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Paul Brody: Why Blockchain Still Matters in an AI-Obsessed World
178 Plays19 days ago
The Agent Economy Is Coming—with Blockchain as Its Backbone.
“This is not about crypto hype. It’s about solving trillion-dollar problems.” — Paul Brody
What You’ll Hear in 30 Minutes
• Why blockchain is thriving quietly—through real enterprise use cases
• The new agent-to-agent economy and its AI + blockchain foundation
• How stablecoins could collapse cross-border fees and reinvent payroll
• Why security and privacy are prerequisites, not roadblocks
• The coming shift from demos to delivery in blockchain adoption
• Why simplification and use-case storytelling will define what scales
Guest Snapshots
Paul Brody is EY’s Global Blockchain Leader and Chair of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. From privacy-first payments to agent-integrated supply chains, Brody leads global efforts to evolve blockchain from pilot to production. Joining him is Saurabh Gupta, President at HFS, with over a decade covering blockchain's rise, plateau—and now rebirth.
Timestamps
00:00 – Where Is Blockchain Now?
02:16 – From Tech Obsession to Real-World Use Cases
04:18 – Is Blockchain Still Too Secretive?
06:55 – Can Blockchain Solve AI’s Security Problem?
08:53 – Agents, Predictive Maintenance & Blockchain Execution
10:34 – What Agent-to-Agent Economies Could Look Like
13:54 – Why Supply Chain Isn’t There Yet
15:22 – Blockchain Still Lacks an “Intuitive UX”
17:16 – The Stablecoin Surge & Bipartisan Regulation
20:48 – Streaming Payments and the End of Payday Loans
24:11 – Public vs. Private Blockchains: What Won
26:40 – What’s Next for Ethereum, Assets & Smart Contracts
Explore More
🌐 Learn more about EY Blockchain: https://www.ey.com/blockchain
🔗 Follow Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pbrody/
🔗 Follow Saurabh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfssaurabh/
🔗 Follow Phil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pfersht/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: Key Guests and Blockchain's Resurgence
00:00:02
Speaker
I'm particularly excited about our next podcast. I'm going to be joined by Paul Brody, who's the head of the Ethereum Alliance and EY's blockchain leader.
00:00:14
Speaker
And in addition to Paul, I've got HFS' very own analyst who specializes in blockchain. His name is Saurabh Gupta, our Research and Advisory President. And we're going to get into some big issues around where blockchain is today. Things went a bit quiet.
00:00:29
Speaker
It's coming back hard. And with all these issues around global supply chains and volatility, the big blockchain debate is back on. So without further ado, let's get this one on right now.
00:00:42
Speaker
Good day, everybody.
Relevance and Evolution of Blockchain
00:00:44
Speaker
Welcome to the latest edition of From the Horse's Mouth. And today i am joined by two of the finest minds in the world, once known and still known as a blockchain.
00:00:56
Speaker
I've got the privilege of having one of our great practitioners, Paul Brody, who's actually the global head of blockchain for EYF. He's off the clock for us, especially today. He's also the chairperson of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance.
00:01:10
Speaker
And he also has a background that includes McKinsey and IBM. And he's a big advocate of public blockchains. But in addition to that, I actually have a great blockchain analyst, our very own Saurabh Gupta, who's also joining us. So we can have a three-way debate about and Is blockchain alive and kicking, or is it taking on some new shape and form in itself? So welcome, gentlemen.
00:01:34
Speaker
and It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. Good stuff, Paul. Did I do your background justice? Is there anything else I missed out? Suspense, father, all-around pretty decent guy, you know but i I don't know if my PR agency supplies you with all that stuff.
00:01:54
Speaker
or um And cult leader. colt leader And cult leader, that's correct. Well, that that's that's implied in the chairman of the EEA role. Terrific. Terrific. So let's just kick this off.
Practical Applications: From Hype to Implementation
00:02:05
Speaker
You know, blockchain was once, you know, a big shiny object that captivated the tech world. It was a real cure-all proposition to revolutionize everything from finance to food safety.
00:02:17
Speaker
So what's happened to it? We don't hear about it anymore. you know It's been submerged under a lot of AI jargon and hype and all sorts of other things going on. Tell us where blockchain is and and where it's going.
00:02:28
Speaker
So blockchain is alive. It's doing well. It's actually... I mean, I do think that if you if you pay attention a lot to the AI stuff, it can seem like blockchain has sort of disappeared. But in reality, blockchain is booming. It's enormous.
00:02:42
Speaker
What is kind of cool is that we are we are moving into this world where people talk about blockchain and we have these debates. Is it DLT, distributed ledger technology? Is it blockchain? Is it crypto? And we're we're moving away from those kinds of discussions. And people are hearing a different set of words, which are stablecoins, stablecoins.
00:02:59
Speaker
payments, supply chains, and especially and decentralized finance or DeFi. So That to me is actually evidence that the ecosystem is maturing and we're we're shifting from ah discussion of the technology to discussion of the use cases. And AI can hope for the same thing over time. It's still new and shiny.
00:03:19
Speaker
Blockchain is, I think it's really thriving. I look at our data, I see a really, really thriving business, but I see one that's really pivoted towards solutions. The day is when people would just be like, come in and be like, hey, can we pay you an obscene amount of money for you to tell us like what blockchain does?
00:03:34
Speaker
Those days are over. What now people are coming in saying is, okay, we want to enter this market. We're worried about this kind of competition. We want to enable payments. We want to do supply chain. Can you tell us how to do payments with privacy? like People are shifting into this very practical mode. So blockchain is thriving, but it's thriving based on applications, not hype.
00:03:54
Speaker
I agree with Paul. I think the blockchain hype is dead, Phil, which is actually a good thing in my in my books. But in reality, the applications of blockchain for actual business use cases is thriving.
00:04:08
Speaker
And sometimes it's useful, I feel, to do it in the background than be the shiny tool where everybody's trying to figure out how can we solve a world hunger using blockchain, right? So I think it's it's actually in a good shape.
00:04:20
Speaker
The big issue we have with AI today is it's all a big secret, right? But everybody wants to find success in it. You know, 10 years, 15 years ago, if a CAO had rolled out SAP or Oracle, they'd be shouting it to the rooftops. They'd be plastering their wonderful outcomes and experiences in CIO magazine or whatever. i but Now everything seems to be so top secret because of issues around cyber and and and and that sort of thing.
00:04:49
Speaker
it blockchain similar in terms of its kind of secret here? People don't want to talk about it much. I mean, what's what's the issue with why we can't get the impact of blockchain out more aggressively?
US Legislation and Blockchain's Future
00:05:00
Speaker
Well, I think, I mean, it's sort of interesting that you're asking this, and I'm here in London today, and maybe this is a bit of a European perspective, but For better or for worse, President Trump has put blockchain, crypto, and stablecoins right back at the top of the agenda. you know One of the things that's really amazing is we will see the passage of the the Genius Bill and the Stablecoin Act in the US. s We'll see some kind of integrated legislation in the next couple months.
00:05:22
Speaker
It will probably turn out to be the only significant piece of bipartisan legislation in the last year. And so I think that's an indicator of what an incredibly high priority it is. And and people do talk about blockchain.
00:05:33
Speaker
I do think people are careful about what they say. And very specifically, blockchain and blockchain generally, DeFi very specifically, continues to have very, very big security challenges, right? Because then what once you create programmable systems,
00:05:49
Speaker
they're hackable. Now, we're going to see a lot of hacking with AI and people are are learning how to deploy AI into the hacking process. And just as we are learning how to deploy and are deploying AI into our security tools.
00:06:02
Speaker
But I think people are careful about what they talk about because they don't want to give away operational security issues.
Security and Public Domain Concerns
00:06:08
Speaker
But at the same time, blockchain does operate in a little bit different way in as much as a lot of the core code base is public domain and it's open source.
00:06:16
Speaker
So there's ah a very active conversation that goes on on the technical side of things about how to continuously improve security. And the Ethereum Foundation has just launched this $1 trillion dollar security initiative.
00:06:27
Speaker
And their goal is to make people feel comfortable holding up to a trillion of dollars of assets on chain. And I think that's kind of really got the focus in the right area, which is if we want mass adoption, we're going to need a number of kind of key precursors.
00:06:41
Speaker
One of them essentially is going to be security and the other is going to be privacy. Right. And I think security is the biggest topic that I'm hearing on all the conversations I'm having right now with enterprise. You know, there was a huge breach in the UK with Marks and Spencer, the retail chain just recently, and it nearly put them out of business. I mean, and this is scaring the living daylights out of CEOs, CIOs at this point, but every big breach we're hearing about, we think there's another five or six we're not hearing about.
00:07:11
Speaker
So can blockchain counterbalance the issues we've got with security, with AI a lot more? is Can blockchain bring a robustness and stability that GenTech and GenAI are struggling with?
00:07:25
Speaker
No, I don't think so. I think that's overly optimistic. I do think you know there are some points of overlap. the The way I think about blockchain is blockchains are deterministic systems. You put them in you put in rules, people follow those rules, the systems follow those rules. And and in in that respect, I do think we will get to highly secure blockchain environments before we get to highly secure and agentic AI environments, because there is so many there are so many challenges that are very visible in terms of understanding fully and deeply how AI models work.
00:07:56
Speaker
We understand fully and deeply how blockchain systems work. They are deterministic systems, they they are rule following, they are programming. Now, there's a whole school of thought around kind of complex systems behavior because they can, to some degree, behave in unpredictable ways.
00:08:08
Speaker
But generally speaking, I think the nature blockchain is such that we will get to highly secure blockchain environments before we get to highly secure agentic ones. But I don't think that blockchain will be some kind of magic bullet that can be used to secure AI ecosystems.
00:08:25
Speaker
Got it. So it's not the trust layer right now for Gen AI? I don't think so, no. Okay. So how do you see AI agents interacting on the blockchain, Paul?
AI and Blockchain Synergy in Supply Chains
00:08:36
Speaker
I am so glad you asked. This is a really hot topic, and it's a really fun one. We're just actually putting together our first plan to do an integration of AI agents and blockchain. And it's really cool. And and here's what it is.
00:08:47
Speaker
We've got a client. They have a manufacturing and operational ecosystem that requires significant amount of maintenance. And so what happens is they built a bunch of AI tools that look at their infrastructure and make thoughtful guesses about when certain machines are likely to break, what kind of maintenance that they might require, and when to maintain them on top of the traditional if it breaks then we fix it kind of model. So they wouldn' want to get towards better preventive maintenance.
00:09:15
Speaker
To do that, you need to stage a lot of parts and equipment in order to do this maintenance. And so what's going to happen is we're going to marry the predictive power of AI. So the AI agents are going to look at the machinery, the data flowing off the machinery, and they're going to say, we think this kind of machine is going to need a certain type of maintenance in the next certain time period, months, two months.
00:09:34
Speaker
right And they're going to put that into the blockchain. They're going to then conclude, OK, based on that, we need to preposition inventory of assets and repair equipment. And the blockchain system will be responsible for looking at inventory levels, procurement agreements and purchasing and basically delivering it.
00:09:52
Speaker
So the split of activity is going to be AI systems are going to make decision making. They're going to make the key recommendations. Blockchain systems are going to be responsible for execution. What do you think an agent to agent economy will look like based on this premise?
00:10:07
Speaker
So what I'm sort of excited about is the difference between a traditional planning-driven economy and a bottom-up economy. When I was at IBM and before my time at IBM, I came from a supply chain planning background. And really what supply chain planning does is we started this top-level idea of like, hey, we're going to sell, we think we want to sell so much, right? And based on this, we build a manufacturing plan and a distribution plan, and it's very top-down and push-out. We tell what people should have and where it should be.
00:10:34
Speaker
If you look at ecosystems like ride sharing, they look much more organic, right? There's tools that try to massage, you know, drivers and riders into the same places and adjust demand and supply. But basically, it looks like there's a very sophisticated dynamic marketplace where supply tends to respond to demand and demand tends to respond to supply and price signals.
00:10:53
Speaker
An agentic economy, I think what's going to be cool is an agentic economy is when we're going to see much more bottom up, where the bottom up is smart agents looking at individual situations in stores or on retail locations or capacity and then coordinating with each other.
00:11:10
Speaker
right One of the interesting things about a lot of supply chains is, let's say you want to put some product in a store. Many times it turns out that there is a store down the street that has an excess of the same product, but the systems don't really exist to go find that.
00:11:25
Speaker
But in an agentic economy, a local AI agent might look around and say, okay, I want an extra 200 cases of soft drinks because it's going to be super hot this weekend, right? and it's going to look around, it's going to look, you know, down the street and be like, well, I can get 100 cases from my distributor, but they can't do more, but I can source another, you know, 100 from other stores.
00:11:47
Speaker
One of the cool things about these agentic AI systems is we can put the brainpower of an industry or supply chain analyst, we can deploy that into each individual, not just into an individual supermarket, but we can deploy it effectively into each product in each inventory location in each supermarket, right? It would be as if one whole person was just responsible for keeping the soda aisle stocked in a grocery store.
00:12:11
Speaker
And when you apply that much brainpower, you can solve a lot of problems in a more bottom-up way relatively quickly. So I'm very excited about an agent economy because I think it's what it really is. It's like, it's this idea of like, I can apply almost unlimited intelligence to problems.
00:12:26
Speaker
Once I know what I want to do, i can plug it into a blockchain and I can have this incredibly reliable, extremely secure transaction processing infrastructure go execute those purchase orders and shipments and and inventory traceability activities.
00:12:39
Speaker
Well, sounds like it's just what our global economy needs right now. We just completed a big study of the Fortune 1000 in the US and 83% of them said that they're increasing investments in automation and AI as a result of the trade instability and the uncertainty.
00:13:01
Speaker
Are you crazy busy right now with clients desperate for help figuring out their supply chain issues? And two, I'd love sobbed away on this as well, because he, you've been looking at this from a research perspective.
00:13:12
Speaker
We're not as busy on the supply chain side as I would like to be. And the reason for that is actually has to do more with the economics of privacy on blockchains. So we've just gotten privacy to a level where we can do smart contracts, payments and transactions under privacy on a public blockchain.
00:13:30
Speaker
The problem is the cost per transaction is not at a level where I can handle tens of billions of SKUs in transactions per day. We've got one client.
00:13:41
Speaker
They told us a couple of years ago, hey, if we're going to do this, we're going to need you to be able to handle about two million NFT transfers per day. Right. Each NFT representing a single serialized product.
00:13:52
Speaker
We just don't have computation prices and capacity low enough to multiply that by a couple hundred or a couple thousand. So right now, ah huge, huge focus of blockchain transactions, the work that's keeping us crazy busy, is much more centered on what an agencing economy will look like in financial services, right? Smart agents moving people's money around, right? Moving money, you know, you can move fundable things more easily and high value items, you can definitely, it's worth the money to get extra privacy or to be able to conduct your trading strategy in private.
00:14:25
Speaker
So we're seeing the higher value applications for fewer transactions. And as we mature the ecosystem, when we drive down these transaction costs, we keep unlocking new use cases.
00:14:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think to Paul's point, obviously, privacy and throughput are important considerations, especially when you look at supply chain. But the other the other thing is, unlike, say, ChantGPT or AI, where my 12-year-old daughter and my 80-year-old mother are both playing with it,
00:14:55
Speaker
they're not playing with blockchain. Blockchain is still a little, call it cultish, right? It's still ah in a narrow ah stream of folks who really understand, can comprehend, and really play with it, unlike chat GPT and AI.
00:15:10
Speaker
And so when boards and CEOs are faced with these tariff situations, et etc., it's not to say that blockchain can't play a role in it. It's becoming hard for them to understand how to do it, right? Because you'll need appalled to really explain it to them. It's not self-evident.
00:15:29
Speaker
I've been a blockchain analyst for, i think, about eight to 10 years now. And I've never seen a blockchain demo which doesn't involve three screens. And you need to understand all those three things to figure out what it's doing.
00:15:43
Speaker
It's not intuitive. It doesn't mean the technology is bad, but it's a complex technology that takes some time to understand it. And I think it's not the first thing that rises to unless you're a blockchain expert or a supply chain expert.
00:15:57
Speaker
to really go and deal with it. So I think there is privacy, there is throughput, there are those technical issues, but I feel those things are getting solved for. I think this issue of the user experience and the simplification and the ease of use is something that also, that's why we haven't seen the hockey stick adoption of some of the enterprise use cases.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's getting beyond the shiny demos to the reality of what we have to do as well to clean up our data and our metadata and all these types of things. And it's the same for just, Gentic solutions themselves.
00:16:29
Speaker
I was excited earlier to hear about this bipartisan bill that's on its way, hopefully. Paul, can you share a bit more about what the administration is driving here to impact blockchain?
Stablecoins in Payment Systems and Small Business
00:16:41
Speaker
andn And then a little bit about, but I think, the impact of stable coins on this. Yeah, absolutely. So the big goal and that a big sense of urgency that's been gripping kind of the US kind of blockchain ecosystem for the last couple of years is a focus on stablecoins. So even more than crypto. So people have been buying crypto and that's become really popular.
00:17:02
Speaker
Even more than crypto, stablecoins have become this incredibly important tool in the financial ecosystem. They're certainly used by crypto investors, but also they're being widely adopted all over the world by people who want to transact with each other in U.S. s dollars. Right. A stable coin kind of is a is a it's a digital token that's usually pegged to the dollar. More than 99 percent of them are pegged to the U.S. dollar, although there's a whole kind of flood of new currencies coming online.
00:17:28
Speaker
But stablecoins are critical for businesses as well. So if you're a company and your revenues are in dollars and your costs are in dollars and your your key suppliers are in dollars and your employees get paid in dollars, then you would really like to transact in dollars as well. And that's the appeal of stablecoins. And EY is a good example, right? We do a lot of business in US dollars, but we also transact around the world with our business partners all the time. And again, blockchain fees, if we could move a lot of our interbank transactions into blockchain rails, we could substantially reduce our banking fees and our operating costs as a result of that. So there's tremendous interest in stablecoins. But
00:18:08
Speaker
both enterprises and banks that would like to get into this business are a little bit cautious because without a clear regulatory framework, people aren't really sure how it's going to be. And and especially prior to the Trump administration, there were a lot of enforcement actions without very clearly written rules.
00:18:24
Speaker
We're now headed into an environment where we are hopefully going to have legislation, rules, and rules of the road that will make it possible for lots of companies to enter this space. We foresee an absolute transformation of the payments ecosystem, partly driven by price and volume,
00:18:42
Speaker
because it's so easy and cheap to do transactions, even cross-border transactions using stablecoins. But that itself is going to trigger a whole other revolution in things like cash flow management.
00:18:54
Speaker
If you can effectively make moving money instantaneous and effectively free or darn close to free. And when I say darn close to free, I mean and you can move almost any amount of money across the planet within about 30 seconds for under a penny, right? If you can do that, you can completely change how your company manages their cash flow and their available working capital.
00:19:17
Speaker
And so I think we're going to see a succession of kind of dominoes fall. The first will just be on international wire transfer fees and remittances, but it does not end until we completely transform working capital and the way the world works in terms of finance today.
00:19:30
Speaker
Paul, if I could ask a follow up to that, but do you think do you think stable coins will largely optimize cross-border payments or, you know, our regular payments as well?
00:19:41
Speaker
So I think it'll be regular payments. And in fact, I just wrote a column which should be published in Coindesk in the next day or two. And it's called The Streaming Model is Coming for Your Money. And what I mean by this is, so we used to buy CDs and then we downloaded music and now we just stream it on demand.
00:19:58
Speaker
And I think we're going to get to the same point with money. We used to hold money as cash. Then we held pools of money in local bank accounts. But in the future, individuals, companies, people are are going to stream money constantly. You work today, you get paid today.
00:20:14
Speaker
right You use electricity, you get billed every night at midnight. I know this sounds completely crazy for a world that works today on like net 30 terms or 30-day payments and things like that. But we extend each other constantly, enormous amounts of capital and working capital.
00:20:29
Speaker
And the reality is that we we do that mainly because the cost of moving money is very high relative to the cost of capital. And we are now going to get to this point where if you imagine, like, how would you concoct your business? How would you run your business if it costs nothing to move money and it happened instantly?
00:20:46
Speaker
Well, if you work today, you get paid today. If you consume something today, you get built for it today and you pay today. today And I think that's where we're headed. And so I think, as I said, it starts with international payments, right? Because international wire transfer is 30, 40, 50 US dollars for a single wire transfer, but it does not end there. It ends, right?
00:21:03
Speaker
When we get to what I think of as a financial streaming economy, where it's transformational for people's individual paychecks, think about payday lenders. They make a ton of money at exorbitant interest rates, tidying people over until the next paycheck.
00:21:17
Speaker
But if the next paycheck is this evening, work today, get paid today, go grocery shopping today, those things are all possible. Yeah, I mean, you're talking to somebody who runs an international company with operations in three continents.
00:21:28
Speaker
And Bank of America won't let us transfer them on $100,000 a day between business units. It's it's unbelievable. So we had very sort of beautifully apropos question posed to us by a small client in the UK.
00:21:42
Speaker
They buy an online service from a company in the US. It costs them $500 a month. So every year they're paying about $6,000, 4,000 pounds, 3,500 pounds. And they're paying for that basically about, in the course of a year, $500 in wire transfer fees. And they're like, listen, this is not good. We thought about either paying the entire annual fee up front, which we don't like because we we are a small business.
00:22:05
Speaker
They just send us in this question like, hey, you're our accountants. Is it okay for us to just send stable coins? Can we do this like over the blockchain? And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can. right And it's it's a small thing. It's such a small payment, but they're a small business and they don't want to pay 50 bucks a month to send a $500 payment.
00:22:22
Speaker
you know When you think about the amount of reform that we need to see take place. So let's think a bit then about what we think is going to happen down the road with blockchain.
Future Focus: Business Applications Over Technology
00:22:32
Speaker
Maybe Saurabh, do you want to talk a bit about how you see blockchain evolving? You've been covering this for 10 years.
00:22:38
Speaker
what do you think What do you think we're going to be talking about with this in three, four years time? Are we going to see it move forward more aggressively now? I think blockchain has already evolved. I remember the first time that I talked to Paul, we had a big debate around private versus public blockchains.
00:22:52
Speaker
And I think the debate has settled more in Paul's favor than mine with public blockchains. And I think the reason behind that is we are building privacy and security into public blockchains.
00:23:03
Speaker
I think we'll, not just because Paul is here, but I think Ethereum is the is the big horse to bet on. Because unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has some functionality. Bitcoin is more well-known perhaps, but I don't know what to do with it.
00:23:16
Speaker
With Ethereum, there proper functionality. I think in three to four years' time, there are some it will boil down to three or four big use cases. And I think we'll start to talk about it less as blockchain or distributed ledgers.
00:23:30
Speaker
But more talk about it as you know whether it's cross-border payments or payments or supply chain or sustainability, or maybe I'm missing a few things. But it'll be talked in the, this is the solution for sustainability. This is the solution for transparency. This is the solution for payments.
00:23:47
Speaker
And I think the blockchain as a term will perhaps even be less used than it is. It'll be talked more in terms of business. My only fear is how do we make it simple to understand and easy to consume?
00:24:00
Speaker
I think there are enough technologists out there who are improving blockchain every day, including e y and so many others. But I think it's still hard to get your head around you know if you're new to you know to this space.
00:24:14
Speaker
And I think perhaps the best way is to just keep it hidden and just say, this is what you look at. What I wish to see, Phil, is a demo which is only on one screen. It doesn't involve five different screens to help me understand what this thing is doing. But I think it's here to stay.
00:24:30
Speaker
i think it will solve some real big problems that we have both as a consumer and as business.
Adoption Barriers: Complexity and Intuitive Solutions
00:24:36
Speaker
I still think there is a layer of abstraction and simplification that we need to see. i think the technology is moving very fast.
00:24:42
Speaker
Thanks, Zahra. And Paul, give me your crystal ball for... maybe two years and five years, what what do you see evolving?
The Rise of Stablecoins and Digital Agreements
00:24:51
Speaker
So first of all, I think Saurabh is right. The whole thing of like hiding how the sausage is made is going to be very important for adoption. like It isn't going to be like, hey, you need to understand block times and MEV in order to understand how stable coins create value. That is for certain.
00:25:05
Speaker
In terms of the two and five-year program, I think a couple of things are going on. So first of all, we are currently in what I think of as the payment stampede. right? Stablecoins work really well. They scale nicely. The costs are extremely low. People are getting into that, and they're going to get into stablecoins in all different kinds of use cases.
00:25:24
Speaker
And about two years from now, we'll really see and maturing and a ramp up of other types of investment use cases. They're all gathering steam in the background, like real world assets that are not treasuries, like real estate and other types of stuff. So we're we're seeing a ramp up of new types of assets.
00:25:40
Speaker
But as I mentioned before, As the ecosystem matures and the cost of transactions goes down and the maturity to build, especially privacy enabled applications goes up, we'll see stablecoins move beyond just payments. If you think about it, every business agreement is is very simple.
00:25:56
Speaker
I have money, you have stuff. We're exchanging my money for your stuff under the terms of an agreement. Now, right now, this full stablecoin mania is just the money. It's just the money moving back and forth. But actually, we need to tokenize the stuff and then we need to digitize the business agreements.
00:26:11
Speaker
The money moving back and forth is actually the last part of the agreement. Eventually, the entire business agreement comes on chain, right? And that's much closer to the five-year timeline.
00:26:21
Speaker
That's not to say we're not going to see. We are seeing adoption now in niche use cases and with early adopters. But the massive on-chain contract stampede, that's three to five years from now.
00:26:33
Speaker
The real-world asset stampede beyond like treasuries is in ah like the two- or three-year timeframe. And I think the next two years really belong to stablecoins and digital currencies and payments. That's a payments revolution is really kind of taken off like a rocket.
00:26:47
Speaker
Well, this has been fantastic and that stable coin today and I think some of the real needs and purposes behind where this is going and the fact that I think the financial services supply chain, I think is critical to make this work. So it's been terrific, Paul and Saurabh getting some time with you today and and i look forward to sharing this podcast with everybody.
00:27:09
Speaker
Thank you for having us, Phil. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for listening to us.
00:27:17
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Remember to follow Phil on LinkedIn and subscribe and like on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform for no-nonsense takes on the intricate dance between technology, business, and ideological systems.
00:27:36
Speaker
Got something to add to the discussion? Let's have it. Drop us a line at fromthehorsesmouth at hfsresearch.com or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.