Unchained - Aptos Is Betting Big on Transparency After Crypto’s Black Friday, Says CEO - Ep. 927

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Last Friday, billions evaporated in a liquidation cascade—and nobody knows exactly what happened because centralized exchanges won't share the data. In this sponsored episode recorded at Aptos' NYC event, Aptos CEO Avery Ching says if their Decibel perpetual exchange had been live, traders would have seen every order, every spread change, every liquidation in real-time onchain. But while critics argue existing perp DEXs like Hyperliquid are already decentralized, Ching says most still match orders off-chain in black boxes. Avery explains why Decibel (launching Q1 2026) will be different, how 500 million Indian users are coming to crypto through Reliance Jio's Jiocoin, and why Aptos partnered with World Liberty Financial despite VCs calling it "garbage in your living room." Guest: Avery Ching, CEO & Co-Founder, Aptos Links:  The Composable Global Exchange Engine, by Avery Ching, CEO Aptos Aptos Post: The fully onchain trading engine built by Decibel Foundation Previous coverage of Unchained on Black Friday: Crypto’s Black Friday Was Its Largest Liquidation Ever. What the Hell Happened? Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🧭 0:33 How Aptos evolved from Meta’s Libra/Diem project 💡 2:27 Aptos’ vision for global trading engine and everyday crypto use 💾 10:11 What Shelby is and how it supports AI, creators, and enterprise use. 🎥 12:22 Aptos’ new media partnership with NBCUniversal ⚡ 14:46 Avery’s vision for a future when blockchains are widely used  🧩 16:10 What Decibel is and how it aims to bring perps fully onchain 🔎 17:58 What would have changed if Friday’s crash was onchain 💵 24:12 Why Aptos partnered with World Liberty Financial on USD1 🇮🇳  28:46 How the Reliance Jio deal expands Aptos’ reach in India 🌏 30:46 How Aptos is building enterprise adoption across Asia 🏦 32:59 Why Aave launched its first non-EVM deployment on Aptos 🛡️ 36:42 What Aptos learned from recent market turmoil 🔚 42:18 Closing thoughts and Avery’s vision for onchain transparency Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone. Before we get started, a quick note. This conversation was recorded as a sponsored interview at the Aptos experience event in New York City. We're grateful to Aptos for supporting this episode. Now, let's dive into the conversation I had with Aptus CEO Avery Chang. So even on like what we consider today to be decentralized exchanges have a centralized component to them. And that could be for example, you start off with an order flow that begins on chain but then gets fulfilled off chain somewhere like an order. matching system. We don't know what's happening in the order matching system. Avery, since we just want to make sure everyone's on the same page, why don't you give a general description of Aptos? For those you don't know, I mean, we have a lot of newbies in the room, which is fantastic. Aptos wasn't, I mean, we've been in MENA for three years, but it has actually started a while back. In 2018, many of us were at Meta at Facebook, working on

building out the new payments infrastructure for the world. And you may have heard this as Libra and Diem. The idea was, was to put together a consortium of MasterCard, Visa, Facebook, PayPal, Uber, Lyft, and others, and build out an infrastructure that could support all of their needs for billions of people around the world. I was the crypto leader of that project, and I got to work alongside many wonderful folks who are still apt to us today. And it was a really great time and experimentation for us. And I think we learned a couple of interesting and valuable lessons. First of all, being early is the same as being wrong.

We were definitely too early for the space, and both the country and also the world wasn't ready for that kind of a vision and product. But it also gives us a tremendous amount of opportunity. We left kind of Facebook in the end of 2021, did a big fundraise with a lot of the founders and backers of Libra, including A-Sizzeen-Z, Katie Hahn and others, to raise our first seed round for $200 million. We raised another Series A round following that, led by Jump Crypto,

the summer of 2022. And our mission has always been the same. How do you're going to build the decentralized Internet for everyone around the world? We're really excited about scale. We're really excited about, you know, making things very fair and democratized out there. And Aptos recently has really taken a focus point

on how do we build what we call the global trading engine, where assets move freely, where trades happen as seamlessly as on centralized exchanges, but with the transatlationalized exchanges, but with the transparency that only decentralized exchanges can bring. And that being the basis of asset movement, whether it's going to be stable coins, RWAs,

or the net new products in the space that we have yet to discover, that can happen only on a decentralized blockchain. And so we're really focused on having a new language called Move to do that, blockchain infrastructure that is world-class, and I think earlier Sasha kind of remarked in the next generation features that will match and exceed the performance and feature set of centralized exchanges in a very short period of time. So we're very, very much focused on being the financial infrastructure, the global economy,

in a fair and democratized world. And I also wanted to ask, because there are so many L-1s out there, how would you distinguish Aptos from other L-1s? So I think there are a lot of L-1s out there, and there's a lot of, if I give it a good analogy, there's a lot of cloud providers out there as well, right? But what separates us from others is this clear focus on our ability to trade assets, assets as fast as the internet and have a competitive product that kind of goes beyond just being general purpose infrastructure. We don't build for just kind of infrastructure's sake. We're building

for a purpose. And that purpose is going to be, first of all, building out the global trading engine and seeing projects like decibel on top of it, which are full stack exchanges and provide, you know, better experiences and also better transparency than what any centralized exchange can do, including NASDAQ, NYC, and others. And the other thing we're really focused on is what we think is a huge opportunity for decentralization in the cloud computing AI space. And our first feroority into that is Shelby using the technology we built for the global trading engine, which turns out is really great for D-PIN, but we'll be more products

to follow. So photo two thesis is really on global trading engine and decentralized cloud. And so if you were to kind of project out, you know, I don't know how many years, but some number of years, you know, if Aptos becomes a big success, then like how would everyday life look different or what would life look like for people that are using Aptos? Like, you know, what new things would they be able to do or, you know, how much faster would things be or cheaper or whatever? So just maybe paint a picture of like what life might look like for Aptus users. Yeah, so I think this is a really important question to ask and the question that's not asked very often. My ideal state of the world is one in which the economy is having on chain. You know, we're working in our jobs. We're being paid in crypto, either stable coins or native coins. That money is rolling into our accounts.

It is earning yield automatically. It is also like allowing us to be paid more frequently because it's so cheap and efficient to do so. We take that yield and now we have AI agents acting on our behalf to invest in products using the feature set of Decibel and other trading infrastructure to automatically have portfolios constructed on our behalf. If you remember a couple years ago, there were many of these robot traders that happened that kind of invests on the equity market for you, but they're not that sophisticated. Crypto can have your portfolio rebancing every minute, every 30 seconds, as long as it's cheap enough and fast enough. And then,

you know, off-ramping into Fiat, that would happen through credit cards or other methods. But in the future, of course, after some time, that all just kind of stays on chain. And now our entire economy from the way we get paid to the way we borrow the spend as well as invests is all happening on decentralized infrastructure that is fair and accessible to all. All right. So now I'd love to hear a little bit more about you and your experience. what were you doing before you got into crypto, then how did you get into crypto, and then after that, how did you come to Aptos?

Yeah, so before I was in crypto, I was working on data infrastructure at Meta, and so actually a lot of us, actually, were several of us from the team, came from that team. And what we were doing was taking a lot, like when you go to Facebook or Instagram, you click on a link or you had a comment, that flows into some servers.

And the servers then process that data and then what we do is take that data and then process it some more and analyze it. To get analytics for the products, to drive new product insights, make recommendations for products, as well as recommend friends and businesses to you. That processing is of huge amount of data. Processes over like 1.5 exabytes a day when I was there, over hundreds of thousands of machines. Very exciting, fun work. We helped enable a lot of work for ads and for growth and for recommendations.

And then I think in 2018, you know, Facebook decided to embark on this ambitious mission for Libra and Diem. And I don't know what to say, like the mission was just too big and too bold to ignore. So that was my first four inch of the space. As the lead for the crypto team, it was kind of my responsibility to figure out what to do next after we realized that DM and Libra wouldn't ship internally. And so we worked very closely with the Facebook team to explore different options around how we could leverage our tech stack in different places of, external communities or also look for internal use cases as well. It turned out that the best option for us was to take this technology out and to raise external funding and to then kind of build interesting products around it. And ideally, the large enterprises, the Facebooks and others

of the world could leverage that infrastructure so that they couldn't ship with themselves. And so last winter, the previous CEO, Mo Shake, stepped down and you have taken it over since then, what has your, you know, what have you done differently since that time? How has your vision differed from, you know, what occurred during the first three years? Yeah, so during the first three years, I think we took a very strong bet on building the best infrastructure on the planet. I think we accomplished that. What we didn't realize, I think, was that how hard it was for people to think of, you know, what to do with that infrastructure. So we have a lot of great technologies. We have Blockist.m. We've got this really fast and performing

blockchain is super cheap, but kind of often remember stable coins weren't yet a thing. And also, there weren't a lot of obvious use cases. And so at the beginning of this year, we really stepped back and said, what are blockchains good at? What should blockchains be used for? And I think the kind of really obvious answer came to was trading assets. And seeing the way that crypto exchanges have gained $50 billion of revenue per year growing very, very rapidly, yet all this is happening in centralized enterprises as opposed to decentralized, it became pretty obvious that there is a meaningful value add for people to trade

on decentralized infrastructure as opposed to centralized infrastructure. I think that was the first insight. The second insight was that you see the rise of AI, you see the rise of cloud infrastructure, and recently we could see how opening I deals with Oracle, MD, have really transformed the cloud market. And so decentralization has a lot of. to offer here as well. We can offer cheaper products, faster products, and kind of build into and support those workloads into the future. And that's a growing industry, $300 billion a

year, growing 30% year over here. And also we found a great partner in Jump Crypto to build alongside this infrastructure. So we've taken some serious bets in the product space. One is going to be along the trading infrastructure. We believe trading should happen on chain. That should be the future. That's a future I want to live in. The other bet we've taken very hard is that that cloud infrastructure is going to be the next big wave of decentralization usage. And we believe they can overtake the centralized providers over time. I was going to ask about Shelby. It's one of the new products that you launched this summer, and it's for high-performance hot storage.

Explain what that means. What are the best use cases and applications for Shelby? So Shelby is really the first product of its kind. It's the first decentralized real-time storage that can support almost anything you want to do out there. You know, in the past, the centralized storage has been used for, like, data availability, kind of archival storage. Shelby says, well, what if you could have

the real-time infrastructure kind of built in the real-time blockchain? And this is good for a couple of different use cases. So the first and obvious use case is AI. There's a tremendous amount of training data that we produce, whether it's censored data or data that is coming through the way we use social media

or the content we create. All that data has to be stored somewhere and needs to be then trained upon and used by different kind of neoclouds, as well as even centralized clouds out there. And Shelby provides a perfect fit for that and actually saving on the egress fees tremendously. So that's case number one, is AI.

The second use case that's interesting is around creators. Creators today use different platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and others. And those platforms are great, but they have their own biases when it comes to the algorithms. They have pretty high take rates. And this is an opportunity for creators to really, you know, drive the platform the way they want to drive it.

can have their own content, own their own content, dictate which ads are being served, and also have the full control over how the content is used with their permission. And the third use case is around enterprises. We've had conversations with many large players about the enterprise's bills being very expensive, many of the Optus ecosystem members here as well as a larger folks, like, folks like NASDAQ and others, that are thinking about, like, a lot of their services from beyond the exchange are in actually exchange services that power more than 50% the revenue today. And they're powered by cloud. And those cloud expenses are quite expensive because they're deployed from the world. They're having data moved from, say, to site to site. They're

supporting really fast, real-time access to that. And I think that's where Shelby can also support. So these three use cases around AI creators as well as enterprise grade storage, I think are massive opportunities for the space. So this morning, you also announced watchy, which is a decentralized operating system for media built on Aptos and powered by Shelby Storage Later. And you're building this with the team at NBCU. How did that come together? We've been very fortunate to be working with NBC Universal for many years now. They're an amazing team of innovators who is thoughtful about the wet tree space. And of course, their content and their reach is pretty much as unprecedented. They're, you know, the number two,

if not, then I'm getting close to number one, contract provider in the world. They've got theme parks everywhere and their their properties are very disjointed in some sense and blockchain is a great way to unify them with identity with payments with loyalty and we've just been very fortunate to to kind of collaborate and ideate together into many different experiences if you actually go into the coney island playground you can see an experience is happening at their parks real-time today where you have scavenger hunts you have games you can play and there's a lot to do from a theme park person but it unifies your loyalty across all the different products

suites between their theme parks, Rotten Tomatoes, the movie theaters, and also helping to re-engage people in the theme park because there's so much fun things to do there. So explain a little bit more like what watchy is, like it's this decentralized operating system for media. And I understand, you know, Shelby is easier to understand because it's decentralized storage, file storage,

so it makes file storage more resilient, more redundant. But what does it mean to have a decentralized operating system for media on top? I would say I would describe watchy as kind of this platform layer for content above Shelby. Shelby is its core is a decentralized storage infrastructure like an S3 from Amazon, but it's not necessarily meant for content storage. And so watchy starts to define a lot of the content primitives you might want to have around digital rights, even encryption around the content, being played. in different venues, rules for how you might want this content to be shared across different platforms. So not only NBC, but maybe Disney, maybe other places, Hulu and others. And so it's just a there above for the content platform in which we already see tremendous on use cases for.

Oh, okay, right, because I have a publication. I know exactly how I, at least at Unchained, would use this. All right, so just talk a little bit more about your longer-term vision for watching, like the way that you described, you know, what it would look like in a few years with Aptos. Like what would it look like once watchy is more widely used, more widely developed? Like what problems would it solve for people? So today the technology is I still think underdeveloped. And a lot of the use cases of blockchain have mostly been around speculation of assets in crypto markets.

But the future we described here earlier today with Sasha and team is actually much more larger than that. So the future we described is around what we call namespace. the ability for us to have these kind of centralized exchange type workloads happening in different data centers and different locations, but tied together through a very high-speed fiber internet that is faster than any blockchain today. And so within those namespaces, you will get 10 milliseconds of latency,

which is incredibly fast, just as fast as centralized exchange, if not faster. And across namespaces, you'll get 50 milliseconds, which is fast in any blockchain out there. And so with this kind of technology, you can rewrite the world. and, in fact, the entire internet on top of it to scale out to the world and not just the world, but the future is really about us also having agents deployed on our behalf, trading assets on our behalf, paying bills, kind of conversing with each other through transactional means. And that's exactly what this technology will unlock, which is everything can happen on chain.

Right. So now we'll talk about another recent product that launched on DevNet. that was in August, and then the main at launch will happen in Q1. I actually met the product manager for it right before coming on stage. So what are the main features of Decibel, which is this product, and how do you see it fitting into the Aptos ecosystem? Yeah, Decibel is really the product that takes advantage of the global trading engine from its groundup. Design in tandem alongside how we think about the Aptos VM, the blockchain, and even the future designs of Aptos.

And this kind of goes back to our thought process around what do we want to change in the world? We really want to change the way that trading of assets is done. Even if you think about today's world, if I trade on Robin Hood, that trade could get front run. It could be sent off to Citadel. And, you know, we just live with those systems because we have to. But a future world of trading could imagine where everyone has equal access, equal rights. So if you trade and I trade, neither of us has an advantage over each other. And that's what Decibles is trying to bring.

It is the first fully decentralized, full-stack, spot, and purpose exchange that brings you the performance of centralized exchanges, but yet with the fairness, democratization, and composability of blockchains. And that's not easy to do, right? Like, that's something it's never been done before, and that's why we're doing it because we believe that this product must exist. You know, if you think about kind of the spectrum of trust in the system, we have centralized exchanges, which we must trust inherently because we have no choice.

we have things like a hyperliquid, which seem to be better, but they're still closed source, but there's this missing piece of fully decentralized, fully on-chain in which, you know, everything is well known, everything is understood, and there's no questions about it. So I am so curious because obviously we just had a major news event involving perps in the crypto space. And obviously, this isn't live on Maynab. But if it had been, what do you think, how do you think it would have kind of operated differently from what we actually saw last Friday? I think there have been a huge bunch of differences.

I think so once, basically when that event happened, almost the first thing I posted to our team was like, I wish Desabola's live and I wish you had the traction of Binance because everything would be much, much better understood. I mean, look, there were a lot of theories going around what happened on last Friday. Was it somebody arbing between the Athena DPEG or perceived DPEG on Binance versus other exchanges?

Was it some other kind of market liquidity being pulled that caused a lot of problems and auto liquidations and deleveraging? You know, it's hard to say because only the exchanges have that data. We don't have that data. And that's something the public doesn't have access to. But if it was on chain, if the rules are well defined,

you know, people will be able to see exactly what happened. We could see which markets withdrew their spreads, when they withdrew their spreads, how tight those spreads became, how far part of those spreads became. That would be very obvious. We would know exactly who was arbbing between different kinds of assets. What we see the orbiting that happens, and we could trace back those addresses to previous trades. And we'd exactly know, like, you know, kind of the chain of events that happened that led to a lot of assets, you know, wildly swinging around and still swinging around today to some extent, right?

But the issue that we have today is also that this is just very opaque black boxes that aren't available. And a lot of that trading happens today on centralized exchanges, which aren't going to share that data because it's kind of proprietary to their particular product and also it's just part of their business practices. But in a decentralized world where all that trading happens on chain, it's all transparent. It's all fair. And also when we think about who kind of profited most from those trades, we don't know, right? We don't know. That the data is all kind of private where, again, if it was decentralized, you have an idea of where the money went. And when you say fully decentralized, you know, you're saying that as in like the existing

purpose taxes don't fit that definition. So what does that mean exactly? Like what aspects do you feel like are not decentralized now that could be more decentralized? You know, and at launch, like what will decibel do differently? Right. So even on like what we consider today to be decentralized exchanges have a centralized component to them. And that could be, for example, you start off with an order flow that begins on chain but then gets fulfilled off-chain somewhere, like an order-matching system.

We don't know what's happening in the order-matching system. If those orders are being fed to another centralized exchange, if they're being processed by one machine, if someone is sitting in the back, you know, literally ticking orders in the back room, we don't know because it's all decentralized and it's all a black box to us. But, you know, there are steps forward. So some of those folks are doing those kind of off-chain order matching and then publishing those orders on-chain eventually once they're matched that's you know a step in the right direction but for decibel we're taking i think the really really hard approach of saying when you submit an order that order is going to be shown on chain that order's going to be matched on-chain with the matching algorithm that everyone can look at and take a

take a peek at and also the results of that will be published on-chain and that's really hard to do when you think about evm that's something that evm was never designed to do DZMMM design is a general purpose blockchain language for constructing any kind of application, but not specialized for trading. That's our advantage when we have Move. Move is a language that we have built specifically for secure asset

management and now augmenting with being the best language for trading in the future. So there's a lot of things I think you'd see differently, but mainly around the transparency aspect, understanding what happened in the system and understanding that no players get an advantage over the other.

Okay. And then this is my last question on this. I know I'm asking a lot about this, but obviously this is kind of the area of the moment that everybody is talking about in crypto. This is a very, very competitive space in crypto right now. So, you know, it's like once everybody saw hyperliquid, just kind of taking up all this oxygen, clearly CZ is thinking a lot about hyperliquid now these two, you know, and then there's like all these competitors that are kind of coming out. And, you know, we always saw like Osse, like, Astor is, you know, getting some attention, lighter. Like there's just so many of these.

I mean, even getting pitches for more things that are coming out. So, you know, when you guys launch, how are you thinking about like your strategy? Is it like a simple, you know, kind of like points and air drops and like whatever? Like how are you thinking about how to compete in this atmosphere? Yeah, it is becoming a competitive landscape from a product perspective, absolutely. But I think when you look between the products, there are a huge. huge, huge differences. And talking about Aster and lighter, right, a lot of those products both have those kind of centralized

components I mentioned in the background. So they're not completely decentralized. Hyperliquid, as you know, is not open source code. And there's a lot of influence from the foundation. So, again, step closer from centralized exchanges, but, you know, not where we want to be. As far as we know, decibel is the only one in this space, which is kind of playing in the fully decentralized, but yet able to match the performance of centralized exchanges out there. And so from a product perspective, we think this is a huge differentiator.

It's going to be multilateral. It's going to have a lot of other features that are very different and distinctive. So, again, very, very distinctive product from the others when you kind of compare. And then from the go-to-market standpoint, there's a lot. We want to be as innovative in the go-to-market as we are in the product space. But that's probably something that the team is not ready to share yet. But I'll just say overall, you want to incentivize long-term token holders. alongside those product users, right?

Like those two need to be aligned together. And I think as long as the tokens design that way, and there'll be a lot of interesting kind of mechanics to make sure that works well, it's going to do really, really well. Okay. I had a feeling you weren't going to answer that, but I tried you guys. All right.

Let's talk about stable coins. So USD1, which is the stable coin of World Liberty Financial, just deployed in Aptos that happened last week. So I don't know how many of you listened to Unchained. or any of the shows we have on our channel. Great show, by the way. Thank you. On the chopping block, which is like a bunch of VCs,

they are kind of negative on World Liberty Financial. I don't know if you guys noticed that in this recent show. But Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly Capital, who's the moderator. He called World Liberty Financial the garbage that got in your living room, which is kind of funny. So I just had to ask,

like, if there's this perception about World Lipi Financial, why did Aptus DeSysicicke? to partner with them. First of all, Haseba is a close friend and investor Naphtos. But secondly, I would say having met the World Lobby team over and over again

and our experiences with both the Zaks, Chase, Donald Trump Jr. and others, we felt a strong synergy in the sense that their mission is really how do they bring crypto to America and to the masses in a way that is easy to understand. And that is very well aligned

with what we want to do as well. And I think they are, are really strongly close to it, related, connected, in many places that can be helpful from a networking and business standpoint. They're excellent and amazing marketers. They're really trying to change the space. And we both great product and tech. So when you think about that combination, it's actually a really, really strong one. All right. So, you know, the other space in crypto that's so competitive right now, like kind of crazy is, of course, stable coins. and, you know, we've got, like, so many stable chains that are launching.

We have, like, a whole bunch of different coins. Now, all of a sudden, companies themselves can create their stable coins via open issuance, which is a bridge product. I just did a pot on that if you want to check that out. But, you know, this is heating up. Maybe not as much as Perp Dex's, but very close. So I'd love to hear more about your vision and your strategy, because clearly that's, like, how, you know,

like users are going to be onboarded. So yeah, how are you thinking about that? Well, the real thing about stable coins is we've been thinking about that since 2018 with Libren and Diem. We tried to launch a stable coin from within meta. It was obviously a little bit too early. But with this year's regulation changing with stable clarity, stable and genius acts going through,

obviously a lot of excitement with the Circle IPO, also moving things forward. You know, we're very fortunate to work close alongside many of the largest stables in the world, USDT, USDC, you know, U.S.D so on and so forth, U.S.D.1, of course. And what we find is that, you know, while it seems in the outside that these all seemly very much overlapping products, the reality is they're all used in different use cases. And they kind of all have their kind of fits within different geographies, different places of the world. So, for example, U.S.D is very heavily outside the U.S.D.

thinking of almost just like regulated kind of U.S.-based currency. And then PYUSD having access to PayPal's customers, U.S.D.1 being the administration and bad currency. So they all kind of have their niche. And we're happy to have them all in Aptos. We're very excited to have them all as partners. And it helps to enable our ecosystem, the people in this room, to build out unique products all across the world, across different use cases and across different geographies. So the stable coin sector can be broken out into like multiple different subgroups. So how are you thinking about, you know, attracting different stable coins to Aptos? Like, are you, you know, you know,

know, considering sort of those different subcategories and, like, how you'll appeal to those users? Well, I think the easiest sell for Aptos is just that whatever stablequin comes to Aptos, we immediately become the fastest, most performant, and cheapest version of the stablecoin across the world, right? So in USDT, we're less than one one hundredth of a cent to transact with, and you're going to get this, you know, sub half a second, you know, half a second latency, which makes it useful for almost everything in the world that, you know, existing payments can't do. You can use it to do micropayments, micro-transactions, rewards social apps through users. You could replace likes with, like, paying like a fraction of a cent. Like all these things become

possible when you pair up a stable coin on the fastest, you know, infrastructure on the planet. So it's actually quite a easy sell for us. Okay. So this morning, you also had a new announcement that you'll be supporting Reliance Gio's Giocoin efforts. For those that don't know, because this was also news to me, Gio is the largest telecoms company in India. It has more than 500 million users. Tell us more about this partnership.

This was a really cool one. We started this actually last December. So it's been a while. But with the large enterprises, you know, it does take some time, typically for them to move forward. And to their credit, Gio and Reliance have been like amazing partners. For, you know, one of the largest companies is all of Asia, to move this quickly and to like push this hard into the space, you know, from the top all the way to like the kind of people implementing the products.

They've been fantastic partners. And we had Pavvus up here to talk about his role in kind of driving this forward. It's not just conversations that happen within India with regulators and government officials, but even outside to their partners worldwide. And Geocoin is like the first, I think, of many big efforts they're going to have to bring blockchain for in the world. and they're taking a very innovative approach from the strategy side to say that blockchain will be the core of a lot of their products, whether it's going to be loyalty-based products, cross-application products, but they're going hard in blockchain in a serious way. And, you know, actually they tried some other chains, didn't work out so well.

And then they came to APTOS because they knew were the only ones that can support, you know, 500 million users across the world, transacting at tremendous amounts of volume. And India is a place where, you know, the fees really matter, because of the scale that they bring to the table. They're just really perfectly suited for what Aptus brings. And so what is the product exactly? Is it similar to like an M-Pesa type thing, but it's like with a crypto token?

So today it's integrated to the browser. And so browser will provide rewards to their product, to the geocoyne. And geoccoins will kind of be the, I think, the centerpiece of a whole bunch of new products we built after that. But I probably can't speak much about that. I think that's more for Pahless to share. Okay. Okay. Well, talk a little bit more about the Asian region because, you know, obviously that's the part of the world with the biggest population. So, you know, how does Aptos think about that? And like, how are you considering expanding in that area of the world?

So we were just on the ground in KBW and Singapore last couple weeks where we met with a lot of our partners. And we're pleased to see, like, not only is the regulation moving forward in the U.S. but other parts of the world as well. We just, we actually have the Lote team here. who we met who is moving forward their voucher program already deployed to millions of people but thinking about the next steps like what about hotels what about stable coin payments for hotels what about stable coin payments for their retail applications and their stores and so to see those

large enterprises you know they are the largest retailer in all of South Korea moving forward and seeing great outcomes with their early expectation of blockchain and relating bigger bigger efforts like that's huge for us when it comes to Singapore obviously there's a home with a lot of the exchanges. And the exchanges, we have great relationships with,

both for listing our projects, but also for thinking about how we collaborate on projects like a decibel to support the transition from kind of off-chain centralized exchanges to on-chain infrastructure, which many of them are supportive of, surprisingly. And just down of curiosity, not that this is, you don't have to give a long answer,

but because there's been this whole, like, geographical, you know, competition, I guess you could say, where when the U.S. was kind of anti-crypto, suddenly like every other jurisdiction in the world was pro-crypto because they were trying to attract this industry. Now that things have flipped in the U.S., like are you noticing, is there like a certain place that builders prefer to build or like which communities do you feel like are?

It does make me feel bad being in the California Bay Area. But I mean, I think it's pretty clear that now that the capital markets are really coming into the space, I think regulation gave them a lot of clarity around this is a safe space to play in and all the IPOs and Dats that have been kind of formed. Also, you know, I've started to make New York, I think that the crypto hub again, it is a tremendous place to build. I think I have to say New York hands down is the number one city for crypto in America. Oh, wow. Nice. Okay. Let's talk about DFI. Defi is, you know, as Eric Voorhees once said, the shining city on the hill. You know, clearly we're in this phase where like,

it's stable coins and perps and whatever, but everybody knows, like, we're, like, you know, you're all building toward a world of defy. So Aftos was the first chain that Avey deployed on that was a non-EVM chain. Kudos to you. Why do you think they chose Aptos and how has the integration gone? I mean, Avi is a longtime story builder in the EVM space and that's why they have so many assets under management. They're very well trusted. I think they just saw a synergy between you know, what apps is trying to build, like very much enterprise grade, secure software. They, they care a lot about security. We've seen that. We've done so many security reviews with them, auditing the code over and

over again, and then deploying very slowly and then kind of ramping up, like is, I think, shown a strong testament to the way they think about their brand, their reputation, and ultimately protecting the user in this space. So I think they saw the same synergy as us. We were very thoughtful. We care a lot about user funds. We want to make sure that the blockchain itself is extremely secure. It's why we built move. It's why we have extensive testing and security processes. I think that our first class in this space as well. So a lot of strong synergies around how we think about a safe, open financial world that I think AVE and Aptos work really well together. And if you try the experience, if you try Aptus with Avey, you'll see it's just the snappiest best

experience you can get with Avey out there. Okay, yeah. By the way, guys, it is a big compliment because Mark Zeller of the Avey Chan initiative of came with my show last winter. And I think I asked him like, oh, why aren't you guys on Solana? And he just was like, oh, I look at that chain and I just don't see anything worth like putting our, you know, effort into it. I don't even remember. But it was like spicy language. So it is a big compliment that they chose Aptos. But anyway, okay, so Aptos has a multi-token strategy. You know, why is that? Like, what did you learn from the Aptos token launch and token launches since then. Yeah, I could see what you

frame it that way, but I don't think of it that way at all. Like, I think Aptus is the base layer token. It will always be the base layer token for the Optus blockchain. But as we know, ecosystem products need to build on top and launch your own tokens are specific to their particular products. The other tokens being launched, I think, are going to be

similar, right? They're just product tokens that are somewhat, you know, distinctive and they have their own mechanics that support their products. and what you want to do as a layer one or any blockchain is to actually have a very strong ecosystem being built. Right?

Like if you think about the U.S. even, the U.S. is a, you know, the government itself has tremendous amounts of debt. But yet, there are so many thriving industries here, Facebooks and Googles and Teslas all built on top of this infrastructure. And I think a blockchain is very similar. You want to have, you know, a very strong base, that's Aptos, but also many strong industries built on top of it. Okay, so let's go back to your vision of Aptos as this global trade engine.

You know, because we just experienced this like Black Friday issue, I was kind of curious if you could just talk about like, you know, for the Black Fridays, right? So you already talked a little bit about like how you thought things would have gone differently. But, you know, how do you envision Aptus building in the future to prevent some of the issues that we saw on Friday. So, I mean, definitely a lot of people got hurt that Friday. Definitely feel for them. And, you know, it was a tough day for many people.

From our point of view, the best we can do is to really build for the future in which a lot of that risk is very transparent. So if you, if there's a risk, you might get auto-de-leverage because of your position in the book and also where others positions are, I think those things should be very transparent. I think people should know not just within that product, but across the industry. And so as a whole, we have to see a lot of this volume transact on-chain as opposed to off-chain so that we can have those metrics, we can convey that risk. Because all this is interconnected together. We're not like one, there's not like one exchange that doesn't affect another. They're all interrelated.

So it's going to be, it's going to take some time, but I think the future has to be that everything moves on chain. And that's where we can start. to kind of move around these problems and make sure that risk is well understood. Risk management is put in place and also that everything is, you know, fair and accessible so that there's no one with an advantage over another. All right. And well, tell us about your experience that day. Like, I'm just curious to hear, like, yeah, how did you hear about what happened?

Like, what would things like with Aftus team during that time? Yeah, so I think there's kind of a small war room of folks that gathered during that day. and we started to share notes on what we saw and observed in the market, kind of debating different theories and kind of trying to understand, you know, what made the most plausible sense. But again, and I think one of the biggest messages I shared with the team is we need to accelerate decibel. We need to make sure that products like this are out in market so they can provide much more transparency and kind of trust for users who use these products that they're not just, you know, gambling away in this kind of closed source casino.

So that was kind of my immediate message, but the other thought was, of course, let's understand what's going on. Let's see if we can reach out and help people. Let's make sure that any positions, if we have any, like, are kind of not, you know, not at risk. And I think the team, you know, responded well. And I think, you know, we're very, very motivated to build out

what was necessary for the products of the future. Okay. So I have one non-Aptos question, which is just, do you like look at that day and feel like there are lessons that the crypto industry overall should learn, like not even just for your team, but like things that you feel like when you think about them, it's, you know, it's stuff like that should be done differently in crypto or, yeah, how do you, like what do you think the industry should take away? I think there are a lot of lessons learned, but I think there are some interesting open questions as well.

Like when you think about what would happen if it was on centralized markets that are regulated versus these unregulated centralized markets, you know, what would happen is circuit breakers would have been triggered, trading would have been halted, regulars would have stepped in and did in a lot of investigation and figured out what happened next. In a decentralized world, that'll probably won't happen and that'll probably be very difficult to have happened. So I think that the best thing we can do is going to be provide that level of transparency and openness. So when people get into positions, they know exactly the risk they're taking. That exactly the rules that they're participating with the system. Right now, again, those rules are kind of black-box.

And, you know, I don't know that there's a clear answer about like, how do we fix this? But I do think that there's a lot of work that means to have done to address the regulatory components. And that's, I think, work I'm excited to work on with kind of our role in the CFTC to push for, you know, responsible protections for consumer safety. Okay. And I'm going to ask you a conspiracy theorist question. I saw some people saying that they thought that potentially this was a coordinated attack,

because the three assets on Binance that dropped precipitously were all ones where basically the pricing mechanism like finance was in the process of changing that. What do you think of that theory? I think it's exactly why this needs to be more transparent and open. Like, we don't know. And unless they publish that data, we won't know. And if they publish that data, we still won't know. So it's something that I think a very small number of people know in the world.

and we'll have to wait for them to come and see. Okay. I just had to ask because I was curious, what people think. All right. So I guess just is there anything about your plans for Aptos, your vision, or anything that we didn't discuss that you would want the audience to know? I think it's important, like, you know, as we did the early part of the year to reflect a little bit on what you want to see in crypto.

Like what do you think the futures industry is? Is it going to be a huge speculation game for different tokens? is it going to provide actual value and utility to customers. You know, we're trying to do the latter. We're trying to really build out a vision for the world in which, you know, it's a safer world for you. It's a more productive world when it comes to your asset management. And also that, you know, this is an internet that people have more control over

whenever there's your creators, whether your data that's being trained with AI, or whether it's your life savings. So, you know, there's a lot of builders out there that have different kind of goals and expectations, but this is what we want to do. We want to change the world for the better. And, you know, we'll need all your help in making it happen. But that's our goals. Okay, great. Well, thanks everyone for joining us. And thank you so much, Avery for answering our Thank you so much, Laura.