TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles - TruNews Presents New World Tech Week: The Future of Money Is Digital

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

We are witnessing the evolution of money in the digital economy. On today’s Godcast, will discuss the trends and opportunities created by the rise of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other digital assets and what role the mobile ecosystem plays in creating further value and accelerating the digital economy. Rick Wiles, Doc Burkhart. Airdate 3/10/22

The following program is made possible by the faithful prayers and financial support of listeners just like you. To find out how you can help, visit nothing but the truth, so help us God. I'm Rick Wiles. This is New World Tech Week here on True News. We are providing you with exclusive video highlights from last week's Mobile World Congress that was held in the beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain. The topic today is the future of money is digital. Doc Burkhardt has the details about this session held last week in Barcelona. Well, thanks, Rick. You know, we are witnessing the evolution of money in the digital economy. And on today's's godcast we're going to discuss the

trends and opportunities created by the rise of cryptocurrencies nfts and other digital assets and what role the mobile ecosystem plays in creating further value and accelerating that digital economy today's godcast will feature speakers specializing in the development and implementation of digital currency and the real-world impact that the growth of this technology will have in national economies, political boundaries, and even in personal relationships. They say that money makes the world go round. Well, soon digital money may make the world spin even faster. Our continuing coverage of Mobile World Congress will begin

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Heaven's Harvest for only $139.99 use promo code seed for free shipping now this promo is available only for viewers and listeners of true news once again your heirloom vegetable seed kit is available now from Heaven's Harvest for only $139.99. Use promo code SEED for free shipping. And once again, this promo is available only for viewers and listeners of True News. Selling fast while supplies last. Call today 1-800-516-4773. That's 1-800-516-4773 or visit heavensharvest.com. Hey, before we start our coverage of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, I've got more books to sign. I am so excited that so many of you are asking for autographed copies,

and I'm signing them as fast as I can every day. We're excited here by the response. Quite frankly, it caught me by surprise. So many people have ordered Final Day in the first two weeks of the new second edition that I really was amazed that pallets full of books have disappeared so quickly. And it's exciting to know. We're working on the ebook version and the audio version. I'm going to have them on available as soon as possible. Most likely the ebook version in the near future but the audio version probably not until early May. So those of you who are waiting, it's just going to take me time to get it recorded. I'm doing a little bit as whenever I can

and then there has to be editing and so forth, but we're going to get it done. It is a large book. It's over 400 pages. So it's a lot of reading and I can only do about 30 to 40 minutes at a time. And I started to get tired. My voice gets weary. My back starts hurting. And so it's not like I can stand there all day long and read the book. But I'm going to get it done for you because so many

people have asked for it. I've got some more to sign here today. And the first one goes out to Norlin. Norlin, thank you so much. We're glad to autograph your book. And I always include John 654 in every signature. So, Norlin, that's not it. Let me get the right page. I'll get the title page. There you go. There's yours, Norlin, that's not it. Let me get the right page. I'll get the title page. There you go. There's yours, Norlin. It's coming to you as soon as I leave the studio. These books go out

in the mail. Second one to Jeremy James. You know who you are, verse 54, look it up. It's a great scripture. And the next one is to Adele. Adele, thank you so much. Adele, there is your signed copy. It will be shipped out very, very soon. This book, as I've said, it's not a book about the last days. There are thousands of prophecy books about the last days. This is the book about the last day. Do you ever think about it?

There's a day that's the last day. I mean, we've been in the last day since the first advent of Christ. After the crucifixion and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, we entered the last days. The last day has been going on for over 2,000 years. But there is a last day of the last days. What happens that day?

Just what goes down when Christ arrives? I tried to capture it in 10 chapters and it is exciting. I honestly believe this book will completely revolutionize your thinking and understanding of the second coming of Jesus Christ. I want to read from one of the atmosphere. And this is on page 115. And it's talking about when Jesus ascended to heaven after his resurrection. It says, two angels suddenly appeared and asked the incredulous men, talking about the apostles, asked a question.

Hey guys, why stand there gawking up into the sky? Furthermore, the angels informed the disciples that the same Jesus would return from heaven. The same Jesus means the God-man who departed the earth in a resurrected human body will be the same God-man who returns to earth in a resurrected human body will be the same God man who returns to earth in a glorified human body. This same Jesus will also come back the same way that he left, in a cloud in the sky. The second coming of Christ shall be atmospheric. Who is coming again? This same Jesus. The angel's words are a great promise of hope for humankind. The triumphant and victorious Jesus who went up will be the same Jesus who comes down. He will

not be a facsimile, replica, clone, impersonator, imitation, lookalike, double, stand-in, mirror image, remake, virtual avatar, or holographic image. The second coming of Jesus Christ shall not be a metaphysical phenomenon nor a mystical religious experience. He will not appear in virtual reality. His appearance shall be authentic. The King who returns will be the only begotten Son of God who came to earth as God in human flesh, was crucified, died, buried, and resurrected from the dead. He will be the real deal. Without a doubt, the second coming of Christ will be an atmospheric event. A heaven-sent cloud whisked Jesus away after the resurrection. Likewise, he will return to our atmosphere someday in clouds of glory. He left on a cloud and shall return in clouds.

Whoever goes up must come down. Jesus shall come down. He shall come down with fire. That's just a few paragraphs from final day in the chapter entitled His Second Coming Shall Be Atmospheric. I want to send this copy to you as soon as possible. Go to truenews.com, click the banner, final day, and order your book. Now, let's get into today's session from Barcelona, Spain, Mobile World Congress. Here we go. Today, we're looking at the world in a new light. And with our different perspectives, we can accelerate opportunities to create value that lasts.

How will you take advantage of the connections you make this week? How will you see connectivity unleashed? As the boundaries blur between online and real life, we continue to rely on digital innovation and connectivity to transform our world. From the metaverse and NFTs to connected devices and IoT, this year's MWC themes will spark bold new ideas to create a positive future. As an industry, we pave the way for transformation and find new ways to help other industries innovate. And now, together, we continue our exciting 5G journey.

Delivering on our industry's commitments to tackle the mobile internet usage gap and reducing our industry's carbon footprint, creating a better future for all. Because together, we will unlock the full power of connectivity so that people, industry and society thrive. This week, in our iconic host city of Barcelona, we will put our convictions to work for our businesses, for our next generation of leaders, and for the world. Are you ready? It's time. Hello. Hi, everybody. I'm Paul Brody. I am your host today. I'm ready, and I am so delighted to see all of you in this panel on the future of money. I am the global blockchain leader at EY, and I've been in this business for about eight years now,

thinking about, well, we didn't call it the metaverse back then, but we've been thinking about Web3 and assets and tokens and cryptocurrencies and transformational finance for all that time. We have an amazing panel lined up for this morning, and I'm going to introduce the panelists in a moment. We're going to talk about NFTs. We're going to talk about the future of money.

We're absolutely going to talk about sanctions and SWIFT and the changes that are likely to go on in the global financial system. I do want to caution everybody. You know, the ruble plunge yesterday, Central Bank of Russia raised interest rates to about 20%. I know people are really anxious to pursue yield. But if you listen to the experts, they all say stick with something less risky like Bitcoin. So we're going to get right into it. First, I'm going to just introduce the other panelists, and then we're going to start, we're going to finish up with a discussion of sanctions and SWIFT and the impact on crypto ecosystems. We're going to

start with a bit more of a basic discussion about NFTs and the future of money. We've got an amazing panelist to start with on my right, Bex Perfect. She is the founder of Nifty World, a YouTube educational channel around NFTs and crypto ecosystems. She has been holding multiple executive and leadership positions in media and entertainment companies around the world, starting at Ogilvy & Mather, working at the BBC Asian Network, Talk Radio, and she's been a tech pundit for Sky News, ITV, BBC Radio 1, Channel 5 News, Weekend on ITV, and The Saturday Show.

Pretty much all places that I don't get invited yet. We have Lars Willemse from Census. Sorry, Lars, I'm getting here. Lars, who is the innovator and pioneer in the world of NFT software. And he is focused on the fractionalization of real estate, which is going to be a very big part of the finance business and running a Web3 incubator. We have Julia Cabral, and she is a strategy and business development executive with 20 years of experience in telecom and media. She has multiple years of experience in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and she is currently the head of global telecom and media partnership at C-Labs, which is the people who run the Celo blockchain. And we've got Ziad Brini, who is from ConsenSys and has spent the past few years engaging in building professional service teams and delivering on

cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystems, including DeFi and NFT solutions. So with that, we're actually going to get started with Bex. And Bex is going to give our first talk. So Bex, over to you. Thank you very much, Paul. Hello, everyone. Good morning. I'm here to kind of talk a little bit about the basics of NFTs and to really encourage you to not just right-click a JPEG, because that is not the idea behind this. The idea behind NFTs is much more complex. In fact, NFT was the Collins Dictionary word of the year last year, but the majority of people still think of it as this concept of right-clicking a JPEG. And actually what it is, is from an investment point of view, it's about true ownership within the digital space. And thanks to the blockchain, it's about true transparency as well, which I

think is really, really important. And obviously, cryptocurrency is that enabler in order to do it. You need to understand the basics of opening maybe a MetaMask wallet, knowing how to buy Ethereum, which is the cryptocurrency of most choice within this space at the moment, and knowing how to purchase it. But then what do you do? And what are the risks? And what are the consequences of doing that? There are so many positives when it comes to buying NFTs. But for me, my journey was the reason why I'm in the NFT space is more because I could understand what I was buying. I was in more control of what I was buying. I wasn't relying on financial advisors, art advisors,

because the NFT space is predominantly filled with a lot of artists at the moment. You know, there's obviously gaming and lots of other areas and music and things. But NFT art is kind of really where it sits. But prior to all of that, I was dabbling in the stock market and having to feel a bit siloed and kind of going, how do I understand these graphs? What do I know what's going on behind these companies? It's a lot of work to get into. And then going into cryptocurrency, I was going, I need to kind of teach myself how to read candlestick graphs

and all that kind of stuff. And then suddenly when you look into NFTs, you dive into Twitter, you look on LinkedIn, you start speaking to the founders. You can have those conversations. You can quiz them. You can ask why this is a good investment. You can read the sentiment of the community within the NFT space up until the point

in which you decide to mint or purchase your NFT. So you feel like you've got more control and you've also got a more well-rounded view of what you're purchasing and the opportunity that's ahead of you as well. You have roadmaps, which are essentially your business plans. Now, there's lots of really positive things. There's always a word of caution when it comes to any new emerging space. And that's exactly what NFTs are. It's a new emerging and evolving space. So with that, you need to think about the fact that it's not regulated. So there's, in some respects, a lack of accountability. There's certain projects that won't dox themselves. You won't see who that person is behind the creator. You have to trust what they're going to say.

And unfortunately, there is a case where, on a number of occasions, I hope this kind of reduces over time, where essentially there are things called rug pulls, where a creator will create a 10,000 PFP project. People will buy into this, and they can walk away. They can delete their Twitter accounts. They can delete their profiles. And they have absolute anonymity within Web3.

And that's part of the problem that we kind of need to look into. There's also scams and scammers, where obviously people can come along and they can drain your wallet if you click on the wrong link. These are all things to be cautious of. But actually, a lot of this stuff happens in similar ways in Web 2 as well. It's just obviously more prevalent because it's a hot topic to be in on NFTs at the moment. Now, NFTs take a number of different forms. I want to just enlighten you a little bit on two of the main forms. And those are the one-of-one art and what that means for you as an investment, and then also utility as well.

One-of-one art, if you think about a great artist like Damien Hirst, for instance, it might cost you thousands, if not millions, to purchase a real-life piece of art from him. But the NFT space allows that to be initially much more affordable. Damien Hirst released a 10,000-piece NFT collection at the price of $2,000 each. Now, that's not the cheapest, but it's certainly more affordable than his in real life works. And you will actually genuinely own a Damien Hirst piece of work, which is incredible. And that will obviously go up in value because if you look at what the yield have what happens in art and the yield around that with Damien Hirst's name attached to it you know that you're buying into a good investment which is a really really positive thing but the part of the NFT community that I'm really interested in and I know that Lars is going to speak about this in

more depth as well is the utility side of an NFT. An NFT is essentially an access token, something that gives you more on your investment. So when you purchase an NFT, you're not just purchasing a cartoon ape or some weird gif or something like that. You're purchasing a token that gives you essentially an access to a membership club, access to something that will give you utilities at the very basic level, merchandise,

access to things in the metaverse and in real life events, networking. But you can also gather more, I suppose, residual income, staking. You can do play to earn gaming. So many other things that can give you more value on return. Airdrops are one of the most important things within the NFT space. If you own a Genesis NFT, that NFT creator may also give you another NFT, which is a secondary part of that or a second generation NFT, which in the future, if that project is popular, may give you your money back on your initial investment without you having to sell it and then some. So there's loads of great opportunities for that. From the

buyer, it's about control and understanding and accessibility to be in charge of what you're going to purchase and not having to rely on financial advisors or art advisors, for instance. And for a creator, this massively changes the economy for them as well. It gives them as a creator the opportunity to sell their work as an artist without having to worry about galleries and to actually sell and create a residual income for themselves, which will go on not just in their lifetime, but possibly the lifetime of their families as well. So I think you can probably tell that I'm pretty enthusiastic about that community.

And I hope that gives you guys a little bit of an insight into it as well. Fantastic. You got us off to a great start. So Lars, I'm going to hand it over to you. Tell us a bit more about NFTs, especially on the utility and the real estate side. Yeah, I think NFTs is a very exciting place to be right now because I think the NFT space, like what it does, it basically gives a visual representation of something that can be put underneath in an NFT. And what that really means is that the intellectual property of creators, of entrepreneurs becomes on the forefront of something that you can now fund your business

with. In the beginning stage, you can reward your early adopters by giving out a certain amount of NFTs that are going to give you something in return in the form of a utility. So like to really explain this in a way that, you know that before you even get into the decision to support a project or a startup, I think you have to understand the landscape a little bit better. So obviously, people have the buzz terms of Web3. So going on to that train, I want to say, OK, if Web2 was on one side, I think you can look at it from a perspective of, OK, I have a bank account now in a traditional sense. And now I'm going to get a Metamask wallet where I'm going to put Ethereum in what used to be euros.

And it really is very similar in the landscape of things. On top of that, when I want to send money, I might give you my IBAN number and then here you can transfer funds into there. Right now, that's an Ethereum address where you would send Ethereum to. It's very similar in its parallels. On top of that, you obviously have, let's say, Shopify to buy certain things in e-commerce. Well, it's not much different from going on OpenSea. Yes, I think there's still a lot of things, entry points that make it very difficult where we're not used to something.

But I think that's also where mass adoption comes, UI, UX, and customer experience, security will all start to improve. You know, you could use a Brave browser versus a Chrome browser to be able to protect yourself already in a lot of ways, talking about the link clicking and all those types of things. So to kind of have that in mind, knowing that we're heading a certain way, it's a forward thinking and kind of like you're early on because maybe those security and those UI UX things are not at the place where they need to be right now. I think it's a great moment to step in and really become creative in your business models because it is an access

token like Beck said and with an access token comes you know I come from a background in software so software as a service can be an access token to a lifetime license to be able to say to people that come in early hey you can fund my my MVP and now, I give out a yearly license that makes the lifetime license become worth more. So there's ways to incentivize those users that we can all understand because we are already used to doing things like that. And then on top of that, the company I started, VacayShares, I basically tokenized real estate in the sense that I can buy a property somewhere and I can say I split it up into weeks, similar to how a timeshare model works. And now I can put an access token to that particular week that you have ownership of. And then you can go into an Airbnb interface that

the only way you can log into that interface would be to actually own that token. So you now create a new way of accessing content, accessing ownership in some regards. And I think that is, to me, the most exciting thing about this. The possibilities are endless. And to really go on the point that made me believe in this more than anything is the smart contract and the royalty distributions.

Because if you really look into the physical art versus digital art, as an example, with a physical art piece, if I sell that art piece to BEX, then I make one transaction, and then I will never see any income from that again. Versus if I sell an NFT to BEX and then Bex decides to sell that NFT when I become a better creator, let's say, and the value of that goes up and she sells it to Julia. Now I actually get royalty income for my lifetime. But in that wallet, it can be after I'm dead and my children and even their children could potentially make

income from that. That counts for software, that counts for real estate, that counts for anything across the board. So for me, with my incubator, what I really focus on is looking at really special use cases of people that are creative, no matter what, web two, web three, whatever it is, but letting them have the funding in their own hands where they don't have to give equity percentages away, they can just basically reward their users similar to how a software company would reward their early adopters. So in that element, like an example of another forward-thinking case would be an automatic trading bot that is a software-as-a-service company,

Satoshi's Index. I work with them on the incubator. And what they do is they provide an automatic trading tool in the form of an NFT. So you get a lifetime license. You log into the site. You basically own the NFT.

You can get access to that tool. So it's like a gated platform in a sense where that NFT grants access to whatever the use of that utility might be. And that to me is the future of what we're doing here. Like I think we have the ability to have endless possibilities inside of your own businesses, or if you are a company, established company, to create arms that might forward the business as a whole because of the possibilities. So yeah, I'm excited about this too. I think it's exciting.

You can become very creative and anybody that has ideas can now really capitalize on it and reward the early users. Lars, thank you. So we talked a little bit about NFTs and both the financial and economic and the artistic side of things. We're going to switch now, talk to Julia about the future

of finance, money, and payments on blockchain. So Julia, over to you. Yeah, hi. I thought, can you hear me okay? Yeah. I thought it would be interesting to touch on what are the key factors that are driving consumers to adopt cryptocurrencies in different parts of the world as money.

And I think there are a few fundamental aspects of money that people value, right? First one is trust, the level of trust given in a particular currency. The second one is usability and cost, how convenient or expensive it is to use a particular currency. And the third one is accessibility to financial services, how inclusive the financial services are that can be accessed through those particular currencies. On all of those points, in many parts of the world, cryptocurrencies are offering advantages to consumers over fiat. And so let me explain why. We know that in the concept of trust, we know that the more consumers trust a currency,

the more widely accepted and used it is. And some of the most trusted currencies around the world today are the dollar and the euro. And we used to have money backed by gold, and nowadays we have fiat money, which is backed by the governments that issue it. But the challenge is that in many parts of the world, particularly in developing countries, people don't trust the governments that issue it. But the challenge is that in many parts of the world, particularly in developing countries, people don't trust the governments. There is mismanagement of the economy. The financial systems are slow, inefficient.

They charge really high fees to transact, and the population suffers terrible inflation. So as a result, the local currencies are really weak and stable and not trusted. So we know that people don't really want to have their savings in Argentinian pesos or Venezuelan bolibas, right, or rubles now, right? We've seen how people are queuing outside Russian banks waiting for dollars, right? So the thing is that this is the reality in many, many parts of the world today. And if we look at the developed world, back in 2008, we had the Lehman Brothers crisis, which was also a trust crisis of the financial system.

And that brought to light the lack of transparency and lack of accountability of a centralized financial system and that brought to light the lack of transparency and lack of accountability of a centralized financial system. And right after that was when the Bitcoin white paper was released as a decentralized technology. What blockchain does is remove the human factor from the concept of trust. Blockchain is transparent and auditable so that anyone in the community has access to the ledger so immediately when something changes, that's in the centralized community, everybody can validate it and there's an internal trade of transactions that's fully transparent.

And that's what is giving trust to consumers in the system, right? Now, if we look at the point of accessibility and inclusion of financial services, it's kind of crazy to believe that still today, a third of world adults are unbanked. They don't have access to bank accounts. And certain financial services are limited to those that can deposit a few million dollars in the bank they're restricted to the very rich what

blockchain and crypto do is democratize access to financial services so that anyone ordinary consumers can have access to all sorts of products and services and that's what's making also the crypto community quite attractive to consumers, right? Then we have the final point on usability and cost. And here I would differentiate between those cryptocurrencies that are volatile versus those that are not. Bitcoin and Ethereum change in value, and they're volatile. And they're volatile because this is an incredibly young industry experiencing outstanding growth. So that when people buy those currencies, they have access to a wide variety of very interesting, innovative, difficult to understand

yet, use cases such as the ones that Bex and Lars were talking about. And also they are providing substantial returns. However, when I'm talking to my clients, we do not discuss Bitcoin and Ethereum. My clients are interested in stable coins that are pegged one-to-one to fiat currencies like the dollar and the euro and are fully stable. And therefore ideal for business applications such as payments, remittances, and money transfers.

Celo stable coins, like the Celo dollar or the Celo euro in particular, are ideal as means of payment and money transfer versus fiat currencies because transacting with them is much cheaper. It costs $0.001 per transaction irrespective of the amount sent. It takes less than five seconds to complete a transaction. It's much faster. It works cross-border interoperably. It removes the need for FX, which is one of the big drivers of cost.

And it's programmable money, which is allowing all these innovative use cases. And also, Celo makes it easy to use because it maps the mobile phone number to the wallet, so that sending a transfer is as easy as sending a text message anywhere on the world. And as the world gets increasingly digitized, more so even after the pandemic, these technological features that increase efficiency and cost and convenience are going to be extremely valued by consumers. And this is why cryptocurrencies also matter significantly, right? So, finally... Yeah, let me make the final point.

So, the other big point I think that people need to be aware of is that Web3 and the metaverse are coming, which is something that is in the mouth of everybody today. But to put it in context, we are at the very beginning of that wave of internet. We expect to be similar to the trajectory of growth of the early internet, which reached 4 billion people in less than 25 years. And crypto assets and cryptocurrencies and these digital goods are what's going to be traded in this new environment. So for all of those reasons, cryptocurrencies are here to stay

and are going to be part of the ecosystem of the future of money. So I believe we'll see consumers using a mix of crypto and fiat currencies. We might see, for example, people using a stable coin to make a money transfer, pay the local bus with a CBDC, buy an NFT with a native token, and for others, we'll continue to use the euro and the dollar. And this will introduce healthy competition to fiat currencies and potentially improve the services to consumers.

Finally, as we are in the Mobile World Congress, I would just like to say that the other big technology that drives financial inclusion is mobile internet. And so the combination of stable coins and mobile is extremely powerful, and I'm very excited that I'm working here today with a lot of operators to unlock very interesting use cases. Terrific. Thank you so much. And we want to finish up with Zia. Zia's going to talk a little bit about one of the other elements of money that we haven't spoken much about yet, which is programmability. Zia?

Thank you, Paul. Hi, everyone. So when I was invited to join this panel the title of this panel is the future of money is digital and I was thinking Well, my money is already digital and some part of the world has quite a digitalized Process in place when you look at central banks today when they supply money to commercial banks Everything happens digitally then after that in the concept of digital money you have various categories as Julia touched base on. So you have regulated digital currencies, unregulated digital currencies, you have different type of virtual currencies and then after that you have cryptocurrencies. So if we are talking about digital money since like the early 80s, what is the

main difference today? And the main difference today? And the main difference today is the fact that we can program money. And so this is the concept about programmable money. So just quickly in terms of definition, programmable money means coded with inherent logic for a predefined purpose. So to create a cryptocurrency, as my colleague said, you need usually to write a smart contract to determine its characteristics and allow actions.

So what does it mean? Let's look at the financial infrastructure today. We all have more or less, I think in this room, a checking account. And to be able to run a simple checking account, you need an enormous amount of resources and humans to be able to give you and to fulfill you that service. Everything can be automated within a smart contract. So we can imagine the field of possibilities in terms of improving security and improving

efficiency in the current banking infrastructure system per se. After that, it means that to perform more complex operations such as setting up interest rates, setting them on dates with advanced parameters, everything could be programmed in a smart contract. As soon as the smart contract is released, it becomes autonomous, eliminate the risk of a third party manipulation. So already you're establishing more trust in your financial system infrastructure. It will mean instant, accurate, secure transaction at a low cost, powered by the secure record keeping of the decentralized ledger. As Julia said, it will be transparent to everyone. So if you have heard about DeFi or decentralized finance, it's already using this type of

infrastructure. We talked about automation, so this is like the first immediate benefit, so improve security, improve efficiency, but in the long run, and I emphasis on that as Julia said already, is you build a better trust in our financial system infrastructure by offering an open source, tamper-proof, and censorship-resistant foundational layer. So that's the idea. Three use cases to illustrate this.

So the first use case that is already widely present in the crypto community is the lending borrowing platform. So Uniswap, this type of platform, basically you can go, lend and borrow some money without having a loan officer in the middle of the process. Takes few clicks, is seamless, it's quite amazing. If you didn't have the chance to experiment it, I invite you to do so. Today to be able to get a loan obviously you need to put a collateral but there are already some teams and startups in the ecosystem that are working into a decentralized zero collateral lending and borrowing platform.

So it's just a matter of time. We can think also about the money, not only when it creates value, but also when it circulates, right? So two other use cases. For example, in escrow services, you have a cell that you would like to complete and you want to use cryptocurrencies, but you have in the jurisdiction where you are living legal requirements that needs to be done. The money can be called in a smart contract until all the legal requirements are checked in on-chain or off-chain, and

then the money can be released automatically if a certain set of conditions are met. It removes a lot of intermediaries within the process. Many financial services providers will see their operating methods changing. We are talking about accounting, because you're going to be able to see the money all the time, where does it sit, and it updates the final account system automatically. payroll services, payment, dividends distribution, and so on.

NFTs are no exception to this movement. Obviously, NFTs will be here to improve security and efficiency due to its intrinsic nature of its technology. Back in the days when I started in ConsenSys, my first use case of NFT was not art or play to game, it was really supply chain. So our job was to identify some use cases and work with clients to see how a good can go from point A to point B in a seamless and transparent way. Today NFT specific demand is emerging. So one of the decentralized exchange platforms, Uniswap, released the liquidity pool NFT in their version 3.

So what does it mean? It means that the recipient of this NFT can manage, redeem, and transfer the right of his or her fund. Moving the right happens when you're moving the NFT. NFT is also crossing decentralized finance through collateralization. So if you buy an expensive piece of art or it took value through time, you can put it as a collateral if you need a loan. NFT rental is coming in the ecosystem, especially at the moment in play to earn ecosystem, Axie Infinity being one of the used use case. So outside of the current revolution play to earn ecosystem, Axie Infinity being one of the use case.

So outside of a current revolution in art and gaming, financial services or more broadly enterprise NFT could be an avenue to further explore with centralized and decentralized organizations. Finally, when it comes to mobile, transactions on mobile wallets have doubled between 2020 and 2025, going from 5 to 10 trillion US dollars, mainly in Asia at the moment. Also almost 70% of websites are visited today, or visited from a mobile device, so mobile is necessarily intertwined with the rest of this evolution. So to conclude for me, I would say that the future of money is of course digital, but resides in a better trust in our financial system.

It's going to be mobile, decentralized, and it's going to be powered by a system that is trustless. Thank you, Paul. Paul Krugman, CEO Alphabet and Google Thank you very much. So I think one of the things that you will have heard during the course of this discussion is that the future of money is taking a lot of different forms. Payments, the actual money part is kind of small, right? Payments are essential, but they are what buy you pieces of art. They are what enable you to enter into these programmable ecosystems and what allow you to buy assets. And I have a couple of sort of thoughts I want to follow on to. First of all, Ziad talked about programmable money. And programmable money is incredibly important. It's also one of the reasons why we may not see central bank digital currencies so quickly

the way people are talking about them. And the reason for that is that if you think about programmability, programmability also means technical risk, right? If you can program it, you can hack it, you can make it do unintended things. And central banks are used to thinking about systemic risk, like what happens if a lender goes bankrupt? What happens if a country stops paying their debts? They're going to now need to think about what happens if you discover

a software flaw, not in a system or a few dollars, but in all the dollars, right? That is systemic technological risk. It's one of the reasons why we will see a lot of central bank digital currency pilots, but not a lot of programmability yet. That being said, I still fully believe crypto assets and stable coins and blockchain assets will not only transform finance completely and utterly by making it programmable, it will also transform organizations. And if I want to have one contribution to this discussion, it's just to talk briefly

about decentralized autonomous organizations. This is the new way that enterprises are being formed. We are starting to see this at EY. We have clients now that are DAOs. And some of the biggest DAOs have billions of dollars in assets. And the thing about DAOs is they are extremely transparent. You probably don't follow all the details here, but I'll give you a good example. At a major DAO a few weeks ago, a stakeholder, somebody who owns the DAO governance tokens,

tabled a proposal expressing dissatisfaction with the marketing content team and suggesting they all be fired. The proposal was debated, it passed, and they were all fired, right? Think about that for a moment. That is an extraordinarily high level of transparency in what you do in accountability, and it will be transformational to organizations. It could be good. I don't know yet, I would say, if we're going to see the wisdom of crowds or the madness of a mob, but it will be transformational. It will also change how competition is done, because DAOs, their product, nine times out of ten is a protocol, and a protocol is a transparent set of rules and logic.

And if you improve your protocol, it's visible immediately because everybody can understand it. And we are seeing incredible market share swings in the market for decentralized exchanges based on competing protocols. So we're going to see in the world of DAOs extreme levels of transparency and extraordinarily high levels of competition. And that will be really different from the world that we live in today. So the future of money doesn't mean just the future of payments. It means the future of organizations, of work, of real estate, of all of our assets. Now I want to finish up the discussion today, talk about sanctions and SWIFT and topics like that.

Everybody is talking and we're going to see this examined ad infinitum in the coming weeks about what is the role of cryptocurrencies or digital assets in evading or walking outside of sanctions. And the reason why that is going to get discussed is because cryptocurrencies or digital assets are the first kind of asset class on blockchains that you can have access to without a bank. You don't need a bank. You can, in fact, be your own bank. In fact, almost everything that we've talked about today involves, indeed, it requires you to be your own bank.

And I'll be honest with you. I find it scary. I have purchased NFTs. And to buy NFTs, we all make it sound simple. Oh, you just go and buy an NFT with your phone. It is not simple. It is in no way simple. First, you've got to open yourself an account in an exchange, and you've got to convert your classical fiat currency into some Ether. Then you've got to send your Ether to your DeFi wallet. If you have problems, do not go online and ask anybody for

help, because the person who's going to offer you help is absolutely going to ask for your passphrase. And this is, you know, you think, oh, that's a basic mistake people make. There are stories on Twitter of people worth a hundred million dollars who have been the subject of extensive, extremely well-orchestrated phishing campaigns. Now, being your own bank means there is no one who can cut you off from anything. If you have internet, you have access to this financial system. And if you have access to this financial system, you can move your money into that kind of a financial system and you can transact and there's nothing that the Federal Reserve or any other sort of traditional regulator can do to stop you other than your own willingness to comply with the law. And this is why we

will see so much discussion about this. Now I don't anticipate an instant transformation of the global financial system because the vast majority of people and the vast majority of money are interested in behaving in a law-abiding way. But the existence of this alternative at this particular time is going to change how some people behave. And I think it will take a few years yet before we see how enterprises adopt some of their behavior patterns.

But we are already seeing it in individual behavior. We had money transferred immediately to military aims almost instantly. Large quantities of money were being moved overseas. You had immediately, not just in the Ukraine, but also in other countries during protests, you had governments taking action to close up bank accounts, to try to cut off access to cryptocurrency. So governments and regulators are starting to become very much aware of this, but they do not have full control.

And at least for the moment, it doesn't seem like there's any easy way to get complete control. I want to throw it open to some of the other folks on the panel to talk a little bit about this. In particular I really wanted to start with you Bex because you started the conversation talking about the educational part of this and as I mentioned before it's not simple to go and get yourself an NFT wallet. So I would love to have a quick round of comments before we wrap up. And I'd like to start with you, please. So it's really interesting when you talk about the simplicity side of things, because that happens not just for the buyer, but also for the creator. What you were talking about, kind of the transfer of assets and helping with certain relief funds and things like that, very quickly you can support a lot of these charities,

scenarios, relief funds, very quickly. Alexander Wang, who is a very prominent person within the NFT space, brought a number of different prominent artists together. They created a collection to donate to Ukraine. They did that very quickly. It sold out very quickly. And they've got the transparency of the blockchain

so you can see exactly where that money is going however i've also heard conversations where creators are going we've we've allocated x amount in our roadmap once we've sold out two charities or things like that and they don't know how to transfer that money or that that the the um the cryptocurrency because those charities don't have the way in which they can then accept it. So there's a complication there. But yeah, going right back to it, education is absolutely key. And we forget, Lars and I were talking last night, we forget about the fact that actually we always create our own language within the NFT space. There is lingo that we use that we don't even think twice about thinking of, but the common Joe will just kind of go, I have no idea what you're talking about.

And we have to break that down. And that's exactly why my business exists. It's to make NFTs easy for everyone to understand. And what we think is super simple is actually super complicated for a lot of other people. So the basics of going back and what is a MetaMask wallet? Why do we need to buy Ethereum when there are certain platforms that will give you the access to buy things in fiat? Why does it matter that you buy off this?

Why can't I trust someone who tweets me back when I mention the word MetaMask support and click on the link that they give them? Why wouldn't I give them my seed phrase? I mean, it's all those questions that need to be answered. And to be honest, because we're such an early space, because we're not even really in the mainstream a year old, it's crazy. And for that reason, there isn't enough resource out there. So there needs to be some people out there who can give that information. And at the same time, people like myself who do that need to give that clarity and trust to know that we are the right resources to go to. Very quickly, where do we find your YouTube channel? You can find me on Nifty World NFT.

If you just put that into YouTube, you'll find me, and I'll say a big hello on my first video and explain to you exactly what an NFT is. Keeps it really simple. Thank you. Ziad, DeFi services and enterprises, are we going to see the rise of a whole parallel financial system outside of the U.S. and European control?

Yeah, I think so. I think that based on the experience we have at ConsenSys talking and engaging with various clients in the Western world but also outside, I think financial services clearly see the value of the infrastructure and the technological innovation that is coming because it's going to help them to automate a lot of their processes. When we look, for example, at central bank where we are at the moment, a couple of years ago, the discussion was like, will central bank adopt CBDCs? Today, the conversation is not about if, but the conversation is about when. They clearly

see basically the benefit of the value. We have done like more than a dozen of experimentation in the past couple of years in wholesale money and cross-border payments. We know it's working. Now the next step and the engagement in 2022, it's super

exciting, is about the retail user and how do we bridge the gap between the commercial bank and the retail user for using cryptocurrency like a central bank digital currency or stablecoin. So definitely I think the horizon is quite promising on that front. Fantastic. Lars, we're nearly finished here. Tell me quickly, okay, people are comfortable having some money in their wallets. They're comfortable putting their credit cards in their wallets. Do you think people are comfortable putting, say, their deed to their house in their phone? come to real estate, I think that we have to be very clever of like how we move into a space. And I believe when it comes about education and security, I think the main thing we have to realize is too, is whoever is trying to sell me an NFT capable of actually delivering on something? Do they own something? Do they have proof that they own something? Like make sure that you're

not buying yourself into a promise. Look really into what is already here right now. I say that in this stage. I think in the future when there's more measures, I would say there might be different ways to look at it. But as of right now, I would say look at the facts that are in front of you now. Look at the utility that's in front of the NFT creators now or the founders. And then make your decisions based on that. I think that's the front of the NFT creators now or the founders and then make your decisions based on that. I think that's the best advice I can give. And that's what you should do your

due diligence on when you're deciding. Fantastic. And Julia, finally, really quickly, do you think regulatory compliance is coming to these very decentralized blockchains? Well, I mean, we've seen how exchanges are being regulated and now they have strict KYC AML controls and that's why, you know, you have to identify yourselves before you go and make some transfer if you're cashing in money from fiat. So that's why I think, although this is considered some sort of anonymous technology, in reality, it's going to be potentially easy to see where the money is coming and going. So that if there are sanctions related to money transfers from certain places,

they could also be imposed on crypto. And so that certain things can be also... So controls coming to the exchanges, but maybe not necessarily at the blockchain level itself. That's right, yeah. Fantastic. So we are out of time. You've been an amazing audience. This has been an incredible panel.

Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you. The preceding program was made possible by the faithful prayers and financial support of listeners just like you. To find out how you can help, visit www.truenews.com.