Antonio, it seems like decentralized versus CFI centralized finance is the
problem here, the latter of which failed so many.
What do you think happened at FTSE X? Yeah, I don't have any particular
insight beyond what a lot of people have already talked about.
Obviously, it was a failing of transparency.
First and foremost, users didn't have an understanding of how their funds were
used and there were no guardrails in place.
I'm really excited about what we're building.
Do you RTX? Because it's literally the answer to a
lot of these problems with defy. You build your built on top of smart
contracts which are programmatically enforced transparency and security of
funds. So something like this never could have
happened on a G5 platform built in the right way.
Well, but what we've seen globally with crypto exchanges and centralized ones as
a result of the collapse is billions of dollars worth of outflows.
What kind of activity have you seen over the course of the last week?
We've actually had a pretty big influx of new users to do RTX.
I think a lot of these events really underscore the need for decentralized
finance and what we're building. And I think when one of the biggest and
most trusted exchanges in the industry blows off, people pay attention to that
and people care a lot more about the safety of their funds.
And I think that will continue to drive a lot of people to defy over time.
Yeah. Is this whole episode really just an
argument against any centralized entity within crypto?
Is this now just going to want to drive people to want to hold their own assets
rather than entrusting it to someone else?
I definitely think it will. And I do actually think that regulated,
centralized exchanges can work as well. Big fan of Coinbase.
I used to work there. Don't stand to touch with them, but I
think a G5 offers another solution where we can trust the code rather than
trusting intermediaries. And I think that's a really powerful new
paradigm that's being built. And I think you kind of see the
narrative play out from this over a long time.
And that was gets hard for people that point, Antonio, right now at the
beginning. I mean, it was about a trust list
solution that I get, why there's a need for some place like Coinbase.
A lot of people just want to dip a toe in the water.
They're too lazy to hold cash in their own wallet, so to speak.
But for the fourth.
For the innovators that started this. The idea is you hold will to your own
private keys and then no bad actors can go and spend your money without you
knowing. Yeah.
Well said, and I completely agree. And I think with the invention of
Bitcoin, we incent invented and decentralized trust lost money, but
finance is a lot more than that, right? You need exchanges.
You need derivative products. You need margin.
And we're all building that kind of for the first time in D5.
But this really is the vision and I think this is the answer.
Can you make money with DIY DAX? I mean, the problem or the I guess the
draw of an FTSE ax was there was so much more lucrative than a coin base, at
least until it crashed. Can you make money on a decentralized
platform? You definitely can actually do a do ex.
We basically all offer the exact same product from a financial perspective
that RTX Finance and others offer in perpetual contracts, and those are by
far the most traded type of product across the entire crypto industry, even
more than spot trading. So it's financially very similar.
We're working really hard to kind of make the product experience for defied
on par with CE. I think that takes a while just with any
new technology, but we continue to see really good growth year over year and
excited for what's to come. And I think this just underscores the
need for what we're building. Yeah, in a big way.
So Antonio, if we got to look at your balance sheet like we saw the very crude
balance sheet of FTSE, what would we find?
So you could do it right now in 30 seconds.
Just go to ether scan type in Dubai, RTX smart contract.
You'll see exactly the token holdings. You'll see our open source code.
It'll link to our audit reports and it's literally transparency by default.
And that actually excites me a lot about defy, because when we talk about
something like this, the initial knee jerk reaction is to regulate and
potentially overregulate the industry, but actually defy can be really positive
for a lot of regulators objectives. And like I have said, would literally
solve this. And I think not only can be positive for
regulators objectives, it can in some ways be 10x better than the existing
financial system. Like what business and history can you
go in 30 seconds and audit their entire balance sheet in real time?
Updated to the seconds. I think that's pretty novel and I think
just what's happened really underscores the need for this.
Do you think it's more likely, though, that regulation overreaches, reacts too
strongly to an episode like this, or do you think that there can be the correct
balance struck between allowing innovation and also regulating it at the
same time? It's definitely something I'm concerned
about, just overregulation of the crypto industry and specifically defy in a big
way. We've been doing a lot of work just kind
of starting to talk to policy makers, talk to regulators and really just
trying to start with education like what is defined.
How can it be positive for regulators objectives?
But I think we're in the very early stages of a lot of those conversations.
And I think there is the temptation to overregulate.
We're really in default for the long term.
I just honestly think that defy will be bigger than centralized family finance
at some point in the future. I think that point in the future is
going to take longer than people think. Usually I say that defy.
I think we'll be bigger than centralized finance and probably 10 to 20 years from
now, which is a long time. And we have a long way to go, but I
think we're building towards it step by step.
And a lot of people will even skeptics admit the
utility of the block chain and the value of something like smart contracts and
and possibly your platform as well. It's a little bit more difficult to
convince people of the intrinsic value of a lot of the coins, specifically
bitcoin. What's your take on how much bitcoin is
worth? It's a great question.
I don't have a lot of info on macro economic trends.
I think that if you look at year over year continues to increase just the
overall adoption and excitement around cryptocurrency.
I mean, it's even reflected in the explosions of cryptocurrency.
RTX is certainly not the first centralized exchange to blow up or do
sketchy fun things with user funds, but it's gotten 10x bigger your every year.
And I think that trend will continue. Obviously, we're in a bear market right
now and that will probably last longer than people think.
But the general trend is up to the right and I'm excited about that.