, I'm the founder of a company called Commonware. We are working on commoditizing all sorts of primitives for building fast and sometimes private blockchains. One of our biggest customers went live last week, Tempo, if you've heard of it. And so we're into the stable coin and trading space. So helping to encrypt stable coin and generally payments transfers,

as well as encrypting trading to prevent MEV and other sort of abuse of trading that you have probably heard about on blockchains. Cool. So it's very interesting because we actually, have different expressions of the privacy stack across our four guests. Like we have, Catherine, and please forgive me if I butcher this, but it's almost as if you're building privacy at the token layer and packaging it that way. We have Patrick who is building universal tools almost that can enable privacy across many different blockchains. We have Eric who has

taken that from a very chain native perspective and bait those privacy controls. into the network itself. And then we have Yanik that is probably the most aggressive of the privacy preserving protocols in that it's all encrypted compute. So they're all different ways that you can get privacy on chain. So I'm expecting a very nice conversation. So maybe Catherine, we'll start with you.

You've spent years around CBDCs and stable coins and tokenized assets. And you have a lot of experience in talking to regulated institutions about coming on chain. What do they usually mean when they say they want on-chain privacy? Because there's many different forms that on-chain privacy can take. You can have confidentiality with the general public. So it's not on a blockchain explore that you can easily pass.

Or it can be privacy with your counterparties. Or it can be privacy against the actual infrastructure nodes that they can't see what's happening. what do institutions want when they say they want privacy on chain? Sure. I think all of the above in the sense that depends on the institution and the use case you're looking at. I think privacy really means quite different things when you get to the nitty-gritty details of how you actually design that privacy feature. And so the way we are looking at privacy is really it's a spectrum, right?

It's not like you either have privacy or not, but it's like what level of privacy are you looking at. And we actually just wrote a report quite recently that you guys can take a look on Payments.org, which is our website. And it's a report we just launched on privacy this Monday. So the way we look at it is actually a by a two-by-two matrix in the sense there's the sort of privacy in terms of identity. And then there's the privacy in terms of like the amount and balances of transfer, the value essentially, value against identity. I think for some institutions, they care only about, say, hiding the value bit, but they can just have the addresses still retain as is, i.e. your public addresses are being known. You don't need to hide

it any further. This is what we call confidentiality, right, in which you hide the amount, you hide the balance, i.e. the value, but you don't need to hide their identity. The other folks who are looking at the reversal, which is more the anonymity set, which is looking at hiding the identities of the send their recipient, but they're fine by leaving the, uh, the balance and stuff on chain. And of course, there's the more extreme end, which is what we call total secrecy, which is essentially combining both identity layer and the value layer to be hidden and private. And I think what's interesting is increasingly when we talk to financial institutions,

that's actually more and more of the desired level of privacy they're looking at, because a good example is, say, you know, a fund manager creating a pool of student loans, and you only want to give to a subset of approved, you know, entities, that in that specific case, if you want to do it on, you know, main net on a public chain, you don't want anyone else to know exactly what's going on other than the parties involved in that specific use case. So you want to hide both the identity as well as the amounts being involved in that specific case.

So in any case, I think it's an incredibly exciting and complex topic for us to, you know, to spend a lot of. of time investing efforts into it. I think as Salana thinking about how do we then present the right solution to them, I think the key is we don't see it as a like a single kind of out of the box single solution that we can just present to any FI and just be like no matter who you are, just go and use this single thing. It doesn't come out of a box. Instead, in order to kind of cater that spectrum sort of narrative, what we want to create is a modular approach, we want to have certain things that's already natively embedded in the

network, Solana network protocol level, things like confidentiality and stuff that we're leveraging ZKs to use it or other technology to use it. And then there's other things you can create your private execution environment that we also enable an institution can pick and choose. And on top of all of that, we have ecosystem players like Archim and others who are building privacies on top of

Solana, the infrastructure to present very specific use cases, infrastructure. So with that spectrum, we also provide them a many-off option, if you will. And I think the point is, as an institution, you can come, mix and match, choose whatever is the right level of privacy to fit for your specific use case. That's how we're thinking about it. Step into a new era of digital wealth with Nexo, the premier digital assets wealth platform. Earn interest on your digital assets, borrow against them without selling. Trade a wide range of cryptocurrencies, all in one place. Nexto is now available again in the US with an evolved product suite tailored to today's market.

For a limited time, new US clients can unlock 30 days of exclusive wealth club premier benefits, including enhanced interest rates, reduce borrowing costs and up to 0.5% crypto cashback on trades. Get started today at nexo.com slash breakdown. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk, terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. Eric, I might throw to you next because I just want to go back to this idea of confidentiality from the network operators themselves. You do give that out of the box almost when they're operating on Canton,

in that transactions can't be viewed by the network operators. So there's actually no real choice there. How important is that distinction when talking to institutions that it's not just simply that, well, the public can't see it and the counterpart is it's no, it is from the top to bottom down, it's not possible. Yeah, I mean, I would start by agreeing with Catherine and say it's actually not even enough. Like there's even more depth to what she was just describing because that privacy configuration is also contextual. It can change in different environments.

So maybe it's appropriate for this party to know this bit of information this time, but then not the next time. Or maybe this intermediate step in a workflow is important to know, but maybe not the ultimate outcome. So that sort of very fine-grained configurability goes above and beyond just those base layer, like what does the world see? And yeah, there is also the added value of, well, sometimes people don't want anybody to know absolutely anything. I think where a lot of these approaches coming on top of the public chains that can be a little difficult is that they start first from this assumption that it actually is additive to provide proofs to everybody in the network, there are definitely times when that is true, but it's not universally true. And so just that configurability that Catherine started about, we've taken that even further. And it's not just at rest. It's not just in transfer.

It's in composition, which is also really critical. So if I've combined multiple assets into a DVP or a multi-leg transaction into a complex update, I can't leak any of that information across that update either. Kind of a silly but I think constructed example is if you were to compose going to a doctor with a stable coin payment, you would not want the doctor to find out how much money you have, and you wouldn't want your bank to find out why you went to the doctor. So these things are even more complex. And I mean, Catherine did a great job, but I think it's even at a deeper level than that. And giving the tools to the participants to pick the right level for them because it's not universal that privacy is perfect.

Like there are times that you want to disclose information. There are places where disclosing data is additive. So you need to give the tools to the participant to figure out the right. right configuration for them and their purpose. Yannick, I'm just wondering your take, because, you know, Archeum is really built on this idea that privacy really needs encrypted computation within the chain architecture itself, which is another step forward, another step further than what's already been discussed. But can it go too far?

Like, do you really need there to be a way through removing, privacy at certain levels or is it really a universal truth that it is completely necessary at all times? So I think first of all what is important to understand what Catherine was speaking about, for example, is that the way you can enforce actual privacy is by utilizing cryptography and mathematics, right? So for me it is about removing trust assumptions, moving single points of failure and utilizing mathematics to ensure that using cryptographic primitives privacy exists. And it's not like what Eric described where we are trusting node operators to not leak information.

But instead, there's cryptographic guardrails where nobody is able to see any type of information. And I think that matters highly both on the retail and institutional level because these these cryptographic primitives that we've designed basically are constructed around this mathematical game where there's multiple participants that are playing this game and all of them

are mutually distrusting each other. And our algorithms are the most performant and versatile solution to enabling those mutually mistrusting participants to run some computation to solve

our problem together without ever having to share information, without ever having to trust each other. And I think that describes what blockchains do in general, right? They allow for global coordination and consensus, especially when we look at retail actors. But I think it's increasingly becoming interesting when we look at institutional players

where I'm able to trade and exchange value with other institutional players without having to leak all of my information, leak all of my signals and are able to do so with strong cryptographic primitives

that enforce that. And that then enables us to use those systems even more thoroughly because we don't need to be afraid about any type of information leakage. And that then has this amazing concept of even more network and synergetic effects evolving because we can inject so much more information into all of those systems that we're

using without having to trust each other. And so the way I would describe it regarding your question specifically about too much information being encrypted, I see it as an evolution that we have traversed. Initially, blockchain started as public shared state ledgers where there's a single shared state on top of which everyone executes and everyone has access to. And then there was this phase of encrypted, isolated state, where primitives like zero knowledge proofs had been used to take information, keep that information to ourselves, and then have some limited set of on-chain interactions based on that cryptography.

And now we're in a phase of encrypted shared state, where we enable the same feature set, that crypto enables for public shared state and public execution, now in a fully encrypted way. And we can easily switch between those contexts. And as Catherine said, it is a spectrum, right? What level of privacy your specific application requires. But it is important to be providing the full feature set

without any reason to be using crypto in the first place or the distributed letters, if those trust issues would not exist in the first place. So Patrick, I mean, this is all becoming incredibly complex, especially considering how many chains there are and how many different trust assumptions there are for each particular chain. And, you know, you mentioned that tempo is building with commonware.

So what does that tell us about, what does that partnership in particular tell us about where blockchain infrastructure is heading for payments? and the movement of regulated assets on chain because, you know, privacy is normally something that seems to add complexity to all of these situations, but I can imagine that operations, I can imagine that operations teams as institutions would prefer there to be not that much complexity and to be very straightforward and predictable. How are you viewing all of this? How do you square that? Like while there are a few applications that I think do better with transparency, maybe things like social networks or things like that, I think most people in the space or like using crypto products prefer privacy.

The problem is the cost of doing so so far has been inhibitive or it has just so far kneecap the functionality that it hasn't made any sense. I think over the last few years there's been meaningful improvements on the research side that have made it a lot less thorny to use, but particularly a lot less. expensive to incorporate in these systems. So like today, this morning, we released some research on basically verifying 100,000 snarks on a single validator set per second. And so we think there's there's a moment coming here soon. Similar to the stable coin moment, I think a lot of this industry has seen over the last year or two, where privacy becomes a lot more affordable and a lot more integratable into a lot more chains. And I think that makes a lot better products, particularly a lot more compelling products for a lot of users in crypto. I think the story,

at least the whole time I've been in this space has always been like, what would you use crypto for? And I think a lot of people got their first answer with stable coins recently, which is like it's just cheaper. Like it's shocker. Like very well adopted, it's just a lot for a lot of users, a lot more appealing of a product option. And I think as soon as privacy and some of these other products reach that cost level that is actually like really competes with today's legacy product, that I think it becomes a very appealing option for folks that are doing payment. folks that are, you know, trading and doing more on chain, where they can actually launch things that I think really are leading the pack in terms of a product experience.

And I think that's what's been missing for a while when it comes to privacy adoption. So I might throw this to you, Eric, because, you know, I don't just want to big up Canton, but I can imagine that there are a lot of crypto-native builders out there that would have hoped that they would be able to work with the same institutions that Canton has been able to attract with with everything that you're doing. So I imagine that you're in a unique position to answer what might be the biggest misconceptions that crypto-nators builders have about what it means to provide institutions with privacy on chain. Like what have the crypto natives missed that Canton was able to capitalize on? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, there's there's kind of a

long road. I mean, it starts with identifying the actual problem for them. It's not trust. And, you know, even in the crypto-native ecosystem, one of my favorite sort of examples is, you remember when everyone said tether was, was, you know, bankrupt. There was all this tether fud going around. Well, if they had been bankrupt, what would it the value of a million validators confirming my transfer to you have been? There's this inherent risk that comes from taking something and putting it on chain. For the crypto-native stuff, I completely agree with you, everything you were saying before. But so much of the value that's coming to this chain is not crypto-native, and you have this inherent connection between this entity. You need to give them the ability to provide whatever

information they need to provide or have the controls that they need to have or the fiduciary responsibilities that they have to be able to meet every single one of those things under the current regulations. So I think that overwhelmingly what people, I'll say don't like about Canton is that we made pragmatic decisions over the past decade to be able to serve finance today, as opposed to waiting for research to evolve, expense to come down, regulations to change, confidence to build in extremely cutting-edge technology, all that sort of stuff. We were able to meet them where they were today and solve problems for them today. And I generally kind of tell that a lot like the Salana story, actually. I mean, six and a change years ago, everybody and their mother had a white

paper, here's how we get fast and cheap, here's how we get fast and cheap. Everyone had acknowledged it, and then they showed up and they actually were fast and cheap. Was it maybe the perfect design? I don't know. I'm not going to say that it was, but it actually delivered on what it said it was going to do. And they were first to the spot. They delivered that value. They built an ecosystem and the pragmatic approach got to the point where it needed to get to, I believe, genuinely win. Today, there are tons of chains that are fast and cheap. They don't have the ecosystem of Solana. meeting people where they need to be right now and not needing to change the whole world and solving a material problem has been the core of our ethos. Pragmatic is really the word that

comes to mind. So, you know, like I was really, really big on Zcash. I am. It's still one of my really big positions in my PA. In a crypto context, the zero knowledge, fully encrypted, total anonymous approach, I'm willing to take that risk because I think that that's the right approach for a crypto native asset. When you're talking about a financial institution, being the leading edge of really fancy crypto and taking that sort of bug category risk that exists in that space is existential for you. The idea of a stable coin having more in distribution on chain

than you thought was there is not a risk that you can take. Not having total control of your asset in a way that you can perfect the secured interest in that holding is not a risk that you can take. So you kind of have to understand a lot of these very unsexy things and make sure that you can bring an asset

at scale on chain and not a representation of it, not a derivative of it. Actually, that's what I find super interesting about the regulatory arbitrage and the decentralization spaces. It produces things that do push the envelope, but they do hit a glass ceiling of scale as well because the capital markets can't come into those zones in the way that they've been structured. So they're changing perception, they're changing expectation, they're changing behavior. But I don't believe that ultimately they'll get delivered through those paths.

And I think people don't want to face that sort of pragmatic reality of being able to do this stuff responsibly at scale. Let's take a moment to talk about NXO. NXO delivers a premier digital assets wealth platform designed to help clients build, manage and preserve their wealth. Earn interest on your digital assets. Access crypto-backed credit without selling your holdings. Trade with advanced tools, all supported by 24-7 client care. Now back in the U.S., NXO offers new clients 30 days of exclusive wealth club premier access. That means enhanced interest rates, reduce borrowing costs, and up to the United States.

0.5% crypto cashback on trades. Benefits typically reserved for wealth club members and private clients. NXO is also expanding its global presence, becoming the official crypto partner of Tennis Australia, the organisation behind the Australian Open and the digital asset partner of the Audi Revolute Formula One team. If you're ready to approach digital assets with a more structured wealth strategy, visit nexo.com slash breakdown to get started. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk, terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. Catherine, I might pose this question to you because to me, when I think about what makes crypto really useful is this element of composability, at least in terms of what the ecosystem is now, because it is so sprawling and so diverse in all these different approaches, all these different use cases. But is there a limit to how much privacy that you can add to tokens or even at the chain level or at the,

the protocol level that all of a sudden that composability breaks down and you do just have a bunch of wall gardens where that privacy might exist, but you can't get that outside of that network. Is there a line here? I think it's an excellent question because, you know, whenever we talk about privacy, I think important thing is the next follow up, what is the trade out there for? And I think this is this wise, as I said at the beginning, is a very complex topic, right? we're taking our time to get it right. I think what's really important about the Salana ecosystem as a whole, as many of you know, we are very monolithic in our approach.

And I think that started right from the very day one when Toli was starting to build Salana, because I think he already had the vision at the time that this is meant for financial applications, right? Because I remember back in the like six years ago, he was talking about NASDAQ of the future, and this is what Salana was built for. So translating that is really about we want to have a chain that could aggregate all of the liquidity,

because that's what's the most valuable thing, ultimately, to any given network. You need to have the liquidity, you need to have the flow and the movement. And I think fast forward to six years later, that is indeed what we have achieved. And so to your point, as we are trying to think about the different, as I said, modular approach to privacy, there's always sacrifices by no means where we're not ever going to achieve the perfect privacy. without sacrificing things. But it's just finding the right balance. And again, giving the different options,

because we're not here to dictate an institution, any development to be like, you have to go down this path. Everything is entirely permission is you can build whatever you want on privacy. In the end, it's going to be the market and the users to decide if that makes sense or not. And I think that works out well so far. And I think privacy is just as a feature as anything else that we're doing on Solana.

And we'll follow the same approach to have the level of options. challenge and for the users too. If I can jump in, I think, you know, composability is the Hilded I am in the context of real world assets. I don't think it's trust. When you look at the root of the problem that we have in international remittances and the failures that we have in our settlement ecosystems and all, it is because we have a ton of independent systems that have to be eventually consistent.

And the only way that we do that today is to reconciliation, which is really, really slow. And composability is the way that you make that just guaranteed to happen at a, at a technological level. At that point, you can start doing global finance across and institutions. So for us, that's been the non-negotiable. We have to deliver privacy without sacrificing composability. And I think that, again, within the context of capital markets and real-world assets

and bringing the economy on chain, that to me is the prize of being on-chain. Yeah, I wonder how you feel about this because, and I just want to jump to compliance and as painful as it might be to discuss compliance. This is, we're at an institutional conference, so it's really top of mind for a lot of people. But from the outside, it certainly looks like crypto has never really solved. Who needs to worry about compliance? Like should compliance and data collection sit with apps or front ends or token issuers

or is it the middleware providers or is it the bridges or is it the relay nodes? And I'm really curious, your take because if it's all encrypted compute, who needs to be compliant? Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. And before I answer that, I think what's important to understand really is, and Kfran and Eric were talking about this, composability. And in my mind, composability is being able to move from this concept of public shared state into private shared state,

in crypto shared state, right? And what it can unlock for us in an institutional setting is we can say, okay, we have confidentiality and privacy within traditional finance as well, right? We have lit trading venues and there's dark trading venues. They are non-lit.

And all of these actually are sort of isolated. And when you want to be, want to do something like smart order routing across all of those dark trading venues within Treadfi, you encounter the dark pool smart order routing problem. With shared state and encrypted shared state, we can turn all of those black box trading venues into lit trading venues, but all of them exist within this encrypted space, this encrypted realm. Now when it comes to compliance, what I think is so important to understand about all of these cryptographic primitives,

including the cryptographic primitives that we've been developing over the last years, is that with encrypted execution, all of this becomes multidimensional. So I can define an algorithm that specifically specifies when I perform a transfer from my wallet to someone else's wallet here in the audience,

then the financial institution that is providing the stable coin that is being transferred should also get access to the information right and all of that happens in a verifiable encrypted way takes a few milliseconds that's it there's full privacy

for cryptographic security while there's auditing in place and that is only the most simple system you can build with encrypted execution you can actually construct systems where you can have and that is I guess more of

future music down the line a couple of years but the way I see this technology evolving not just within finance but enterprise as a whole is that we can get rid of

a lot of expensive processes and simply define clear rules which defines how information is being processed and what are the consequences of what is

contained within that information and only if certain rules over which there is collective consensus are met, then this information, let's say, gets shared with a third party. And I think that is the future where open finance, together with traditional finance, will move most likely. At my heart, I am extremely cyphopunk. So I would say the ideal world that I see

is a fully encrypted world where everyone, be it an individual or be it an organization, right, has this ability to bring themselves into a strategically superior position by keeping ownership over all information. I think that's what it is at the end of the day. And that's what we see on an individual level,

but also within capital markets. Patrick, I might throw to you because what Yanuk is describing is a whole new system. But I get the feeling that traditional finance really wonders whether any of these new systems are backwards compatible with the frameworks that came before. Is any of this backwards compatible? Or are we really just building a new world that we had better exist in for the better of the

industry overall? I think the space has steered closer and further from that. I think with the early ideas of Bitcoin and some like Zcash, some of these early like more cyberpunk things, I think it was very much like it's our way or the highway. But now with like all these focus on real world assets and stable coins, like, I mean, we've definitely put ourselves in a position where it takes two to tango. So I think like you can layer on all this crazy cryptography and whatever.

But if ultimately like whatever asset is here it is has the right to stop it, or inhibit something at some point, like, why at it? Like, it's just... Bingo, bingo, bingo. It's a big question. And, like, I love the cyberpunk stuff. And, like, it would be really cool. The problem is, I think there's a...

I mean, whether or not it's true, there's a lot of people that think, like, it runs the risk of really aiding illicit finance. And you can take a really strong position on, like, cyberpunk principles. But if you're not willing to go down with those cyberbug principles, like, you're going to have some very,

very difficult conversations with some people from three-letter agencies. And, you know, I think that, like, the technology, ultimately you have to reckon with its impact on society. And I think that sometimes it doesn't feel quite like the society that wants to see crypto thrive, wants to see this full encrypted world be the world that ends up taking advantage of this technology.

So I'm hoping that, like, we get to that, and I think, like, an internet world that is enabled by that is really cool. But, like, if the user demand, is like on these assets that are issued by regulated entities on chain, it begs the question of like how much, how close we can actually get to those ideals unless we like really rethink how those assets are actually issued or what those assets are.

If we're on like a massive metaverse where like nothing is actually physically tied to anything and it's like a globally native asset, where there is no true ownership, like true like creator or manager, super interesting. But I think for a lot of the assets we're working with today, Like, I think temporal privacy is much more useful and interesting. Like, can we hide trades before they're actually executed?

But then after executed, reveal certain information about it is much more compatible with the worldview that a lot of the enterprises that want to bring significant value on chain have. And so I think there's a question as like, do you comply or do you choose to go the other way? And I think there's a big open question today in the crypto landscape. How big is that market for the... Let's go all the way of cyberpunk because in recent years, it seems like that group of people has gotten smaller. That's just not as loud anymore. I mean, imagine a scenario. J.P. Morgan calls a regulator.

Great news. Just installed some new tech. I can't see anybody's balances anymore. But a black box gives me a big thumbs up every time something happens. Like, it's just kind of a ludicrous example. But I think it is telling that this isn't really additive if we're trying to rotate the GDP. on chain. It's all extremely additive if we're trying to create regulatory arbitrage and push the boundary and disintermediate and attack and create something alternative above and beyond what the

existing system is. And that's fine. There's a definitive space for that. But it's not necessarily the application that I don't know, we're working on at Canton. So I don't have any qualms with it whatsoever. It's just not really eligible to be applied in these contexts. Maybe yet you could add to my statement, but I don't think right now. Catherine, I might throw to you quickly because in how I have viewed Salana's trajectory in that it really did start out as a very retail focused, it was the community chain almost. It was very retail heavy. Beach shift now towards institutional interest and that's because the institutional interest is here.

But is there a world where if institutions are coming, on-chain at scale and they use Salana. Where does retail fit into this? And we don't even have to talk about Salana specifically, but the chain space overall. How does retail still be catered to when institutions are so powerful in what they're demanding? Yeah, it's basically two-sided of the market, right?

You need retail, you need institution, and the marketplace is where they meet. in fact, I think is very important to have both retail and institutional on the same platform, whatever that might be, in order for them to intact. Because when we think about institutional use cases is not just wholesale financial use cases. It's very much there's a small B2B, B2C, whatever you have it. I think actually just kind of, again, tracing back a little bit of the history and all of the things that happen organically, I think it's very interesting. And I think as you're asking the question, I was just kind of thinking,

the growth with the trajectory of how Salana has evolved over all these years, sort of like on a macro scale reflects the trends in crypto rule. And what I mean by that is at the very start, right, like SVM, Solana Virtual Machine, the Solana entire architecture was designed to be the NASDAQ. And right now we're calling Internet Capital Market. That vision has never changed. We really wanted to create a blockchain that is highly performant

that can compete with all the centralized exchanges, etc., in a completely trustless, permissionless setting. And we are achieving that right now. Now, what's interesting is that now you have this amazing, high-performance, scalable infrastructure, but because this is an open permissionless network, any use case, anyone can come in and build and see what will actually succeed and take off on what doesn't.

And so it just happened to be that there was a period in time that, you know, whether that's NFT or what, whether that's meme coins, like that actually brought a lot of retail interests. And it's actually through that experiment, if you will, it allows a lot of the retail liquidity to come on chain. And through that experience, they start to have a wallet, right? They start to understand financial literacy in a very different and interesting way that as a creator of the chain, you would not have predicted that like ahead of time.

But it just happened organically. And that's what I think about is very interesting when it comes to market forces. And you just see how things go. Right. But now, as we're thinking about the future state, I think it was obviously everyone acknowledged regulatory plays a massive influencing all of that. Prior to 2025, I think the sort of the trend is there, but it's always undertone because no one dared to move into here. And thanks to genius, thanks to hopefully clarity and many other things, we finally have a real shot for financial institutions

to participate. And of course, we need to treat it very seriously because, as I said, without institutions retail can only, you know, like just in a specific corner, but it's the same case for institution as well. Ultimately, blockchain is used for distribution purpose, is used in order to aggregate a lot of these liquidity such that, you know, different assets, as we said about composability, can intact, can compose, can really trade against one another. This is where new value creation can also come in.

And this is where I think is really exciting. If we continue to be, you know, highly scalable, scalable, performant, and composable right from that design. I think ultimately is the market forces to really tell us, you know, what's the next trend, where is the real value is going to stick? Eric, I'm wondering your take on that. Because Kenton, it obviously has a focus. Can you learn from the retail market forces anymore?

Or is it the institution's game? I mean, I know I look 27, but, you know, I'm old enough to live through a lot of the early days of the internet. I do think that we too often hold Bitcoin and Ethereum as our model for what does a successful public network look like. And I think actually the internet is a much better case study. And it's gone through very similar evolution to the early days of the internet. I mean, the early adopters were building their own single page web apps and blog posts. And there were, you know, encyclopedias online and things along those lines. And then it became a co-mingled existence of retail, institutional.

Certain websites came to much larger domination than others. And I think that's just part of the general evolution. It's rare that you find the incumbent institution be the first mover. I don't think that that's a reasonable expectation. And I saw a really great Twitter back and forth with some of the founders of Stripe. And they were talking about how once they really opened up to the Challenger ecosystem, They got kind of two things. One is the obvious one, which is really fast feedback loops,

and the product just involved much quicker. But I think more telling was that they said that those new business models that got built on top of this capability, got pioneered by the challengers. And that was the part that was harder for the incumbents to kind of come up with. Well, how do I really take advantage of this? What's the value to the user? And again, just kind of a silly hyperbolic example. I always like to talk about Napster versus iTunes and Spotify.

Napster, I think even to this day, is the fastest adopted thing on the internet in our history, something in that neighborhood. And I think it's undeniable that it completely changed expectations for what it means to consume that form of media. But it wasn't Napster that won. And the risk that it comes with interacting with a fully decentralized regulatory arbitrage, gray zone enabler of a change is fundamentally different than the safe contractual delivery of that to me in a format that I can consume at whatever pace I'd like to.

And so I think that this is a natural evolution, and I'm, I'm like, unbelievably supportive of all this stuff that takes place in these broader ecosystems that are retail first, that push the envelope of what's possible. We get boom and bust cycles and experiments that do and don't work. But it's always changing the perception of what's possible if our economy is on chain. And it serves as a really strong light to help us understand, well, what should we be enabling? So I take tremendous inspiration from everything that takes place, especially the failures, and even from places that people don't anticipate. Like, I've been pretty public about how there's far too much hate for things like JP coin in this audience. Maybe not so much. But I mean, if you go to the more crypto-native ecosystems, that's a pretty common whipping child for the market.

But what it took for them to build the internal institutional knowledge, to be able to engage in these ecosystems, how can they do it? but they're going to be able to react to opportunities unlike any other institution, just from the investment that they've made to date. So I think there's far too much, like, religious debate in this space instead of accepting, whether it's retail for retail sake, decentralized for decentralized sake, institutional and highly centralized. All these things have a place on the map. Finance is deeply heterogeneous. Capital markets are deeply heterogeneous.

There's a lot to learn from all of them. And there's no one-size-fits-all. So yeah, our go-to-market is just B2B first, but we do have tons of retail use cases going on in the network right now. Just people are not as aware of it as, you know, the big names that we have been lucky to work with. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. Please give a wonderful guess a round of applause. Thank you so much, everybody.