 It's on the crypto assets and cryptocurrency. I know you are maybe part of the fan of the crypto assets as reason why you come among the traffic jam and arrive here so early. So thank you so much. Welcome. With the global digital payment volumes predicted by an average of 10% into the 2020. And also the prices of the cryptocurrency ups and downs and very dramatically in the last few years. We know they are highest to the 20,000 and now to lower than 7,000. So among this kind of very volatile markets and also a lot of craze, the regulators have the issue. So in this panel, we're going to talk about how can regulators and their businesses and also consumers and investors and work together to support this version in crypto markets while safeguarding the financial order. So it's kind of a very complicated issue, but we have to work together for a better future for the crypto assets. So we have a great panel today, a very, very good combination. And to my left, Mr. Vigy, sorry, Viginius, Sink Kev Vicious. Am I right? Thank you. Minister of the economy of the Lithuania, very young but very good regulator, have a lot of experience on the economy. And next to him, Mr. Mike Kayamori. He is the Chief Executive Officer of the Co-Queen of Japan. Welcome. And next to him, Ms. Melton Dimitros. She's the Chief Strategy Officer and the Managing Director of the Co-Queen shares. And she has been in the United States and UK and Canada, so she can represent a lot of the countries and the country's attitudes towards the crypto assets. And last but not least, Jeremy Lehrer. He is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Circle Internet Financial. He's from the United States and also can talk a little bit about regulation and also the innovation in the United States and elsewhere. So let me start with the price of the asset currency. If we look at the Bitcoin, and we have done a lot of research on the pricing and the valuation of the Bitcoin. And the result is that according to several different valuation models, the Bitcoin's price should be at 7,000 or 4,000 or something around that range. So at that time, we know that we have the very hype of the Bitcoin now below 7. So do you think now it's a rational market and now the valuation is right from a Japan view? Because Japan allowed a lot of the craze for the Bitcoin, a very supportive government attitude there. Please, Mike. Yeah, so it's a great question. And I'm not sure if there's a good answer for that. That said, a year ago, a year and a half ago, the price of Bitcoin was less than $1,000. So that was January 2017. And it went up to 20,000. Now it's 7,000. The cost to mine Bitcoin is about $6,000. So if the price of Bitcoin goes down under that, most mining companies will go out of business. So to that extent, when you look at from a cost price analysis that you could say that $6,000, with the difficulty of mining right now, could be the floor. So if it goes under, it's an attractive price. So that's how you can potentially look at it. It's very difficult to look at the short term and see what it is. But if there's positive news, it goes upward. And there's negative news, it goes down. But you can see compared to other alternative tokens that the price of Bitcoin in the past three, four months has kind of been in a range. So I look at this as probably like a market equilibrium. But what about the prices of other cryptocurrency and assets? Do you think they're also rational or without their prices level? I think some are and some are not. And I think the general sentiment, when you look at specifically Japan, I would say maybe half of the user base joined the crypto asset around late last year, October, November, December. So the Japanese regulation went in and the first license was granted end of September. So from October was when the retail customers came in. So most of the people were able to enjoy when the price went up, but who joined in December, they're all underwater. So from that perspective, there is a negative sentiment within the Japanese retail customers and even more so for the alternative coins because some are scams. And it's very difficult from an end retail customer to really see the difference between a potential real alternative token that is doing well and a potential scam. Yeah. Jeremy? Sure. A little perspective, I think first, it's important that people understand there's a wide range of different types of crypto assets and they all have different fundamental value propositions. They all have different ways to assess them from an evaluation perspective. And I would say the institutional market is just now starting to build frameworks for valuation analysis on these. I think a lot of the growth in the market was not driven by fundamental valuation analysis. It was driven entirely by retail speculative interest. And so not all crypto assets are created equal. Some are very much oriented at payments use cases. Some are oriented at being commodity technology platforms. And some are more security-like in nature. And they all have to be looked at very differently. I think stepping back, though, when you look at the growth in the asset class last year, sitting behind that was a fundamental thesis and a belief. And the thesis was one of a couple things. One was a thesis that a non-sovereign digital gold was going to take hold. And that's the Bitcoin thesis. And that's a very, I think, a very compelling thesis. And there's a very good long-term case for a non-sovereign digital gold that could have enormous scale. But there's another thesis, which is that blockchain platforms allow for a new form of global record keeping, transaction processing, and computing that is decentralized. And that kind of new platform infrastructure that is public and not controlled by any company or government is something that we can build completely new forms of businesses and operations and value around. And that thesis, the sort of blockchain as platform thesis, I think is a big part of the secular interest here and drove a lot of the initial growth. But a lot of the price movement was very much driven by retail demand. And so I think the price levels are pretty rational now. A kind of 80% corrections, when we saw the bubble growing, we thought, OK, there's probably a 70% to 80% correction coming, and that's very much what we've seen. And now I think the market is looking for what are the real applications that are actually going to derive value from this. I think people want to sort of see, put money where your mouth is, so to speak. They want to see the use cases come alive. And once you see the use cases coming alive, then I think you see another kind of appreciation. But where you have the assets decoupled, so they're not all going to trade in parallel, which is completely irrational. They're going to be decoupled and really more intrinsically valued based on real frameworks for valuation. Thank you for sharing a very interesting and also different angles towards the crypto assets. You touched a point, the public. When we view the crypto assets, do you think it's a more private experiment on the currency and on the platform? Or the public should play a big role there. If public have a role here, then it might be centralized instead of decentralized. But crypto assets, the dream of the crypto assets is we are decentralized. So how do you look at that? Yeah, I mean, this is the next layer of the internet. And this is a broad-based buildout of technology that is open infrastructure, the same way the rest of the internet is open infrastructure. No government controls the internet. No corporation controls the internet. And it's just another layer of the internet that's being built out. But that involves private sector innovation, academic computer science innovation, regulators' involvement. It's not an either or. It's multiple stakeholders that have to be involved in how this technology gets developed and applied. But fundamentally, it's just a new public infrastructure that's available to all of us to build on top of the same way that the web, TCPIP, email, other things are available for us to build on top of. Yeah, we'll dig deeper a little later. Before that, a melt-in, how do you look at the price and the irration, or yeah? So I view the world, I think, slightly differently. To me, cryptocurrency is fundamentally what we're experimenting with here. What's so interesting is a revolution in how capital in our world is formed. So historically, if you wanted to finance a company an idea, maybe you would pursue debt financing from a bank. Then venture capital came along, and you could pursue equity financing, which is a market that's really active in the US especially. There's a lot of venture capital, a lot of startups. And I worked in the venture space in cryptocurrency for quite some time. And what we're seeing now really to be the emergence of ICOs, Bitcoin and Ethereum in particular, for investors who bought these assets early created a lot of wealth. And what they wanted to do was to continue investing in this vision that Jeremy described, this vision of a decentralized second layer to the internet, one where payments are actually digitally native. And so these people who are already motivated by this idea started to take their capital and to invest it in new ways outside of the existing structure that exists today, which is the form of an initial coin offering. And so I think the challenge is that now that the world has discovered ICOs, everyone wants an easy button, right? They want to hit the button, raise money, and not really have to think about rules and regulations and laws. But there's a reason that the financial system in those countries is the most regulated part of an economy, and it's because of consumer protections and fraud and all of these other issues that occur whenever you have people dealing with capital. And so I think the point we're at now, what we've seen, we went through this mania, and what I liken it to is Carlotta Perez, who's an academic at MIT, wrote this fantastic book about how typically financial production and actual capital production, they're decoupled, especially in the early stages of the new technology. We saw it with railroads in the 1800s. We saw it with the internet in the 1990s. I think it's fairly common when there's new technology for there to be a lot of excitement and everyone wants to invest. And so we saw this with ICOs where prices were completely decoupled from any sort of rational valuation. But at the end of the day, I'm a free market capitalist and price ultimately is supply and demand, meaning an equilibrium, and there is supply. I think what we've all learned in our industry is there's a tremendous appetite for crypto assets. And now the question is, will we internally, as industry leaders, work together to bring some rationality, to bring some standards and self-governance to the industry? Will regulators step in and do it? We've seen this in Korea. We've seen some of this in Japan and in the US. I think we're at a really exciting intersection. I personally am excited about ICOs security tokens, this idea that you can create capital in new ways. But I do see at the same time that we're starting to see an evolution and probably a maturation and a professionalization of what's happening. Yeah, thank you. Minister, do you agree, all of them? I think the base was set is absolutely correct, that the price definitely was international and probably at the beginning, who jumped on the ICOs was probably, some people were tech savvy, who were just excited about it. Some people were just following the money and trying to earn easy money. And now the price is getting towards more stable and towards more rational. But in general, probably for countries, I think especially for small economies like Lithuania, it gives a tremendous opportunities because our startups has raised a terrific amount of money in those half a year, a year time, when they introduced the ICOs. And of course, as a government, we have had to react. Because it's a long way. Sometimes I usually read those white papers and there is terrific ideas, well-changing ideas, but there is a long way from that white paper to actually implementing that idea. So as a government, we have to react. And of course, we should be very clear guidelines starting from taxation, paying taxes because probably society cures if do you pay taxes from these new activities. Again, then who is responsible, whose responsibilities, what is fraud, and et cetera. And I think we were the first ones and then a couple other countries followed. Now we see the future with the security tokens, but in general, I think it gives a great opportunity. And for the governments, it's extremely important to set a very clear playing field, but not to interrupt into innovation. That's very important. As it was mentioned before, it's a terrific public infrastructure which gives a great opportunities for new economies, for a small economies. We can't compare in many traditional industrial fields with China or Germany, but as a small economy, in our startups can bring a extremely good and innovative ideas and raise capital, which is extremely conservative in Europe. And in ICO world, it's a little bit different. So in my opinion, it definitely brings a great opportunities, but the playing field has to be very clear. And here I think the dialogue between the people who are actually doing it and the government has to be very sufficient and bringing the best results. And as I said, clear playing field usually solves many problems where nobody really wants to deal with the crooks and fraud. You are very right that for a small country, the policy attitudes might be different from the big ones. So let's imagine you were the regulator of the United States. Are you going to take a different view? Do you think a United States regulator have the right combination of the policies towards innovation also to the ICO and this kind of the regulations? It's very hard to say. I can only speak off from my point of view. And I can say, first of all, you have to view it. You have to make a decision. Is it a opportunity window or it's a possible fraud where you have to close it down as soon as possible? It's a threat for your financial system and et cetera. So you have to make a choice here very clearly and choose the path. For me, it's an opportunity window. It's an opportunity window for innovators. It's an opportunity window to put a infrastructure into the next level, create and implement some great ideas and especially giving that it's a platform equal for the whole world. It doesn't have someone who's not ahead. Everyone is at the starting line and in a very close position. So for me, it gives a very clear opportunity window. My goal as a government regulator is supposed to create a favorable environment so that the startup in Lithuania would be able to create international team, bring the best professionals and offer the solution. Yeah, yeah, great. So Jeremy, how do you look at the regulation action in the United States to the crypto assets? At one hand, I think they are very supportive of the innovation, right? But on the other hand, in the exchanges, when we have the exchange of the crypto assets, then the regulation from the United States is very, very urgent. They want to change ICO into the STL, security token offering. Then the changing of the name means that maybe the nature of the crypto assets will be changed. So when I talk this to the actually one guy who regulates the crypto assets in the Bank of England and they feel that the ICO is totally different from the STL. STL is not a crypto assets anymore. What is your view on that? Yeah, so just in general, the US has actually been regulating this space for over five years. So the US Treasury Department issued regulations on virtual currency exchange five years ago that set in motion a whole regulatory regime around the currency use cases of crypto. And so, exchangers of cryptocurrency for fiat currency needed to have licenses and protect society from money laundering and things like that. So that was five years ago. The trading of commodity assets and things like futures and derivatives, that was regulated by the CFTC and certain licensure given around that. So now there's futures markets that are regulated that are major exchanges. So that's been significant progress in terms of the capital market side of how this works. And then the last piece, which you're referring to, the SEC getting involved. I think in general it makes sense that we need to protect investors and protect markets from bad actors. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that 90% of ICOs are scams or fraud or just not serious, some mixture of that. So there's an enormous amount of challenges for investors and protections from that. And if you look at a lot of exchanges in the world, there's an enormous amount of market manipulation, wash trading, pump and dump schemes. I mean, it's not pretty. And so there are not capital market protections that again, society and investors would expect in a mature market. So there have to be some rules established if you want this to become an institutional phenomenon and a mainstream phenomenon. Now, I think the challenge for the SEC is they gave some high level guidance but they didn't give much more. And so it left everyone uncertain, right? What is a utility token? What is a currency token? What is a commodity and what is a security? And so they've been reluctant to give more guidance. And then I think secondly, when crypto assets are very clearly investment contracts and playing the role of an investment contract, there has not been a lot of progress on fundamentally the regulated activity. So what does it take to register a crypto asset with the SEC? What does it take to offer it? Under what exemptions? What does it take to trade it on exchanges, on the secondary market? And so there's still a lot of work to do to get clarity. But I would say we spend a lot of time with the government, including the SEC. They're very focused on getting this right. They really want this to happen. They see the benefits of this as a new innovation in capital formation, as a new innovation in how businesses can raise capital. And that's tremendous. So there's work to do to figure it out. I think you will see a great deal that in the US market clarified over the next six months. Yeah, please. I actually want to take a somewhat contrarian viewpoint. I think one of the challenges is if the idea of blockchain technology is decentralization and permissionless innovation, the idea that we don't have to ask the SEC or regulator for permission, I think one of the things we as an industry have to recognize is we can't be judge and jury and say, this is a worthwhile idea and this isn't. Again, if we believe in permissionless innovation, what it means is we're going to create two alternate systems. And I already see this in the crypto market. One is the path of evolution. Businesses like Jeremy's and Mike's, where they work with regulators. They're in jurisdictions that have strong capital markets regulation. They're in jurisdictions that require licensing. And then we see the revolution side, which is firms that have said, you know what, instead of trying to fit what we're doing into this box that in the US, the regulation box for finance has existed for 100 years unchanged. So instead of taking this business model and cramming it into that box, they're saying, I'm going to go to Malta. I'm going to the Isle of Man, to Bermuda, to Barbados, to another jurisdiction where regulators are willing to write completely new rules. And so to me, they're sort of a bifurcation. But I am concerned sometimes when I see regulators taking a very heavy-handed approach, or I would say a very traditional capital markets approach to cryptocurrencies, because these assets aren't stocks. A cryptocurrency should not be a security. Bitcoin is not a security. And so to me, we as an industry also need to change how we write regulation to create room for new types of markets. When the internet was first regulated, the US did something. They created safe harbors. So they said, here are the boundaries within which you can innovate. And we're going to wait to see what happens before we regulate. And I think the hard part here is because we're touching money. Regulators feel very anxious. They need to do something. It has an impact on economies, economic stability in some places. And I think, again, I'm always very cautious to take a balanced approach, because the whole point here is we want permissionless financial innovation. And if everything becomes regulated, and only accredited investors can buy ICOs because they're now security tokens, that defeats the purpose to me. Can I add to that? So I think, look, this is not going to be a broad-based global mainstream phenomenon if the leading companies have to go to safe haven environments and where there's basically places that have a reputation for allowing money laundering. That's not going to work. That is not going to make this a mainstream phenomenon. So I think it's very challenging if we think that the Malta is going to save us in this case. So I would actually look, and I would agree with Meltem on a lot of things here, which is I think ICOs and token offerings are different. And we do want to have a framework for those specifically. And I think I would look to, Switzerland has done some interesting work in this. I think the one to pay the most attention to right now is France. France is the third largest economy in Europe. They have a major initiative under Macron to create a framework for ICOs. They have a very favorable tax regime that's just passed this week. They really want to see a clear regulatory framework that is really oriented towards the benefits of crowdfunding with some minimal investor protections, but really open-ended in the definition is not jamming this into securities law. It's saying there's ICO regulation, but it's very lightweight. It is a bit of a safe harbor. It creates a framework for that. So I would pay attention to large markets like that that are pushing forward. I think you're also going to see legislation introduced in the US in Congress in the near future, which aims to create a kind of ICO framework that would be outside of traditional securities law. It may have some enforcement or oversight from the SEC, but which really starts to define these types of token offerings as a new class of financial capital. Yeah. Before I move to Mike, let me ask you to a very quick question. Do you think Bitcoin is a currency? Bitcoin is more like a commodity. It behaves more like a commodity. Long term, it could be a currency. Long term, by short term. Yeah, I mean, it's a store of value. It's a non-sovereign store of value. It has an economic model that is in an economic philosophy similar to gold. And so gold is a commodity. I think the reason why. But gold was currency. Sure, gold was commodity. But now, commodity. It had attributes that made it useful as a currency. And I think Bitcoin has attributes that make it really useful as a currency as well. But it doesn't meet the definition of a medium of exchange and unit of account that are at least for mainstream payments use cases. And that's OK. Yeah, that's true. It's good to have a long term store of value that is digital. I mean, that's really powerful. So we shouldn't run away from that. Yeah, maybe Mike first, then Melton. So I don't think we need to try to define what, for example, Bitcoin is at the moment. But if we cannot define, how can we react? Please allow me to explain. So for example, in Japan, the bill passed the parliament in 2016. That was part of the Payments Act. So at the time, the Japanese government looked at Bitcoin from a payments perspective. Actually, when you look at Singapore now, they're also going to revise their Payments Act. And include virtual currency. And Bitcoin is part of that virtual currency amendment that they're going to put in the Payments Act. So from that perspective, the government looked at Bitcoin as a payment, at least from an Asia perspective. Or Japan, which is one of the largest economic powerhouse, to put the first legislation in. And that was part of the Payments Act. And when they were, so that means the bill they were working on was at least six months to a year before that. So that's 2015. So from the government perspective, there was only Bitcoin. Maybe a little bit of Ethereum. But Ethereum, the government officials never really looked at at the time. Now with the whole ICO, it's really changed everything. So from a payments perspective, every government has some kind of framework or guideline around how you can do KYC, AML, and digital payments. When it becomes an ICO, where it has the characteristic of a security, then it becomes a very different. So it seems to me that they become has the two sides of the nature. One side is kind of currency. One side is asset. As asset, we have to regulate as asset and securities. But as a currency, but now it's not currency at all. It's a kind of interesting hybrid. Not a currency at all. We don't know how to regulate, how to react to it. And it's not a pure asset either. So how can we make the balance? I think that's why Japan created a new legislation amending the Payments Act. And within that, there's some basic things from a government perspective that they always care about. And the biggest thing is KYC. Know your customer. Who are the people who are buying it? And from an anti-money laundering or counter-financing of territory. So you mean the trend is from viewing it as a currency first, now move on to view it as more on the security and assets. Exactly. Especially. So Malcolm will not like that way, that direction. I don't think anyone is looking at Bitcoin as a security. No one. I haven't seen anyone. As an asset, yes. As property, yes. As a commodity asset, yes. But that's totally different than being an investment contract. A security is an investment contract. It is an offering to investors for capital in exchange for a return on that capital. That is not what a commodity represents. So regulating Bitcoin as a financial asset, as a commodity asset, that's pretty much how it's being viewed as a payment system as well. But not as a security. I don't think there's anyone anywhere in the world who's considering regulating it as a security. Yeah, I think the experiences in the Japan is very interesting. Because the Japan viewed Bitcoin as a currency. Then as a currency, we have to look at the potential of the, we just take Bitcoin as example, view the potential of the Bitcoin as a currency. When we look at the efficiency of the Bitcoin or efficiency of blockchain, it's very, very low. Because you have to report to everyone. So the efficiency is zero. If we have a huge, if we have the old population in the world to transaction on the blockchain, then the efficiency is zero because it's huge. So how do you look at the potential of the bitcoins to become the real currency in terms of the transaction? Yeah, please. I think, I mean, it's probably, you mentioned before the discussion in a 10 years perspective. But I can't see it in a very close future. First of all, I think some societies should start by going cashless. And we see many nations that really use cards rarely. We have some great examples like Sweden where it's under 9% population use cash. But let's start with that. And then again, currency, I don't think so. I think it's exactly very well described and most of the government see it as a commodity. As a possible investment, regulated, very well described, but not as a currency for a long, in a long term perspective, I don't think so. We might have some stories. We know that ICOs are extremely well known in Asia, but Europe, it's a different story. United States, again, if you look at the market share, Asia is dominating here. So we might have different regulations in Asia, but coming to Eurozone, for example, I can't see it happening as a currency at so on. Yeah, so Mike, you want to finish, because I interrupt you, I'm sorry about that. So obviously long term, as the innovation and similar to like the internet, it improves. When internet first happened, obviously even before the Netscape moment, there was a long period where it was inefficient, it was clunky, when everybody in the world connected, there wasn't enough IP address, so all these things. But over time, technology innovation allows it to become more efficient and productive. So in the long run, you think that Bitcoin can be a real currency? Not only Bitcoin, all other protocols, it could be many things that will allow the blockchain, Bitcoin, and other protocols to address and solve many pain points that exist today. Yeah, interesting. Before I open the floor, I will ask our panelists about another angle of discussion and maybe you can join us a little later. So Minister touched upon the kind of role of the cashless, some feature of the feature and the role of the crypto assets towards the cashless economy. So because we don't like the cash because a lot of the cost to store and transfer the paper money. So the digital money can be a lot of efficiency, a lot of the good things there, and we can have this smart contract and maybe monetary policy, you know, some innovation and some intervention there. And also we can have a lot of interesting things, a lot of the good story and future for the cashless economy. Then my question is, towards the cashless economy, do we need a private crypto or digital currency or we should rely on the public digital currency, which is called CBDC, Central Banking Digital Currency or Digital Fiat Currency. Is this competition between the private and the public? Melton? So the way I view it is central banks play an important role in a country's economy. And for as long as we can remember, people have been defined by nation states. A few weeks ago I was in Vienna at Euro fee, which is a gathering of all of Europe's finance ministers and central bankers, BIS, and we had an interesting conversation over a dinner where the question became, who has the right to print money? Yeah, and historically, if you had an army and if you had an economy, you had the right to print money and the world has changed a lot since then. What I think is interesting, particularly for my generation, is we're starting to shift from physical economies where people are defined by the borders of a nation state, where they're defined by their citizenship to a digital economy where people are much more mobile, they live in many different places, maybe they hold different passports, maybe they're an Estonian e-resident or a resident of another nation as well. The idea to me of digital currencies is we have all of these different digital economies, these digital communities in which people participate online that share different philosophical beliefs. Likewise, I got into Bitcoin in 2012 and back then, Bitcoin was much more ideological in nature. It was a community of people who shared a set of philosophical values and social values and the monetary system of Bitcoin is modeled on some of those values. Some of these new digital currencies, these new blockchains, these ICOs are very similar in that it's taking people who believe in a certain set of social or philosophical beliefs, digital economy, digital community, a digital nation state and they're building their own monetary systems. I think that's much more so for utility tokens than STOs and asset-backed tokens. But I do think we're in the middle of a very critical shift in the way that people think about the role of money and the role of identity and where they belong and how they identify and express that. And so to me, I certainly see a role for central bank-issued digital currencies but also the evolution of new types of digital currencies, corporate digital currencies. So Rakuten is issuing digital currency. There are a few other corporations that I work with closely that are looking at creating their own economic ecosystem where they issue assets themselves or issue currency themselves. Jeremy's issuing a currency. So I think again, there's this really interesting evolution of how we think about the borders of an economy and the borders of a financial system. And so to me, that's really the exciting innovation. Yeah, so Melton, in the long run, at the end of the day, do you think government will disappear? Nation will disappear? No, no, that's not what I'm advocating for. There's certainly a very important role that governments play but I do increasingly see the private sector playing a very important role. And I think that what I would like to see, what I think leads to optimal outcomes for everyone is a closer collaboration between the private sector and the public sector. I don't think we need highly centralized, very large planned governments. I think we're already starting to see challenges if we look at the refugee crisis in Europe, right? There are a lot of challenges that arise when you have very closely coordinated governments. And even in the US, I feel bad for regulators in the US for trying to keep up with ICOs, especially the SEC. They're underfunded, they don't have enough staff, and now we're dropping this whole new problem into their laps. So I think, again, what I'd love to see is the private sector, particularly the innovation economy, startups, entrepreneurs, collaborate more closely with governments to start to fill some of these holes to solve challenging problems that not one nation can solve alone. Yeah, so kind of the PPP, public and private, partnership in the long run. But it's really in your long-term view of the very diversified and very well-governed by ourselves on the earth, maybe not today's government. Today's government and tomorrow's government is huge different. Do we have a revenue towards that, Jeremy? Yeah, there's a lot we could talk about here. It's a great subject. I very much agree. I think an open internet architecture for value exchange is really, really powerful. And actually, not just value exchange, but sort of the ability to arrange, to foster economic arrangements among participants in a trustless fashion is really revolutionary. And it changes how we govern things, how we organize communities, what a corporation even is, how it exists. So I think we're in the early stages of a kind of reconceptualization of what corporations are, what economic arrangements are, how they work globally, how money and value moves. So it's a really wonderful time and I think we'll look back in 10 years, similarly to how we look back to the last 10 or 20 years in terms of the internet of information and the changes had. Specifically on the topic of central bank digital currencies or whatnot, I think our long-term view is that there will be non-sovereign global currencies that are broadly adopted and used. And that is not likely to happen in the very short term, but it's very clear the technology is gonna make that possible and that would be very attractive to economic actors and individuals potentially to have that. How that maps to taxation and governance is a completely separate issue, but I think we are headed in a path to have non-sovereign stable value currencies, digital currencies. In the short term, our view has been that what we want to do is we wanna unlock the power of blockchain platforms and the stability and sort of economic regularity of fiat. And so we created a system called CENTER, which is launching actually very soon. And CENTER is an open source technology and an open standard scheme for issuing fiat stable coins. So for issuing dollar coins, yen coins, euro coins, et cetera. And it's a whole governance scheme for how to do that. And circles launching the first US dollar coin very, very imminently. And we think that's gonna be very powerful if you can have essentially instant settlement at very low cost with high levels of security to any internet connected device in the world with fiat money, that's much more powerful than the fiat money that we have today. And then when you layer on top of that, the ability to program and build economic contracts using smart contracts around that fiat money, then you can open up completely new forms of economic arrangements, whether they're investment or even just basic forms of contracting between parties. So fiat stable coins, we think will be from an industry perspective, not from central banks, but from an industry perspective, will be the next wave and will probably get broad, broad adoption in the next few years and may in fact be the killer app of blockchain, at least from a payments perspective that people have been looking for for a long time. Yeah, the precondition is that's that your central bank can accept you. Yeah, I mean, this is essentially a payment system innovation. I mean, central banks accepted Visa and Union Pay and Swift and other payment system innovations. So fundamentally, this is just a new record keeping model and transaction settlement model, but you're still dealing with banks that are regulated that hold the reserves and the monetary policies controlled by the central banks. And so it mirrors the monetary system, but with a radical improvement in the ability to conduct transactions and form capital. Yeah, a very short technical question. When you have this platform and this system, do you use the blockchain technology purely only or you use other kind of the technology too, like the real-time RTGS, this kind of old system technologies? No, it's all built on public blockchains. The initial, what we call reference implementation is built on Ethereum. And that's really the only platform that works today for these kinds of applications. There are other experimental blockchains that don't really work yet, but which could in the coming years. And so as more public blockchains emerge that can tokenize assets and run code, we'll look at those too. Mike? Yeah, so not all currencies or between the public and private. When you look now already, when you look at loyalty points, telco credits, they're creating an ecosystem where they can use those points or your telco credits to buy goods, like normal goods. And that is completely separate from a central bank control system, right? Already central banks, whether they go issue their own cryptocurrency or go cashless, what people want is something that is better, faster and cheaper, right? And if that happens through a government-issued cryptocurrency or a e-cash or digital cash, that's good, but also there's a big private sector that currently uses existing technology to provide loyalty points, amix points, telco credits and all those. All of these are going to go digital. Some will use blockchains, some will continue to use centralized technology to do that. What will happen when you look at five and 10 years is the market will decide, right? Do you really want a stable token that is pegged to the US dollar or do you want something that is stable across digital assets? There's a lot of initiatives that are going and the market will dictate. The best thing is that innovation is being fostered right now, right? And if it touches Piat, there's a lot of existing regulation that's coming in. If it doesn't and it's more utility, it's going to be more innovative and a lot of people will come in. If it's like an asset or a security, then existing security laws will come in. So as an exchange, we need to be able to cope to all of that. Yeah, so that market decide, but where is the monetary policy? Yeah, well, no, I think when you- When a lot of the currency is used by this group of people, that group of people, but it's outside the fiat currency system, then how can monetary policy have a role on the rest of the system? Well, I think so that's where when it exchanges with Fiat. So you are going to have monetary policy there? No, that's why we work with governments on it, right? So obviously, there's initiative around SROs, a self-regulating organization. For example, specifically in Japan, that's actually an extension of the government. That organization needs the blessing of the government and where the government cannot define each legislation to the detail, that's where the SRO comes in. Again, it might be a little different globally, but in Japan, that's how it works. So as a regulated exchange, we will always work with the government. From our perspective, it's not an option or a privilege to work. It's a necessity to work with it. Actually, a long way to go to tackle all this issue, but very tricky, very complex and very important role of the government. Yeah, so to begin with, I probably wouldn't be so optimistic separating business and the government straight away and saying that feeling bad for the U.S. government. We probably can remember 20 years ago when financial markets were completely differently organized and then we have 10 years ago a financial crisis where overpaid, overstaffed financial banks, they just went down and many of them in the countries looked at the governments actually with the wide eyes to bail them out. So don't be so confident. At the end of the day, you need a government and of course, the government role first of all has to be open and let the innovators create. But on the other hand, it also has to protect because it's a great opportunity for a fraud, for a very quick fraud to fool people and in some countries it can end up with a very bad crisis when the people have put their assets in and when people lose their money, lots of things can happen. So I wouldn't be so optimistic separating the business here and the government. I think the government's role is very important. Of course, governments will always drag their feet behind the innovators. That's absolutely normal and clear. Many of the government doesn't really even understand what these ICOs and so on. Probably it took some people in the business already worked for five, seven years in it and then the government's only discussing it now. So of course, it will take time but the playing field has to be regulated for sure. I think it will also put some additional competition between the governments who will have actually the most favorable playing field to attract the companies to invest and so on. As I said, it creates a new opportunities but it has to work hand-in-hand with the governments and separating it from the central banks, it will create a additional shadow and lose the trust. Yeah, I think now it's time for us to open the floor for the discussion, a lot of hands. So we collect all the questions together then we throw them to the panelists. Gentlemen, please, please identify who you are and very brief question, please. Martin Brunscom, a technology investor based in London. I'm also a advisor to the European Commissioner for R&D and Innovations. I have a question for the minister. So what would kind of a perfect digital stable currency look like for you? And also taking into account the consideration that according to the European legislation, the only currency we can have in Europe, fiat currency, is the euro. Great question. The gentleman here, yeah. So my name is Martin Metzger from LCAX Liechtenstein Cryptocurrency Exchange. My question is to Germany Aller. We see that crypto asset market is just at the beginning compared to other financial assets. So how strong are institutional and professional investors already in the space and what's blocking them for entering it? Yeah, thank you. Very good question. Yeah, the gentleman there. Hey guys, my name is Arun from Horizon State. We've just won the award for technology pioneers and we're presenting a cryptocurrency blockchain company. Just as a suggestion for the panel, I would like you to consider a different type of asset which is not, monetary, necessarily, a blockchain asset. I think we've heard from Jeremy that 90% of the ICOs might have been scams. We probably represent a small minority of 10%. We're trying to do something good and we are providing an asset which is not necessarily a link to any kind of cryptocurrency even though we have our own. And I'm quite interested to hear from the panel what are those assets and how these governments could use these assets for the greater good because we are innovating faster than possibly what we could have imagined a decade ago. Yeah, very good question. Then, yeah, the gentleman behind. Hi, my name is Stefano. I'm a member of the Goba Shapers community also a technology investor. My question is about wealth distribution in crypto assets which is probably the elephant in the room, I think. As many other assets, the owners of cryptocurrencies actually do very few, right? I'm an example risk consensus which is one of the largest Ethereum investors and many people in the field actually think of it as big conflict of interest. So I'm really wondering what is the opinion of the panelist about the effect of this very skilled wealth ownership. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, gentleman here. Thank you. I'm the CEO of CVC, of Coach Group, the leading group of Turkey. I'm addressing my question to Mr. Alayri and Mr. Kiamori. It's a little bit value relevant question. If you look at the fluctuation pattern of these cryptocurrencies during the very last years, I mean, almost always there's been an adverse movement value-wise among these cryptocurrencies on the very fourth quarter of these all past years. Would you expect the same to happen this year? Thank you. Yeah, maybe, okay, yeah. From Jeremy first, and you can pick the questions you would like to answer and some questions for you, really. I can't remember the questions that I can answer. I think that the... Yeah, institutional investment. Yeah, I'll start with that. Yeah, so on the institutional side, this is always the kind of the promise is that this is gonna become an institutional market and that all of a sudden all of the pension funds and investment funds are all gonna have an ownership in Bitcoin and the price will be 40,000 and it's gonna be wonderful. That's sort of been a kind of thesis. I think what we've seen is a lot of the activity, of course, last year was retail. Jeremy, sorry, because of time. Very brief, please. Very brief, okay, fine, yeah, fine. Basically, a lot of institutions are getting involved. There are more and more that are creating the ability to do this. They're making sure that legally, they have a way to do it. Technically, they have a way to custody these and they're establishing relationships with trading platforms to do this. I think a lot of capital from the institutional sector is still on the sidelines because they're waiting for the next major set of catalysts that are moving this market because they don't wanna start entering this market when there's still sell side pressure. So I think fundamentally, there is an enormous amount of institutional activity happening. We're very involved in a lot of it and we will see a significant amount of new investing activity on the institutional side when we see the market start to recover. Yeah, thank you, Melton. I'll address the question around wealth distribution. I think this is an area that I'm personally very passionate about and I do agree most cryptocurrencies today are not decentralized at all. If anyone's interested, I've published extensive research online about how cryptocurrencies not decentralized at any layer, but most importantly, I think this economic premise of fairness and equality has not yet been realized and it is very problematic. I think in Bitcoin, 20% of the Bitcoin are owned by the top 100 wallets. Ethereum, it's even worse. In Ripple, it's something like 70%, so not very decentralized. I think one of the important things that we as industry can do is introduce new metrics by which we measure platforms and protocols. I introduced nine metrics to sort of measure the degree of decentralization in these platforms, one of which is effectively a wealth genie coefficient. But I think again, disclosure, investor disclosure, investor transparency is similar to the way that an institution might disclose the positions it holds or an analyst may disclose the positions. They have an interest in and their direct family has an interest in, can go a long way towards at least reducing the amount of moral hazard and information asymmetry that exists in this industry. But again, I think there are people experimenting with ideas of fair coins, coins that are distributed to every person in some sort of new structure that are interesting. But so long as money and the acquisition of coins are coupled, meaning if you invest, you get to own x% of tokens in a protocol, this is gonna be very difficult to overcome. And at the end of the day, I've always said, if a venture investor owns 50% of the tokens in the new internet, as a consumer, I don't wanna use that internet. So to me, until we solve that problem, it'll be very difficult to build globally usable networks and applications. Yeah, Mike. Okay, so I think we addressed institution, SQF wealth, I'll talk about price. So. Maybe only price, we don't have enough time. Yeah, so there was a big ramp up in China in that was 2013 and then the Mt. Docs incident happened. It took about two and a half years to recover. There was a big ramp up late last year and there's been a big correction now. Statitions will say that end of the year, prices will go up. But then again, when it has gone up last year to that amount and there's a correction, I think there's gonna be, it's gonna take a little bit more time for that correction to take place. And all these capacity problems and all these things, the market is trying to make it more legitimate for institutions and people to come in. So with that, I think that's gonna be the next wave. Yeah, thank you, minister. Very briefly, I think first of all, it's safe and secure because if we're talking about Europe, it's extremely conservative, not even all EU countries are in Eurozone. And if you look at the societies, not all of them even trust banks. So talking about the digital currency, it's a long way. So starting with the safe and secure, that's probably the answer. Yeah, we only have a few minutes that I think it's time for us to wrap up. I would like to ask you a very interesting question. If we think about the 2050, why 2050? Because there's a saying that in 2050, that AI will have a general AI and might be super AI, then the robotics may have the intelligence of the human being. Then that is a very critical moment for the human being. So my question for you is that in 2050, do you think which currency will take place of the United States dollars row today, which accounts for around 50 or 60 share of the global payment? I am from a government perspective, we'll stick with the dollar. Okay, Mike? So that's 32 years from now. Yeah. So again, 32 years before the internet just started. So it's very difficult. I think it could be Bitcoin, it could be something else. And with the advancement of technology and with the digital age really in prosperity, I think there's a possibility that, but it could be a central bank one as well. But I think it will be a non-severant, like a public one that will be embraced by the people. Yeah, Melton? I think as global macro instability increases in our world and the trust that people have in institutions gets eroded as more and more macro crises impact, particularly people's savings, people's well-being, their livelihood. I think we will see an evolution towards people choosing to hold currencies that are more transparently governed. And so my view is more towards public and less towards central bank issued. But only time will tell and I've been wrong about many things. So, yeah, Jeremy? Yeah, I think a non-sovereign, algorithmic, AI-mediated global currencies will be dominant within that timeframe. Then do we have a global central bank for this currency? We have policies that govern the AIs. Yeah, so we leave us to the AI. Great, let's wait for the 2050 to brace the pure AI. Thank you very much, then. Thank you, our panelists, and thank you so much. Interesting.