On Ep. 14 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined by Yuval Rooz, CEO @ Digital Asset to discuss their top predictions for 2025.
On Ep. 14 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined by Yuval Rooz, CEO @ Digital Asset to discuss their top predictions for 2025.
Timestamps:
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Unknown Speaker 00:00
Simon,
Sy Taylor 00:10
welcome to tokenized. My name is Simon Taylor. I am your host for the tokenized podcast, author at FinTech brain food and head of strategy at sardine. And on this episode, we are bringing you our 2025 predictions. What a year it looks like it's going to be. We're going to have some hot takes on institutional cryptos, stable coins and cryptos for adults now, all very exciting. But Joining me is my co host, my friend, the unbelievable, the talented, the sometimes late for a meeting, but always, always great when he shows up. Kai Sheffield, the head of crypto at visa, how you doing? Kai? Man,
Cuy Sheffield 00:53
I am excited for 2025 What a time that we get to live and work in so many things happening. It's going to be a great year. I can feel it. Yeah, there's
Sy Taylor 01:03
things under the surface that you and I see that are really, really interesting, that's for sure. But just got to remind everybody, of course, that these are the opinions of contributors, not necessarily those of their company. And of course, it's not tax, financial or legal advice. Please do your own research out there people. Before Kai gives us his three predictions for 2025 I sat down with Yuval ruse, who's COO and co founder at digital asset, and we both gave some of our predictions for 2025 here from Yuval and I now joining me is a good friend our sponsor, Yuval ruse, from digital asset Yuval, how you doing, sir? I'm
Unknown Speaker 01:48
great. How are you, Simon, I'm really
Sy Taylor 01:50
well. I'm in a predictions. Kind of mood? Have you got some ready? Are you feeling like we can make some predictions for 2025
Yuval Rooz 01:58
I did some trading before we started. So you know, I'm all just stuff. You're pumped.
Sy Taylor 02:02
So we're recording this in November, so a lot could change between now and next year. It's a crazy time, but crystal ball time. Do you have your first prediction ready? Yeah, absolutely. Prediction number one, Yuval ruse.
Yuval Rooz 02:20
So I think that maybe, as a kind of baseline for everything, what we're going to see is that the US will move from regulation by enforcement to more regulatory clarity, and that will really create this spring effect at the rest of the world to then we have to catch up with the US. So regulatory clarity in 2025 led by the US.
Sy Taylor 02:43
And what does that mean for everybody in the industry? You know, you speak to institutions on a regular basis. You speak to lots of large organizations, smaller innovators. Has everybody been waiting for that clarity? Or have people been sort of coiled, ready to spring? Yeah,
Yuval Rooz 03:01
I mean definitely, when you talk to banks and they're telling you that there's a half year waiting line just to get a regulator to take a look at what you do with a database technology. Yes, there's quite a lot of interest by the players to do more. So I think that regulators just giving this clarity of what you can and cannot do will open the floodgates for more budget and more activity from the large institutional players. We're obviously in
Sy Taylor 03:35
London at the moment, Europe is right next door. We've had mica now for several months, what have been your observations of what happens after regulatory clarity?
Yuval Rooz 03:45
So at the end of the day, if we take a step back and just think that blockchain and crypto is more efficient rails for finance, I think that with the regulatory clarity, with the ability to demonstrate that those pipes actually grease the wheels and allow to do more activity and more efficiently. You're just going to see, over time, more and more assets move into the new rails, and we're going to stop talking about the technology and just going to see the TVL grows.
Sy Taylor 04:17
What asset goes first? What's the front of the line?
Yuval Rooz 04:21
Yeah. So that's maybe kind of leads me to my second prediction, which is that collateral mobility is going to be probably one of the best use cases for this technology, and therefore the total value locked by real world assets will reach 25% of stable coin market cap. Oh, that's, that's a pretty big pretty, that's
Sy Taylor 04:47
bold, yeah. And so yeah, the collateral mobility for the uninitiated, for somebody who has maybe more of a payments background, maybe hasn't worked as long in capital markets as yourself, just for. Remind everybody what that means.
Yuval Rooz 05:01
Yeah, so I mean when you're doing trading and you're not settling assets in real time. So for example, when you do derivatives trading, or when you do things on a t plus one or t zero basis, you have to provide margin in order to reduce the risk for settlement failures, and that's where you use collateral. So today, the traditional collateral takes, in some cases, days, best cases, usually a t plus one. So that actually prevents players from being very capital efficient. So very similar to what stable coins did to crypto trading, the ability to move Fiat from one exchange to another in real time, this collateral mobility is going to become the use case, because both in traditional finance, when you think about interest rates being more balance sheet efficient, is a huge opportunity. But also when you start looking at crypto till today, stable coins were kind of the de facto collateral. Now people are saying, well, if I can actually use real world asset earn yield on my collateral, why would I do that versus something that doesn't pay me yield? So you're seeing with the Biddle Fund, with Benji by Franklin Templeton, you're seeing quite a lot of institutional we're working with Goldman and doing very similar with HSBC. You're seeing there is a mad rush now into real world assets on chain. I think the use case around collateral is a really good use case, not just for traditional finance, but also for crypto. You are seeing crypto players starting to say, can we actually use real world assets as the collateral instrument so we can earn yield.
Sy Taylor 06:44
I'm interested in your views on how these worlds are converging, because 2022, certain large exchange with three letters and its name collapsed, and the CEO ended up in jail, and it felt like the worlds of crypto and trod fi couldn't be trying to get further away from each other, but if anything, now, they seem to be blurring into each other. There's a blurred lines. There's institutions that are quite mature on both sides. What are you seeing in terms of that blurring, that convergence?
Yuval Rooz 07:16
Yeah. So the same year of that exchange, there was a two letter, very well known bank that also fell apart from, you know, mismanagement of risk and collateral. Maybe different reasons for it, but at the end of the day, kind of a very similar outcome. And I think that the reality is, what people understand is when you don't manage things as efficiently on chain with that kind of visibility, there is a lot of risk or unknown risks that then one day you find out about them. So again, I just don't view crypto and blockchain as anything other than just being able to manage traditional finance in a very efficient manner as a result of the three letter exchange and some other headlines. Regulators around the world thought, well, is this something new? Is this something different? And really, for us at digital asset, we tried to show that it isn't. We're actually not trying to recreate the financial market. It's the same instruments. It's the same activity, actually, with much less risk built into it if you do it right. So I definitely see those two worlds eventually converging, where crypto is bringing new asset classes, but it's actually the underlying technology that opens the door for that efficiency, that reduction of settlement risk, and as a result of that, create new financial instruments that today just wouldn't be financially feasible.
Sy Taylor 08:43
There was a mean in sort of 2016 which was, we like the tech, but not the currencies. But actually, what's happened since then is some of the assets have been adopted and wrapped in Trad fire instruments like ETFs. And what we've also seen since then is that the tech isn't just permissioned anymore, and it's not just the walled gardens, although there are many of those, it's also starting to move into the permissionless space and starting to figure out what your on off ramp looks like. Do you think institutions can, in a meaningful way, go into that more open source, open, decentralized set of technology stacks, and how do they do so safely?
Yuval Rooz 09:24
Yeah, they use the internet today. So they do use an open, permissionless network today. It's just that the internet gave them the tools to protect their customers information to be able to permission who gets to access their services. I think at the end of the day, public permissionless chains will eventually get to that level of functionality where everybody can connect to it. You could see assets like a stable coin, that if you have a wallet, you could have these instruments, and you'll have real world assets issued by banks that say, in order to hold our assets, you have to be k. I say to ml at the end of the day, there is no ability to compete with that in walled gardens, right? So as long as the technology, and this is really what we've been focusing at, digital asset, provides that set of tools to allow you to be in an open network but still protect your customers in a way that you're required. I think that that kind of user experience will always trump private networks. I threw Trump in there. Yeah,
Sy Taylor 10:29
you did know the elephants over here. Prediction number three hit me. So I
Yuval Rooz 10:35
think that the first prediction regulation, which will then create massive influx of real world assets on chain. I think that really the third prediction is you're going to see crypto derivatives volume double. You're going to see things like on chain repo double. So you're going to see these type of use cases. So right now, with Broadridge, we're doing somewhere between 100 to $150 billion of repo a day. I think there's a good chance we get to half a trillion by the end of 2025, a day. And I think that you're going to see things like crypto derivatives trading double as a result of managing collateral more efficiently, you could reduce the risk of your counter parties. You get more leverage. You'll see more activity.
Sy Taylor 11:27
And it just starts to sound and feel a lot more like a sensible move from an asset allocator to be using more modern technology stack to de risk their investment opportunities.
Yuval Rooz 11:38
If you are a shop that have multiple legal entities in the US, in Europe and in Asia, and you're allocating your 100 million dollars, but because it takes you t plus 1t, plus two, to move money from one place to another, you are effectively going to over capitalize Your legal entities in these three jurisdictions. Now, if you know that you have the 100 million dollars available to you wherever you want at any point of time, you could actually use the 100 million at any given point of time to the maximum possible way. Why would you ever use the old rails to do that? And as long as you could do that in a way that protects your activity, meaning your activity is not for everyone to be seen. Yes,
Sy Taylor 12:27
the commercial confidentiality thing is important. Then
Yuval Rooz 12:30
I don't see any reason why you would do things on the old rails. You
Sy Taylor 12:35
know, it's fascinating. HSBC and JP Morgan have, I think onyx or now Connexus and programs to allow corporates to do the same thing. From a treasury management standpoint, you can move money around the world in that speed and make yourself a lot more efficient. So that sort of idea of global 24/7, instant liquidity is the theme that runs through everything. So thank you for your predictions. Do you mind if I have a go at mine and I invite you to react to Simon's 2025 predictions. Number one probably won't surprise you. Regulatory clarity in the United States, it is the obvious thing, especially since we are talking after the election. But I think regardless of which way it went, we were perilously close to having some clarity on regulation. We've had bills get very close before in the United States, and I think we've also had a change in both of the houses of Congress that really changed the balance and the dynamics now in a completely different way. What I think this starts to unlock is a sense of permission, even though it's not that implicitly, narrative wise, it now feels like, okay, there's a mood change, there's a vibe shift, there's this understanding. We've both worked in financial institutions for a long time, and somebody asks the question, what will the regulator say? And the reality is they'll say, Well, how are you managing your risk? You know, what are the consequences? What mitigates Do you have? That's what a conversation with a regulator looks like. It's more what will everybody else think and what signal are we sending to the market? So that signaling is actually, I think, of equal importance to the regulatory clarity. I don't know if you're seeing that vibe shift yourself, or has that even started to permeate yet?
Yuval Rooz 14:23
I actually think you're right. I think that that signaling started already, before even we knew where the election was going, and I think that now it will just accelerate. So I think that one way to think about it is regulatory clarity is one thing, but kind of to your point around signaling, I actually think you could have used this technology within the existing regulatory environment as of today. And I think that signaling to your point, why it's so important is I actually think you're going to see institutions start using the technology now, because before that, lack of signaling was intimidating to these regulations. Institutions. So even though they might think that they could use the technology and not break any rules, it's just that lack of signal, of like, yeah, we embrace this technology. This is something that, as long as you use it in a safe and sound manner, all good. That lack of signal prevented a lot of organizations from even dabbling right, even just trying. So I think that it's a very good point that just that signal will open and accelerate activity even before any new rules are introduced. And
Sy Taylor 15:31
the signaling also is not just the things that we see, it's what the conversations are behind closed doors with the CEO and the regulator, but also the teams and the examiners. And I think that tone might start to shift as well. Prediction number two that stable coins become really mainstream, and yes, we've had the stripe moment, but the volumes are still relatively low on who's using stable coins day to day. The traction is still very, very early. If you were to look at the numbers, certainly less than 10% of stable coin volume is actually payments activity. But increasingly, B to B payments will start to be what dominates in stable coins, and stable coins will become more industrial in how they're used. And with, to your point, the adoption of real world assets, we solve the problem of is a stable coin a security by making it a very simple payment instrument, but giving you the access in real time to something that has yield like a money market fund, but with instant liquidity. And that's a treasury manager's dream.
Yuval Rooz 16:39
Yeah. I mean, think stablecoin Is your checking account. Money market fund is your saving account, and as long as you can move back and forth in real time, 24/7, you have coverage. And I think that, to add to that is again, and this is one of our big focus, one of the things that we actually heard from corporates is that the functionality and the characteristics of stable coins are super interesting for them, especially multinationals. If you could add a layer of privacy on top of that, they would start moving way faster into those type of instruments, because, again, a publicly traded company doesn't necessarily want the whole world to see in real time their payments activity, right? So I think that adding again, another layer of permissioning and privacy to a permissionless or public chain for them to be able to have that kind of B to B 24/7 global payment network where they can actually enjoy the characteristics without everybody needing to know about everything that they Do, I think will only accelerate everything you said. You don't
Sy Taylor 17:43
want to be using the consumer grade wallets and the consumer grade Tech because you will immediately broadcast what your wallet has been doing for all of your competitors benefit, which is probably not what you want if you're a publicly traded company or something along those lines. And then my third one is sort of a double headed prediction. I think the AI plus blockchain narrative becomes what drives the next Bull Run Cycle. And frustratingly, like every previous cycle, there will be a lot of fluff, there'll be a lot of things that are complete snake oil, and prices will run up and go parabolic once again, and unfortunately, people will not have learned the lessons of last time. The same will always be true. Please. People never invest more than you can afford to lose. However, some people still will. But what everybody's figured out is exactly to that privacy point. What's happening in an AI at the moment is everybody's trying to push the computation to the edge. They're trying to push the data to the device. They're trying to get it out of the cloud. There's a real move back towards privacy and computation happening locally. Why? Because all of your data has been exposed. It's all been scanned. It's all available on the dark web, so every company is about to be hacked or has been so how do you regain security and privacy over data? How do you train models and have ownership over data? And how do you have a mechanism for monetizing all of that new commerce and activity? Well, wouldn't it be handy if we had this privacy preserving cryptography that happened to be a very good state machine, a very good way of moving consequential transactions and permissioning things to happen in signing transactions. So I think the market's starting to get that now. It's starting to understand that this is the perfect bedrock for AI based commerce, but we'll see a lot of experiments and a lot of failures. So that's my Wilder one. What do you think of that 1am? I too early? I've been too early before.
Yuval Rooz 19:51
So first of all, we have a client that is already using AI on top of blockchain. They're using it more for hey, if. Putting data into blockchain, I better be comfortable that the data is accurate. So they're actually using llms to kind of give confidence score around your own data. So they're effectively originating mortgages on chain, and they're using AI to give like a confidence interval that all the fields that were inserted were all good. But listen, I think that you said some pretty interesting things. And I think that as you start having quite a lot of optionality we just talked about, I'm going to have a whole range of money market funds. I have a whole range of stable coins. They will all have their own characteristics. So if you start thinking about today, when you have all these optimizers that are just thinking about, well, which collateral should I use, which asset should I put my money right now? Should I sweep my cash into the Biddle fund, into the Benji fund, into this fund, into that fund? I think that all of those things will start giving quite a lot of optionality. Which, on one hand is good, on the other hand, is starting to make the world very, very complicated. And that's where you could actually start thinking about, well, how do you overlay AI to actually make optimal decisions for you? So I think you're going to see a lot of that. I think that a lot of it will be wrong in the beginning, and that's why I totally agree with you. You just need to be careful, not just from an investment perspective, but when you use these tools, bad things could happen. And you just need to be careful as you
Sy Taylor 21:30
if I hired a treasury agent AI to manage my treasury on my behalf, and I gave it the permission to move money back and forth between a money market fund and something went wrong. What happens then? Yeah, I'll give
Yuval Rooz 21:45
you an example. Imagine there was something called Luna as a stable coin, and it was giving you a really good return. And, you know, and your treasury management agent said, optimal outcome, just put all of your savings into something like that. I think that that's where things can go south very quickly, and over time, they will only get better. And of course, we will learn from our mistakes 100%
Sy Taylor 22:08
so before we wrap up, you about what does your agenda digital asset look like for 2025 I'm assuming you're seeing some broad themes with clients. You're seeing some broad things happening on the global stage. What's your readout of the market looking like?
Yuval Rooz 22:24
So how do you bring, again, stablecoins and real world assets on chain with privacy, to really create those Prediction number two and three to really make real world asset 25% of stable coins to double the volume in crypto derivatives trading to double the repo. I think that if we actually show institutions that you could conduct the same business that you do today with an improvement of an efficiency without compromising for privacy, I think that there's quite a lot of interest. So our biggest focus right now is this, collateral, mobility, bringing stable coins with privacy is really kind of where we're putting a lot of our bets on. Well, I'm
Sy Taylor 23:11
going to be watching that too. Yuval, if people want to find out more about you or what you're doing at digital asset, where do they find you? You
Yuval Rooz 23:18
can learn about Canton at Canton dot network. Our company is digital asset.com and I'm Yuval Ruz on Twitter. All
Sy Taylor 23:26
right, thank you, Yuval. Thank you. So that was a fun chat. Thank you to me, and also thank you to Yuval, but mostly, thank you to Yuval. I thought those predictions were spot on, and we'll find out pretty soon if they came true. And we've got one more thing before we get you to the main event, we've got to thank our sponsors before Kai gives his prediction. So thank you to our sponsors. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. Visa's tokenized assets platform, vtap uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat back tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This podcast is also supported by our friends at digital asset, the creators of the Canton network. Canton is unlocking the utility and liquidity of institutional grade real world assets with over $3.6 trillion of assets issued or processed on the network today. Think of it like defi transactions, but with the privacy and control institutions need digital asset solutions make it easy to tokenize, use or invest in digital assets. On the network, create connected applications, or simply get started with a validator node. Visit Canton, dot network, forward, slash, connect to get started. And now what we made you wait for the whole show. Kai Sheffield Prediction number one, what's going to happen in 2025
Cuy Sheffield 25:22
Yeah. So for the first prediction, I expect to see growing demand in usage of stablecoin linked carts. And I think throughout the show, we've been talking about just the growing demand and activity in the stablecoin ecosystem, and as more and more consumers, particularly in emerging markets, get access to stable coins as they adopt new wallets that are being built for them, there's still this challenge of what can you do with a stable coin? Where can you spend it? And I think it's going to take time for direct acceptance to really roll out. And right now, there's just very limited number of merchants that you can spend a stable coin with, and so we're seeing more and more demand today of many wallets coming to visa looking to integrate and issue a visa credential connected to a stable coin balance, and being able to spend that at any merchant that accepts visa. And this is a few years ago. We really referred to it as crypto linked cards. And there were crypto exchanges, there were people holding Bitcoin and other assets that they were then selling and using a card as an off ramp to spend. Now it's like there's this new type of stable coin, native Neo bank or wallet, that the card is this critical component that unlocks utility and spend and and I think that there's just a huge opportunity to be able to provide that merchant acceptance embedded inside stablecoin wallets, and then we're really excited about some of the work that we're doing in settling those transactions in stablecoins. And so you can start to have this kind of new class of FinTech product that we think is really going to pick up in 2025 so
Sy Taylor 26:59
talk me through a use case. I'm using a wallet today. Maybe it's a defi wallet, and maybe I've got some stable coins sitting in it. It's self custody, or maybe it's something that's custodial, and I might hold crypto in there. I might transfer it, but I would get some branded card and I would be able to just pull on the stable coin. Like, what does that look like for me as a consumer. I think
Cuy Sheffield 27:21
it's both. There are self custodial wallets that consumers are holding stable coins in, and they're really treating stable coins as basically a store of value. They just want access to dollars, but then when they want to spend then they have to send the stable coin to an exchange, sell it for Fiat, push that Fiat back to a bank account or an existing wallet and then spend on that Fiat. You kind of have to plan ahead, versus if the wallet the stable coin in can just have a visa credential link to it, you don't have to plan ahead. You just go in and spend, you tap to pay, and then you can pull from a balance of that stable coin, and ultimately, the issuer of that card can settle that stable coin to visa. I think they'll also be custodial wallets that could look more similar to what a traditional Neo bank is today. But we're seeing many different permutations of this, and it's both on the consumer side and on the corporate side. We haven't really talked about this nearly as much of there are now stable coin linked corporate cards, where you have small businesses that are in emerging markets that are operating a business in dollars, where they want to be able to pay an AWS bill on a card, but have that card linked to a stable coin balance in their corporate treasury. And so we're seeing this transition from crypto cards to stable coin cards, and they're gonna be more and more of these products that go live in 2025 it's
Sy Taylor 28:39
kind of taking everything that we've had in FinTech, in the US domestic and maybe the g20 domestic cards world, and just making it available to more parts of the world who want to buy from the g7 g20 providers who naturally accept cards, but might not accept Your local currency as easily in your local payment methods. It's really powerful stuff. It's exciting. All right, when I gotta say, I strongly agree. I'm seeing lots of this, and there's no lack of momentum around stable coins. But speaking of stable coins, what's gonna be the unlock? What's your prediction? Number two? Number
Cuy Sheffield 29:18
two is, I think the rise of bank issued stable coins and non dollar denominated stable coins. And so we've talked a lot about the existing stable coins. Today, the non bank issued products like circles USDC, like tether and usdt. Today, 99% of stable coins are backed by dollars. I don't know if that's going to significantly move the needle in terms of overall supply being kind of less than 99 or 95% but I think we'll see a lot more products that come to market, where we're almost seeing new stablecoin launches or announcements every month at this point, and I think that they're only going to be more from Yes, there will be more. Fin. Tax more non banks that get into space, but importantly, there will be the first bank issued stable coins. And I think 2024 was a notable year with SOC Gen and your CV as arguably the first really, truly bank issued stable coin product. We've announced that we're working closely with BBVA, and we talked about on the show in an earlier episode, their plans to issue a stable coin in Europe with us in 2025 and I think as the regulatory environment gets more clarity, we'll see more banks starting outside the US. And then ultimately, I think the question is, what happens in the US that say, You know what, let's issue a stable coin product. And we're really excited at visa to be able to help them with that. And 2025 is the year that every bank needs a stable COIN strategy, and we think that there's a big role for us to help them with that. And some banks will create their own stable coins. Some banks will interact with existing ones. But there really is an opportunity to have a much more competitive and robust stable coin issuance landscape with banks participating in a meaningful way. There's
Sy Taylor 31:04
companies like Braille, Ben Milne from diwala, that are actually actively helping banks issue their unstable coins linked to stuff we've seen. Project Guardian in Singapore for quite some time, has been looking at how you help banks and financial institutions move into it in a regulatory compliant way, but the sort of local currency side has been missing from this conversation, like it's all dollars. But actually, if all how all that happens is local currency gets swapped for dollars, then it's very hard for those local businesses to then actually use those dollars to pay the bills and to do something. So if I'm a seller and I'm selling product internationally, I still have to go back through the traditional rails, and it gets kind of difficult. But if there's local stable to stables, then that becomes a little bit different. And we've seen a lot of projects trying to build liquidity in that space. I think
Cuy Sheffield 31:54
it's going to be really interesting to see what the major use cases are for non dollar stable coins, I think that they will be different than dollar stable coins. I think dollar stable coins, I would expect, are always going to be significantly larger in terms of circulating supply, because you have this demand for people in businesses all over the world to just hold dollars. I think that there's less demand for consumers of businesses to hold euros or hold pounds in a stable coin form outside of Europe or outside of the UK. And so I think that non dollar stable coins will be more payments oriented. And so if you look at the supply versus the transaction volume, I would expect that the supply is going to be much lower relative to the volume that they do. But I do think they're really interesting use cases, both from a on and off ramp perspective. If you're moving money into a market, as you mentioned, being able to do some type of on chain FX, move from $1 stable coin into a local stable coin, and then be able to redeem that local stable coin for Fiat or to initiate RTP transactions. So I think that's one use case. I think that there will be the large capital markets on chain settlement of many types of tokenized securities and other assets. I think that's a clear use case. I think there are some interesting elements of in a way, non dollar stable coins can kind of give governments and central banks much more visibility into how stable coins are used in their market. It's much easier to track and have transparency and collect taxes and have some level of capital controls. If you have $1 stable coin converted to a non dollar stable coin that's issued by a regulated entity in the local market, versus if you have dollar stable coins converting into traditional local Fiat that happens off chain, which is much harder to track. So I think it's still open question Which of these use cases become the largest drivers. But if we're really, truly going to have an on chain payments ecosystem, I think you need to have most major currencies represented on chain where they can interact with each other, instead of just having dollar backed stable coins as the only currency that's available on chain. Future
Sy Taylor 34:03
of FX feels like it's going to live as a token at some point in the future, and we're going to see it in these initial global south to global south currency flows. But it would make sense that you'd want something stable in the middle of that as a volatility rather than a token cents. So the dollar plays very much a similar role to the one it does in the rest of the economy. Hit me with number three prediction. Number three, you're closing us out here, man, make it a good one.
Cuy Sheffield 34:33
So I think three is probably the most fascinating to me, and still the earliest. But I think 2025 could be the year that the intersection of crypto and AI becomes consensus. And I'd argue that 2024, it's in and even today it's it's still somewhat non consensus and controversial. Of there are some people who think there are a bunch of ways that AI and crypto are going to come together. Are other people who think these are they're two different technologies, one centralized, one is decentralized, and they're just going to develop in parallel. And I think even the recent appointment of the AI and crypto czar, with David Sachs in the US as one single role instead of two separate roles, is a good signal towards maybe there's a lot that could happen between both crypto and AI, and the way that I'm seeing this, just in general, in my personal life, is starting with agents on social media. And I don't know about you, but my Twitter x feed, probably a third of the posts are coming from literally, LLM powered agents who are engaging on crypto Twitter, in the crypto trenches, or developers building these agents, and it's fascinating, bottoms up, open source experimentation. I think it ranges from, I think I have my first AI agent reply guy that just started roasting me in the replies to one of my tweets and and it wasn't bad. That's like, I was impressed that some of the roasts were pretty good. And so I think that the first way that consumers might start to interact with agents could end up being on X or Twitter, on social media. And there'll be these social agents that are characters with personalities that have objectives, and I think many of those agents are being built in the Open Source Plus crypto AI ecosystem. And so there are a bunch of experiments around having tokens and ways that crypto platforms are making it easy to build agents. And it's still super early. I think this has only really showed up in the past few months. I think you're gonna see many more agents in social media environments in 2025 and it's less of AI development is just very top down, big tech open AI and or the company open AI. And it's more this bottoms up, weird, crypto native, almost like some of the things that where nfts came from, of creative people building AI enabled content creators that have some crypto or token wallet element to it. And so I think it's one of the most weird and fascinating aspects of the space and and I think we're going to see a lot more of that in 2025 we've seen
Sy Taylor 37:20
the first few Tiktok creators with hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of followers that are entirely AI generated, and a lot of those are monetizing through tokens by default. These two are crossovers, and there's different schools of thought. There's the school of thought that says, Well, this is just the new meme coin phrase, AI is hot. So put crypto and AI together, and you'll be able to pump the price of a token. But what you're saying is much more interesting, which is this, is this is a meaningful change in how people interact online, and a meaningful change in how they transact with that creator, that new type of agent, that new type of creator. I also think there's a third thing, which is, AI generally, is lending itself towards decentralization in that I need some level of cryptographic verifiable proof of the history of this bit of IP ownership, and I have some level of requirement for a really simple, low cost programmable payments rail, like a stable coin, and I need some this permanent record. So there's a bunch of companies I've seen doing stable coin linked payments for AI agents, and there's a bunch of companies I've seen doing creators and AI agents that use some sort of token underneath it. And then there's a bunch of provenance companies. So that's one theme, and then the other theme is a lot more AI running on device, because people really care about privacy and data provenance. Nvidia, just a couple of days ago, launched their little chip that can run at the edge for a robot, Gemini and Apple intelligence run on the device. Maybe it's not that wild. Maybe it's going to shift from non consensus to consensus. That's a big, big call, my friend. Any other wild cards you want to throw out at us is, is Kai going to going to go on a world tour? Are you going to leave the house a little more like, what's what's happening with Kai in 2025 hopefully
Cuy Sheffield 39:17
I leave the house more in 2025 I think, right now, just trying to figure out how to survive toddler parenting. So I mean, indeed, with him, more more tips from you on how to deal with a 14 month old, but 2025 will be a great year. Really appreciate everyone listening to the show. Please give us feedback, and excited to see how we can continue to bring on amazing guests and unpack these topics together, yeah,
Sy Taylor 39:41
and I should say, it's been an incredible launch. We have had some incredible guests, and, my goodness, have we got some big names lined up and people beneath the surface doing incredible things. So hopefully we can keep our streak going. I think we've got a stable coin and real world asset institutional leaning audience and. And it's hopefully the contents there, but leave us a review. It really helps us out and get in touch. You know, just hit me up. I'm FinTech brain food@gmail.com drop me an email, and I'd be very happy to speak to you or hit me. S y Taylor on Twitter or find me on LinkedIn. Kai, how do people get hold of
Cuy Sheffield 40:19
you on Twitter? X act, Tai Sheffield and visa.com/crypto
Sy Taylor 40:23
thank you so much. Reminder, everybody, do your own research. This isn't financial advice, but, my goodness, it's a fun prediction show, and we hope you'll tell your friends about it. We'll see you next year.