The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Is About To Go Parabolic - Here’s Why | Avery Ching, Aptos Labs

Episode Date: February 2, 2025

In this episode of The Wolf Of All Streets, we delve into the transformative journey of Avery Ching, co-founder and CTO of Aptos Labs. We explore how his innovative work is shaping the future of blockchain technology and its real-world applications. Join us as we uncover insights that could redefine our understanding of decentralized systems. Avery Ching: https://x.com/AveryChing Check out Aptos here: https://aptosfoundation.org/ ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://archpublic.com/  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #aptos  Timecodes 0:00 Intro 2:30 Crypto’s Time to Shine 5:15 Aptos Growth in 2024 8:00 Blockchain Scaling for Adoption 10:45 Real-World Blockchain Use Cases 13:30 Stablecoins and Global Payments 16:15 Future of Decentralized Trading 19:00 Why Aptos is Different 21:45 AI and Blockchain Merge 24:30 Government and Crypto Innovation 27:15 The Next Big Crypto Wave 30:00 How Institutions Are Adopting 32:45 Trading and Market Evolution 35:30 The Future of Web3 38:15 RWA and Tokenized Assets 41:00 Private vs Public Blockchains 43:45 AI-Powered Trading and Agents 46:30 AI in Legacy Finance 49:15 Crypto’s Biggest Adoption Hurdles 52:00 The Role of Aptos Token 54:45 What’s Coming in 2025 57:30 Final Thoughts The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

I think those are the kind of key lessons I would say I've learned from my time at Meta in a decade. Decade at Meta. It's a long time. Aptos is named after an American city in California. And our roots obviously are from Meta and Facebook. 25,000 transactions per second. That's actually more than all the credit card, like Visa, MasterCard, and every credit card processor combined. Yeah, I think Visa does visa does 1700 transactions per second i use chat gpt mid conversation and that's the most basic thing i didn't know off the top of my head visa's uh

transactions per second guys i looked at them you know after four years of pain and misery with a contentious regulator and legislative body in the united states it finally feels like the crypto industry is time to shine. But not only do we have all of these tailwinds from regulators and legislators, we finally have blockchains that can scale for mainstream adoption. It really does feel like everything is happening at the perfect time. I had a long conversation today with Avery Chang, co-founder and CEO of Aptos, who I've been working with for a long time and looking forward to that partnership further into the future. We talked about everything that's

coming from their ecosystem, but more generally from DeFi, NFTs, AI, the metaverse, all of the things we've been excited about for so long in the crypto space. Spoiler, 2025 is going to be absolutely massive. Maybe we should start with the state of Aptos coming into 2025 here. You had a pretty wild 2024. I've obviously been keeping up with the metrics on a monthly basis. I mean, insane growth with wallets, insane growth with network usage, basically insane growth across the board. Maybe you can just give us the quick TLDR on where we're at coming into a new year.

Wow, that's definitely tough to summarize everything real quick, but a couple of highlights might be setting the daily mainnet transactions in 2024, four times, I think, topping out at 326 million transactions in a single day, more than 3,700 transactions per second, and no disruptions, no downtime, no increase in gas costs, just really proving out that Web3 is ready for prime time. And with the right technology stack, you can do almost anything there at this particular time.

From a growth perspective, it was great to see Electro Capital highlight Aptos as the second fastest growing ecosystem in all of Web3, the first fastest growing moving ecosystem overall. And then from the numbers perspective, we've seen daily active addresses and monthly active addresses hit all time highs in 2024 and 2025. I think we're roughly around a third or fourth place in the entire ecosystem. And I think it like 1.3 million daily active addresses fairly recently and continue along with that journey. So from our perspective,

we're seeing Web3 adoption really start to take off and grow by leaps and bounds. I think TVL grew by 10x. We saw users grow by 10x. We've seen interest just grow massively in the move ecosystem and in Web3 as a whole. And couldn't be even more excited about the initiatives in 2025 that are going to be underway.

Yeah, we're going to get to those in a bit and I think talk more generally. But I'm curious, when we talk about this user adoption and wallets and all these things, what are people actually using? I take for granted that our audience will understand exactly what's actually happening in the ecosystem. But I'm assuming that there are certain apps or protocols or things that people are really finding sticky and are using over and over and over again, and probably some that maybe we had assumed would see more meaningful levels of adoption and maybe

aren't. Yeah. So some of the top applications in Aptos that are driving a large number of wallets towards them are actually products coming from out of India. We have Chingar, which is a social media application. We have Kgen, which is a gaming infrastructure company. Stan's driving massive traffic. Aragon is a gaming platform. Just to highlight a couple that are meaningfully pushing the numbers out there now. But there's a bunch of others from a user perspective. And then from a more like a DeFi perspective, we're seeing DeFi really take off in Aptos with protocols like Aerie, Amnus, Iconia, Thala,

Solana, and others trying to build out novel things that can be only done with the Aptos stack, leveraging the most scalable network, the cheapest fees, and also the fastest latency. And, you know, for traders, tick-to-trade efficiency is one of the most important things out there. And that's something you get out of the box with Aptos. Something that's also not well-known is something like Panora, which is another well-used application

within the Aptos ecosystem, allows you to kind of route orders through different kinds of options in this space. And given the fees are so low, the routing is actually very, very efficient. And so those are things that we're excited about to see, like how that develops over time in 2025. Are you finding that those are users

that are migrating from other ecosystems? Do you find, is there a way to even measure if they're utilizing Solana for one thing and Aptos for another or Ethereum? Or are you finding these people like wholesale basically migrate to Aptos for all of their needs? you find that these people like wholesale basically migrate to Aptos for all of their needs. I mean, it's a question I could ask, I guess, any founder, but it's a really interesting one because I don't really have a mental picture of how your average

Web3 user sort of behaves with so many options in the market. There is a lot. I mean, I think the best way to kind of measure it a little bit in terms of where these users are coming from is through the bridging protocols. And we're excited to see Layer 0 was live on day one with Aptos. I think the first 9pm integration that was done. And we can see a lot of the traffic coming from other networks into the Aptos ecosystem because of that. Wormhole is obviously another bridge which allows people to window into Aptos. And then kind of seeing both the flow of funds as well as the kind of users that are transacting in between these networks is going to give us an idea that there's just a lot of excitement coming to Aptos ecosystem across the board.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now let's talk about 2025, right? Because I'm assuming that what you're building will give us a good picture as well into kind of what's likely to actually gain adoption in Web3 generally, in DeFi generally. So you can, I think, kind of give us the roadmap for how big this space can become in the next year. One significant thing that happened in 2024 and also kind of rolling out in this year is the onboarding of major stablecoins into Aptos. So USDT onboarding in December and also USDC going to mainnet very, very soon, probably next week or two, is something that changes the game for Aptos. And so going back to our history and roots, I was at Meta for 10 years before this,

was the tech lead for the DM blockchain and Libra project. And as a part of that process, we really start to understand the challenges and use cases of payments across the world and supporting billions of people, especially cross-border money movement to reduce both fees and also time is something that is extremely important to us to help provide financial infrastructure to people around the world.

So we're excited to see now these staples come on board. We're starting to see remittance companies starting to use this infrastructure. We'll see a lot more in 2025. And just see that flow of funds happening across different payments corridors is something that we expect to kind of explode from the Aptos perspective. And the main reason is because the fees are just so cheap with Aptos. The time is so fast. You know, it's almost a no-brainer like why wouldn't you use this infrastructure for something that could be done much much more efficient in today's rails that's just for the payment side

um for the infrastructure side we're we're excited like aptos is both you know the most scalable the cheapest the fastest platform out there and we want to really drill into what that means from a trading perspective and so you're going to start to see a lot more infrastructure built around how do we make sure we can have the best um you know purchase taxes spot taxes uh and then leverage the infrastructure for getting the fastest time from uh tick to trade as we talked about earlier into the infrastructure and so we can kind of build on you know what almost feels like a very centralized exchange experience with decentralized infrastructure and when you do just unlocks so many possibilities about things that centralized exchanges can't do or the limitations or concerns about them. And just having that operate in a

decentralized permissionless way is going to, I think, unlock a ton of value for customers going forward. The final avenue is in terms of real estate assets. And we've already seen companies like BlackRock and ThinQ and Templeton issue money market funds on top of Aptos. We're in great discussions with large corporations about how to move other financial instruments such as large scale loans or private credit into the Aptos ecosystem. And we're also excited about the smaller scale stuff, the emerging markets where you see microloans starting to play a big impact and how they can access financial instruments that weren't traditionally available at competitive rates. So those three areas of high performance trading, money movement through payments, and also the real assets coming on board that are going to really change the game for emerging markets are three initiatives that we're super excited about for 2025.

What specifically makes one blockchain faster and cheaper than another from a technological perspective? I think you're, I mean, maybe in layman's terms, but, you know, every blockchain seems to be competing for those effectively two metrics. Of course, the third is security in the trilemma, but, you know, speed and cost seem to be the ones that people really prioritize right now. Right. When it comes to speed, I think this comes down to algorithms and protocols. And this is where we have a huge edge just because the protocol was designed for very, very low latency operations and a decentralized infrastructure. And so having our current Aptos BFT consensus protocol and also our pipeline design. We have a pipeline design of data dissemination, consensus, parallel computing, parallel execution, parallel storage, and then also the last phase of proof verification certification. Just allows us to kind of,

we started the design from the very beginning. It is something that has worked well. And if you think about the analogy in kind of more layman's terms, we have these CPUs in our MacBooks, our phones, which are highly pipelined processors. And that's how you get very fast speeds, how you leverage the die sizes and all kinds of things like that to get incredible performance. And so we've done that at the blockchain level. We've parallelized it, we've pipelined it.

And now it's just a matter of kind of tuning those parameters to get even more performance out of it. But that design has been really core to a very, very fast experience. The other thing I think that comes with it is just our experience in building large-scale systems. So before I was on blockchain, I worked on data infrastructure and meta, where we managed millions of machines, supporting services like billions of queries per second across large-scale infrastructure. So just understanding how that works and how to optimize for those kind of workloads helps us to design a system that works in a decentralized context as well.

From a cost perspective, this is more about the way that the economics of the system work. And so when it comes down to it, the cost of the system should really be, and this is our belief in the Aptos world, it should be kind of the cost of the infrastructure. So how many machines do you have running, how much storage you have, the compute costs, the networking costs, as well as the operator costs. Somebody needs to maintain these machines. And then kind of keying it to the lowest possible price point

to just service those elements. And of course, the healthy margin of profit for those individuals. But nothing more about that. The protocol is not trying to make money off of the fees. That's, I think, the key thing. And so when you have an infrastructure that's been designed for minimizing costs for the consumer, because ultimately the consumer cost is going to be the one that drives adoption. Consumers are very price sensitive. So having all that in play and thinking about those considerations allows us to have the

lowest cost of market, which is an order of magnitude cheaper. And so if you go to gas fees now, you look at the cost of UFCT across kind of all the different options, Aptos is, I think, an order of magnitude cheaper than everybody else. Even cheaper than Tron, where we all know the bulk of Tether is being utilized? Yep, cheaper than Tron. So is that just a first mover advantage on their behalf at this point? And you assume that people will eventually find the faster, cheaper option. But obviously, I think people have just been using USDT on Tron as the answer to Ethereum's high fees for so long.

That's just going to take time to move them away. I think there's definitely a bit of first mover advantage for Tron and others out there. But as people that are very price sensitive will definitely start to find the better options out there in the future the other thing that's going for us though is that there are certain use cases that can't be can't work with high fees right so like let's give an example you you run a podcast obviously you have a social media presence if people were to tip you see on the granularity of a cent or like 10 cents you have users across the world like that doesn't make sense if your fees are going to be comparable to that.

So this is where Aptos being, I think, I don't know, a 10,000th of maybe a hundredth of a cent or something like that makes it like a cent tip is not that bad. Like paying 1% fee on that is not horrible.

And if it's 2 cents, it's like even, you know, it's half a percent fee, right? So those things become much more tenable and we can even drive fees lower over time, I think, as we start to optimize the system infrastructure even further.

So it's also going to be about like, look, your customer's looking for the cheapest cost. They're also looking for just new products that can be built with that, new experiences that can be possible from those kinds of cost models. There's a lot there to unpack, but it's interesting you talk about the price sensitivity and this sort of granularity, but definitely applies to payments,

but really applies to the trading, as you mentioned. I mean, if you dig into especially the early days of high-frequency trading, the amount of money that Wall Street firms would spend just to have like a slightly better fiber optic cable or to be a little closer to the exchange for those fractions of a second edge when algorithmic trading started, it's astounding. Like the math doesn't even make sense to me how much money they would have to be making for what they spent just to gain that fraction of a second advantage. So I would imagine that even for retail traders using it, this is more with those institutional traders in mind down the road. Even though they're not necessarily trading on a DEX yet, I assume you believe they will.

I believe they will. I believe that a lot of our trading volume will shift from centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges over time. Mainly because there's a number of properties that centralized exchanges offer that centralized exchanges do not. In particular, just a lot of safety around asset management, around pricing, around even just transparency and openness of the platform. And then centralized exchanges are important parts of this space. But the closer you get in performance there, and I think we've seen products like Hyperliquid, I think, really pushing that space closer. But to do it more decentralized and even more performant over time is where the ultimate points industry is going to go towards. And blockchains are great for moving assets from one person to another. That's what they're really great at.

And that's basically trading, right? So every time we can see that happen as quickly and as cheaply as possible, it's going to provide value to somebody. You have the unique sort of experience coming from Meta, right? Which is one of the largest, I imagine, centralized infrastructures on the planet. So initially, you were going to build this for them, right? And we all kind of saw what happened with Libra, Diem, and the congressional hearings and the pushback from the government. And we've had the story here of how that ended up being Aptos effectively. But what lessons do you think that you learned

from building those systems in a centralized environment that have sort of like given you a lead building it in a decentralized environment? I think thinking about scale from the early stages is probably one of the biggest beneficiaries of that, right? So a lot of blockchains will kind of work on the assumption. And it's not wrong. Just like, hey, we'll start with something that works.

And then as we see more adoption, we'll kind of grow that product and add more features to it. In meta, we've had a chance to take a look at all our lessons learned and say, scale is important from the beginning because it's actually hard to change your designs later on during that time period. And so two things that we kind of lessons learned were,, a skill that you should design from the beginning for, because it's hard to add later on. Even if you want to make it something that starts off

kind of more reasonable in terms of performance, you should have an avenue towards getting to millions of transactions per second. The other thing is going to be upgradability, because we know these systems are early in their stages. There's a lot left to go in terms of how the movie developer experience kind of evolves over time, how use cases of all over time and the infrastructure is needed to to build that evolves over time and so building into the protocol itself like how do we upgrade this protocol in a way that um is decentralized i think it's also key for us so we have launching

governance where users kind of vote uh in terms of token holders vote to to for upgrades of the system and upgrades once that vote is passed anyone can kind of finalize token holders vote for upgrades to the system. And upgrades, once that vote is passed, anyone kind of finalize upgrade and make sure it goes forward on chain. So between these two things, the notion that you need to kind of adapt quickly to new use cases and things you didn't even imagine when you started designing the system that it would be used for, as well as design for scale in the first place,

I think those are the kind of key lessons I would say I've learned from my time at Meta in a decade. Decade at Meta. It's a long time. It was a long time. So you were obviously doing something before Libra and DM there, but I'm assuming that it was sort of all leading up to this. So I would say a lot of my experiences have been, fortunately, kind of all, you know, very useful from different perspectives to work on Aptos. So my early days as a student, I was doing a PhD in high performance computing. I worked at different national laboratories, including Sandia, Argonne, Los Alamos. And I think the work there was how do we, they have these large, large supercomputers

with hundreds of thousands of cores. How do you effectively leverage all these cores networking infrastructure together to do very complex computations around say protein folding or simulating nuclear explosions or things like that in a safe way thinking about that as a you know a starting point for me kind of helped me think about how parallelism concurrency can actually really be valuable for any kind of high performance infrastructure. And then when I got to Meta, it was more about you have this tremendous growth in a product, Facebook growing by leaps and bounds, doubling its user count every year, and not just user count, but the way the user interact on the platform.

And now I work in data infrastructure where we try to take these user actions on the website or on the mobile app and then turn them into actionable insights. So a lot of data processing, a lot of data to crunch and execution of that data to then drive product insights that can help drive the product to grow. So we're processing extra bytes of data on millions of machines. And so for that, it's like, how do you kind of scale out infrastructure that to match growth and also how to kind of build at the bleeding edge of things. And so combining these aspects of high performance computing, parallel computing, supercomputing, as well as how do you kind of scale out data to support a lot of analytics now a blockchain base, which is going to be a different kind of database, a decentralized one that is

basically built for transacting assets between users in a way that's very high performance, that requires high reliability, scalability. And to your point, lastly, about security, all these things are meaningful towards where Aptos needs to be and Aptos is evolving into. So we obviously have regime change, right? We've gone from, I think, what anyone would define as a contentious regulatory and legislative environment to maybe 180 degrees to seemingly, you know, when you got the president launching meme coins and such, I think we can say that the governor is off for building in the United States in crypto. A, is that your perception now after kind of suffering for the last four years?

And Trump has made comments about blockchains that are made in America. I would have to imagine you guys qualify. I think I couldn't be more excited for the new administration coming in. I mean, Trump launching a coin during the crypto ball and then, you know, all the, you know, appointing David Sachs as crypto czar, AI czar has been a great steps forward in this process. And I think the rhetoric coming out about how crypto is going to like America's gonna be the innovation place for Web3 and crypto.

It couldn't get any more excited about the changes upcoming. We are very, very excited to work with partners who are leaning into that. So Aave and Chainlink are obviously partners who are close to that. And there are partners as well. To your point about being an American chain, Aptos is named after an American city in California. And our roots obviously are from Meta and Facebook. And we reside, most of our employees reside, of course, in the United States. So it is definitely an American chain and one that we are proud to build in,

especially with the new climate and atmosphere supporting innovation within America. Incredibly impressive that you guys continued to stick it out here through that entire time. Because almost everyone I spoke to was like, dude, we're out. Like they left long ago or they had an idea and just said, I'm not going to do it. It's not worth it, right? And you guys just powered through.

Even after all the pushback that you saw when you were at Meta trying to launch Libra and DM, you had to know it was going to be a contentious and difficult environment. Definitely. But I guess I have a fundamental belief that America does want to lead in innovation about all things. I think we saw other areas of maybe 5G and other places where that didn't work out so

well. And so I'm always confident that the government will kind of figure out, like, we need to have innovation happen here in the United States. And so glad to see it coming to fruition with the new administration. So we've had sort of rolling narratives throughout the past cycles of what the future would look like with so many blockchains launching, right? I think last cycle,

everybody was very concerned with having enough block space and it being interoperable, right? So all the bridges you were talking about, you know, Cosmos was a huge ecosystem for bridging and building cross. Now it sounds like there's a race on layer one for like the Lord of the Rings,

you know, one chain to rule them all. Do you think that with how you've been stress tested with the plans that you have, that Aptos could effectively handle everything that needs to be built in Web3? Not now, but maybe now, but in the future? I would say now. I would say now is the time in which, if you look at the traffic that runs across Web3, kind of workloads that have happened, not just in benchmarks for Aptos, but also in mainnet, I would say, yes, Aptos is ready for every single workload in Web3 combined and put together so and i'd be happy to go ahead and we could run the experiments and we could try it out

if we could get the simulations from other networks put together but i i'm pretty confident that's the case today um so it's just a matter now of seeing that adoption come and like to understand like why that hasn't happened yet i think you kind of look at cloud to some degree right cloud infrastructure when it was built out in 2006 with ad, there weren't a lot of people that were thinking cloud was the future for the way infrastructure is deployed. They were concerned, like when I was at Meta, I mean, we watched very carefully, there were concerns around like, you know, what happens if we need more hardware and they can't support that? What happens if we need certain hardware types? They don't have that. And what

about security for user data? A lot of different kinds of concerns out there. And it does feel like that way, you know, for Web3, like if, you know, the recent Trump coin launch and then seeing those issues happen around the launch, like, you know, if you try to submit a transaction, it might take half an hour, it might take a day, it might never get accepted.

I don't know if you tried to buy some Trump coin, but, you know, if you tried the experience, it was definitely a tough one. And so those kind of experiences show us that while there might be massive demand for this block space, you need to be doing the protocol that actually works for this. And so that's where we hang our hats on. We're really excited about what we've done. We've seen that growth in the Aptos user base without any issues to congestion. And so

it's ready and we're here. And we'll see 2025 is that year where we start to see major, major adoption of infrastructure usage because infrastructure is ready. Yeah. And obviously, we've mentioned it a few times. I'm sure everybody here knows, but that was the Trump meme coin launch on a Friday night before the inauguration. And effectively, there were a lot of reports that there were issues with Solana at the time, which actually had been on a very good run since its sort of history of having downtime or people define whatever happens in different ways. They're still debating whether we had downtime on the Trump launch, but I think very clear that a lot of transactions, as you said, were stuck or didn't go through. So it's semantics, right? It's interesting, though, they got the benefit of this massive stress test, right? So I would imagine that even though that happened to them, they'll take whatever lessons were learned and that might help them scale, right? So how do you

sort of, I guess, have the balance between never having that happen so that you don't get tested and know where the problems are and just waiting for something and praying? I mean, basically, I'm not saying you guys haven't had those moments at all. It's just highlighted when it's highlighted on Solana a number of times. Right. I mean, this is we've seen it on Ethereum a million times, right? Where like one NFT project launches and Ethereum doesn't work in the past. Yeah, I think that's what's kind of holding some folks back. Like folks that want to launch

large use cases, right? Like, so if you have, they say like you had a large social media website and you put, you know, the Web3 in the critical path for how user experiences with that. And now that goes down,

your whole user base is like pissed off at you. And so that definitely holds people back when user base is like pissed off at you. And so that definitely holds people back when they see these kinds of events happening in Web3 in general, to your point. We build Headroom into our protocol. And I think the question is, how much Headroom do you want to have?

And I think I'm pretty comfortable with where we are today. Like we ran an experiment in 2023, end of December, where we ran, I think think about 100 plus nodes similar to the setup for mainnet uh with the latest version of software just payments transactions from one person to another and saw more than two billion transactions in a day and so that's you know more than 25 000 transactions per second that's actually more than all the credit card, like Visa, MasterCard, and every credit card

processor combined. And so for that, for us, that kind of shows like that's enough headroom. Like if we suddenly get a use case that spikes more than all the credit card transactions in the world on Aptos, you know, we feel comfortable that we can, we are, you know, we're ready for that. And, you know, we'd be okay with that. And if something goes beyond that, wow, that would be incredible. But I think that's a lot of headroom in place for kind of the next generation of Web3 to evolve in.

Yeah, I think Visa does 1,700 transactions per second. And I remember last cycle, everyone saying, well, for something like this, just use the centralized, you know, use the centralized system. It's faster. Decentralized systems, blockchains will never be as fast as these centralized networks. Didn't take very long. Not at all. I mean, I think it just shows that people are motivated enough

and from a technology perspective, it's viable, it will happen. And I think that's exactly what we've been able to show with Aptos. I've kind of long said that stable coins were the killer app of crypto so far. I mean, maybe outside of Bitcoin, obviously, as digital gold or whatever narrative we assigned to it and being the original blockchain. But you talked about stable coins coming to Aptos. Do you think that that will continue to be at least through the next year or two where we see the most growth in crypto, like more people utilizing stable coins, realizing you don't need a third party in between to collect a toll. It's going to be slower because that seems where all the growth has really been. Yeah, I definitely

think that stable coin usage and adoption will grow very fast. It's the one that has some product market fit today. And as we can start to think about the different use cases for where payments roll, like there's cross-border payments, there's commercial payments, there's peer-to-peer payments, and the biggest one of those three is cross-border payments. And that's an area I think we want to see massive growth and adoption in from Aptos' perspective because that can have the most impact.

The other thing I think of those three, like the one that is the most painful for consumers is the cross-border payments because of the fact that the fees are so high and the times are so long. And then the money movement across countries is unclear sometimes around what can be done, what can't be done. Yeah. I mean, we literally lack the infrastructure for me to send 15 bucks to Nigeria, right? Through banking rails. Just can't do it. Exactly. So that's the area where I do expect massive traction in the industry, but also for Aptos specifically.

And what's going to bring more people into that? But besides the simplicity, do you think that we'll see more sort of mature financial services wrapped into that? Like, do you think that, although it was a four letter word last cycle, that having some sort of yield on those when people are holding them in their wallets is going to be yet another sort of layer to that adoption? I think yield is going to be important too. Yeah. I mean,

definitely people, you know, kind of have yield from different kinds of asset classes, wherever you are in the world is a major thing like for financial kind of democratization. So really, really excited about those areas as well. And that's kind of where the real assets, I think, really, really fit in. Yield from, I mean, you can imagine loans even as from yield, right? Like we're loaning out money, we're getting yield on that. There's definitely some risk associated with it, but on the whole, if you have like pools of loans, you're getting some kind of yield that is reasonable and also helping to support those, like provide much more competitive rates to those markets where

those rates might not be as competitive today. Yeah. You kind of in passing mentioned both Aave and Chainlink, two of the biggest names in the space period who I believe you are now officially working with and integrating with. So A, I mean, I guess talk about why working with Chainlink and Aave, but then I want to get more into a deeper discussion about what DeFi is going to look like moving forward and where its place sort of is in relation to the legacy financial system.

But, I mean, first, maybe just talk about what you're doing with the two of them. Yeah, so both Chainlink and Aave are integrating Aptos. I think a think allows the first kind of non-evm uh support and so pretty excited about that uh kind of shows like you know they looked up logged in protocols selected us and of course those are big heavyweights in the evm ecosystem and i think if you try the experience in the avi test net i don't know if you had a chance to play with that for for aptos you know compared to the mainnet product uh for for different other chains it is night and day and it is lightning smooth it is the experience you would expect

you know dealing with any other financial institution uh that you've ever worked with in the past and uh and that's pretty incredible and inspiring i think to see like how the experience can just look um just like a web 2 financial and, but yet still having a decentralized platform with high-speed rails under the covers, with extremely low fees. And then with Chainlink coming on board, having that very reliable, trusted source of data and oracles that can now be transacted across the entire AppTest ecosystem is a huge win

for all the developers and users who are building out in the DeFi space there. Okay, so let's talk about Aave. Obviously, the blue chip, one of the first major DeFi protocols, almost being viewed as dinosaurs because crypto moves so fast at this point. Is what Aave has been doing in the past the capacity and excitement that we have around DeFi? Are they showing what's possible, or do you think that there's a lot more that DeFi has to offer moving forward?

I think it's one of those trusted protocols where there's a lot of new things that pop up all the time. But if you want something that is very audited, heavily audited, heavily reliable, very thoughtful from a security standpoint, it's going to be hard to find someone better than Aave in that space. And they also have very neat new ideas, which I probably can't talk about much, but I think when you can leverage the Atlas infrastructure,

you can do a lot more than what you could just do on EVM. And so those are the areas that we're particularly excited about partnering together, not just on the existing product suite, but on the next set of products that the Aave team is looking to build.

Right. So what does DeFi look like to you in the coming years versus the global financial system? If you ask people when DeFi first was invented, they say it replaces it wholesale, right? I would have argued certainly at that time it would be a parallel system maybe for people who didn't have access to it or were more crypto native. But does it ever, I mean, is it getting to the point where the UX UI is so simple that it could become the plumbing for that legacy financial system or we'll find more meaningful adoption in some sort of way? I'm trying to visualize where it plays, how much of that system it eats, and what that looks like. Yeah, it's a great question.

I think we have a pretty specific view here so our view is that as more assets come on board and on chain whether it's like these money market funds or some of these loans or some private equity that just provides a better venue for trading these assets to a larger market when it comes to payments infrastructure being happening on chain that's also going to drive more adoption for d5 in general like better like you said yields accessible to everybody across the board and then the last piece, of course, the trading aspect. As the systems become much, much more performant, starting to, from a user perspective, looks almost identical to a sex experience.

I think that would be another factor here. So what happens to me is that you have a system like with Aptos, which is almost connecting these centralized exchanges and the road assets into one system us which is almost connecting these centralized exchange assets like centralized exchanges and the road assets into one system where you can actually permissionlessly interact with them compose these things and things like again the composability is something you can't do across centralized exchanges there's no easy way for us to um you know make a trade on nasdaq at the same like contingent on trading in mysc um or based on some other thing that happens outside in the real world.

Those things can all be possible in a DeFi ecosystem that is very powerful, very high performance, and then has massive liquidity on top of it. So that's kind of the future I see, the future I see for Aptos and for the industry in general. Does that TVL and liquidity

come from onboarding the huge institutions that already have it? Or is it going to be something that needs to grow organically within as more apps and more protocols are added? Or is it a bit of both? It's definitely gonna be both. It's definitely gonna be both. I mean, look, the good thing is that there's a lot of, there's a lot of equity in crypto from like a lot of successes in Bitcoin and Ethereum and others. And so there so it can come from that direction. It can also kind of come from the broader open financial system, which is starting to see now that this is the future. And I don't think they can really ignore it anymore going forward.

And as these infrastructure and technology improves to a large degree, there's no option but for this to actually take off in a meaningful way. And so we'll see things going beyond kind of experimental dipping their toes into like much more serious integrations into what does it mean to be more on-chain trading platform. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We've had these other outside of DeFi,

we've had these sort of, I guess we'll call them bubbles, right? In the past, NFTs, Metaverse, obviously DeFi was one of them. We all know, right? We got really excited. Everything with that name goes parabolic, then prices drop. 90% of the stuff goes away, but there's this couple percent that's left that I think plants the seeds for sort of the future of those buckets. Do you think that those things sort of catch a bit or excitement again? Like, I think gaming was one that we were way too early on last cycle that we're starting to really see

start to bubble behind the surface. But like our NFT is going to come back. Are we going to be building houses next to Donald Trump in the sandbox, you know, in the metaverse? Or were some of these things just complete hype and euphoria? I think it really depends on each one, right? Like we can go kind of go line by line on these. I mean, you know, NFTs really picking up kind of led to meme coins, in my opinion, and led to like these almost like AI based meme coins as today, like in virtuals. So it's a form of like, how do you speculate about how something could be valuable with respect to community or a certain product. And I think that even the way tokens are today fits part of that piece. That evolution, to me, it just keeps continuing into different forms for a long period of time.

When we think about other areas of the metaverse and stuff like that, and gaming, for gaming and metaverse, they're very, and gaming. For gaming and metaverse, they're very similar and related in some ways, right? So games are virtual worlds, metaverse is a virtual world. Gaming, I think historically, has been kind of more about assets and games moving to blockchain. And that's nice, and it's a good first step.

But the real interesting thing for me with gaming is it's not just about assets moving on-chain, but the interoperability of those assets across other applications. And so we haven't seen a lot of that lately. But when that happens, I think that'll be truly exciting. Is that like sending your skin from one game to another? I've got a sword in one game

and I can port it to another game or your identity more appropriately, your character goes from one game to another. Yeah, I think things like that. But I mean, if I gave a different example from a different genre of application, something like KidLabs, which is building on Aptos,

a ticketing platform. So tickets, you know, they're interesting to have on-chain because of a variety of reasons. You get directly connected from the event organizer to the consumers themselves, which is great.

But they could also be a loyalty play where I'm pretty old. So like I remember in the old days, if I went to a game, like a basketball game or something, if the team won, I might get a free taco from Taco Bell. Dude, 100 points and you get a free taco. Come on, man. I went to college too. So that kind of thing that can be done on-chain now is a way to distribute incentives, coupons,

rewards as a part of that platform. You can imagine that happening in gaming or any other kind of vertical within the Web3 ecosystem. So more of that, I think, is going to drive... The interoperability aspect is something that has not played out yet in terms of value, but it needs to be. And that's where I think we'll still have traction

in the coming years. Interesting, because maybe that's the interoperability play is not just being able to do generally things from chain to chain, they can handle it. But if there's a game on one chain and you want to port it to something on the other chain, that's where you need it. That's a really interesting something

I never kind of thought about. So just that usage of those assets, but also like the ability for us to kind of use those as networks to kind of bring in other consumers. And also like, as you think about these laws in place, like advertising and marketing kind of fall very naturally into that once there's sufficient kind of traction in Web3.

So a lot of it is also just us getting proper distribution and then some of these old Web2 techniques of advertising and marketing and then going back to, again, how these marketplaces work are usually high-frequency trading-type applications all playing together in our virtual cycle. There's been others, but I think that gives us the gist. We have new ones, though, right? So RWA and AI. In my mind, those are kind of the two biggest that are bubbling right now. RWA, I think, could be very, very real this cycle. I mean, I think last I checked, it's RWA.xyz. Outside of stable coins, there's already $11 or $12 billion in institutionally tokenized assets.

Not huge, but it's a real number that's grown very, very fast. And it seems like the biggest players are deeply looking at that, right? So I don't think that's a bubble when BlackRock is doing it, right? That's right. And I think to your point, like people have been trying to dip their toes in there. And that's why it's kind of modest at this point with maybe 11 billion there.

But what we're hearing from the institutions and from what we talked to, there is a real desire to go beyond those experiments into something more tangible and much more deep. And I think a lot of these projects have experimented with more private networks in the past. Of course. And those things are great for experiments, but in order to kind of move the ball forward, public permissions networks and those networks that also can support aspects of privacy that

are necessary for those high-speed transactions are going to be very important for us going forward. And so that's where I have private blockchain is going to be a thing. Seems like nobody talks about it anymore. It just seems really difficult to be siloed. You know, like I get it if like J.B. Morgan coin, they need to use that for their own cross-border transactions, period. But that doesn't scale beyond that singular use case. We'll see. I mean, I guess this is more of a regulation question than anything, but I guess with the administration in place,

I mean, I think public blockchains are going to have a lot of advantages over those private blockchains in terms of usability and interoperability, as we just talked about. So I hope that most of it moves to public blockchains in the future. So in my mind, AI has been one of those sort of like, we'll see it bubble and then it'll pop and it'll come all the way back down. And then in a few years, in the next cycle, it'll be huge. But

I'm starting to change my opinion on that. I think AI is moving so fast that, listen, I think a lot of the AI agents suffer. Some of these tokens will disappear, obviously. But I think that is moving so fast that it's now just inextricably going to be combined with blockchain technology. So even if the token doesn't work or something, I mean, is it fair to say that you guys are utilizing AI heavily and that's going, that's not going to be removed once it's in there?

No, I think AI has a lot, I mean, to your point, has there been a lot of hype around AI? Yes, there has been a lot of hype around AI. And then if you distill it into things that are very practical, there are very good use cases for it. We actually have worked with Microsoft on some early initiatives and some trials

around how we could build out AI infrastructure for like answering questions about Aptos that are very up to date in real time, the Aptos AI Assistant. We've tried experiments around how AI can actually help developers onboard and to move, right? Move being a new language. And just in general, programmers are going to be

much more accessible to new languages because of the fact that AI can help them translate their code, even if it's not perfect, from one programming language to another. They can do that with Solidity to Move. They can do that with other forms. And now you really lower the barrier of entry from a programming switch from one language to the next.

So that's another area that's really exciting. To your point around AI agents, AI agents kind of today are much more like rebranded bots, I would say. There's not a lot of AI going into those things, but the potential is there for sure. Because as you can imagine, the bots today will trade on your behalf to achieve certain goals and values, but an AI agent operating on your behalf will be able to, for instance, book you a ride on Uber or schedule a book a restaurant you want to go to

based on your tastes, and start to leverage a lot of your preferences, both implicit and explicitly, to do things on your behalf. And I think one of the first use cases of AI that's going to be kind of obvious is to think about how does an AI agent trade on your behalf at high frequency to kind of make sure you are maintaining certain goals around your financial portfolio. Or, you know, if you have a desire to do certain things that you're, you know, you're aping in immediately. Those kind of things, I think, is where AI is going to really, you know, play a large part in the future. I wonder if it's going to just mimic people's bad behavior if it's learning from them, right? Because we know that people are terrible at these things.

And if you're programming it to behave like you, what gets me about the AI trading, which I think is absolutely the future, everybody's going to have an agent, they're going to be out there. But trading is still generally a zero-sum game. So if my AI agent is still player versus player on your AI agent, and one of them is going to lose. So there's no way you could just have a perfect trading AI if there's other AI out there competing in the order book. Yeah. So there are parts that are PVP, as you mentioned. I think those pieces are going to be probably less. I mean, I think they're more as like, you know, maybe you want to keep a certain position in BTC and ETH, for example, right?

And you want a certain exposure to that as an overall asset class in your portfolio. You know, AIG can do that for you. I know trade on your behalf. So it's not going to necessarily be maximum. Every balance. Right. Exactly. So that's the way I think about it is more like, you know, maybe there's a PVP aspect to it, as you mentioned, but it's going to be like about like, what are your goals from a portfolio construction standpoint? Portfolio manager. It replaces your RIA, basically, right? You say exactly what you want. You take a model portfolio of some sort

and you don't have to have a call every three to six months because it's actively doing it on a daily basis to keep you on target. Exactly. It can normalize based on your demands, how frequently you want to rebalance. I mean, you can imagine with fast enough trading, you can rebalance every couple of minutes or every couple of seconds.

As long as you have those fees in a reasonable place and it's not eating into your overhead of your portfolio. And taxes, right. But yeah, obviously, there's a lot of reasons to do it the way that it's been done. But we could see a lot of those regulations and laws change as well. But I do think that's really interesting because not only can it obviously balance your portfolio to your own preferences, but it should be able to maximize strategies moving forward for there. See where you have an inefficiency, see what's underperforming, naturally rebalance into something that has a logical reason to outperform. And that's going to be better than any human. Absolutely.

And you have access to stable coins, you have access to Forex and over time. And, you know, with the right infrastructure that something like Aptos can provide you, it's just like very, you can operate at very fine granularity because it's so cheap, it's so fast, it's so scalable. And so our job is to make sure that infrastructure is there for you. So when this future takes place, like you, you know, you have the best possible experience. Do you think that AI is also going to be dominant in legacy markets off of

blockchain? I mean, we keep talking about this natural marriage between AI and crypto, but it's not like, you know, JP Morgan isn't looking at AI. I think every field should be looking at AI, right? Like everything. I mean, even, even podcasters, right? Like how can AI help us in the podcasting space? Think about how we can answer questions better

or like, you know, come up with questions on the fly based on the responses that are happening in real time. I use ChatGPT mid-conversation and that's the most basic thing just for, you know, sometimes it's background

or a little bit of research, you know, but I didn't know off the top of my head Visa's transactions per second, guys. I looked it up, you know? but I didn't know off the top of my head Visa's transactions per second, guys. I looked it up, you know, using it. Perfect. Right. And so I think every field is going to be leveraging the IoT as fullest, and it's just going to improve us as efficiency for society going forward. So what do you, I know we're coming kind of to the end of our time,

like what are you most excited about now coming forward? As I said, it just sort of feels like it's all systems go for the first time ever. For you, for me, anyone in the United States who's participating in this in general, also in the midst of an already existing bull market at the right time of the cycle, I have no idea what's going to happen in the future, but it feels like the stars are aligned right now

for an explosion. So what really excites you, I guess, the future, but it feels like the stars are aligned right now for an explosion. So what really excites you, I guess, shorter term, but also beyond the hype cycles? Short term, I think, like you said, all the stars are aligned, whether it's going to be politically, even the way that infrastructure is coming together. The fact that these systems can scale and provably through Aptos to support internet scale capabilities. These things are all really important ingredients for making these happen. Now I think the next job is just adoption. And we're seeing this. We're seeing the largest institutions in the world, which we will announce sooner rather than later,

starting to think about really exciting use cases and bringing that mass adoption into the web3 space um we'll see we're seeing now that like you know the way the trump coin and took off for wlf world liberty financial is starting to think about how to bring crypto to the masses is also an area that that will push forward with adoption going forward and i just see this as a huge acceleration of you know different different verticals sure, but especially in the finance space. Three areas that we care about, the trading, payments and cross-border payments, remittances, as well as the real estate. These are the areas that we expect to see massive growth in 2025, from infrastructure to products to usage that we're here for. We're going to be pushing as

hard as we can to accelerate that coming future as fast as possible. I guess worth asking, with all of that in mind, how does the token itself play into the ecosystem and why is it important? Because obviously, we could talk about all the technology for days, but there's a token associated to it. Right. So the way I think of the AppTools token

is just like it serves three purposes. It's a way to pay fees in the network. It's very cheap, cheapest in the market. It is also a way to secure the network through staking. It's also a governance piece I mentioned earlier, which is the on-chain governance to vote for network upgrades going forward in the future. But what we're going to see also

is exciting token launches from the ecosystem in the next couple of months where're going to see also is exciting token launches from the ecosystem in the next couple of months where some of the bigger game changers are going to be allowing people to participate in the economy of those networks. And they have major plans in terms of growth, for TVL, for users, for new adoption that we're all very, very excited about for 2025. I can't wait till those plans materialize into things that we can talk about.

Can I get the announcement nod, the breaking news? Can we break it? Because I know you guys have so... We'd definitely love to chat with you guys more about that when those things happen. But we're seeing the signs from our side that crypto is ready to take that major leap forward as an industry.

Serious players are looking at it, not just as a trial, but as an actual use case. One thing we can talk about, of course, is the Hong Kong stable coin, which is being considered to build on Atos. And that's something that's exciting because a regulated stable coin would be incredible. It feels like we're going to have more stablecoins than memecoins soon.

That's right. That's right. That's the hope, right? So the more adoption that comes that's supported by governments, regulators, that'll happen abroad as well as here in the US is going to drive this adoption much, much more quickly into the present. So to all the devs listening out there, all the people who want to participate, what's the best way to check out what you guys are building, start to get a feel for it, play with it, or even just for your average retail sort of investor enthusiast to start playing with Aptos?

Yeah, that's great. I would say download the Petro wallet. You can use it on mobile. You can use it on a desktop browser. Start. And from there, there's a bunch of ecosystem activities you can do. You can play with different DeFi things. You can start to play some games. You can start to look at other products like your labs and buy some tickets if you're in New York City.

There's a ton of things to do there, and I would imagine you should go check that out immediately. If you want to build, we're welcome to a lot of new things being built. A lot of novel ideas, really. How do you leverage Aptos' unique capabilities in throughput, in cost, in also scalability and latency? And then also things like we have

features like on-chain randomness, which allow you to build really unique gaming speculative-type experiences on-chain randomness, which allow you to build really unique gaming speculative-type experiences on-chain. And then trading-wise, I would say there's no better place to build trading platforms than on Aptos. So those

are areas that we're really pumped about. But anything novel that is going to really help bring more adoption, we're excited about. We have a new head of ecosystem named Ash. I would definitely encourage people to reach out to him as well. He's got a very busy job,

but he's taking an inbound of so many different developers that are excited about building stuff, but he can definitely be helpful in the process. And my DMs are always open as well on Twitter. And people can find you on X and Avery Chang. That's right. That's right. Easy. Don't harass him too much in his DMs, guys. Busy. He's busy. Yeah. Go to the other guy. But man, like the more I talk to you, the more when I think about just how everything's aligning and then it feels like not only are all

the things we needed to line up in the background, but now it's actually ready for the big show. Like the technology. It just hasn't been in the past. It is. And it's going to get better. We've got Raptor coming, which is a new consensus program. We've got BlockSV2, which would be a new parallelization engine. We've got MoveTo, which is already helping devs get on board to move much faster. There's a ton of stuff being worked on the tech side to make it much better for devs going forward in the future. Awesome, man. It was really a pleasure to talk to you. It's been a pleasure to work with you guys and can't wait to see what's coming. I know that I might get an inside line on those announcements, which is really exciting for me. And just can't wait to see this sort of play out and for us to catch up on a monthly,

bi-monthly, whatever it is, basis and really just keep the pulse and see what's being built, man. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I'm glad we got to do this. I really enjoyed this chat, Scott. Thanks a lot.