 Basically, you can divide the entire blockchain growth into two areas. One is the crypto-related and another is the business blockchain. The crypto-related areas are growing slowly because there are some regulatory hurdles which are getting resolved by the government of India now. And we are seeing the growth in this ecosystem a bit cautiously, but it is happening now. So crypto exchanges are generating good volumes in 2023. The workforce that we are building from colleges and universities have a lot of blockchain expertise now. Earlier, it was very difficult to get the blockchain expert, students or professionals from the market. Now, that's not the case. Similarly, the crypto-related products, also a lot of startups are coming from India. I think there are more than 300 companies which are working in this direction, especially in India. As far as business blockchains are concerned or the blockchain for the enterprise are concerned, that is something which is booming a lot in India. SDFC is doing a project, ES Bank is doing a project for settling off the funds abroad. Similarly, in supply chains, you can see many companies starting from the smaller companies, like Killer Jeans, two of the bigger companies like Geo. Everyone is trying to create an ecosystem where they can include traceability in their end-to-end products using blockchain. So supply chain is something where you are seeing a lot of adoption in India. Agritech companies are there. I work with a startup that is doing traceability of agri-agri-agri products. So now you can trace your vegetable of fruit from farm till fork. So those kind of ecosystems are developing very, very fast. Similarly, your decentralized ID or ID on blockchain, this is something that even IITs are working along with ADHAR and other kind of projects. Healthcare domain projects are coming. Apollo has started a first project where they are putting all their data on blockchain healthcare, which has a humongous potential. So the business blockchain growth in India is taking a lot of pace and adoption. The crypto is slightly delayed from the other parts of the world. So we are currently at seventh rank across the world. But I think this year, once the entire guidelines and the legal framework is made and done, I think we will see the similar growth in the crypto space as well. Thanks, sir. I think this is helpful. So seeing crypto already making ways into finance, supply chain. So let's take this to Avinash. So Avinash, based on your experience at Clear, how are you seeing business being transformed or a significant value is being generated using AI, crypto and blockchain? Yeah, so ClearTax serves both customers and enterprises. So what we are seeing, right? There's one set of technologies which is AI which is far ahead of adoption curve. It's very difficult or it's becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to adopt to AI because the technology is there. It's just how do we adopt and how fast can we adopt? And there are technologies like blockchain, Metaverse, NFTs. These technologies are like the technology is still not as scalable or is still not there where common use cases or common businesses can adopt to them easily. So we are seeing this two different bipolar world where one technology is far ahead and there's other technology which is still lagging behind. And businesses are trying to adopt but it's still not there yet. And common use cases like for example in our own company, AI has transformed a lot. Like we are trying to adopt AI into marketing. There are video campaigns that can be personalized to each user. And there's operations that can be built on chat, GPT. So a lot of transformation is happening and we are running behind the block to adopt to them. There's also a lot of new use cases that are getting unblocked. We are also someone who sell mutual funds and 50% of our customers come and ask, can you please recommend me what sort of portfolio of mutual funds should I have? And when you are discussing something as discreet and as customized to every user, there's no construct that you can give which can be adopted to everyone. And with AI and GPT and some of these models, you can build a good framework and a good construct that can be personalized to many, probably a million users. So yeah, a lot of businesses are sort of trying to haggle between the two worlds and my sense is that a lot of businesses would try to move faster towards AI because the technology is far ahead. And blockchain, I think once it catches up, people will look into it but businesses have started looking into blockchain and it's still not there yet for adoption. Got it. So there's a good start, but still there is some way to go. Yeah, yeah. So let's now take it to Kamesh on the meta side, on the meta-verse side. What's the road ahead for meta-verse? We all have seen the hype curve about a couple of years back or at least an year back on this. So and how do you see NFTs and other digital collectibles getting adopted, especially in India? So I can give some examples. Unfortunately, we don't see any kind of blockchain adoption happening other than crypto to be frank, right? So if you take an example of biggest meta-verse like Sandbox, so where there is a token business which is going on, there's a billion-dollar market cap and everything. If you see the actual users who are really spending time and efficiently using it, it's highly questionable. Right now what I see in the last five years, I always used to watch any interesting use case which can get out from crypto. It's not actually. So we were all talking about blockchain, all the billion-dollar companies are trying to pilot something on blockchain. But the money and finance and entrepreneurs can make money as well as the VCs want to inverse everything around revolving around cryptos. Unfortunately, if you say that I'm really solving some purpose in the real world through blockchain and obviously using this technology, no one cares. So right in a VC point of view as well as the adoption point of view, it's all about the tokens as of now. So I would say that the meta-verse, I would say gaming is something that's really natural towards adapting to NFT. Why? Because of people already buying $200 billion worth of in-game assets already through PlayStores. Unfortunately, whatever you buy through PlayStores, I know you can't re-trade or you can't rent these NFTs, right? So because there is no concept of NFTs in PlayStore, right? So imagine if we able to convert every digital gaming asset that we can convert as NFTs. So people can buy the guns or dresses and skin and then if they, after playing the game, they feel boring and then they can even easily re-trade it or you can put it for rental. That is the other use case that we can generate around that. So what I see, the world is moving towards that because, which is not quite natural because it is not new, right? People already, there's a big industry, people buying in-game assets for fun. Like it's like watching movie for an older generation. But right now for the younger generation it's all about just buying out the new game for 5,000, 10,000 rupees and just playing it for fun, right? Which is there. So I feel like this younger generation naturally adapts towards the NFTs and re-trading and everything. You can see this Web2 world, that is the biggest gaming marketplace called Steam, which do billions of trade volume like Binance, right? All the young kids are used to buy the gaming assets and trade it for fun, right? I can see that is one gun which cost $160,000 just for the fun. This young kids are just buying a gun for the $160,000. They can re-trade, they can only re-trade inside the marketplace. They can't remove that asset to the different game or move the asset to the different game. They can't put it for rental. So but still people were spending money for it, right? So because for them it's so important because their entire friends and family and the community of all, everyone sitting on Discord and chatting about the game and they want to showcase things, right? How we used to buy Rolls Royce and Rolex watches and everything for the newer generation is all about gaming, right? They want to showcase things, how they play well in the game, what kind of premium assets they have and if there is opportunity because of the NFTs, they can re-trade. Naturally, we see there's a huge, you know, in the three, four years, we're able to see that there's a huge spike for NFTs and gaming. So if we can say gaming is part of Metaverse, right? So Metaverse is nothing but I would say it's gaming. The biggest Metaverse right now is going to be roadblocks but it's a centralized Metaverse, right? So where I feel like, you know, naturally this Metaverse culture is already there. People are spending time inside the game, right? So I feel that is something we don't want to define Metaverse like sandbox. I feel like every games are going to be Metaverse, right? If you're able to move the assets from the game, then it's going to be Metaverse. That is where I see there's a huge opportunity. For example, we recently did something with Flipkart, right? We're just moving, you know, we're powering the entire technology for Flipkart where they're trying to re-trade their loyalty points as NFTs, right? They hold close to half a billion worth of loyalty points inside there. You know, everyone has super coins and everything, right? Imagine like you can trade the super coins, right? Those kind of use cases we are experimenting with them. We already just launched a soft launch and we able to generate 1.1 million wallets. So it clearly shows that it's adoption. No one cares about crypto, right? When it's come to, you know, if you're able to get a discount through Flipkart, right? You already own cash back. You don't know how to use it, right? If you can re-trade that, any kind of technology is fine for the people. So that is what I'd say. That's very interesting, NFTs, collectibles, gaming. But I think on the blockchain and crypto, let's hear from the next round what panelists have to say about the challenges and adoption. But moving on to Varun. So Varun, see, we heard about the potential of all these technologies there. What, according to you, should be the policies or the policy frameworks to ensure that the adoption increases and people move ahead without much of an issues on this? Yeah. So Rajat, I have good news to tell. Okay, the good news is, if you talk about adoption, it's happening. And it's happening in India, in public sector. You know, we all crib about government not coming up with policies, government not doing this. All of that is towards the financial aspect of tokens that we call it, which is crypto. But if you look at the underlying technology of decentralization and blockchain, the maximum and the biggest case studies that exist in India are in Indian, in public sector, whether it's land records, whether it's Digiatra, by the way, it's my favorite app. Or, you know, so I think one thing that I would like to ask every time we discuss this is, what is the problem we are trying to solve? And that also leads to your first question. It's not whether AI is solving the problem or blockchain is solving, it's a problem. And that solution needs all technologies to come together. So that's one. As far as the regulatory framework is concerned, look, the short answer is nobody has figured it out yet. Anywhere in the world, right? The difference is in approach. Some countries have approached it in a more liberal way. Some countries, including our government, is conservative because we all know, right? There's a lot of speculation involved in this, right? And we have a large population who does not understand the technicals of crypto. They would just buy crypto because they saw somebody in YouTube and said, oh, this will go up 100%. So 99% of the cases in retail sector are like that. But if you really look at it from a government and regulatory aspect, nobody has figured it out yet. Nobody has a concrete law. These things happen in iterations. Even if you look at the financial systems that exist today, banking, they were built in iterations over decades and decades, right? So it will take time for the regulatory framework to evolve. I think one area which will really accelerate this is forensics. So today, the biggest challenge government, I was talking to some of you before the session, the two words that all governments globally are worried about and they're scared. One is censorship freedom. It's not about, it's not about, this word reflects the mindset of the person. They don't want to be controlled, right? And which is dangerous in some cases, that it is not dangerous, but censorship freedom is a problem. And that when it coupled with anonymity, which is again, big, this is what governments are very, very scared of. And the way these things can be managed and governments can be, they feel more comfortable when they will have the right technology to do forensics. I think that is, and forensics at scale, if it has to happen in India, because we know every guy at the corner is buying crypto and selling crypto and, so this is one area which needs improvement. The second is, I think the technology itself is yet to mature. So if you look at Web3 stack, there are a lot of white spaces which are yet to be created, right? There are people who are working on it. It's not there yet, right? So I think that is a second piece. Third piece is, we have to understand fundamentally, this technology was not created for one organization. This technology was created for ecosystems, right? For solving industry level problems. So applying this to solve those kind of problems where two competitors have to come together to solve it. I think those are the use cases which are waiting to be discovered, right? Traditionally enterprises are very control savvy. They want to have control over IP. They want to have control over service. They want to control it, right? I think that mindset is evolving as we speak slowly and slowly and people understand that it's important for an ecosystem to succeed that you have trust in this ecosystem and that comes when you don't have a control and you have a governance. So most of these chains that you see are run by foundations. They're not run by dot coms and they're mostly foundations. So these are things that are being developed as we speak. So are these the only hindrance? Do you see talent also as one of the hindrance or at least holding us from where we should be? See talent in blockchain is simple, remote. I think, I love that word, right? Because this is our gift as blockchain developers to the IT industry remote, right? Other places you want to be physically co-located in an ODC as we call it in IT industry, right? Here it is impossible to find 15 developers in Delhi. It is impossible. So you need to leverage up the development of you but from the consumption point of view. People using that. Are they trained enough right now or do you need post-training? Some of the best implementations of technology are when the technology is not visible. Use Digiatra. I'm a big fan. Again, but unless you go into the FAQs of that app, you will not know that it runs on blockchain and it is using verifiable credentials. I am very passionate about it because I myself run DiceID, which is our product of verifiable credentials and we're creating the largest ecosystem of talent in India. But coming back to the point, Rajat, it should not be visible to users. It should be about solving the problem and user experience, right? Isn't it? Nobody had a change management for WhatsApp. Exactly. So I think that is the fundamental thing when there is a lot of friction in Web3 because the way you log in into an app is very different the way you log in into a Web3. You have to attach your wallet and that comes with its own risks, right? So I think these are the things which are getting solved. Mobile enablement of Web3 apps is another area which is getting solved as we speak. Good, so let's build on that, Kamesh, with you. So from Metaverse perspective, what are the key success factors which will solve some of these challenges and improve adoption? Right now I would say experience of the game, right? You can't find the experience of roadblocks in any of the Web3 games as of now. Most of the Web3 games are more like DeFi-based games. Just people used to play the games just to make coins, right? So there is no real interest or addiction in the gameplay. That needs to be changed. So that's why I can see the next boom is going to be on AAA games getting into Web3. So that is something, you know, because every six months or every Bitcoin orbing cycle which we used to figure out a new trend, right? The last trend was into more like UNISAP kind of exchanges, DeFi boom, all these kind of things happened. It is not in 2018, it is on after 2020, it's all happened. The next boom is going to be on the gaming, I would say. So right now the gaming quality of the game and the experience of the game really sucks. So the only way to change huge adoption and everything, so if you have a good game, as you were rightly telling, that you know, people should not even feel the chains or blockchain, it should be seamless to them. So that's where we're able to get more adoption and then like Fiat payment gateways and everything which is really getting day by day mature now. When governments also start supporting for Fiat payment gateways, we can see you can buy cryptos on set pay using your UPI or CACADIC cards, right? So which is the facility that we were able to see evolving for a period of time. So getting Fiat payment gateway and then like, you know, having better user experience other than MetaMask and then like, you know, good quality of the games. All these kind of things will have a bigger adoption and more users will get into the, as of now, which is not available. If you take a biggest meta versus right now, whatever we're speaking in the web three world, if you, you can't spend more than 20 minutes into that. You'll feel so boring after 30 minutes. So that is a way, but the coins can be treated on billions, but unfortunately, if the real users will not have a good experience for something, but that is a way, even internet. In the initial days, right? If you want to see your mark and everything, it takes, you know, 30 minutes and everything to get your results, right? So those were the days, but right now it is on the mobile. I think this evolution will happen. So I'm able to feel it because I'm, last month I was in LA, I'm able to see more than 25, 30 plus game, all AAA rated games are getting into, you know, NFTs and web three. So, which is a good positive sign because top studios are getting into that. So top AAA studios are exploring meta versus and all this kind of things will have a, I think naturally in the next one year is we were able to see a lot of adoption towards the gaming metaverse and web three because of the quality of the games. So the user experience which is driving the adoption and we see the value being realized in subsequent years to come. So let's build on top of that, Avinash. So at ClearTechs, how have you seen your organization demystifying these technologies and bring a more business lens or improve the overall business operations there? So one thing, you know, what we observed while demystifying this is some of these technologies that are coming off this age are from a completely different universe. It's not something that is easily adaptable, you know? You, I think it's a good, yeah. It's very difficult for engineers to sort of suddenly adapt into, you know, people who have been coding in Java Python to suddenly adapt into SolidDT Rust. It's very difficult for marketers to communicate effectively about crypto technologies. You know, we had to even change up PR agencies because our existing PR agency didn't know how to effectively communicate, you know, crypto taxation and things like that. You know, so the, it's a challenge for most of these organizations to demystify this and it is another challenge to actually make it work into an effective business model. There's this analogy, you know, like three years, you know, long back I had, I was stationed in Brazil and I lived there for three years. Brazilians generally follow football and probably F1, but if you show them any sport, you know, you generally show them basketball, you show them American football, rugby, they don't play rugby, but if you show them rugby, they're probably in 15 minutes get what the game is. You show them cricket for two hours, they don't get a clue what it is. Nobody gets a clue what cricket is. And except probably the subcontinent and a few commonwealth countries, nobody understands what cricket is or naturally gets what it is. It is a challenge for them. And some of these technologies I sort of is analogous to cricket. If you are in it, you understand what to do. If you are outside of it, it is very difficult to adopt. And it's as if there's a Chinese wall between and you have to cross it to understand what the other technologies. So like Anuj and Varun were saying, it's very difficult to get developers in these technologies. And so people, I mean, it'll be transformational as an ecosystem to start getting people, developers, marketeers, operation executives to start understanding the technology and support the businesses effectively. So yeah, it's challenging for existing business to suddenly adopt to this. And yeah, so because the learning curve is very steep. Yeah. Varun, you want to add something before I come to Anuj? Yeah, very quickly. You have to look at blockchain talent from two perspectives. There are further segmentation. One is developers who integrate blockchain into the apps. That ecosystem is developing, right? The integration with Ethereum, Polygon is an SDK integration. So people are able to learn and they're able to do it. But writing the contract is difficult, right? If you want to use say Polkadot to construct a blockchain assembly, is that talent is difficult to get? Just want to do it. Interesting, good. So just to add on this thing, since we talked about adoption and all, see, I agree to the point that any technology, which is for the consumer side, it should be like almost invisible. You are doing a facial recognition. Do you know that there's a lot of AI tech behind this thing? If you are, you might have used, or everyone over here must have used DND services. You know this is all done on a blockchain there between telecoms. So technology is there to solve the back end problem for it and make people life easier. And that is where many people are not even aware that they are on the blockchain indirectly. They're using this technology, but they are just because of the ease, which are larger enterprises have put years to bring in. They are unaware that it's a tech game at the end, where now if a DND would happen for one market, at one telecom, it will be there for all the telecoms and you cannot really go beyond that wall. So a lot of things are happening. Governments have came in, in this particular sector, health ID. So health related data, aims have floated tenders and everything, where they want all their health data to be kind of put to encryption level all over the blockchain thing itself. So it's a more enterprise game so that users' life can be made easy and user experience remain unchanged for all the people around. And that is where the people are targeting and focusing on. Got it. Now I think that makes sense. And so let me bring back to Anurja. So let me just bring back to you Anurja very quickly. So based on this, I mean what fundamental shifts do you have to see? We hear that we should not be aware that what kind of attack is being used behind. But what fundamental shifts that organizations needs to have to bring all this to the business part? We see on a consumer side, there's already there. But from a business, that typical traditional supply chain, typical finance, how do you make value and money out of that by using these texts? So first you can counter the blockchain adoption crypto adoption part as well. So I think most of the blockchain adoption is invisible, like as Varun also said, because under the hood, what technology is getting used is not known to us. But I'll still hold to the point that this sector is growing by 80%. And even in India, it's growing even higher, especially the business blockchain. As far as the challenges for the organizations are concerned, it starts from assessing the need of a blockchain itself. Earlier it was very difficult for blockchain companies to convince the client that it is actually the requirement. Now we have established decision trees by which if you traverse through those decision trees, you can at least come to know that you need a blockchain. There is a problem of trust. You need a distributed ledger. There's a problem of consensus. You can't do it with a third party agreement and all. So at least the first level is now very, very clear that you can convince a corporate that a blockchain technology is needed in their organization. The second issue that we generally face whenever we start working with any client in the blockchain space is how do we interoperate with their existing IT systems? Because that is also very, very complex in nature. Creating a blockchain architecture and integrating it with the current technology stack. Blockchain has a completely different way of designing the thing. It's a distributed architecture. You have nodes. You have application running on different points. You cannot develop an application from scratch for an organization. You generally have to integrate with their ERPs, apps, or any other legacy systems that they are using. So how do you create an architecture? How do you bring the data and take the data forth and back from those? And how do you put it in a ledger? How do you basically sync up the databases of those two organizations together? That's another major challenge. Whenever you start designing the blockchain applications for the enterprises. And normally when you design a blockchain application, it's not only one organization that become parts of it. You generally have to bring many organizations that works in that ecosystem become the part of it. Because essentially what you want to solve is a problem of trust. And the problem of trust exists between multiple entities. So it's not only about I convince Reliance that I want to win the blockchain, but you have to convince the entire ecosystem which works around Reliance to have a blockchain adoption. No, this is helpful. So let me just take a final question sort of to you. So sort of see what, and I think it's in public news that in APAC there is some funding that comes approximately a 140 billion. And China takes up a huge chunk of that. And India is I think at least one fourth or one fifth of what that funding is. Where are we lacking? What is that problem that, where are we struggling that this kind of a huge fund goes to our neighbor? And what's the problem here? What are we lacking here? So Rajat, if you would see when it comes to enterprises, startups, building the tech on the blockchain or metaverse or AI, there are lot happening in the space. I can give you a count on fingers like they are at least 35, 40 different companies were trying to shape or change the paradigm of how we interchange data, how the interoperability works. There's a company called Modrex which works on crypto as a service. They're putting up the entire exchange to custodian everything in one stack and lot of the things are all together. Then there's a company which is doing like a rupee card. So they are using the regular rupee cards and then they are giving the benefits of a crypto and a digital gold or the card itself. So user would have that ease because it's already pre-created wallet in the rupee card and they're kind of leveraging on it. Government is helping them out. It's not like the startups and the enterprises are not there working in the direction for India. It's just the other side of the mindset where VC sits there. They want a second validation coming from Western world or from somewhere outside the country as a proven or use case as a proven market where they would see that okay, Indian market shall be also adopting it. It's also a mindset again that Indian consumers are not smart enough but I would really contradict on this day we have a larger IQ than most of the Western worlds in general or in average. So it's just a certain mindset because we have seen the shifts from e-commerce to D2C. Now it will be a pure tech play for another coming half a decade. You will see a lot of investments coming or routing to India because of, you know, now again, governance play and other things will matter a lot in that particular thing because investing in India is always difficult. People take out the funds set up in UAE, Singapore, other free zones outside the India and that's where Indian founders are working, Indian founders running entities out of the India and operating in India, putting the team over here, putting the fund outside India itself. So it's just that the mindset has to change to a larger extent to enable that thing. A lot of things are happening in India when it comes to this amalgamation of tech.