Michael Metcalfe: Thank you Lee. And thank you, Nadine, for the for the for the generous introduction. So given what I'm wearing and what Nitin is wearing, you can guess who's the Flintstone and who is the Jetson. That's the starting point. And I would like to start perhaps, maybe with a bit of a disclaimer. So economists, far more capable than I have proven very clearly that they're very bad understanding, revolutionary technological change. I think the flagship and this comes up, you'll have heard this a lot of your crypto promises, I'm sure, is the the Paul Krugman article in 1999 where he claimed that the impact of the Internet would be about the same as the fax machine. So just bear that in mind in the disclaimer for my my bit of the talk and I just want to spend 10 minutes sort of asking this this headline question here. Was this year the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning in particular for Bitcoin, obviously, which is the flagship crypto asset? And I began, if you may, there's a phrase where I come from, I'm sure it carries here that there's never a truer word said in jest. And we do have a bit of fun in the research team. So so once a week we publish a meme in our Charts of the Week publication on Insights, and this was one that we published on the 22nd of November, this idea that Bitcoin would go to the moon and then maybe it comes back.

Michael Metcalfe: And of course it actually I think if I could summarize my talk, it might actually be a little bit like a children's book that some of you may be aware of that Mommy, I love you to the moon and back and you'll see, see why I come to that. So I think in this journey that we've had this year, we've actually learnt a lot of really important lessons. The first one is that volume alone does not solve for volatility. The second is that being a disruptor is very different from being something that diversifies a portfolio. But after all of this and this is this is why I get to that children's book title actually, is that after all this, when we look at who is holding Bitcoin today and the kinds of entities and wallets that hold it, it may actually be remarkably that Bitcoin is in a better place today than it was at the start of the year. And then so this is a very narrow 10 minutes and then Nitin is going to take you out into the real world of digital and the potential applications. So so let me just start so, so this whole idea of beginning of the end, is that an exaggeration? I mean, look, so we know that Bitcoin is incredibly volatile. We've seen monthly drawdowns in excess of and obviously Ronnie was talking about monthly drawdowns yesterday, Monthly drawdowns of more than 40% in Bitcoin are not uncommon.

Michael Metcalfe: So so what was what was special about this summer? I think I would just simply say it was the size. So we hadn't had a drawdown, this sort of that magnitude while Bitcoin market cap was where it was and what that means. And just to kind of put this into a bit of perspective, so the chart on the right here is you look at it, so that's all in 20, $22. So I just did it for inflation and we've been talking about kind of past financial crises throughout these last couple of days. And look, so LTCM, you remember that. So that was an estimated loss of $250 Billion. Lehman was an estimated loss of 750 billion. Bitcoin this year has lost more than both of those. And so it was kind of four times more the systemic risk out. Sorry, I shouldn't say this to me. It was four times greater. The loss from LTCM, which obviously caused a great deal of systemic risk. So I think that just puts it into a bit of perspective. This was a huge stress test for the crypto industry. And as Nadine said, and I always remember it so Bitcoin more or less is the same age as my son. And I know for sure he couldn't take $1,000,000,000,000 hit. So that I think is is interesting. The other thing which is is kind of I think new about bitcoin because it's a new a new asset class is that it's very sensitive to media coverage and looking as you saw with with Geo Quant, as you've seen with our talks with our partners from MKT, you're going to see another talk from MQTT today actually, is that we're quite good at capturing media narratives.

Michael Metcalfe: And so here's the media narrative on Bitcoin. And over the summer, we'd never seen such negative intensity of media coverage of Bitcoin because it's so volatile and because that was such a cataclysmic hit to Bitcoin market cap. But what you'll see actually there's a little bit of hope here. It's begun to it's begun to normalize. It's come back. The negative media intensity isn't as high as it was. And you might also think, well, so why should it be important? It's not just because it's a new asset I just like to highlight. And she can't be with us these two days, but she's been talking at some of our other conferences. So academic partner Antoinette Shaw has published a paper just highlight. That the behavior of retail investors in Bitcoin is slightly different to traditional assets and that you typically they're very much momentum investors. And so things like media matter a lot more. So I begin to try and understand what kind of factors influence Bitcoin relative to traditional assets. And so that media normalization is one thing just to be sort of I guess, somewhat hopeful about maybe it isn't the beginning of the end. I think the other thing to point out is that even after that significant capital destruction that we saw in Bitcoin and the regulators decide what it is and what it isn't, but it's still an incredibly on its own, it's still an incredibly large security, let's call it a security for the sake of argument here.

Michael Metcalfe: And it's it comes in and out depending on where the market cap is, but it's certainly always in the top 20 and quite often in the top ten. So this is the thing. It's still a very high volume asset. It just simply the thing that I think has thrown everyone and the assumption at various stages was that bigger would mean less volatile. And that's normally true in traditional assets. Traditionally, the bigger they get, the less volatile they get, but it's not always the case. So Tesla is a good example of that. That's a very large stock that still has a very large volatility. So this isn't unique to Bitcoin. It's just the fact that we just need to get used to the idea that it's highly volatile. I think the other thing that's become very clear though, and this is actually drawing on a paper that those of you that saw this event online a couple of years ago will have seen Mark Kritzman and his co-authors Megan Czasonis and Will Kinlaw and David Turkington highlight the fact that actually the case for including Bitcoin in an investor portfolio had sort of yet to be made because you couldn't see the diversification potentially that it was bringing.

Michael Metcalfe: And certainly this year the thing that's been very clear, it isn't just that Bitcoin has moved in tandem with equity markets, but in particular this kind of this conditional correlation. So what you really need for a diversifier is when markets go down, you need the thing that's diversified in your portfolio to go up. But unfortunately, in the weeks where equities are down, actually in particularly tech stocks, so this is the chart in the middle here. The correlation between Bitcoin and tech stocks in Dan Weeks is over 80%. So the case, the diversification case for Bitcoin on its own at least is simply not there. Another claim that used to be made was that because it was scarce supply that it would somehow be an inflation hedge. Now, of course with price stats, we've got a very you know, we've got a daily measure of global inflation. So we're in a unique position to judge how well Bitcoin does as an inflation hedge. And again, in the very last 26 weeks, one year three. Now of course, for an inflation hedge, you need the correlation to be positive. So when inflation goes up, you want your asset to appreciate. So obviously you're very clear you don't need the correlation to know that that hasn't been the case yet. So we've learned that Bitcoin actually is primarily a very correlated, volatile liquid, very deep large market, but it's a correlated tech play.

Michael Metcalfe: It isn't an inflation hedge. And so we've kind of learned and I think that correlation comes from something which actually I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad thing and here's why. So this chart shows inflows in true traditional assets, so equity, mutual ETFs and equity market mutual funds and fixed income. So that's data from from ICI. And then I've looked at the inflows into Bitcoin and we're calculating that using a using an indicator called change in realized market cap that we get from a data partner Glassnode. And here's the interesting thing. So think about this as net inflows into these three different asset classes and you'll notice that particularly in in sort of in 2020 and 21, the really curious thing about this chart is these flows are all on the same axis. So in other words, Bitcoin was part of this. It was playing in the same pool as traditional assets. And of course that's great. When the tide is is is the wave of liquidity is coming through as it was in 20 and 21. But it also means when the tide goes out, as it's done very strongly in 21, that 22 sorry, is that actually Bitcoin suffers the same way as traditional assets. So that's why you've got the correlation. And so the fact that Bitcoin was in the same pool to some reason, this is some extent this is a function of Bitcoin's acceptance actually that it's correlated, not potentially a weakness. We just need to think of it in different terms.

Michael Metcalfe: And so I just want to finish. So obviously there we were showing sort of net outflows from Bitcoin as of course you'd expect so. So who are the people that have been left holding it? And again, this is using data from Glassnode that they grouped together wallets that behave in certain ways. It's really interesting for me because we're just at the start of the journey of building our research in this space. It's very similar to what we do with investor behavior and what what Glassnode do with the with the wallets is they look at wallets and that behaves similarly in grouped into entities. So that's the first thing. So you've got kind of a a client type, if you like. And then they look at the behavior and the behavior they're looking for are wallets that on average accumulate. And don't sell very often. You know, that sounds a lot like long term investor. Now, it doesn't mean that they're actually institutions. Now, let's just be clear. We don't know that they're institutions, but they have behavioral characteristics of institutions. And so here's an interesting thing. When we look at the current holdings of Bitcoin, actually 78% are now held by these wallets that don't sell very often and typically accumulate. Now, that's not great news for liquidity. It's not great news for volatility, probably. But how about this as an asset held, you know, for Erik, for people holding State Street stock, that's the kind of people that you want.

Michael Metcalfe: You want people that kind of typically accumulate and don't sell very often. Right. So so I think that is that's somewhat that's something of a positive to take away from the carnage that we've seen this year is actually that we've fundamentally come down to what Bitcoin is and what it isn't. And also long term investors, these are probably people that have been fans of Bitcoin right from the beginning that are just accumulating over time. They hold more Bitcoin now than they've ever done before. So just to wrap up. Bitcoin this year has survived the one of the stress tests that would have killed any traditional market. And it's really interesting. There's no centralized institution in Bitcoin to protect it. Like we have traditional assets and yet it still survived the stress. Now, of course, there were some accidents, obviously. But in general, it's still here. But we've learned, I think, a lot more about what it is and what it isn't. So volatility isn't going to go away. Actually, it is correlated, but correlation, I think is part of its growing acceptance in the fact that we're seeing such strong inflows into the asset class and it's increasingly held by long term players. So I'm going to stop that. And I should just say that Bitcoin really is just a very small part of that and this is what you're about to hear from Linton. So I will hand it over to you.

Nitin Gaur: Thank you. Hard act to follow three amazing speakers. So my name is Litton. I lead the technology design for Digital Asset for Sixth Street and I have like 40 slides. I have 20 minutes. I want to speak really fast. And there's a reason for it because when I moved from India in 92, the calling rate was a dollar five per minute. So I had to accommodate and speak words per minute. And the point of the story is that I don't have that problem today. So technology changes lives. Technology changes the things that we do. And so what I'm going to talk about today, it's quite a heavy topic to be covered in 20 minutes is going to be about a sum total of my life in ten years. I spent a decade in this space and life was a lot easier in 2012 2013 when you had just bitcoin and ether. Today you have 200,000 plus different tokens out there. So to make sense between LinkedIn, your day job, you had to make sense of all these things. And so talk about crypto, which is a foundational element that started out 14 years back, which was the money system transformed to a rails, a global rails, and then transformed into Web3, which is taking a whole new shape that instead of just creating rails, moving assets, now you're building a whole new economic system which is truly global in nature. And I, I aspire to paint that picture as opposed to simply comparing Bitcoin to everything else.

Nitin Gaur: There's a whole lot more to this industry in general. And then eventually looking at what I've been now labeling as exponential finance and exponential finance, you'll see, as we discussed, Web3 also has a lot of implications in our business, has has a lot of implication in crafting that investment thesis that many of the de novo sort of hedge funds and some of the investment managers looking at the space, especially the venture community in general. So hopefully I'm able to communicate these things. But I would say this the hardest part about my job is to keep up. I mean, there are days I'm spending a whole day in looking legal briefs and figuring out if a token happens to be a security, looking at statues of common enterprise versus Hobbes test, looking into if a token happens to be a commodity versus a utility, and then eventually looking at token oftentimes as a payment instrument only because we need to understand as to which of these three distinct categories it falls into in defining not just the technical architecture, but also the regulated framework that we need to follow, especially in the industry that we are from. So it's hard. The other day I'm looking at economic systems because everything in this industry is about incentive, economic systems, right? So suddenly you put economics hat on and I oftentimes catch myself sound like an economist when you're discussing in terms of what is the incentive economic systems, what is the demand supply ratios, how do you sort of maintain this having a one token model, two token models to control the economic system of what gives token its value? And other day, which is my favorite part as a technologist, reading a bunch of white papers, figuring out as to how the investment in technology, both in terms of quantum and the ability for us to be able to maintain the cryptography that protects the industry needs to be invested into.

Nitin Gaur: So it's you could safely say that I've, I have developed over time ADHD because it's really hard to focus. There's a whole lot of happening in the industry and I'm hoping to hopefully give you a framework so that the whole intent of this 20 minutes is to really inspire, not educate and giving you a rubric to to have a view in the industry, not just purely from Bitcoin and ether the two dominant asset classes or sort of benchmarks in general. And then eventually for you to craft any investment thesis, you need to understand the space. And that's the intent for me to be able to present some of these topics to you. I think Nadine mentioned this in her talk, the emergence of the fifth asset class. I think Fidelity really just released a a survey which has been going into most of the investment, just treating this as a separate asset class and for the earliest for the longest part, this was classified and pushed under the umbrella.

Nitin Gaur: We've been talking about crypto as a fifth asset class, and I would like to discern between two different things. One is tokenization of existing asset classes, and I think Nadine touched upon this. There are massive amount of work that the industry is doing to take advantage of blockchain DLT as a transaction system, a truly global transaction system that provides transparency, provides sort of rejection of transition. And cost give us all kind of advantages that we've seen with the crypto industry per se, and a lot of investment has gone into it where a bunch of our sort of investment management community Asset management committee, custodian banks, retail banks have looked into this and saying, Can we tokenize X, Y, Z? And tokenization gives you the ability for you to fractionalized assets, gives you the visibility into assets, solves the issue of time and trust as these two constructs have enormous sort of economic implications on our industry. So going back to that, we've seen that with real estate, all the conversations that we've seen in terms of stablecoins, central bank, digital currencies, these are all tokenization of assets. Tokenization of cash is today's stablecoin and eventually we're moving towards central bank digital currencies. And none of these sort of digital assets, they still derive the value from the underlying asset. So if you're tokenizing ether, for instance, if you tokenizing gold, it still is tied to the existing asset classes. Where things become interesting is when you bring crypto into this into the mix.

Nitin Gaur: So I do want to discern between the fact that we're using the same technology to be able to transport assets, to use the rails to take advantage of, to solve the issue of time and trust, ensuring that we have the visibility of movement of assets and eventually unlocking the cost of locked capital that gets lost in the movement of these assets. And it gets worse when you do it globally and emergence of fifth asset class. I think it deserves and I've been saying this now for two years, it does deserve its own category one. As you will see, it's a lot more than simple valuation risk. It's it's it's emerging to be having its own economic system. You will see that it's actually disrupting all potential industries from media entertainment to definitely financial systems to creating new sort of industries that have not existed before. Going back to my example early on where telco was disrupted, in my case, you'll find that our whole new categories in my last count was 17 new categories of industries that are popped up. That is not Bitcoin. It's a lot bigger than that, that industry group. So I think it does deserve the classification of having its own asset class because a lot of metrics that you see, which historically we have used for asset valuation and evaluating risks simply don't apply to crypto. And we'll see that in a minute. As to why I'd like to set the stage, since I only have 10 minutes and I have 40 more slides to go, is what internet did for exchange information.

Nitin Gaur: Blockchain will do for value. And this is a profound statement. It's an old statement. I've been making this for ten years, so certainly old. But if you realize what internet evolved into, it was really a mechanism to move information and we took that mechanism to more value. So today our financial system is generally a batch relay system where we process information and we move the information. That's how we move value. We really move value using all this interconnected system, which makes our system fragmented and hence the fact that our system is fragile and it's aging. Our financial system that we have used to move value when it is never really designed to move value. And this is where things become really interesting. What crypto proved, and this is after GFC, the white paper that came out was really again trying to have a much more sound monetary system, but eventually turned out to be rails where we try to protect this information to create a trustless system, truly a global system, to be able to move things of value. And so the question that I asked myself is, is this an evolution that we have come this far and we begin to now see vulnerabilities of the system where you see constant hacks, we see constant amount of investment we are doing in protecting this infrastructure. Cybersecurity threats is because now we've come to the point that we have reached the limits of what is the intended use of technology per se.

Nitin Gaur: So what's next? Or is there a revolution that suddenly now we're building a whole new parallel system, which we'll see in a minute that massive amount of investment is going in building that infrastructure that allows us to be able to move value without all the new ones and all the challenges that we experience in today's information networks. I chart, but layering helps. So we have one. And I'm dating myself now. We all read nudes. That's all we did. We passed on websites, say, Hey, check this out and we just read information. Didn't do much. It simply helped us disseminate information, read white papers. Universities allowed us to be able to have more information and information dissemination become becomes really fast becomes web too, which is read right. Ability for us to interact gave birth to Facebook's and Googles of the world and suddenly now we're able to interact with the web, be able to have a point of view be able to sort of which led to again positives and negatives with information and disinformation. And that led to a lot of evolution of protocols that allowed us to be able to do these things and suddenly now be comfortable in interacting. We had HTTPS, we have some security protocols, we're comfortable banking, we're comfortable making payments, and things were really going great. Com's Web trio. And this is, again, evolution or evolution, where suddenly now we're going after read, write on the whole notion of ownership comes to life.

Nitin Gaur: So creator led economy started from art. Many of you who have seen the fad of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks, these are just an example. But the whole idea is that your health data is not yours. Your any data that you produce is not yours. And the industry is trying to figure this out in terms of saying that if you have identity that you own on the Internet, can you not then be involved in financial primitives, which is monetizing your health records, monetizing your data in form of nonfungible tokens. So think of nonfungible tokens not just as those fees or profile pictures. It's funny looking memes, but we have a use case where we have been talking about this for the longest time that what if we could use a health care data to monetize it? And when you monitor something you have a sense of ownership. Suddenly you have an account. I have a wallet and I need a fungible instrument in the system, which today happens to be a layer one protocol or stablecoin. So you see as to how we are financially using every single thing that we do, every single thing that we own, whether it's custodial or non custodial, you can have a wallet or you could delegate the wallet for somebody else to safeguard it for you. And not only we are trying to take the assets that are tokenized which have existing risk and valuation mechanisms that we all are used to, but we're going after this massive category of illiquid assets that we neither have perspective of figuring out the valuation mechanisms so nor know the risks of having those assets.

Nitin Gaur: And there are a bunch of examples that have popped up in the last two or three years where think of student loans. The ability for me to be able to use this technology, to be able to provide some guarantees in the ecosystem, to be able to say, I need to borrow money. And you will see some examples that I will showcase in a few minutes. So Web3 are really took this to the whole new level of things like having an account and creating a whole new set of assets that never existed before. And I did some work with blockchain research about a few years back and we looked at the number that what you see on, on the existing asset class is 470 plus trillion, give or take a trillion depending on where we are today, the valuation that we have done of the non bankable assets, these are the assets that we don't really classify as quote unquote traditional assets is about 2.4 quadrillion. So that's a trillion of trillion. So it's a massive opportunity. And this is why if you look at I want to throw another term here, but crypto is all about terms is metaverse. We've seen the valuation of metaverse to be in trillions only because of that reason.

Nitin Gaur: We expect that huge amount of sort of things to be unleashed at some point. So crypto, just like internet protocols, crypto hat protocols, this is where we talk about tokens. So this to me is I've been working on this for almost about eight, eight years and refining this and figuring this out in terms of how do you define because everybody just talks about Bitcoin and ether, which is layer one. So layer one is the foundational protocol that facilitates movement of asset. It's a rails, it's truly global rails and connects the entire globe. So you'll hear things going, being banned in China. Things begin to move in the jurisdictions that are more friendlier or have a much more clear legal sort of definition of what we can do and what we cannot. And that gives you the ability to here have truly liquid assets. So you you begin to realize that Bitcoin ether and many of the other layer one protocols you may have heard of, like Solana and Cardano and Algorand and Binance of the world, they are truly liquid assets because they facilitate transactions. So they are rails that move the assets all across the world layer to solve what layer one doesn't security privacy scale only because you're building a global system. Transaction per second is a problem. And you have and and each of these layers have a token, right? Layer three is about the real entity of how we interact with this the business services, the identity, the decentralized exchanges.

Nitin Gaur: If anybody wants to venture a guess, uniswap, which is the decentralized exchange, is in layer three, which facilitates again, it's a decentralized exchange, the ability for you to be able to take token from different ecosystems. Use this protocol to exchange tokens with any without any centralized entity per say. $1,000,000,000,000 went through it last year. A trillion? This is just this will all happen in just about two or three years. So massive, massive gravity in terms of how this is evolving. And what's interesting to me is therefore, this is where my focus is, which is the Amazon of this world. So if you look at Amazon, almost up to 40 years of of evolution of Internet and TCP IP, Amazon is able to coordinate between, I would say at any given day, 15 to 300 different systems that lets you buy and things show up the next day on your doorstep or even the same day in this day and age. So supply chain tracking and tracing payments, movement of money, transfer of money, B2B behind the scene, all that is handled by this complex systems all built on Internet. It's a massive coordination that goes on so you can get your stuff in 24 hours. I'm looking at that as to what that will look like in this world. So you have automated market makers, for example, you have yield farming, which looks into a lot of this is what I would say is algo trading on its on on on steroids, which look into finding the best you can get in the entire ecosystem.

Nitin Gaur: And to me my focus is layer four, because layer four takes advantage of all the layers underneath the cover exactly like what Amazon does or or any shipping company does today. The question is each of them have their tokens and they have interdependencies. So if layer one fails and you have a project that's on layer four, chances are you're not going to succeed because the underlying system is failing. So there is an economic linkages between these layers that we are trying to unpack. And again, 200,000 plus tokens, 16,000 plus tradeable tokens out there compared to what, 9000 securities, give or take. So it's a massive system where, again, the valuations are all potential value in many cases. No one really understands these sort of what gives a token its value. I look at this rubric to say, What are you doing? What's the utility? And so and many of these tokens are meme driven, which is another problem from data perspective. And you talked about data yesterday, is all that all the data about these protocols are trapped in Twitter and discord channels. You don't have indexes. You don't have the traditional market data. You don't have the same metrics that we measure every single security with the same lens. All that is completely shifted when you look into these tokens.

Nitin Gaur: So there's well more than Bitcoin and try to understand this layer and try to unpack this to see as to what gives token its value. Where does it set in? And there's a layer zero, which by the way, 40 billion has gone into it in building a parallel infrastructure. So what we've seen, and many of you may or may not know, this is the technical advancements we've seen in technology in general, which is encryption. And ensuring we have efficiency is far, far greater in crypto than we have seen in traditional cloud technologies that we are used to. So all the stuff that you see in mining has led to a massive amount of investment and innovation that you've seen in asset, which is the chipsets to make it more efficient, more energy efficient, more cost efficient. To me, all that's a net gain. It's not just about cut and dry valuation of Bitcoin. And there's a there's another theory that's floating around. But to me understand this space because it's this is what the evolution is all about. So a lot to discuss here. I have a paper on each of these topics, so connect with me and happy to share some of that knowledge. I look at this to say, yes, the foundation is technology, but it's an economic model at the end of the day. And this is another beauty of it, is that if you had an ether and you're in the US or you're in Vietnam or you're in India or you're in Mongolia, the rules of engagement to access any of the markets are exactly the same no matter where you are.

Nitin Gaur: And that's a very powerful concept. This is what information is. If no matter where you are in the world, you have access to the same information which early days. The reason why we all came here to study was the fact that you had more information, more libraries and more books. Not the case anymore. Right? So you're trying to level the playing field, which many of us who live in the US and UK and many of the advanced economies have advantage of just living here because you have access these markets. And I think DLT and many of these layers sort of level the playing field, which is where you begin to see now layer your tier two. Tier three cities in many countries are the largest consumers and opening of these wallets or accounts which participate in this ecosystem. So a lot happening in that space, cryptocurrency in general, not to be confused. I do differentiate between crypto currency and digital asset and crypto assets. It's a byproduct of the economic infrastructure and that's the incentive. Economic that we look into is it's a global infrastructure and someone has to keep it up and someone has to get paid to keep it up. I have a lot of work done on this in terms of global macro. I think Michael and me had talked a lot on that topic is there's a whole evolution of crypto macro, which is the economic system where tokens are generated, tokens are burned, and what is that economic system and what is the direct impact of the global macro that affects the crypto macro, hence the valuation of tokens, dependency on interest rates and everything else.

Nitin Gaur: But there's another thesis which is towards the last bullet. And I wrote a paper on this topic where because we are pricing everything in USD or GBP, we begin to see some of these challenges and a massive amount of of liquidity has moved from traditional markets into crypto markets. We are stablecoins and every time there's an event and liquidity gets sucked out, that affects the valuation of these assets. But what if we could price these assets in layer one or truly liquid protocols because these are global systems. So bitcoin ether, if you price and value these assets, will that make a difference? So there's a whole debate on decoupling of crypto as a fifth asset class and not have any dependency on our existing sort of economic structure that we built into it. So a lot in that space. But these are some of the fundamentals that I just want you to keep in mind that dictates as to how we look into crafting a portfolio that that that with certain thesis that goes into it. Last light before I pause is at the end of the day, I mentioned this early on in my web three year discussion.

Nitin Gaur: You have the bankable assets and I think we kind of know where things are. It's been evolving for over 100 years. We have markets, we have system, we have secondary markets, we have data, we have all kinds of structures in place to be able to evaluate the risk and the valuation models. What's interesting is the non bankable assets, the arts patterns, heirloom potentiality of you to be able to make your earnings. So think of bank loans, think of tokenizing art things, think of your insurance, think all these things were not traditionally there suddenly now have a market for it. So with that I'm going to pause. There is a really fast 40. You had some really fast slide movement in there, but hopefully it made sense again for me. I'll say one more thing is crafting a portfolio. I've done that with many, you know, working with ventures, working with hedge funds in the past is it's qualitative and quantitative. You have to understand the industry and what mistake many of the traders do is they look at the the traditional charts, whether it's momentum, whether it's volatility, whether it's risks, and a lot of decision goes into into into trading those tokens as opposed to understanding what are the effects and impact of what's happening in the world, both in the crypto world that effects the valuation and utility of these tokens. I'll take a pause and I think we have enough time for some discussion.

Michael Metcalfe: Yeah.

Lee Ferridge: Okay. Thank you, both of you. We have a couple of minutes for questions. Not very long. Unfortunately, yes. No, that's different. So one that came in was and you touched on this, the 200,000 sort of different crypto, etc.. The question was, does the digital world need to coalesce behind one cryptocurrency or even fewer? Is the range of different cryptocurrencies hindering its adoption?

Nitin Gaur: Partly yes, and partly no, because I would say that the the ecosystem that's evolving has its own value. So this is disrupting media. Entertainment is disrupting supply chain. Each of them have their own token economic system. And I would say this, that until now we are looking at digital transformation. So how do we use technology to transform digital, whether it's digital rails, digital apps? But now I think with this we're looking at transforming digital how digital is meant to be. So using decentralized, autonomous organization, smart contracts to be able to automate a few things with repudiation, with rules built into it, that takes away a lot of mental work that we're doing so we can utilize that energy, doing everything else. And I think not all products needs token, but I think Token provides a way to convey that value in the system, if that makes.

Lee Ferridge: Sense. Yeah. So either of you, what are your thoughts on central bank digital currencies as a means of exchange? Wouldn't they do everything we want unless you're a criminal?

Nitin Gaur: So I, I've implemented like 19 cbdc projects in my in my IBM days, and we look into three factors of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, three properties that any currency should have. And cbdc to me is a necessary sort of thing that we need to have because the world is moving towards digital interaction and digital transactions and we need to pay for these things and our existing system is falling short of doing that. And so I think Cbdc is when they came in. Every country has a different agenda. Of course, in Western economy, it's about security settlement, some economies, about economic inclusion, but in many cases it's to keep up with the pace of growth of human beings, But also the demographic that's coming is more digitally savvy and they want a digital way to to interact and transact. And many of the systems that we have now simply falls short of that of of that, I think.

Michael Metcalfe: Yeah. I mean, just just that in fact, I was on a panel on this a couple of weeks ago, and it was noted that I think there's more than 100 central banks globally now studying central bank digital currency. And that number just two years ago was less than half that. But I think the point that came across very strongly was that they're developing it very different rates. And in some places they're on pause. But in others, like China, it's kind of much it's going to happen faster in certain countries, I think. But the direction of travel is very clear.

Nitin Gaur: Yeah. Ba has just recently had a report where they look into Enbridge, which I was aware of in my IBM's ACS interoperability. So exchange effects is a huge challenge in this space to move money globally at a pace at which now and the cost of doing that today is enormous. I think we know that it's like 9% to the remittance of space and every other sort of segment of payment actually has a lion's share of it. 80% of world's global banks are looking at cbdc. We have stable act in the US that's on the floor and that has implications and settlement. And if you go towards real time settlement, that changes our industry a little bit, I think.

Michael Metcalfe: Just a bit.

Lee Ferridge: Final quick one for you, Michael. Where do you see the future of sort of macro research and crypto? Where can we get to a point where we can really use macro to predict crypto or where do we go with that?

Michael Metcalfe: Well, so actually some of the work that I showed there today has been appearing in the digital newsletter which which Nadia mentioned at the start, but actually in from November onwards, some of the data that we showed from Glassnode there will be on insights and we're sort of starting up a sort of monthly newsletter on it, just looking at that to try and capture adoption, but also to capture the macro effects onto crypto itself. And look, and that's easy. I didn't have the chart in the thing, but look, we know from our own morning meetings on a monday, you know, the people are looking at the crypto performance over the weekend because obviously traditional markets aren't open to try and actually you can use that to predict the S&P. So whatever you do, don't think that this is that crypto somehow is separate and is not going to touch additional markets because it very clearly already is.

Lee Ferridge: Thank you very much, both of you.