 Luxury related topics appeared in Davos for the first time in 2017 since then the crypto community has been conquering the city of Davos. What does the WEF community think of crypto? Well they consider it sometimes an alien, sometimes look at it with curiosity, sometimes with hype. But the real crypto activity is not developing here in Congress area but on the prominent of Davos. Davos has long been the spiritual home of the World Economic Forum but a walk down the central promenade in town you'll find a myriad of crypto currency and blockchain events that have taken over local shops in recent years. This is Hotel Europe the home of the Global Blockchain Business Council. That right there is blockchain hub. That's Hedera, here we have Circle. It's safe to say crypto has invaded Davos. The World Economic Forum was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab. This non-profit organization was founded to gather together initially 1,000 members with a annual turnover of over 5 billion US dollars. Now it counts 3,000 paying members. Behind you can see the Congress Center where the main agenda of the World Economic Forum takes place. The theme of this year is cooperation in a fragmented world. Recession, globalization, challenges brought by the pandemic, challenges brought by those industrialists who are participating in these events. Conversations with the cryptocurrency and blockchain community paint an interesting picture. Inside the World Economic Forum a select few drive thought and policy on the sector. Meanwhile on the streets of Davos the cryptocurrency community has its own ideas about the future of finance. There is a changing perception in a couple ways. One is that crypto is here to stay. I think that we're going to see more of traditional finance come into decentralized finance and more elements of decentralized finance come into and more blockchain come into traditional finance. I think there's more of an embrace that it's an industry that's here to stay. For me it's still the next five years is gonna be huge for for DeFi and kind of collaborative measures across industry. If we give it five to ten years max the inside of that compound is going to be filled with blockchain people and the policy people will be coming to us to ask that we implement in the fabric of the systems that we build the various different policy proposals that they would like to see enacted. So that power struggle is in place. We're currently outside and that swap is going to happen organically and and I don't think we need to force this. It's happening. It's unstoppable. You did tell me that you actually live in Davos so you've you've seen the town develop over many many years. How have you seen the evolution of crypto and blockchain coming into Davos and being a part of you know an outside part of the all economic forum? I know right we are a little bit of kind of a second second web here outside but you know the web has been an early early embrace of you know of blockchain of applications clearly it was more around tokenization web three all of that but less about crypto. Even though Tradfire may claim to understand crypto they still seem reluctant to publicly engage with it. Do you think the the two are removed from each other or is there a lot more sort of synergy and and conversations happening between the two industries? Davos is very public don't forget that it's by necessity I think that they need to shield themselves a bit. Credit Swiss CFO I was told is you know hugely you know bullish on blockchain and he said listen this is absolutely necessary technology and it is the future it's just a question of when they kind of publicly kind of you know the landslide moment so it's going to happen. There's a 30 year old right now that does care and in 10 short years a person is going to be 40 and they're going to be in a position of power and in 10 short years from there they're going to be 50 and they're going to be mainstreaming the blockchain like the 30 year olds 20 years ago mainstream web one. There were two panels at the World Economic Forum this year focused directly on cryptocurrencies which improves on last year's singular panel. The leading voices at these panels were representatives from Ripple and Circle to companies whose use cases perhaps in line more with traditional finance than with the decentralized crypto industry. What is your take on what's going on inside we're in terms of crypto and blockchain adoption and outside in these type of events? I think for us it's really important to raise awareness of what we're doing and how it does differ from some of the more speculative things that have happened. We're out there talking to policymakers. We're talking to traditional companies outside of tech who are looking at using USDC as a payment solution. We're talking to tech companies to figure out how we might integrate with the work that they're doing. We're talking to humanitarian organizations. Do you think crypto and blockchain is here to stay in Davos? I think it's actually one of the perfect places globally to have that conversation because you could literally have both groups in that proximity and you kind of again we talk about banners of various crypto firms and the like down the promenade but also you're kind of walking by traditional finance at the same time so we have the ability and we've always been a bridge in the industry between the two. That's kind of what we've done from the very beginning and on our ripple network of course we have traditional banks and we have very innovative fintech players and PSPs and we have to go back and forth and prove the use case to both and so this is a place where we actually have to do that every day. We're not spinning and chasing you know ideas that there's really no audience for or things that people understand why they're actually relevant to their day-to-day business. That's what we're here to do. We just got to get right to the points and get people alongside us to keep moving. Some individuals I spoke to believe there needs to be a wider representation of cryptocurrency and blockchain industry members driving conversations inside the world economic forum in panels and workshops. There was a prominent person that was invited to WEF that we all know but then the invite was revoked. No matter what's happening within the ecosystem it's ridiculous to use FTX as a way to to paint the crypto space. It just shows ignorance. We talked about the herd is coming the herd is here. We talked about mass adoption. Mass adoption is here. We were very excited in 2018 like family offices are going to invest. Family offices are right here. I'm talking to them every day so it's exciting times man. It's really exciting times and anyone that's out of the space now because they lost money and stuff it's your loss. It's your loss. Another noticeable trend was the presence of traditional finance at crypto and blockchain events. Banks, financial institutions and investment fund managers are all having active conversations with decentralized finance protocols and cryptocurrency exchanges but ways that they can gain access and exposure to digital assets. But there's there's definitely self-interest. Many of them are bitcoin owners, wisely so. We've seen bitcoin actually outperforming NASDAQ and gold and I would say it's a smart thing. A smart investment manager always looks for diversification. In your opinion, how do you approach investing in blockchain and crypto projects? I mean obviously you explained that you you have a stake in cryptocurrency itself. Where do you see the most value? I do believe that the blockchain is intrinsically or integrally tied to cryptocurrencies. I ultimately believe that these tokens are going to be the value that's transferred back and forth between people and a result of which it'll increase the demand for those coins which will push up the price. And what makes sense is just like I use today the enterprise software, the cloud computing analogy. The companies that adopted the cloud, they grew their servers, grew the revenues, revenues increase the value. This is a little bit more unique. People don't see the cash flow associated with it so therefore they think it's worthless. But if you are a proponent of Metcalfe's law and you understand that there's great value in the network effect, these things will be worth a lot of money over the next 15 to 20 years. Do you think the World Economic Forum and mainstream institutions are looking very heavily at made-to-verse platforms as ways to engage and drive digital communities around the world? Yeah, definitely. I think this is going to happen when we talk. We talk right now to lots of brands and we see there's a lot of interest because they need to connect to their customers in a certain way with consumers and that's where they experiment a lot. I mean, we're clearly an experimentation phase. We all know that but there's also good use cases coming up. Yeah, I think everybody's pretty much bought into the idea that the web will even evolve into an immersive version of it to take time. But people are realizing it and are taking the first steps to understand how they fit into the plan. Every year the World Economic Forum comes to Davos and the main street is literally transformed. Shops are taken over to house various events and at the end of the week when the show is over everything is taken down as you can see quite literally bringing down a curtain on a very busy week. My overall experience with the World Economic Forum tells a story of two industries divided, just a handful of people are driving conversations around the adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain but it's not that negative. It seems that the World Economic Forum is really looking at the ways to understand cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology adoption is already pretty ubiquitous. Meanwhile on the streets of Davos you see many many crypto and blockchain events taking over town and traditional finance is making its way there anyway. It seems like cryptocurrency and blockchain is here to stay in Davos. It's only a matter of time until more proponents are chatting inside the World Economic Forum. My first Davos was in 2018 just in January when Bitcoin reached 17,000 and I felt that the crypto community was pretty marginal. Since then it definitely has appeared more within the official web program. We can see that the synergy between the Treadfy and DeFi is getting more full and developed. I think that the web is also pretty perceptive recently because they understand that the capitalism as it was and globalization as it was in the recent years is not that promising anymore and there are challenges that can be solved only with new technologies and also with new communities involved and here we are the centralized community the only way to move forward and definitely a very important element of the sustainable future. Cheers! Oh, you drank almost everything. I did!